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Note that I am not endorsing a high-tariff world view. In general low tariffs are a win-win-lose and thus positive sum.
I am pointing out that Trump is right about Chinese cars and seems to tap into the (fully justified) American working-class resentment pretty well. American factory workers got the short end of the stick. Almost everyone benefits (hey, cool cheap cars!) while they get broken communities and welfare.
I guess what I don't see in this resentment is that the UAW was ultimately let down not by free trade, but by Detroit's perpetual inability to produce a competitive product. If the UAW had been assembling prettier cars with better reliability, we wouldn't be here. I don't see why we'd give the engineers in Detroit another chance to make another fucking Buick?
The UAW was really bad though. It doesn't matter how well you design a car if the workers hide bottles in the door panels as a joke. Management and engineering had plenty of flaws but the UAW also deserves some of the blame.
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In fairness to Detroit, all the competition comes from countries that ruthlessly excluded American cars, raised high tariffs so local industries could build strength, or stole all the engineering secrets and profit.
Ok, what does that have to do with the consummate inability for Ford to build a Camry competitor between 2003-2018?
To be fair, some of that is regulatory and/or government policy based- US legal environs definitely pushed towards a more adversarial relationship between the UAW and management than was strictly necessary, for one example, while Japanese competitors mostly didn’t have to deal with that.
The electric F-250 idiocy ford is pursuing is also hard to see with a non-US based company.
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I liked the Focus and wanted one as my first car after graduating, but they stopped selling it before it came time to get a new car, alas.
I think what happened is Detroit got disrupted by foreign automakers. Clayton Christensen's model of "Disruption" is probably too broad and contains too many predictions for me to get into here. But, basically, Japan came in and dominated the lowest end of the market Detroit was happy to concede, then the Japanese got better and came for better markets. Broadly, now, Detroit has fled to the most elaborate high-end markets, and they're stuck making cars according to a failed model that can only continue to die out.
Tariffs alone probably won't save Detroit, but Trump is probably right that a bloodbath is coming for the American auto market.
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Tariff market shortfall should quite honestly be a defense budget line item and it's strange to think that nobody really considers it like that; if not from ensuring a war with external powers can be effectively prosecuted without external supply chains and expertise, then from ensuring a war with internal ones does not start due to economic inequality.
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