"Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary, more beautiful than love," said Trump in an interview before he won the US election in a landslide. So for sure he will use tariffs very generously in his second administration. And this time he is quite experienced and implementing tariffs will likely won't take that much time.
The question is how he will approach steel tariffs. There are already widespread steel tariffs for much of the common steel shapes and grades, however some countries had their privileges on this program. Mexico and Canada enjoy the free status from Section 232 tariffs and there have been many complaints for Mexican imports by the domestic industry back by the bipartisan group of politicians, even though Mexico imports more US steel products than they export to the US.
Mexico will be a big target for sure, especially Trump's temperament will be mixed with the immigration issues. Threats to actually implementing tariffs on Mexico can certainly be in the cards. Trump also changed the level of tariffs quite fast with a tweet in the past, so things can change quite fast in the first 100 days of the administration, catching everyone off guard.
Tariffs against Chinese products will not change much, as they have Section 301 tariffs of 25% which is on top of the Section 232 steel and aluminium tariffs.
Trump can also up the Section 232 tariffs from 25% to you name it. Small bumps maybe somehow worked out but serious increases will have serious consequences on American manufacturers and traders once again.
Milder version of the new tariff would be to implement 10-20% to all products imported from everywhere as Trump was talking on the campaign trail. Since this will be applicable to everything, customers will have no choice to pay those and pass it on to the next chain in the supply chain. American consumers will be the last chain in the supply chain to foot the bill. This is again basically another tax on consumers and will be inflationary.
Perhaps a more useful version of a tariff implementation could be for some tariff on downstream steel products, such as nails, pc strand, mesh, fence, and widgets and gadgets made with steel. Both the Trump and Biden administration avoided opening that can of worms due to the sheer number of tariff products they will need to pay attention to and administer. Yet again, if the whole US imports are in the cards for tariffs, what would be the big deal with downstream steel products.
There is not much the players in the steel supply chain can do to adapt to new administration. They will have to wait and see what the new administration will implement. Hopefully changes will not be so fast and furious so that the market can work it out without serious pain to the participants. | 
