The reality of trying to make US manufacturing great again
The fortunes of furniture makers in North Carolina and Foshan in China show the impact of Trump’s tariff regime
By Peter Foster in London, Aime Williams in High Point and William Langley in Foshan
Jerry Samet has lived in High Point, a small town in North Carolina that has styled itself as the heart of the global furniture industry, for most of his life.
After taking the helm of his father’s business, he works from a sprawling warehouse on the edge of town whose showrooms are peppered with bright chairs and desks.
But in recent years the furniture industry veteran has watched the once vibrant sector of his home town decline.
Over decades of global trade liberalisation measures, the US furniture industry turned to countries such as China, Mexico and Vietnam for both parts and finished pieces.
North Carolina alone has lost more than 60,000 furniture-making jobs since 1990.
This is the dynamic that Donald Trump and his trade officials have said they were trying to reverse with a targeted move in their series of high duties on imported goods.
In October, Trump introduced sweeping tariffs of 25 per cent on imports of kitchen and bathroom cabinets and upholstered wood furniture, along with levies of 10 per cent on lumber.
The aim, the president posted on social media ahead of the announcement, was to “make North Carolina, which has completely lost its furniture business to China . . . GREAT again”.
Samet’s company, High Point Furniture Industries, which still makes all its furniture in the US and buys the vast majority of its inputs and raw goods from other US companies, might have been expected to benefit from the new regime.
But companies like HFPI say in fact they are now paying more for their parts as other businesses pass on the cost of tariffs — which include duties of 50 per cent on an array of steel and aluminium products, as well as “reciprocal” tariffs ranging from 10 to 50 per cent on almost every trading partner.
“We are buying from distributors in the US, but they have imported [goods] and have to pass the tariff on to us,” says Samet.
“That’s the situation we have, they pass it on to customers.”
And often it is ordinary Americans who pay the final bill.
US government consumer prices data shows furniture prices, which had been falling for 18 months before Trump came to office, up 4 per cent in many categories in the year to December 2025, well above the US inflation rate of 2.7 per cent.
“We definitely increased our prices multiple times,” says Doug Townsend, the president of Magnussen Home Furnishings, a wholesale retailer based just outside High Point that employs about 150 people.
That helps explain why, in the down days between Christmas and New Year, the White House quietly slipped out the announcement that it was rowing back plans to double levies of up to 50 per cent on kitchen furniture.
It followed similar moves earlier in the year on coffee, cocoa and other agricultural products, alongside exemptions for key electronic consumer products, such as mobile phones.
Trump’s promise to use tariffs to revive North Carolina’s furniture industry formed part of a trade policy designed to, in the words of the US trade representative Jamieson Greer, “accelerate re-industrialisation”.
Yet over the course of Trump’s first year back in the White House, that grand ambition — which covered not just furniture but shipbuilding, autos and chipmakers, has time and again been tempered by reality.
The administration justified the decision not to increase tariffs on upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets by citing “productive negotiations” it was having with its trade partners.
But analysts say the retreat also reflects intense industry lobbying, growing domestic political pressure over prices and a dawning realisation of the limitations of tariffs as a tool to bring back manufacturing to the US.
“The administration has quietly been receptive to arguments that significant sectors should be exempted from tariffs, or arguments that the theory that tariffs will reshore production back to the US don’t stand up,” says former US trade representative Michael Froman, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.
The idea that US manufacturing is going to come roaring back is “a nice talking point for the administration and for people who believe in tariffs”, adds furniture wholesaler Townsend.
“But it just doesn’t work that way.”
On the other side of the world, in the vast furniture wholesale markets outside the southern Chinese city of Foshan, news of Trump’s latest tariff retreat is met with a weary shrug.
Producers selling their wares in the huge collection of megamalls known as China’s “furniture kingdom” in the suburb of Lecong complain of the disarray caused by the on-and-off volleys of Trump’s trade levies.
