If President Trump’s tariff strategy is going to bring production and jobs back to the United States, Didi Caldwell will be one of the first people to notice. Caldwell calls herself a factory whisperer. Her company, Global Location Strategies of Greenville, South Carolina, “is at the tip of the spear,” she says, in helping foreign and domestic companies find places to build factories in the United States. Her company helped London-based beverage company Diageo set up a whiskey distillery in Kentucky, Georgia-Pacific make Dixie plates and bowls in Tennessee, and Denmark’s Rockwool manufacture stone wool insulation in Wallula, Washington.
Caldwell is pessimistic about the job creation that Trump insists will take place thanks to his tariffs. “While everybody supports bringing good, high-paying manufacturing jobs to the United States, it’s not like turning on a light switch,” she told me. “You need to develop sites, you need energy, workforce development. That will take at least a decade. The tariffs, and the way they are being used, do not meet the stated objective.”