It may not be the best time for a manufacturer to move an entire supply chain to the United States after all.
President Donald Trump’s protectionist trade policies — that the administration claimed would bring an industrial renaissance to the country — keep getting less protective. Trump had already backed off his planned steep tariffs on imports from most countries after announcing them last month, instead targeting China with 145% duties. This week, he agreed to slash those fees, too, down to 30%.
“We do not want a generalized decoupling from China,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
Trump and his advisers say bringing manufacturing home is the overarching goal of his tariffs and negotiations. But his back-and-forth with China may have just demonstrated how interconnected the two economies are, and how difficult such a renaissance might be.
The 90-day reduction in tariffs, including a drop in China’s retaliatory tariffs on American goods, is supposed to give negotiators time to work through a potential trade deal.
Some China hawks don’t sound very happy with the move.
“I don’t believe we should buy any products, services, apps, anything from China,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida told NOTUS on Tuesday when asked if he believed the tariffs should have remained in place. “It is a despicable government that wants to destroy our way of life.”
Scott, a Republican, still expressed optimism that Trump can get China to abandon unfair trading practices during ongoing trade negotiations.
“Hope springs eternal,” he said. “He wants them to change, so I know if anybody can get it done, it’s President Trump.”
Trump also spent much of his first term negotiating a trade deal with China, slapping tariffs on Chinese products and responding to the Chinese government’s retaliatory moves against U.S. industries. That conflict eventually resulted in a trade deal in which China committed to buy more American products, but that commitment was never fulfilled.
The economic turmoil did incentivize some companies to move production away from China, to alternatives like India, Vietnam or Mexico. Getting out of contracts, signing new ones and hiring workers in a different country is a yearslong process; to start again by moving everything to America, where supply inputs would now be costlier because of the tariffs is an even more challenging prospect for many companies.
The economy has fluctuated wildly since Trump announced his tariffs, and generally free trade-supporting Republicans have been having a hard time stomaching the immediate effects.
“The Chinese have snookered the United States over the last decades and made us dependent on things that only they do and make,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn.
Cornyn sounded happy on Tuesday to simply see the markets responding positively to the deal to reduce tariffs.
“I’m glad they’re making progress, and I hope they continue, because obviously the markets were a little rattled,” Cornyn told reporters. “It looks like things have kind of gotten back to where they were before ‘Liberation Day.’ But they need to continue making more deals.”
Cornyn believes more robust supply chains are necessary for national security, particularly for products of strategic importance like semiconductors. But he also said striking trade deals with countries around the world to reach “zero tariffs” would be “the ultimate free trade deal.”
Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota also celebrated the move.
“The fact that the tariffs are coming down is a good thing for American consumers,” he said.
Even with all of the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s policies, Rounds placed trust in the president’s “art of the deal.”
“The president wants to do the art of the deal, and this is his way of doing a deal,” he said. “He’s clearly out making a deal right now with China, and that’s a good thing for all of us.”
Democrats, of course, don’t see any of this as the art of the deal.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, described Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs as a “designed soap opera.”
“It’s driving Americans crazy. It’s causing companies to shortchange investment. It’s driving up prices and shortchanging GDP growth,” Murphy said in an interview. “I mean, it’s all a disaster.”
“Nobody knows what’s real,” he added.
Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who has sharply criticized the Chinese government, also said he doesn’t see how Trump’s strategy can boost manufacturing at home.
“The president is completely botching the tariff use,” Merkley said Tuesday. “Tariffs, done right, can encourage investment in the United States. But investments are only made when you have a stable plan, when people know what it’s going to look like not just this year, but by the time I build a factory several years from now.”
“He’s basically discouraging investment in the U.S., saying our policies are subject to rapid change and chaos,” Merkley argued.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who wants long-term higher tariffs to boost American manufacturing, looked on the bright side when asked about the deal to slash tariff rates.
“Well, it’s a pretty big tariff still,” he said. “I hope it stays that way or we get some commitments from them to stop cheating on trade.”
He pointed out how Trump’s initial plans changed the way investors and companies are talking about tariffs: “A year ago, our average global tariff rate was 2.5. Now it is 13. Our China rate currently is 30, and Wall Street is, like, celebrating that as extremely low,” Hawley said.
“When President Trump at the beginning of his campaign floated, ‘Maybe I’ll do a 10% general tariff,’ I mean, people just melted down,” he recalled. “‘Oh, we can’t have that.’ Now it’s 13, and people are like, ‘Oh, great, very manageable.’”
Was this all just some kind of psychological warfare to get people to see higher tariffs — just not as high as Trump first announced — as less painful?
“If that is the goal,” said Hawley, “I think he’s done a good job with that.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.