The hot debate in DC right now is over President Trump’s dialling-down of his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Did market turbulence force a retreat, as critics maintain, or was this a planned masterstroke, as MAGA world insists? Either way, the move has clarified one very important fact: decoupling the US economy from China’s remains his top priority.

That process began during Trump’s first term, continued under former president Joe Biden, and looks set to intensify. But while decoupling is a political consensus, it’s still rejected by many at the commanding heights of the economy, including business titans close to Trump himself. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Jamie Dimon, Tim Cook and, most recently Ray Dalio are just a few of the corporate and Wall Street honchos who’ve urged against decoupling — or, at least, against a rapid and complete separation.

The problem for these figures is that Main Street is dead-set on divorcing from Beijing. That is especially true for the regional manufacturers who form the heart of the GOP’s power base. Men like Zach Mottl, the president of Atlas Tool Works, a family-owned precision manufacturer based in Illinois which was hard-hit at the turn of the century. Mottl wholeheartedly backs Trump’s tariffs, especially the ones targeting the People’s Republic. “I think it’s a great time,” he tells me. “I love what’s happening.”

It’s easy to see why. When China was admitted into the World Trade Organization in 2000, US manufacturing convulsed. Mottl’s company — which specialised in sheet-metal fabrication, stamping, and assembly — saw revenues drop to about $7 million by 2003, a third of what they had been four years earlier. Two years later, he was forced to lay off half his workforce. “I went home that day and cried and cried,” Mottl says.

Mottl’s woes were by no means unique. The manufacturing share of US GDP has declined to under 10% today, down from a third at its postwar peak and 14% in 2000, just as the China Shock took effect. According to research, as imports from China surged, many manufacturing-heavy counties lost jobs and living standards declined.

The devastation wasn’t just economic, but psychological and even spiritual. This contributed to what Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton and his wife, the Princeton scholar Anne Case, termed “deaths of despair”: a strange and disturbing decline in working-class life expectancy associated with rising depression, alcoholism, and opioid abuse. The geography of this malaise overlapped with deindustrialisation.

In the two decades that followed, Mottl was able to retool his operations to aircraft and missile components serving the defence industry, where most of his business these days comes from. But today, Atlas is only surviving — unless Trump’s tariffs kick in. “Tariffs are about us thriving. We last spent 20 years cutting our own throats,” he says. “I finally see an opportunity to make a new marketplace. My American workers shouldn’t have to work for Mexican or Chinese wages.”

Yet tariffs alone are unlikely to revive the manufacturing share of GDP, let alone the manufacturing share of the workforce. To boost the latter, what’s needed is industrial strategy and worker retraining after decades during which America’s manufacturing regions lost their industrial know-how to atrophy. Today, as many manufacturers complain, it is difficult to find American workers able to stay sober from nine to five, much less excel in tomorrow’s advanced, robotics-led factories. It remains to be seen whether the Trumpians are as interested in this aspect of the task as they are zealous for tariffs.

Still, Mottl claims he has been inundated with requests for quotes in recent days, and hears talk of adjacent firms preparing to shift operations from overseas back to the homeland. “I’m trying to get my machinery order, my team in order, and we’re hiring,” he adds.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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