If you make or sell anything in the US, or really anywhere, you need stuff from China. Anything that contains any electronics (i.e almost everything important), many resources, plastic parts, anything the US has outsourced is ordered via sea freight from China.
Now it's 64% less things over a single week. Your whole economy relies on cheap stuff from China and they made it not cheap anymore. So companies will not order anymore, because they can't afford it, knowing that can't just double their prices. Most companies probably hope, that this is temporary and want to delay their orders until they have some level of security, that shit is not two or three times as expensive as it was the month before.
If that doesn't happen, everything down the supply chain will be affected. From food to cars to data centers and IT, consumer goods, cosmetics, healthcare. The shipping companies themselves. Logistics, ports, trucks. Building materials like steel and concrete. Everything. And most companies hold very little things in storage these days, they rely on just-in-time delivery because material on stock is expensive, so this impact will come very quick.
And nothing, outside of a gigantic national effort that would be comparable to the brutal industrialization of the Soviet Union or China, could compensate for this. The consequences are a massive economic crisis agaist which 2008 or Covid looks like peanuts.
Trump will bend. Or he might have to dodge a few more bullets.
I work in heavy industrial production and my company bought another.
Their plants were in a much worse state in regards to health and safety. Higher incident rates, worse safety practices, less maintained equipment and a worse culture about mistakes and criticism lead to people get hurt much more often.
Among all the corporate nonsense, I appreciated that they actually invested the money to make work safer. People get heavily injured or lose their lives when dealing with these large machines. Most of the workers there were grateful as the last owner was just interested in running the plant dry, no matter the cost of human lifes.