I am rooting for Trump but you just raised the bar so high as to guarantee failure. I see at least three reasons: 1. There is a price/demand curve for everything and it will not disappear just because goods are made in the US or because imports are banned or punitively taxed. 2. There is also a high cost to labor in the US (regulatory, legal, environmental, education) that will take decades to root out of the system. Manufacturing may came back but don’t count on there being a lot of jobs to go with it. The jobs that do come along with repatriation will tend to be higher skilled, higher paying, and scarce. 3. Capital and profits are punished in this country.
Trump can fix 3 immediately, he can start fixing 2, there is nothing to be done about 1. Those steps alone will be yuuuuuge but they will not result in the abundant jobs paying high wages and requiring no skill like we had in an era of the past.
Waging a trade war with China may feel good but that was the last war. Even China is losing the jobs war to other poorer countries. Unleash energy, capital, kill idiotic agri-industrial policies (sugar, ethanol, EPA) and watch China fade away without a single shot in the trade war.
China has added over 40 million manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years while we’ve lost 6 million. Most of the lost jobs can, and will, come back. We barely export anything to China - most of what we do export is just raw product that is finished in China and shipped back to the US. Mexican trade is a bit trickier as our trade deficit with them isn’t nearly as bad in aggregate dollars or % of total trade.