Also, you can't do it across the economy all at once. If you really wanted to build up domestic manufacturing, you'd pick a few small sectors that are either almost in the wheelhouse of existing domestic producers or simple enough that that production capability can be realistically developed from scratch in a few years, and then you tariff just those sectors while providing the aforementioned investment. Once you've gotten the results you're looking for, you expand to other sectors.

You don't do it to the whole economy at once because the negative economic effects of the tariffs will impede the very development you're hoping for, and because there's just not enough free labor, expertise, and funding to simultaneously develop domestic production of everything.

Don't forget a key component of Trump's tariff policy is to "replace" income tax with the tariff (tax). This effectively replaces income tax with sales tax. And you can guess which economic class benefits from this the most.

That's probably the real goal. I was a little skeptical about Project 2025 but it really looks like they are following it.

Why were you skeptical of it?

People seem to be willing to go out of their way to rationalize around having to take threats beyond a certain magnitude seriously. I think something similar seems to be happening with all of the discussion around Greenland (and Canada, for that matter); the idea of us actually getting into a serious territorial dispute with Denmark or Canada would be such a divergence from what anyone is familiar with that it's easier to just discount it as not being a realistic concern.

Sure, on one hand there's normalcy bias.

But on the other hand screeching about every little thing is just as stupid.

At the end of the day you can't use brain dead rules of thumb to alleviate the need to actually think things though. You actually need to consider the political and economic realities the various moves that various parties might make.

All big things are actually just series of little things.

This is unfortunately a fact that’s easily obscured by the “clarity” of retrospection, through which big things look like obviously big things.