I think that Trump's goal is to return production to the USA and he tries to force companies by high import tax rates because otherwise Apple and other companies don't plan to leave China. Being dependent on China is a very bad case for the USA. His migration policies will lead to a negative economic impact because illegal migrants are the reason why they get some things cheaply. Thanks to illegal migrants, they have cheap labour to build houses, to do very dirty and physically demanding jobs and to work overtimes with a very bad compensation. If Trump reports illegal migrants, prices of many things will go up in the USA but long-term, such an environment will guarantee good job conditions for local citizens because I think that those Americans who grew up in comfort won't work as cheap labour.
It's interesting to see how his approaches will benefit the USA. I know that it won't benefit my country because there are many migrants from us in the USA. His strategy looks interesting. If he succeeds, then I believe that many rich countries will change their policies.
It is worth knowing that a lot of the objectives Trump seems to have and many of the promises he has given are not new. Such plans like to "return production to the USA" is an old objective that other presidents have pursued as well. They even have a word for it: reshoring (as opposed to offshoring).
They've tried it for many years and even spent a lot of money on this initiative. It has not been a great success.
However, it is still interesting to see what will be different this time because of two things:
1) Trump's plans are very radical and somewhat impossible
2) Timing is terrible. The world is in a high tension situation filled with lots of conflicts that has made the economy unstable and very RISKY. Taking big risks at this time are terrible
There are also a lot of contradicting interests in it. On one hand because of #2 US has to rely less on imports and "reshore" because the supply chain that is already disrupted can be disrupted even more. But on the other hand, at this stage it is an impossible thing to pull off.
I read someone crazy a while back where they estimated that if for example Apple were to be forced to manufacture iPhones in the US, their products would be worth like $100k! That's like 100x more expensive than what they cost now.
That wouldn't just make American products impossible to export since nobody would be able to afford them in any other country but also it would make them unaffordable for the American consumer as well.
So reshoring in a lot of cases means the death of that company.
They also cannot do what the Chinese did with their currency (keep the exchange rate low to remain competitive) because the only reason why US dollar is still alive and is used globally (despite the dedollarisation) is that it is rather stable and has a high exchange rate.
The moment they crash the exchange rate to compete, is the moment the world would dump the dollar and most importantly would dump trillions worth of the US treasury bonds effectively crashing the US economy.
I am thinking out loud here but this is what makes it interesting to me. From what little I know of economy, it is impossible for anyone to "return production to the USA", the capitalism and Petrodollar have made sure of that. So we wait and see. Maybe this time they pull a rabbit out of the hat and surprise us all...