Opinion | Trump cannot look to the past to make US manufacturing great again

Instead of competing with China in shipping, rare earths or EVs, the president should target leading-edge industries like aerospace and quantum computing

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Published: 5:30am, 2 May 2025Updated: 8:19am, 2 May 2025

On April 2, US President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on virtually every country, friends and foes alike. The purported goal was to revitalise domestic manufacturing and create millions of high-paying American jobs. In the Rose Garden, Trump dubbed it “Liberation Day”, to “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn”.

Nearly a month later, it appears Trump’s words have no more staying power than his Liberation Day tariffs, most of which he later postponed. The real goal, it seems, was to coerce countries to lower their tariffs, buy more American goods and economically isolate China – all in exchange for easing or calling off the tariffs. Domestic manufacturing was never a priority.

Liberation Day was a ruse. It was also a major missed opportunity to make meaningful and sweeping industrial policy changes.

A president serious about reshoring would have taken a surgical approach to tariffs, targeting specific industries – healthcare, telecommunications, aerospace and steel – critical to the nation’s economic and security interests. Instead, Trump slapped tariffs on everything.

Blanket tariffs make zero sense. The United States will never go back to the 1950s-style assembly lines to make things like toys, kitchen appliances or vinyl flooring. America long ago lost the skilled labour force, home-grown tooling and equipment, price competitiveness and product development needed to make even these everyday items. But that’s OK. Those products aren’t critical to the US economy, don’t create meaningful jobs and have nothing to do with national security.

Vice-President J.D. Vance has crudely described Chinese manufacturing line workers as “peasants”. In fact, many of his so-called peasants have degrees from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They programme highly sophisticated robotic systems, analyse billions of data points to improve quality, and work on factory floors beside engineers from Apple, Siemens and Boeing.