The US’ most important good is intellectual property. They rely on other countries to protect their IP. If you no longer rely on them for trade because theyre tariffing the shit out of your country, you don’t need to appease them anymore by protecting their IP.

To be fair, we mostly have examples of how free trade reduces prices. But this reduction in prices usually wasn’t instantaneous and perceivable by ordinary folks. Because corporations wouldn’t hand out the savings to consumers until the very slow market force of competition forced them to. Tariffs will make everything more expensive and even if they are eventually culled, stuff will not become suddenly cheap again.