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Happily, MAGA does not have to choose between just the two options you listed. There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.
I think it is a serious error to assume the MAGA coalition is held together by a desire to "own the libs". Thats what some figures may cathartically tweet about, but the actual voters that matter care about their jobs, the cost of groceries and morgtages, and their kids education. On all of these the proggo left has failed misrably the past few years, which is why in 2024 the GOP, not the DNC, won the lion's share of the working class vote.
Do you actually expect that onshoring manufacturing will raise wages (relative to the cost of goods and services) for the majority of working-class and middle-class Americans? Have similar approaches worked in the past?
Yes, because yes. 1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector with wages that were, adjusting for inflation, median wages, and CoL, comparatively much higher than they are today. Now will a new American manufacturing boom look like that one? No, it will be much more heavily automated and high tech, but the funny thing about robots is they still need a large number of people to operate, maintain, repair, upgrade, and pioneer more uses for them. A factory I worked at actually hired more workers despite completely automating the actual assembly line and ended up passing out a lot of raises as people skilled up.
Shit that will never happen. Building a factory takes longer than these tariffs will ever last, which is just under four years tops if Trump is willing to let the entire GOP burn to death in the midterms. This is a historic fuckup, Trump just metaphorically blew his brains out on live TV with this shit.
You should consider that the odds of "literal war with China" happening in the next four years is relatively high, possibly 100%, the odds of the US winning are decent, and if Trump gets the US started onshoring before obliterating the industrial capacity of our main rival (which is why the US had such a nice industry between 1945 - 1979) before that happens he might be hailed as a hero and genius.
The odds of me shitting my pants in the next five minutes are possibly 100%. I probably won't, but if I do then I guess the odds were 100% all along. Also you're not obliterating the industrial capacity of China WW2-style with anything less than carpet-nuking.
No, what I mean is that it is possibly already baked in – I dunno how likely this is but Trump, as POTUS, may know that we're going to war with China in less than four years.
On the one hand, touché.
On the other hand, Chinese trade flows through overseas shipping. A war with Taiwan might involve carpet nuking levels of destruction (the Three Gorges Dam is within Taiwanese striking range) but is more likely to involve interdicting Chinese trade routes and might also involve striking their port assets. If China loses the war, its fleet, its merchant marine, and its port infrastructure, even without destroying industrial capacity or critical infrastructure it will hamper their exports for years.
Why are we going to fight a war with China? I don’t want to get nuked over Taiwan. I don’t consider this inevitable or desirable.
To destroy their AI clusters, lowering the chance of a misaligned singularity of course!But seriously, there are lots of potential reasons. One of them is superconductor control, although I think this gets less relevant every year. One of them is that China might attack the US as part of their opening salvos against Taiwan over uncertainty as to what the US would do, which essentially would render US desires moot – there's no world where we don't respond to that.
One of the most overlooked reasons, in my humble opinion, is to stop nuclear proliferation – my understanding is that Japan views a non-CCP-aligned Taiwan as a core national security interest. I think there's a nonzero chance that if Taiwan reunifies with China, Japan acquires nuclear weapons. If Japan acquires nuclear weapons, South Korea may follow.
Nuclear weapons proliferation is arguably bad for a lot of reasons but probably one of the core ones from the perspective of US policymakers is that it undermines American power relative to the rest of the world.
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