These shot up to 145 per cent at one point early last year before steadying after Washington and Beijing agreed to a détente in May.
December’s decision to delay the additional tariffs on furniture only adds to the confusion.
“What we fear the most are the tariffs,” says Zeng Chunsong, who runs Douding Furniture from a shop nestled among Lecong’s more than 180 speciality emporiums.
Throughout last year, his colleagues in Lecong traded stories of American buyers refusing to pay for orders as tariffs shot up erratically, creating expensive backlogs in the areas’ warehouses, but the situation has since stabilised.
Many players in China’s Rmb456bn ($65.4bn) furniture export industry have also adapted the furniture they sell to suit tastes in new markets such as India and the Gulf states.
The flags of 29 nations — from China to Egypt — hang from the ceiling of the Louvre International Furniture Exhibition Center, a huge showroom for high-end pieces in Lecong, but the Stars and Stripes is conspicuously absent.
“Very few people come over here from the US,” says Cindy Cao, a sales representative at Jiwu Collection, which exhibits at the Louvre centre.
She adds that they had been replaced by Russians, Indians and people from the Middle East — a reflection of China’s shifting trade patterns.
“It’s getting harder each year . . . our customer profile is changing,” she says.
The picture on the ground in Foshan is reflected in the trade data from Trump’s first year back in the White House.
Despite the tariff blitz, China’s trade surplus with the world continued to grow, exceeding $1.2tn last year, even as Chinese exports to the US fell by 20 per cent.
At the same time, says Neil Shearing of Capital Economics, exports to the US from other Asian manufacturing powerhouses, including Vietnam and Cambodia, have continued to grow despite attracting tariffs of about 20 per cent.
Data suggests that a significant amount of Chinese export production is being rerouted through other Asian countries.
Before Trump came back to office, China manufactured nearly half of the mobile phones imported into the US, a figure that has shrunk to less than a quarter, with the slack taken up by a combination of India, Thailand and Vietnam.
Similarly with furniture, after Trump imposed tariffs in his first term on Chinese furniture imports, trade rapidly rerouted via Vietnam, which now leads China as the main exporter of furniture to the US.
“The main takeaway from the past 12 months is just how remarkably adaptable and flexible the global trading system now is,” Shearing adds.
“We have the highest tariffs since the 1940s, and yet global trade continues.”
A significant part of the underlying reason for such trade resilience remains Asia’s continued competitiveness: even with a tariff of 20 or even 40 per cent, goods made in China or south-east Asia are still cheaper.
Ding Kai, manager of furniture maker Tsemoo, says the tariff onslaught came as China’s property sector slowdown was hitting the domestic market, forcing more local companies to try to sell overseas.
Despite the uncertainty caused by tariffs, the US market was still viable given the intense price advantage held by Chinese producers.
“It’s still nothing to the competition we have in China,” he says, pointing out a high-end dining chair that Tsemoo sells for Rmb1,000 [US$143] to domestic customers but could fetch $1,000 overseas. “We still have an advantage.”
Trump’s trade policy may have succumbed to economic gravity during the course of 2025, but trade analysts warn that much uncertainty remains over how the administration will handle the next phase of its attempt to rebalance the global trading system.
The administration is committed to removing or reducing Chinese content in strategic supply chains and has threatened 40 per cent tariffs on goods found to have been “transshipped” via Asia to avoid levies.
Cracking down on Chinese goods entering the US through back doors will be a central part of forthcoming talks between the US, Mexico and Canada as they review the USMCA trade deal, forged by Trump in 2020, this year.
In Asia, coercive “poison pill” clauses have also been inserted in the limited trade deals the administration signed with south-east Asian countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia, threatening retaliation or termination if countries sign other trade deals Trump deems contrary to “essential US interests”.
And in Europe, the inherent volatility of any deal with Trump was demonstrated by the president’s decision to use the threat of fresh tariffs on eight European countries to pressure Denmark into selling Greenland to the US.
