Trump has a long and well-documented legacy of overpromising, followed by outcomes that don’t quite match the hopes he helped inflate. His bluster is only partly to blame for that. The other half of the problem lies with the audience: people consistently underestimate how hard real things are to build, and how long it takes to rebuild what has already been destroyed.
You can’t just decide to “bring manufacturing back,” build a plant, cut a ribbon, and assume the rest takes care of itself. Erecting the physical structure is not even the main challenge. It’s the easy, visible part—the bit politicians love because it photographs well.
Every production facility sits at the center of a dense microcosm of competence: skilled workers, engineers, technicians, safety culture, tacit knowledge, habits learned over decades. People who know how to run machines efficiently, safely, and without turning the place into a liability nightmare. Once that knowledge is lost, you don’t “restart” it. You start again from scratch. Slowly. Painfully. Expensively.
That kind of rebuilding requires enormous investment, and more importantly, long-term assurances. Assurances that rules won’t change midstream. That energy will remain affordable. That regulations won’t mutate every election cycle. That demand won’t be legislated out of existence. And those are assurances no single administration—certainly not one with a four-year horizon—can honestly deliver.
Four years is nothing in industrial time.
When I worked for the largest oil and gas company in Central Europe, the old hands told stories about what the company once was. It had been one of the best in Enhanced Oil Recovery—world-class, by all accounts. That expertise had been learned the hard way, when they were forced to revitalize oil fields damaged by Soviet extraction methods. It took time. Discipline. Serious engineering culture.
By the time I arrived, it was gone. Not weakened. Gone. Only a shadow remained—PowerPoint echoes of former competence. The people were gone, the practices forgotten, the institutional memory erased. You couldn’t resurrect it by decree. You would have had to rebuild it almost molecule by molecule.
That is the reality facing anyone who talks about rebuilding manufacturing today. It will be very, very hard. It will take a long time. And it will not bend to slogans, tariffs, or televised confidence. Industrial capacity is not impressed by bluster. It only responds to patience, continuity, and pain.
