If you think about it lucidly, all that tariffs have done is make the ‘protected’ industry more inefficient and unproductive. Thus they become inept bungling corporate messes.
And if you study economic theory, protectionism was proven to be too challenging for most fiscal policies, and is actually out of vogue. Very few nations have been able to pull it off, and those few have been the ones that have managed to use protectionism to improve the protected industry, and once the protection was lifted the industry was very robust and efficient.
However if you look at the examples in the US this is not the case. American protection is basically set up in a manner that only protects American jobs, but does not provide enough incentive for the industry to improve itself. And although the jobs are saved, for now, they soon disappear once the protection is lifted, and the industry is found to be even more inefficient than how it was at the beginning. And all the jobs that had been ‘saved’ disappear.
Take a look at the steel industry, and compare it to a country like Japan (which is one of the biggest steel exporters in the world). Japan is so efficient that it is in the top tier of steel exporters, even though it DOES NOT have any steel ore or mines whatsoever. It imports the ore, improves on it, and then exports it. The American steel industry on the other hand is pathetic. It is actually miraculous it still exists. And unlike the American Automobile industry which has somehow managed to survive (although I was reading an economic projection that said the Big Three American car makers will be out of business in the decade, or so foreign they are no longer ‘America’) , the steel industry seems facing outright extinction!
And all that protectionism will do is prolong the inevitable.