Tariffs are a short term lever for rebalancing the ability of your nation’s manufacturing sectors and skilled labor to produce both peacetime and wartime goods. We shortsightedly exported the jobs that kept our population’s skills polished. We need to rebalance that or we will eventually have to face that we exported our nations ability to defend itself against foreign forces, both physical and financial through monetary trade and mass production of supplies. It’s not a tax on its own citizens. It is meant to relocalize long term sources of prosperity, like localized mass production, community and regional self reliance, diverse skill set development across our population, etc.