Let me preface it by saying I don't care much about what Trump says. I don’t find it worth talking about anything from the perspective of he’s great and wonderful or he’s crazy and evil.
Anyway, my contrarian take is that economists are too fixated on borders in a way that I've come to think of as weird. Why is international trade such a sacrosanct principle that everyone loses their minds talking about it? Here are a few things that are, in my view, important and unassailable economic truths, but I never once heard them discussed.
1. A tariff is just a special case of a tax. Economists (I'm talking academia economica as a whole) are broadly supportive of all sorts of taxes that impose tremendous deadweight losses on an economy and distort how markets operate. For example, nobody goes off the rails when someone proposes increases in income tax rates. Biden seemed to campaign on the idea of taxing unrealized gains. These sorts of changes seem potentially much more destructive, but this sort of discussion wasn't met with the same handwringing as talking about any sort of tariff.
Every tax imposes deadweight loss and creates disincentives. Would I rather have a tariff that raised $nB or an income tax that raises $nB. That's a worthwhile economic question that I hear nobody talking about. But there are reasons to believe tariffs might be preferable in some important ways (they tax consumption rather than production, collection is simpler, etc).
2. Some level of taxation is necessary, especially when we are close to fiscal disaster. There will have to be spending cuts but likely also tax increases. Tariffs are likely the easiest of tax increases to propose politically because, unlike most other taxes, they have a constituency of people who will directly benefit from them. A large number of the folks who will bear the costs of the tax are people in those other countries. That is, if we have to raise taxes somehow, and the political climate is against raising taxes directly, this is a politically sensible way, right?
No, Trump's not saying (yet?) that he's going to abolish the IRS and try to replace income taxes with tariffs. For the foreseeable future, that doesn't seem practical. But if we must have new taxes, it's far from clear that this is the worst kind of new tax to impose.
WRT tax increases the median economist seems willing to embrace, say, the Elizabeth Warren agenda without too much trouble.
3. When it comes to goals, I agree in theory, but in practice trying to sus out the goals and motivations of policies has always seemed like a fool's errand. If you ask the Bootleggers why they're for prohibition, you get a completely different answer (if they're being honest) than you get from the Baptists. Any policy broad enough to matter will have multiple goals and motivations.