It’s moronic.
Name one thing China cannot mine, make, or import from Europe/ Africa / brics, that it cannot do without, that only the USA can supply.
They could literally put a 50,000% tariff on American goods and just stop buying anything from the USA... And be over the worst of it in months.
Now flip it. Name one thing the USA can make without any import from Europe/ Africa / brics, that it cannot do without, that only the USA can supply. And remember, every time something crosses the US border, Trump wants a tariff applied to the US importer.
Sure, Zimbabwe and a few others are thinking, zero tariffs give them a very marginal benefit on exports but the question you should be asking is, what American goods can Zimbabwe reasonably afford to buy, that it cannot get from anywhere else... Cheaper?
Or, another way to look at it: Russia and North Korea are notoriously protectionist and yet neither of them are capable of making washing machines or cars or televisions for export.
DEXP televisions in Russia are basically resellers, dependent on Chinese parts and Taiwanese knowhow. They’d be mad to tariff China, it’d practically kick them back to selling 1080p televisions instead of 4k.
Back in the day, you could get cars from the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, in Europe. Yugo, Skoda, Lada. But you were desperate.
A school friend of mine refused to get in his dad’s car, which was a Zastava... Not because of bullying (nobody really knew what it was) nor because it was from the Eastern Bloc, but because it was we had to go across fields and farm tracks. We both used to get lifts across fiekds in the back of a Land Rover with wooden benches and I’m telling you right now, even that was more comfortable than the bloody Yugo. Every few weeks, his dad’s Yugo needed fixing.
I doubt it’d be that bad for the USA if it goes America First on cars, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before anyone in a city like London, York, Tokyo or Rome buys a wide American muscle car because they’ve got the turning circle of a battleship and on a double parked street they’re about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.
That’s why Ford can sell Focuses all over the world without difficulty but it can’t sell muscle cars in their European dealerships. There’s simply not enough interest.
Anyone who wants a left hand drive Ford pickup in a right hand drive country goes to a specialist importer, not to their nearby Ford dealership. This isn’t going to change even if there are zero tariffs in either direction.
By the same logic, I bet nobody here would be seen dead behind the wheel of a Citroen Ami hatchbacksl even if Citroen opened a factory in the USA and was selling them at $8k a pop.
It’s not just cars with China. you seem to be focused on our cars. You’re probably right when it comes to American Muscle cars. China imports a lot of crap into our country. I would bet that 90% of all items in a Dollar Store is made in China. The amount of substandard steel we import from China is massive. My brother-in-law has a steel company on the south side of Chicago, he’s a Democrat, but he’s also very happy with these tariffs.
We import a lot of products from all over the world, and a lot of these countries have put on massive tariffs on our products is outrageous. That’s why a lot of companies have moved there industries to these countries. Now we can have them move back, pay a little more but at least we’ll have the manufacturing capacity in our country. We as a country cannot sustain the same status quo. We need these tariffs.