It seems that a main goal of the tariffs is to “bring American jobs back.”
But unemployment had been pretty low, that’s one of the few things Republicans couldn’t really rag on Biden about, so basically Trump is trying to fix an issue that isn’t really broken (and could get worse depending on how the tariffs effect employers).
The main thing they could rag on Biden about was inflation, but tariffs are only going to make that worse. Even if they do actually “bring American jobs back,” it’s a lot more expensive to produce stuff in America, yet in most cases if it’s even possible to produce here (which isn’t always true), it will probably still be cheaper to keep producing it overseas but it will just cost consumers more.
I think even a lot of Republicans thought Trump was bluffing about tariffs. Or at minimum didn’t think he’d go to this extreme. But of course people are now afraid to criticize him. Doing a quick search on x, even co-President Musk seems to be ignoring this topic. His only post with the word tariff or tariffs since 2021 was one a few weeks ago where he pointed out that Tesla is impacted by the tariffs.