The reason people keep bringing this up is not because it is a bad business decision for Trump to have the clothes made overseas. It is because Trump has based a significant part of his campaign on promising to punish companies that have made the same economic decision HE has made. Why are you okay with Trump having his clothing line made overseas, but not okay with Ford making cars in Mexico, or Apple making computers in China?
Because it just is difficult to impossible to make some things here. It is simply not economically feasible. The cost is too high to be able to sell the product. This is the result of decades and decades of bad decisions. I am not in any way a proponent of an isolationist philosophy where we only make and buy things in the borders. It’s an international economy, and we want companies like coke and apple and gm selling in China and India, Latin America and Europe. We’ve accumulated great wealth in this country selling to those countries. We also have to expect some thing imported here. Textile manufacturing has been a huge loss to many areas of the country because it simply doesn’t work to do it here. There are plenty of products that makes sense to build in China or India. We need to reset our costs of labor, taxation, healthcare/benefit costs and union drag on our own business and manufacturing to move the balance back to where more things can be made domestically. Each decision is a unique case, such as the Carrier move from IN to Mexico. We need to make costs to operate here more reasonable so more companies can make the decision to build here and no elsewhere. In the meantime, some industries simply are best served with foreign manufacturing.