[ethersteeds]

Outside the specious argument that other countries would pay, the other more serious argument was that tarrifs would promote the growth of domestic alternatives.

Yes it will hurt, they argued, but the long term effect will be a stronger and more independent domestic economy. And the pain is worth it for that end. There's plenty of evidence that what actually results are inferior products from domestic companies insulated from international competition, but that was the pitch.

There's also a large group in the base that voted for this who already had an ideological "buy local even if it costs more" philosophy, so to them the proposal was just to force everyone else to join their cause.

[notahacker]

Thing is, whilst you can make that argument for carefully chosen tariffs in strategic industries (something basically every country including the US was already trying to do, for better and for worse), you don't get much domestic production realignment for arbitrarily large short term tariffs as a precursor to a "big beautiful deal" or punitive tariffs because other countries push back on your proposal to annex another country. Or indeed tariffs levied on the exports of uninhabited islands

In some cases, the Trump tariffs have actually been so poorly designed that US manufacturing has been hit, because the tariffs on the raw materials and parts are higher than the tariffs on importing finished products from third countries...