The Messy Reality of ‘Made in America’

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The construction of a massive factory in Arizona was supposed to embody the Trump administration's world with literally 18,000 reasons to think twice about building in America. It's Monday, December 22. Peter, good to be coming to the studio. Delighted. I wonder, just to start this conversation, if you can describe this factory that you recently visited to us. Yeah. Sure. So it's about 09:20 in the morning on Friday, and I'm just arriving I mean, there's this giant, mostly empty desert valley in the Extreme North Of Phoenix, as far as the eye could see, really, emptiness. I'm standing on a gravel road, looking at cactuses and various desert scrub just flowing out to the horizons, that this is all gonna get filled up with housing and and offices to feed So this factory, I've seen a lot of factories in my day You sure have. Is on a scale that I've never even imagined. We're talking about more than a thousand acres. The complex itself, I'm looking at a long, low, gray building with a bunch of smoke stacks visible on top. You can see at least a dozen cranes. You can hear the roar of something. There's black smoke now coming out of the top of one of these buildings and beyond, you can see these cranes that are working And there are construction cranes in every direction. Now I lived in Shanghai, China, in the height of the construction boom there. So I was in Dubai when Dubai was under enormous construction. And then to the west of there, there's a ton of cranes, just counting real 12, 34, 56, 7891011. I mean, I'm running out as I've counted 15 of them, and there's still more. And then there's more visible, like, way beyond to the west that could be a These are the only places where I've seen these numbers of cranes and numbers of construction people wandering about. And that feeling of, like, you're present there for a moment when things are really changing in a deep way in that place. Just beyond, I see heavy equipment on the move. I see diggers that are moving soil around. There's a whole wall of porta potties, as you would expect at a giant construction project. I mean, this is, people say, the biggest construction project in North America. And I I gotta say it doesn't disappoint. And looking at this factory under construction evokes that sense as well. Of scale. Not just scale, but that this is important beyond the thing itself. What does it represent, this gargantuan, crane filled, factoryville? It represents a moment when a consensus broke out in the American political system, in the business world, that globalization, this system that we've been living under for most of our adult lives, has been very fruitful and beneficial in all sorts of ways, but there are some things where it matters …