Vice President JD Vance is clapping along with the MAGA faithful to President Donald Trump's tariffs this week, but in the past he has repeatedly insisted that U.S. manufacturing jobs were not coming back and dismissed efforts to force them to return with tariffs as a futile exercise by "hyper-protectionists," according to a review of his social media posts and interviews over the past several years by CNN's Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck.
Tbf, he’s probably right that US manufacturing isn’t coming back, even with current nonsense considered. Trump, as well as the four year cycle of the presidency (if, unlike me, you don’t believe the republic is cooked) is too volatile to build a future on. Four years is a really short time to rearrange whole ass supply chains, especially with everyone depending on hyper fragile just-in-time supply chains. Plus, there’s always the chance that Trump could wake up tomorrow, declare victory, declare tariffs woke, and move on to the next shit storm. It seems likely that for the next four years, companies will use this as a cover to raise prices on top of forwarding the costs of tariffs, and do nothing to actually rearrange supply chains. In fact, if anything, I would expect smuggling to explode in popularity, but I guess we’ll see.