I found some elements of his agenda to be questionable at best and destructive at worst. I’m a big fan of fixed tariffs imposed uniformly on all products imported from any given country. But imposing tariffs on a commodity-by-commodity basis never struck me as a good idea.
Trump's fixation on protecting the U.S. steel industry, for example, was baffling to me. It was great in theory but terrible in practice. It probably cost him tens of thousands of votes in key Rust Belt states. A few months ago I came across a labor report with a bunch of statistics by industry. It said there were fewer than 85,000 steelworkers in the U.S. as of 2018 or 2019. Protecting the jobs of such a small cohort of voters never made any sense to me, when you consider that for every steelworker in the U.S. there are probably 15-20 people employed in OTHER industries that rely on steel in their manufacturing processes and were seriously disrupted by the rising cost of steel. At least one major Japanese auto manufacturer (Mazda, I think) shelved their plan to build a new plant in the U.S. due to their rising cost projections for domestic materials.
But hey — what do I know?
The steel industry has a low number of employees because it was melted down & shipped elsewhere many years ago.
Those are very specialized jobs.
The unions have caused some of their own demise due to demands that were not realistic.
The steel coming from other countries isn’t near the quality of US steel, and we ALL depend on that steel for our transportation needs. The steel used in the New Bay Bridge in San Francisco has many problems...and it carries a vast amount of traffic.