If you want to protect strategic production, you apply selective tariffs to support that local production while ensuring it can ramp up and import what it needs until it becomes self-sufficient.
Most countries, the US included, have used selective tariffs for this purpose. Applying a blanket tax on every type of import just increases inflation, as you can't possibly manufacture everything locally. For many products—especially cheap ones that were outsourced to China—there's no way to produce them cheaply enough for your internal market to absorb all production.
And you can't export them either, because their higher production cost makes them uncompetitive compared to cheaper alternatives from low-cost countries.
The secondary effects of import taxes are wide-ranging: they help when applied selectively and carefully; they don’t when applied capriciously and without thought.
The mere fact that high taxes were slapped on phone imports so "phones could be made in the US," only to backtrack mere days later, demonstrates that this is either the work of an insanely bright economist nobody understands, the scheme of a grifter aiming to benefit personally, or the capriciousness of a borderline dementia patient who cannot act rationally.