1. As others have said, you’re not likely to find Trump stans on Lemmy.
2. There’s really very little to debate. The tariffs are patently absurd, and every serious person agrees on this. Anyone capable of actually formulating a structured debate is incapable of defending them. It’s a paradoxical request.

The thing is, there are individual aspects of the tariff situation that could, theoretically, be defended, but the sum collective cannot because each aspect undercuts the others.

The simplest way to see this is to examine the three contradictory explanations that the administration has offered for why the tariffs are being applied:

1. They are intended to repatriate manufacturing back to the US
2. They are intended to be a bargaining tool to force other countries to treat the US more fairly in trade matters (presumably resulting the elimination of these “tariffs and unfair practices” that they claim other countries are applying to the US).
3. They are intended to be a new source of revenue, funding tax cuts in perpetuity.

Suppose 1 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to return manufacturing to the US, they have to be permanent, or at least very long term. No company is going to spend 4 years building a factory just to avoid a tariff that won’t be around in 4 years time. But if the tariffs are permanent, then they cannot be used as a bargaining tool, because the bargaining process has to conclude with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced in order to win concessions from the other side. And if the tariffs are supposed to move manufacturing back to the US and address the trade imbalance, they cannot serve as a long-term source of revenue, because eventually (the theory goes) those companies will produce everything in the US, meaning they won’t be paying tariffs.

Now suppose 2 is true. If the goal of the tariffs is to be a bargaining tool then the bargaining has to end with the tariffs being removed or substantially reduced. In this scenario, the tariffs will not result in repatriating manufacturing, and they will not serve as a source of long-term income for the reasons we just discussed.

And of course, if 3 is true, the same problems apply. If the tariffs are to be a source of long-term income then the current trade imbalances have to remain. If manufacturing repatriates, the income dries up. If deals are struck in return for removing the tariffs, the income dries up.

Tariffs can, when applied thoughtfully and with care, serve as a tool to help achieve any one of those three goals. They cannot solve any of those problems on their own;

• You cannot fund a government entirely on tariffs, the US tried that for a long time and it proved to be a bad idea because international trade is worth so much more to your economy
• You cannot move manufacturing home with tariffs alone, you need to also invest in supporting the infrastructure, training and other supports needed (which is exactly what Biden was doing with the CHIPS act that Trump shit-canned)
• You cannot use tariffs effectively as a tool for negotiation when you apply them to the entire planet at the same time, thus pitting yourself alone against everyone else.

And they certainly cannot solve all three of them together.

Bernie Sanders has long been an advocate against unrestricted free trade. There are many progressive economists who favour the careful use of tariffs as a way of preventing corporations from exploiting cheap international labour for profit while driving down domestic wages. Cory Doctorow has an excellent essay on this subject; https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/

There’s also Bessent’s plan to repatriate manufacturing by strong-arming the rest of the world into accepting deals where they peg their currency to the US dollar, thus allowing the US to devalue the dollar while maintaining it’s privileged position as the global reserve currency, which would in turn tend to shift the US trade balance more towards exports. But Bessent himself isn’t really a fan of using tariffs to achieve this, and any sane person would plan to go after a few countries at a time, not the whole planet. It’s also a bad plan anyway because once people see that you’re planning to devalue the currency you just pegged them to, they’ll probably just tear up those deals, because if you weren’t acting in good faith why should they? Also, devaluing the dollar, on its own, would likely do little to increase domestic manufacturing in the US. It would make existing US exports more attractive, but it wouldn’t create any kind of a serious case for investing in more manufacturing in the US. The US standard of living is still much, much higher than most of the places where companies can build these goods, which means its simply more expensive to do anything in the US. That only changes is you massively reduce the US standard of living, which isn’t exactly the big win anyone in MAGA wants, now is it?

The point being, yes, there are plenty of arguments for the use of tariffs, just like there are plenty of situations where a reasonable person might want a gun. That doesn’t then imply that it’s a good idea to shoot yourself in the foot. What Trump and his administration are doing with tariffs cannot be defended, because it simply does not make sense as a plan. It’s an incoherent, self-defeating hodge-podge of ideas that could only have resulted from many different warring factions trying to enact their own preferred plan while a mad-king at the centre of it all listens to anyone who salves his ego while having absolutely no comprehension of the realities of what he, or anyone around him, is trying to achieve.