I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.
Capitalism is about efficiency, and eventually there are going countries where producing certain items will always be more efficient. East asian countries have spent decades innovating and investing in their manufacturing capabilities.
Also, one thing that grinds my nerves are the narratives of trade balances that only focus on physical goods but conveniently ignore services.
US exports trillions in software, ai, music, videogames, financial services, cloud, and that's conveniently ignored.
Eventually tariffs come back biting those who issue them, because the moment your local industries don't need to compete anymore to survive, they have no incentives to innovate.
Of course it goes without saying that launching an absurdist comedy interpretation of a global trade war is not the way to fix the problem.
1. Raise the price they sell the imported item for.
2. Eat it.
3. Lower the price they are willing to pay the exporter.
For the Trump tariffs it has been overall it has been about 90-96% #1 and #2 and 4-10% #3. I haven't seen a breakdown of how #1 and #2 is split.
It's paying more for something just to keep it domestically available for purposes of national security.
Of course an important corollary is that Trump did not, in fact, tell anyone to drink bleach or Lysol. His supporters were stupid enough to do it on their own initiative, at Trump's mere suggestion that it was worth looking into.
1: https://www.poison.med.wayne.edu/updates-content/kstytapp2qf...
The "logic" is/was that this was a lie directed at his "low information supporters" who tend to simply "believe" whatever he tells them without question. Those same supporters would have been very much against having a "tax increase" levied upon them, but so long as he lied to them and told them "the other country pays the tariffs" then they were fooled into not understanding the tariffs were just a tax increase and so were "in support" of the tariffs.
That was the sole logic -- although there have been times when I've seen news blurbs that have made me wonder whether Trump himself actually believes his own lie about "other countries pay us" in regards to tariffs.