Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs.
Even then the quality wouldn't be up to par. Since we've collectively agreed we don't need to have due process anymore, I guess I can look forward to making shoes will I'm being indefinitely detained.
The US just doesn't have the supply chain that China does. You need to be able to source the materials, and they have, effectively, entire cities dedicated almost wholly to producing those "intermediate" raw materials—eg, things like the grommets for the shoelaces, the big sheets of faux leather that can be cut to the right size & shape to make the body, etc. They also have the industrial capacity to do the molding for the soles, and produce the laces, at scale.
None of that exists here—in some cases not in the scale required, but in most cases not at all.
With across-the-board tariffs, the only way to fully avoid them is to start from the raw materials on up—mine and purify the minerals, raise the animals for their leather, pump and refine the oil for the plastics, harvest the trees for their rubber (are we still getting rubber that way...?). All here in the US.
Some of those raw materials likely don't even exist on our land in sufficient quantities to supply all our industrial needs, even setting aside how much time, money, and manpower it would take to set up the mines (and ranches, and oil fields, and rubber farms), the several stages of refining, and all the different ways the materials need to be shaped or alloyed or combined or extruded or or or...
And where is the money to fund all that going to come from? Clearly not the federal government (unless, I suppose, you posit that it's one or more of Musk's companies doing all this—I suppose that could be one of the aims here; just give Musk a monopoly over literally everything we make...). Every domestic company is going to be cutting back six ways from Sunday, because every product is going to cost massively more, so even the people still making as much money as they were last year are going to be buying less. And many people will be making less, either because of those same cutbacks (through layoff or hour/wage reduction), or because they were part of the federal agencies getting wantonly gutted for no good purpose, or among the companies that did business with them and now have lost a major customer.
Bringing manufacturing onshore for any significant percentage of our consumer or industrial goods is barely even a pipe dream. It's pure cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy.
Welcome, this is where we're going to be for foreseeable future. Prison made inferior Nikes will end up costing 500$ a pair. Not that anyone is going to have money to buy them.
As you mentioned we'd probably need to still source from other countries. The bigger issue here is the USD may lose its reserve currency status.
The rest of the world might just trade in Euros and Yuan. Inflation will truly take off then.
Who will?
The Trump administration? Why would they be selling counterfeit Nike shoes?
Nike themselves? Why would they buy shoes from someone else? And if you mean they'd just keep manufacturing them elsewhere...they'd still have to pay the tariffs when they hit customs, so they'd still be $$$$. Unless you're proposing that Nike is going to start an industrial-scale smuggling operation...? Or that the Trump administration is going to provide some kind of sooper sekrit tariff waiver just for them, so they can pretend to be selling Made in the USA Nikes? And that's only talking about Nike. What about all the other manufacturers of consumer—and industrial—goods?
None of that passes the smell test. Nike's not going to take a loss to pretend their foreign-manufactured shoes, which now cost them much more, are actually being cheaply made in the USA just to prop up Trump. And Trump is, to all appearances, 100% all-in on these tariffs: he would rather have them and utterly wreck the US (and global) economy than have things cost the same because no one is actually paying the tariffs just to "prove" that his bonkers excuse for an ideology actually works.
No; if Trump gets a third term, it will be, purely and simply, because he has managed to utterly destroy the machinery of democracy so that a free and fair election in the US is a wistful memory.