The Court and the voters: Will Trump’s tariffs survive?

Sumter, South Carolina is now home to a 500,000-square-foot rare-earths magnet manufacturing plant, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said in a November 7, 2025 interview with Steve Bannon.  Holding the first magnet to come off the assembly line, Bessent characterized the facility as a critical “first step” toward fueling Trump’s economic engine:

Sumter is the real South Carolina. This used to be a soybean field and the President’s tax policy has brought this home. Not only is this high-precision manufacturing but  the is national security. We let China take control of rare earths, the rare earth magnets too and they’ve had us in a chokehold. This facility is the first step toward breaking that chokehold.”

This 500,000 square foot plant will help us take control over our supply chain. Magnets are in everything from  fighter jets to iPhones to every car to every medical device to cat scans. The Chinese use this as a big negotiating tool and Trump raised the tariffs on China because of it. Capital expenditures are how you bring things back here. Those two coupled together will return us to be the manufacturing superpower we are.

Bessent also pointed to Boeing’s North Charleston expansion, where the Dreamliner is built.

President Trump has been going around the world doing these trade deals. I believe he has personally sold more than 1,000 Boeing airplanes, and these are great high-paying jobs for people in South Carolina.

According to state and company disclosures, e-VAC Magnetics — the U.S. arm of Germany’s Vacuumschmelze (VAC Group) — built its first American facility on ~85 acres in Sumter County’s Pocotaligo Industrial Park, completing construction in early November 2025.  Using locally sourced raw materials, the facility will produce rare-earth permanent magnets (high-strength NdFeB and SmCo) for E.V. drivetrains, defense systems, and industrial motors, with a target capacity of ~1,600 tons/year.

The project is backed by a mix of private capital, South Carolina incentives (site prep, water/wastewater, expedited permitting — only 8 weeks to approve), and federal support (including a Department of Defense industrial-base award and an advanced-energy tax credit) to stand up a U.S. rare-earth supply chain.  The company provides approximately 300 full-time jobs (after approximately 800 construction jobs for the build), with potential to scale “six to ten times” as additional lines come online, according to Bessent.

On November 3, 2025, Ucore Rare Metals announced an agreement with VAC/e-VAC Magnetics to strengthen the North American supply chain by providing high-purity rare-earth oxides from planned refining sites in Louisiana and Ontario to the Sumter plant — reducing reliance on Asian imports.

President Trump has pushed reshoring since his first term.  He signed an early 2025 executive order on national security with rare earths as a pillar (after a similar order signed in September 2020).  Bessent and Trump believe that projects like the Sumter plant will grow the economy, employ Americans, and protect U.S. interests over the long run.

Nevertheless, the Democratic sweep of blue-state special elections in November suggests that voters may be running low on patience.  The results were not unusual — these were blue states electing Democrats.  But many, especially those age 40 years or younger, are anxious about jobs, the cost of living, and the housing market for entry-level buyers.

Many Americans also remain unconvinced about the benefits of Trump’s economic strategies. Trump’s tariffs, for example, may be difficult to embrace; in the short term, they are likely “to raise prices, and reduce available quantities of goods and services for U.S. businesses and consumers, resulting in lower income, reduced employment, and lower economic output,” according to the Tax Foundation.  His tariff authorities are under Supreme Court review and could be curtailed or reversed.  During Nov. 5 oral arguments, justices across the Court —  including conservatives — pressed the administration’s counsel as to whether the International Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) actually allows a president to impose sweeping tariffs, signaling skepticism that could narrow or unwind some measures.

Republican messaging has also been problematic, a point Trump emphasized after the elections.  Though Trump often connects with ordinary voters, too many GOP candidates have been hell-bent on undermining Trump or have failed to articulate Trump’s economic strategy to younger and working-class voters.  Heading into the races, they neither showcased what has already improved during his tenure nor touted the unrealized benefits of his forward-thinking agenda.  “Republicans don’t talk about it,” he told GOP senators at a Nov. 5 White House breakfast.  “They don’t talk about the word ‘affordability.’”  One thing is clear: The immediate benefits of Trump’s policies are not obvious to the average American.

Trump has been criticized for focusing on foreign policy.  Bessent and Trump, however, advocate “foundation first” economics, a strategy that looks overseas to lay the groundwork for domestic growth, better employment, and lower prices in the long term.  Bessent told Bannon that the effects of Trump’s policies will take time:

I wish we could have thrown the switch, and the jobs and manufacturing would have come right back. It’s a process — we didn’t get here overnight. The house got burned down; it takes time to rebuild. We’re rebuilding from the foundation.

Bessent calls tariff revenue a “shrinking ice cube.”  He continued, “A successful tariff regime leads to reshoring.  As factories return, tariff income falls, and payroll/income-tax receipts from high-paying jobs rise.”

Trump is not just focused on tariffs.  He has endorsed no federal income taxes on tips (“no tax on tips”), overtime pay for blue-collar and service-industry workers, and reducing income taxes for seniors.  His administration has extended the expiring components of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) to restore business tax breaks, provide tax breaks for high-income households, and expand the Child Tax Credit, all slated to take effect in 2026.

“First, stop price increases where we can—gasoline and some foods. The home run is real wage growth.”  Bessent reminded listeners that during President Trump’s first term, hourly workers did better than supervisory workers; the bottom 50% saw net worth rise faster than the top 10%.  He added, “By 2019, blue collar wages rose faster than white collar wages and non-college graduate professionals” because of Trump’s policies.

Bessent said that the One Big Beautiful Bill is “retroactive … so we will see substantial refunds to working families” in the first quarter of 2026, and wages will jump up in the first quarter because of “adjustments to tips, overtime, and Social Security.”  The Trump administration also continues to focus on cheap energy and easing regulatory burdens. 

Bessent argues that the real affordability issues — owning a home, making car payments, buying food — are driven not by tariffs, but by services-sector inflation.  Durable wage gains come from factory work, not government-heavy hiring.

In the near term, Bessent says Trump is focused on “stopping the price increases and lower energy costs, especially where state policies block affordable energy.”  In the long term, Bessent believes that “the home run is real wage growth from high-paying manufacturing jobs.  Real long-term wage growth results from working at factories like I am at here right now,” he said.  Bessent points back to Trump’s first term as a model, claiming that lower-income and hourly workers saw faster net-worth gains than managerial classes.  The goal is to repeat those gains at larger scale and in more places.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.