[fxtentacle]

American products are too expensive, so nobody buys them. Import taxes make imported products more expensive so that they are even more expensive than the American products. The hope is that this makes it cheaper for American consumers to buy American products than to buy imported products.

But the elephant in the room is that the American-made products are now so expensive that you cannot profitably export them to any other country. So you have effectively limited the market size to purely the internal American market. And that means Chinese companies might have much better economies of scale. Because they can capture customers worldwide and not just inside America.

But most likely, the house of cards will fall over before you ever ship the first American-made product: Headlights need injection-molded parts. Since this was historically almost fully outsourced, the U.S. has almost no production capacity in this area. Building these factories takes 2 to 5 years. That means, unless everyone is fully convinced that these taxes will stay in effect for at least 5 years, nobody is going to build the necessary manufacturing capacity. And good luck finding US investors who are happy to invest millions into a factory with a predicted 5% profit margin.