What happens is that on goods there is a point above which a consumer won't pay. If an English made fly reel costs $400.00 and they move production to China where they can produce them for $30.00 does the company then sell it to the consumer for say $40.00? No, they get as close to $400.00 as they can, as long as the market will bear it and keep the rest.
So what's going on? Fact is, the English company could have gotten the final price down to $300.00 and still made them in England, and the Chinese in reality are not just manufacturing geniuses but instead artificially manipulate their currency and worker wages to make darn sure they undercut the English company. Then, when the English company is dismantled guess what happens to the price of the Chinese fly reel? It goes way up.
In the mean time, the Chinese have massive cash flow of money from other countries which they put into private equity firms based in Dubai and Beijing and begin buying up farmland, hospitals, and so on from Canada, US and Europe. The hospitals are especially cheap because they went bankrupt because they took care of 1000's of people who had no real ability to pay but got care anyway which was written off or paid by the states. (This I have personal experience with). The people had no ability to pay because they derived their income from manufacturing jobs which went to China - yet they still had the audacity to get sick.
Bottom line is that a tariff can mitigate the above damage somewhat and my point is that some of that cost is met by the consumer, but the manufacturing company and the country currently producing the product all have room in their profit margins to pay too. That is why lawsuits to recovery Trumps tariffs are meaningless. All this is dynamic and is difficult to predict. Jobs saved in U.S. or Canada mean employees contributing taxes and paying real money for insurance for health care and so on. That has not been argued in most of these discussions.
Yes the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out because the shareholder wants to make more $$.
The company is not going to eat the tariff as that cuts into their profit margin which means less for the shareholder which means share price goes down and leads to stock sell off which leads to lower share price and the cycle continues.
Plus you have to look at the raw inputs that the companies need. Oil, minerals, steel, aluminum, potash, without those they cannot operate. Those cost will be passed on.
But the biggest problem for the US is the fact that he has made the US an unreliable trading partner.
When he governs by tweets and lashes out like a hurt child he can not be trusted.
That is why you see so many countries building trading blocks that exclude the US.
Will they trade with the US, sure but it will be on a completely different level.
The US is not the only game in town any more.