Technology

It is pretty much what the EU is doing. Tariffs on Chinese cars to compensate for their subsidies and brand agnostic subsidies for EVs on the domestic market (also applicable to Chinese cars of course, but equally to everyone else, levelling the playing field).

We have yet to see if the European producers are going to survive but they at least appear to have gotten the memo on at least competing in the sector of not oversized, affordable EVs again. Renault is pretty successful with its R5 and I would think also the new Renault Twingo should sell well for example.

In the US the car industry has pushed itself into a corner it cannot get out anymore, except maybe Tesla, which does know how to build efficient and somewhat affordable cars. It just chooses to go the opposite way because the guy at the top is a lunatic. The rest of the sector doesn't even know how to do it, even if they wanted. They are heading to their Kodak/Nokia end game. Except Nokia found a way out by offloading the damage to a foreign company stupid enough to purchase the doomed branch and consequently refocusing on the other branches that it could secure a future (for Nokia that was mobile communication infrastructure).

Lobbying for walling off the US market while making laws to postpone the death of oversized combustion engine vehicles, will postpone the inevitable but only by so much. At some point the US will be the only underdeveloped country left, still choking in traffic fumes, I don't think it would even get that far before everything collapses among US car producers.