Trump knows nothing about nothing, so defending anything he says is never actually defending him, but the tariff thing his highlighted some stupid by people not named Trump. And, look, again, I am not defending Trump's tariffs and certainly not defending his motives, which are gibberish, for implementing them, but I saw one very stupid economist mock Trump's assertion (said, stupidly, of course), that it's important to have a domestic steel industry. You can just import steel! Mocked this economist.
Yes you can. Also we have just in time production and internationally spread out supply lines for everything. It's not an unreasonable concern. We aren't too friendly with Mexico these days, Trump's about to nuke Korea, we never get along very well with South America (Brazil), and Turkey is, well, having some issues at the moment. Those are the four after our top source of steel, Canada. I suppose we get along with them pretty well this week, though nuking Korea might cause a few problems with everyone.
The defense of "free trade," which is never really "free trade" anyway, is always overblown, and brings out lots of stupid from people who should know better. It's just one of those things which separates The Very Serious People from everybody else. A form of virtue signalling, as the kids would say.
