Domestic manufacturing isn’t coming back without a thoughtful investment program. A lot of older people still think of China like in the 1980s where it was mostly low-wage, low-quality products but that’s nothing like true now and they have entire clusters of world-class product pipelines with long supply chains which would take a long time to bring back in stages.

The other problem seems even bigger: we don’t have many high-skill workers available, but our wages are high enough that anyone bringing manufacturing back is going to try to automate it as much as possible. That seems like a real bind for the Republicans’ isolationist strategy: exports will be down due to a trade war and a difficult price/value ratio in the areas other countries currently dominate, and if we’re heading into a more automated economy we’re going to have a growing number of people who won’t be able to afford to buy much. This seems like a vicious self-inflicted cycle if it gets rolling.