Democrats should emphasize that tariffs alone will not create jobs or build new plants.

They have to be paired with investments, tax incentives and other industrial policies. That is why Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. As a result, in 2023 we had the largest investment in new American factories in decades — including a factory that Mitsubishi Electric plans to build in my district, with hundreds of jobs coming online when it’s fully operational. If the Trump administration succeeds in killing these pro-manufacturing policies and illegally freezing the funding that Congress approved, it would undermine the effectiveness of Mr. Trump’s tariffs and his expressed goal of American industrial revival.

The corporations that profited from the old trade regime should pay for this revival, not workers and consumers. If we make it easier to join a union and ban stock buybacks, the gains from protection will translate into higher worker pay, not just windfall dividends for investors. Strong antitrust enforcement can stop corporations from using the cover of tariffs to intensify their price gouging. Mr. Trump and my Republican counterparts oppose all of those plans. And that’s why their approach is unlikely to benefit most Americans.

Every past trade deal was sold to American workers with the same lie: that we could export our way to a trade balance. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is pushing that line now, claiming that a “reciprocal tariffs” plan can intimidate other countries into cutting their tariffs and buying more of our stuff. But the main problem is on the import side.

The United States has had mostly duty-free access to Mexico’s markets since the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and we still have a huge bilateral trade deficit with Mexico. Mr. Trump tried to update NAFTA in his first administration, but our trade deficit only expanded. Instead of just hitting Mexico with tariffs — if and when Mr. Trump makes up his mind about them — we should fix the agreement he signed with Mexico to force companies seeking its benefits to agree to higher wages and stronger labor rights enforcement, to pay for their pollution costs in Mexico and to stop Chinese firms from using it to obtain duty-free access to the United States.

Western Pennsylvanians know how important it is to get this right. We lost more than our share of manufacturing jobs and factories to bad trade deals and policies. As our tax base collapsed, hospitals, schools and vital public services faltered, too, and communities were stretched to the brink.

For the last decade, Mr. Trump has capitalized on voters’ justifiable anger on bad trade deals, but his administration is too undisciplined to deliver the relief Americans need. That is why Democrats must fight hard for smart tariffs and other trade policies that will deliver good-paying jobs and restore America’s manufacturing leadership.