President Trump reminds us constantly that he wants to bring back U.S. manufacturing. The vision is alluring: shuttered factories reopening, assembly lines humming — perhaps an American army of “millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones,” as the commerce secretary recently imagined.
In Trump’s mind, there’s only one way to get there: tariffs.
Of course, it’s incredibly difficult to attract new manufacturing when you can’t explain the rationale for the policy, or commit to the policy itself. But there’s a deeper, more bewildering incoherence to Trump’s approach to trade — and nowhere is the contradiction more glaring than in clean energy.
The Trump administration inherited a genuine manufacturing boom. Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the clean energy industry has announced hundreds of new domestic manufacturing facilities, representing tens of billions in capital investment and hundreds of thousands of new factory jobs.
These are exactly the big, beautiful manufacturing plants Trump claims to champion. But instead of building on this foundation, his administration is actively working to tear it down. The White House is weaponizing grants and loans to projects that have already commenced; slashing support for regional clean energy hubs that would support tens of thousands of local jobs; and eliminating entire agencies dedicated to building cutting-edge industrial infrastructure.
This is the puzzling reality of Trump’s trade policy: it’s all stick, no carrot. And it’s creating profound uncertainty across every sector of the economy, especially in energy. As a result, we’ve seen $8 billion in factory plans scrapped already this year.
“When you think about what the potential was — and the 900 plus factories that Trump was handed on a silver platter — all 900 of them right now are fearing for their existence,” explained my Open Circuit co-host Jigar Shah, on this week’s episode about tariffs.
There is a legitimate intellectual movement behind trade populism. Organizations like American Compass and the Coalition for a Prosperous America have been building sophisticated arguments for protectionism for years. They make a case that America surrendered its industrial base in pursuit of cheap consumer goods and that rebuilding manufacturing capacity is essential for national security and middle-class prosperity. (It would be difficult to find someone who disagrees with that premise, in theory.)
“The Trump administration folks, the people who are driving a lot of these decisions, believe that this is not about degrowth, that this is about reindustrialization,” trade lawyer John Smirnow explained on Open Circuit this week. “If we want to be strong economically from a national security perspective, we actually need to reindustrialize this country.”
It sounds reasonable. But if reindustrialization were actually important to Trump, you might expect the administration’s other actions to align. Instead, they are flagrantly undermining the very industrial policies that were bringing cutting-edge manufacturing back to America.
Nothing illustrates this contradiction more clearly than what’s happening in batteries.
The tariffs come at a particularly bad time for America’s burgeoning battery industry. While domestic battery manufacturing capacity has doubled since 2022, most facilities still import at least half of their components from Asia. With tariffs potentially making these components prohibitively expensive, the entire sector is at risk.
My Open Circuit co-host Katherine Hamilton, who works closely with battery companies, described the challenge: “I’m hearing even from companies that are here and have, say, new battery chemistries that don’t rely on China. There is still the issue of, ‘How do we build a manufacturing facility when we need all these parts that are only available globally?’ They can’t just manufacture the parts to manufacture the parts.”
What makes this particularly rough is the timing. Companies have spent years developing strategic plans for building domestic manufacturing capacity, carefully calculating when and how to import specific materials and equipment. Now those plans are in jeopardy.
“These are high specialist, niche, high precision manufacturing processes, and you cannot build domestic capacity overnight. Even if you got the money from tariffs to pump into building new capacity, it’s similar to the chip industry — you can’t easily build expertise,” explained Kwasi Ampofo, head of metals and mining at BloombergNEF, told Latitude Media reporter Maeve Allsup.
In other words: If Trump’s flagrant attacks on clean energy companies haven’t already made it too risky to invest in a new plant, then tariffs might make it prohibitively expensive to build a factory at all.
The result? For grid-scale batteries, Jaffe expects projects planned for 2025 to be smaller than originally intended. And for 2026, “that number could be zero.”
Manufacturing is not a monolith. It’s a complex web of supply chains, expertise, and relationships built over decades. “Our superpower here is innovation,” Hamilton explained. “Our superpower is not only to come up with great ideas, but to take all these raw materials, these things that other countries have or can do better and cheaper than we do and make them into something of higher value.”
By disrupting this ecosystem without any clear plan for what comes next, Trump is creating a massive economic burden with no clear endgame beyond the creation of chaos itself.
Some in the administration appear to view this chaos as a feature, not a bug. Smirnow noted that “uncertainty is actually one of the most potent trade weapons. The more uncertainty we can create with respect to imports, the more it forces people to build factories in the U.S. where you actually have more certainty.”
But this assumes the U.S. can quickly develop alternative supply chains — a process that can take years. And in the meantime, as Shah bluntly put it, “everyone’s just going to be taxed to holy hell.”
So what’s really driving this incoherent approach? If it’s not actually about reindustrialization, what is it about?
There are many trade populists who have a genuine desire to bring manufacturing back to America. But in practice, Trump’s approach appears to be more about forcing others to submit to his will.
“Honestly, the only thing I can fathom is that we’re really doing a trade war with China,” Shah observed. “The rest of this stuff, this manufacturing stuff, is all just random talking points that people are talking about. No one in their right mind is thinking about doubling down on manufacturing in the United States right now while all this uncertainty is occurring.”
But in the end, this approach isn’t about manufacturing at all. It’s about revenge, dominance, and the pure satisfaction of making others kiss the ring. And America’s clean energy manufacturing renaissance may be one of the first casualties.
For more of Stephen Lacey’s conversation with Jigar Shah, Katherine Hamilton, and John Smirnow, listen to the whole episode of Open Circuit.
