Sometimes, especially when stocks are tumbling, bond yields are soaring and the dollar looks like it is about to lose its reserve currency (and be replaced by what: the yuan? the euro? the turkish lira?), it is easy to forget what is the driving motive behind Trump's trade war. And in a nutshell, it is this chart: US debt which at $37 trillion is unsustainable, and which is growing at a pace which everyone - not just the bipartisan CBO, but also the Fed, the IMF, Elon Musk, the shoeshine boy, literally everyone - knows for a fact is catastrophically unsustainable.
But while everyone knows something has to be done to avoid a devastating catastrophe, until Trump came along nobody would dare do a thing to change the current status quo for the obvious abovementioned reasons: any attempt to restructure or even modestly adjust US debt-funded "growth", which transforms roughly $1 trillion of debt every 100 days into less than $200 billion of economic output...
... would lead to tumbling stocks, soaring bond yields and the dollar trading like it's the Turkish lira. Kinda like right now.
But the US had to start somewhere, and Trump did that amid the now familiar howls of terror from market participants (how dare Trump do something that trades long-term viability for short-term pain), the co- opted mainstream media and of course establishment economists, all of whom agree something must be done... just not this and not now.