(The Daily Signal)—For President Donald Trump, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s $100 billion investment in U.S. chip manufacturing represented “a tremendous leap—like, a leap that nobody would have really said was possible.”
But TSMC’s $100 billion is just a small part of the at least $3 trillion in investments and trade commitments the Trump administration has racked up in just six weeks since Inauguration Day.
The $3 trillion of investment and trade commitments with the United States involve key allies, such as India and Japan, and major players in the private sector—Apple and Oracle, to name just two. These arrangements also cover critical industries beyond chip manufacturing, from pharmaceuticals to automobiles to artificial intelligence.
With the announcement of TSMC’s $100 billion investment—which Trump celebrated with TSMC CEO C.C. Wei, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and AI czar David Sacks on Monday—the Taiwanese company is nearly tripling its previous investment in additional chip manufacturing investment in the United States.
Before the announcement, TSMC had invested $65 billion in U.S.-based manufacturing. Its first American manufacturing plant in Arizona, which began with a $12 billion investment in 2020, opened for business late last year.
TSMC plans to use the $100 billion in new investment to set up three new chipmaking plants, two chip-packing plants, as well as a research and development center.
TSMC dominates the global semiconductor industry. In terms of revenue, its foundries account for more than 60% of global market share. But that was not always the case. Just over 30 years ago, the U.S. accounted for 37% of global semiconductor production, while Taiwan was just a few measly percent.
U.S. policymakers engrossed in the doctrines of free trade saw the semiconductor industry flee to subsidized and protected Asian markets. For decades, free-trade dogmatism dragged America into a ditch.
Now, the Trump administration is offering a way out. Trump’s policies have spurred investments that diminish China’s leverage over the American economy. These investments are a foundational pillar for any attempt to make the U.S. economy more resilient to a China shock and revitalize American manufacturing.
During his first full day of his second term, Trump unveiled “Stargate,” a $500 billion investment into artificial intelligence over the next four years. Trump called Stargate—a collaboration between SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle—“the largest AI infrastructure project, by far, in history.”
Just a month prior, SoftBank announced a $100 billion investment that aimed to create 100,000 American jobs. Additionally, Trump secured a $20 billion initial investment by DAMAC Properties in early January for new data centers based in the U.S.
As Vice President JD Vance outlined in his speech at the Paris AI summit last month, the Trump administration is committed to competing with China in the AI space while also challenging European notions of how to regulate AI and chart the future of the AI economy.
After Trump said his administration was considering placing tariffs on pharmaceutical imports, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced it planned to invest $27 billion in four new manufacturing facilities in America. The company claimed that, once complete, the plants will create more than 3,000 jobs. Building the facilities themselves will require 10,000 construction workers, the company added.
Since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, production of generic drugs and the chemical compounds used as inputs for those drugs increased at a rapid pace. That was not the “invisible hand” at work; rather, it was the result of conscious policy choices on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to subsidize those industries, thereby undercutting drug producers and jobs in the U.S. and across the West, nations that were at the time drinking deeply from free-trade dogmatism.
Tariffs also may have been a factor in Apple’s decision to invest in the American economy. After Trump announced an additional 10% tariff on China, Apple announced it would be investing $500 billion in the United States and hire approximately 20,000 workers. Apple plans to open a new factory in Texas and a manufacturing academy in Detroit, as well as expansions in Arizona, Nevada, California, North Carolina, and other states.
Apple will double its investment in its U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which includes working alongside TSMC in the Taiwanese company’s Arizona facility to produce advanced silicon.
Apple plans to hire the 20,000 workers over the next four years, the vast majority of whom will be focused on silicon engineering, AI and machine learning, and the like.
Trump has also worked with foreign leaders to court more investment in the American economy and bolster American exports. Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledged the kingdom would invest $600 billion in America. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed with Trump on increasing the trade between U.S. and India to $500 billion.
Japan, meanwhile, has promised to open more auto plants in the U.S. and import American liquified natural gas at “historic” levels, thereby reducing America’s trade deficit with its Asian ally. One Japanese automaker, Honda, is reportedly moving production of the Honda Civic hybrid from Mexico to Indiana in response to Trump’s tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
For Trump and his administration, “Make America Great Again” starts with actually making things in America again.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
