The victors of Trump's tariffs

The big picture: A lot of what's crucial to American industry and society either isn't made here, or isn't made in enough quantity to fill demand, or is made here but at much higher cost than overseas.

• Trump's looking toward a blunt-force fix: Make foreign products so expensive that there's profit to be made by making them here instead.

Zoom in: Two very specific industries would potentially win quickly.

1. Energy production — from rare-earth minerals to finished products like solar panels and batteries — would benefit under Trump, who in October called tariff "the most beautiful word in the dictionary ... my favorite word."

• The rare-earths supply chain, including 17 metallic elements critical to electronics, is a huge concern for both military and civilian applications. The GAO said in September these minerals are in short supply, and the Pentagon hasn't moved quickly enough to ensure they're not being sold to adversaries.
• A Chinese export ban in December only raises the stakes for boosting production.
• Domestic rare earths producer MP Materials is up more than 30% this year, as anticipation builds for a tariff regime friendly to the business. Domestic battery tech companies like QuantumScape are surging for the same reason.
• "The targets are defense-related things, energy … there's clearly a move to make the U.S. provide more of its energy needs," says Steve Dean, chief investment officer of Compound Planning, which manages $2.5 billion for clients. "Rare minerals, battery tech — that helps those industries, those domestic industries, to the extent we have those. Those are some of the winners."

2. Makers of critical medical supplies, including vials and syringes, are also potential big winners.

• The U.S. medical supply industry is already under pressure, with multiple single points of failure, and plenty of low-cost international competition.
• Just last fall, Hurricane Helene took out a North Carolina plant owned by Baxter that produced about half of all the IVs used in U.S. hospitals.
• A tariff regime could make it financially viable for more companies like Baxter, Medtronic and Stryker to make more medical products at home for local use. The American Hospital Association has called for incentives to increase domestic production and bolster the supply chain.

Reality check: Some industries look like winners but probably aren't, at least initially.

• The industrial supply chain would appear to benefit from tariffs on metals like steel and copper, but as Trump's first-term levies proved, sometimes that production just moves to another low-cost country.
• When Trump imposed steel tariffs in 2018, production simply shifted to other nations, rather than being re-shored in any significant way.
• "The winners and losers will be shaped by what gets onshored versus what goes to Vietnam or Mexico, in terms of the supply chains," Compound Planning's Dean says.

Between the lines: The Washington Post reported on Monday that Trump would scale back the threatened scope of his tariffs, and pointed to the industries highlighted in this article as "key sectors that the Trump team wants to bring back to the United States."

• But Trump vehemently denied that his "tariff policy will be pared back."
• Trump rejects the assertion from mainstream economists (and the Congressional Budget Office) that his tariffs, as promised, would cut economic growth and raise consumer prices.

The bottom line: Tariff winners and losers will depend not only on what the U.S. builds now, but what companies ramp up to build more of in the future.