The move has left EU diplomats warning of a fresh trade war with the US, less than six months after Brussels and Washington agreed a truce with a “reciprocal” tariff deal that hit EU exports to the US with a blanket 15 per cent tariff.
The administration’s ability to impose punitive tariffs will also depend on the outcome of a US Supreme Court ruling, expected in the early part of the year, on whether Trump can use emergency powers to impose his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs.
A ruling against the government could lead to those tariffs being removed.
Trump warned on social media that an adverse decision by the court would leave his tariff policy in a “complete mess”, with companies potentially able to claim refunds estimated at more than $150bn.
However, analysts argue that whichever way the Supreme Court rules, in the short term at least, Trump’s willingness to intensify his trade war is likely to be tempered by rising political pressure on prices at home.
As the country heads towards this November’s midterm elections, Democrats routinely blame “Trump’s disastrous tariffs” for the rising costs being faced by working families, even though the data shows that the overall impact of tariffs on US consumer prices has, thus far, been relatively muted.
Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist based in North Carolina’s capital city of Raleigh, says the party’s candidates were focused on Americans’ unhappiness with the cost of living and inflation.
“A lot of the tariffs we’re seeing are hitting every single consumer,” Jackson says.
“The only thing on voters’ radars right now is increased prices, whether those are grocery prices or utilities.”
There is also the need not to destabilise continuing negotiations with China’s President Xi Jinping.
Trump has up to four scheduled meetings with Xi in 2026, including a visit to Beijing in April.
As part of a one-year truce finalised in South Korea last October, Trump agreed to suspend the most severe US levies on Chinese goods for at least a year after Beijing threatened to further throttle US access to critical minerals and rare earth metals.
The truce in part reflects a realisation in Washington of just how powerful China’s dominance in global supply chains has become, says Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC.
For China’s part, he adds, the US is too big a market for exporters to ignore, even if companies seek to grow their market share in alternative destinations such as Europe and south-east Asia.
The sheer size and importance of the US market to China, coupled with Trump’s pragmatic nature, raises the prospect of further deals struck in 2026, he adds.
“It’s not inconceivable that we suddenly see the US strike a deal saying that Chinese exporters should invest in the US,” Neumann says.
“We have someone in the White House who is exceedingly pragmatic and can turn things around.”
But the combination of price pressures at home and the need to protect the relationship with Xi will prompt Trump to tread cautiously, according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group political consultancy.
“Unlike on the security front, where President Trump is unconstrained and will become more aggressive given America’s overwhelming military superiority, I expect a lot more predictability on trade from here on out,” he says.
However, in the longer term, Froman of the Council on Foreign Relations says the fact remains that Trump is committed to living in a “higher tariff world” — a position that is unlikely to change, possibly even after his term expires.
Past experience had shown that tariffs, once imposed, are difficult to remove again, not least because governments grew to rely on the revenues, which hovered at about $30bn a month in the second half of 2025.
“Historically, we know tariffs are easy to put up, and harder to take away,” Froman says. “A $285bn tax increase is a hard thing to get through Congress.”
That means potentially more pain for furniture makers in North Carolina and elsewhere in the US.
Peter Theran, chief executive of the Home Furnishings Association, which represents retailers, says the decision to delay the additional sector-specific tariffs had provided some breathing room to the industry — but that pressures from wider tariffs remained.
Ultimately, he says, they were hurting a still viable US industry for its reliance on imports.
“The upholstery industry in North Carolina, for example, is assembling furniture from imported parts — fabric, wood, studs and staples — which is driving US employment and taxable revenue,” he says.
Samet in High Point says the lingering uncertainty has meant fewer customers committing to revamp their offices by placing large furniture orders and splashing out on high-end US-manufactured wooden conference tables.
Nobody wants to make a decision, he says.
“This has all just really put a damper on the economy.”
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