Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Reindustrialize America Overnight

It Will Take Decades, Not Years. Subscribe for full access.

Reindustrializing the U.S. could create jobs and revitalize communities hollowed out by factory closures as production shifts overseas. And while tariffs may spur some investment in domestic manufacturing, economists and trade experts say that a full-scale resurgence would take far longer than the Trump’s presidency.

While tariffs can be implemented quickly, building factories is typically a slow, costly process. It can take years—and tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars—to construct and equip plants capable of producing cars, appliances, and semiconductors.

“The sort of reindustrialization that’s being talked about isn’t the product of months or years,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “It’s the product of decades.”

That poses a fundamental challenge to President Trump’s vision. Companies need long-term certainty about tariffs, not just what they’ll be tomorrow, but where they’ll stand years down the line. Without that clarity, businesses are hesitant to invest billions in relocating production to the U.S., where labor costs are significantly higher.

“We make decisions around aluminum production that have a horizon of 20 to 40 years,” Alcoa CEO Bill Oplinger said at a conference last month. “We would not be making an investment in the United States based on a tariff structure that could be in place for a much shorter period of time.”

With the unpredictability of trade policy, executives struggle to forecast where tariffs will be even a week from now, let alone in a decade. And even if Trump maintains high tariffs throughout his second term, there is no guarantee his successor would continue them after January 2029.

“Do you build a widget plant in America when you don’t know if the next president will kill the tariff?” Princeton University economist Alan Blinder told CNN. Blinder said tariffs that could disrupt decades of North American supply chain integration, particularly in the auto industry.