I think you underestimate them. They'll just buy shoes from another country, import them in secret, repackage them, and sell them as American made Nike. They could easily strong-arm Nike to make a deal to go along with this. They'll do a "tour" of the "factory" that makes nothing, and MAGA will eat it up. They'll show us doubters all how wrong we were to doubt the carnival-barking-clown savior of America. And then he'll get a third term out of it.
> They'll just buy shoes from another country, import them in secret, repackage them, and sell them as American made Nike.
Who will?
The Trump administration? Why would they be selling counterfeit Nike shoes?
Nike themselves? Why would they buy shoes from someone else? And if you mean they'd just keep manufacturing them elsewhere...they'd still have to pay the tariffs when they hit customs, so they'd still be $$$$. Unless you're proposing that Nike is going to start an industrial-scale smuggling operation...? Or that the Trump administration is going to provide some kind of sooper sekrit tariff waiver just for them, so they can pretend to be selling Made in the USA Nikes? And that's only talking about Nike. What about all the other manufacturers of consumer—and industrial—goods?
None of that passes the smell test. Nike's not going to take a loss to pretend their foreign-manufactured shoes, which now cost them much more, are actually being cheaply made in the USA just to prop up Trump. And Trump is, to all appearances, 100% all-in on these tariffs: he would rather have them and utterly wreck the US (and global) economy than have things cost the same because no one is actually paying the tariffs just to "prove" that his bonkers excuse for an ideology actually works.
No; if Trump gets a third term, it will be, purely and simply, because he has managed to utterly destroy the machinery of democracy so that a free and fair election in the US is a wistful memory.
