I've read some pieces recently about Trump's misdirection and his taking actions to confound things so that others, the media and the press mainly but also some Republicans, don't understand the real intent. Using that, I'm going to posit a simple idea that might explain things.
The idea is this. Certain domestic industries are clamoring for protection. The one that comes to mind is microchip production. In the past, Silicon Valley companies have imported their microchips, possibly from a vertical integration arrangement where this critical input was produced abroad as part of a global supply chain. Suppose that, as of late, the decision was made to bring that supply chain entirely within the U.S. You may very well recall that this was a goal both for Biden and for Harris.
Now, the efficient thing to do in this case, assuming the government supported this goal, would be to place sector-specific tariffs to make the import of these inputs more expensive and thereby enable domestic production of the inputs to be more viable. But that would be showing one's cards. Trump does not play Indian Poker.
So, instead, we have the current tariff morass, where the bulk of it simply offers cover for the desired protectionist policy. Further, to make things more explicit, we really only want to apply tariffs to inputs that come from China, though one might imagine that China would itself use intermediaries to avoid the tariffs, if possible. We don't have any desire to place tariffs on goods from Mexico or Canada that are not themselves imports from China.
I want to note that this is all conjecture on my part. I have no direct evidence about what I'm saying here. But it does make sense to me.
