I have seen a lot of know-it-all democrat voters posting in the last few days about how Trump's economic strategy is bound to fail and those who voted for him for economic reasons are fools. Obviously I am extremely sceptical of these people, as economic literacy has never been a strong point of progressives (not to mention how they are all suddenly experts, like how they were for virus propagation, climate change, etc.).
Nonetheless, I myself am no economist. Can somebody with a better understanding explain the strategy to me, and also any potential ways in which it COULD backfire in the way progressives are suggesting?
Tariffs are a means of protecting local economies from being completely destroyed by foreigners. Everyone was doing them to us and we were playing pretend free market, which any actual economist knows was nonsense. If everyone is on a free market playing field (never gonna happen) it's "fair" competition, but you still need to protect your local industry to preserve resilience of your national economy.
When you're competing against literal slave labor and countries that don't have anywhere near your living standard or respect for life, your choices are to either lose in that market, use tariffs to stop or limit them, or go to war to enforce US labor standards. Tariffs are much simpler.