Drew Greenblatt believes the great equalizer is finally coming.

For years, Greenblatt, the owner of a steel fabrication plant in South Baltimore, has been imploring someone to do something about the “cheaters” in other countries — especially China.

Greenblatt says his company, Marlin Steel, competes with foreign factories that enjoy generous government subsidies, steal his intellectual property and undercut his business by ignoring environmental and safety standards.

Finally, America is poised to fight back. Or at least, Greenblatt hopes so.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump has vowed to slap tariffs on the biggest U.S. trading partners: Mexico, Canada and China. But how aggressive these tariffs will be — and which industries could get exemptions — is unclear.

Tariffs are taxes on products from other countries. They raise the price of consumer goods and disrupt global trade. According to Greenblatt, they also could save American manufacturing.

“It’s Sandtown vs. Shanghai,” Greenblatt said, referencing the West Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester. “That’s what this is all about.”

Economists warn that tariffs will trigger inflation, slow economic growth, and cause some people to lose their jobs. But the effects won’t hit everyone equally. There will be winners and losers. Greenblatt believes his company — and Baltimore — will win.

“This is so important. This is not like theoretical Ivory Tower, ‘Let’s discuss this at Harvard,’ ” Greenblatt said. “No, this is like, ‘Drew is gonna hire people from Sandtown.’ ”

Greenblatt believes so strongly that tariffs will boost his business that he said he recently bought a new $300,000 machine from a company in Chicago.

Founded in 1968, Marlin Steel employs about 40 people in Baltimore, Greenblatt said. They mostly make steel baskets used by the medical industry.

Wages start at $20 an hour and escalate with time and experience, Greenblatt said, and benefits include health care, vacation, a 401(k) match and opportunities for overtime.

It’s jobs like this that once drew millions of poor immigrants from Europe, the American South and Appalachia to cities like Baltimore. The rise of Chinese manufacturers and changes to international trade policy decimated U.S. manufacturing. Changes to transportation didn’t help Baltimore either.

Baltimore’s position on the Chesapeake Bay and its railroad lines to the Midwest once enticed factories. The creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s and the rise of trucking allowed factories to set up shop in rural areas and southern states, Adam Scavette said in an interview last year, when he was a Baltimore-based economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Those regions were attractive for factories because of relatively cheap land and non-union labor, Scavette said.

Today, the Baltimore region has one of the lowest rates of manufacturing jobs of any major metropolitan area in the country, 2023 federal data shows. Just 4% of its workers are employed in manufacturing.

To Greenblatt, this is the moment to resurrect Baltimore’s manufacturing industry and bring people out of poverty. He shouted his points to be heard above the noisy factory.

A forklift beeped. A steel press hissed. Welding torches crackled. The repetitive thumping of a machine pulsed like a heartbeat as it unspooled thick wire and cut it into rods of steel.

The steel came from a Tennessee plant that recycles old dishwashers, cars and other refuse, Greenblatt said, so he isn’t worried when some economists warn that tariffs could hurt factories that rely on Chinese steel.

“I’m buying American steel. I’m using American labor,” Greenblatt said. “I’m pretty bullet-proof.”

Most major U.S. corporations have far more complex supply chains, said Hung-bin Ding, an associate professor at the Sellinger School of Business and Management of Loyola University Maryland.

Apple, for example, doesn’t really make iPhones, Ding said. It’s more like a research and development firm with a marketing wing, he said, and it relies on about 200 contractors scattered across the globe to make phones.

This strategy allows companies to be nimble and make their products as cheaply as possible, Ding said. Tariffs would upend this system, he said, but it might steer business to smaller U.S manufacturers like Marlin Steel.

It depends on how sweeping Trump is with tariffs, said Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School.

In his first term, Trump largely exempted some companies, including Apple, Dai said, because they were viewed as integral to the U.S. economy or national security.

Dai said powerful CEOs are probably lobbying the Trump administration about this issue right now. And those CEOs have a lot more clout than the owner of a midsized steel fabrication company based in Baltimore.

Still, Greenblatt, who declined to say whom he voted for, said he believes Trump will enact most of the tariffs he promised last year on the campaign trail.

He walked over to a 230-ton press break that can snap off a finger like a horse eating a carrot. He gestured to an employee, Frank McQueen, and then pointed at a beam of light that triggers the machine to shut down before any accidents.

“My competition in China, they lose the finger, they fire the guy,” Greenblatt said. “I love Frank. I want good things for Frank. So we put on the $20,000 light bar.”

Steel manufacturing is one of many industries subsidized by the Chinese government, which allows companies to flood international markets with cheaper products. Last year, China had a trade surplus of nearly $1 trillion, a figure that is unparalleled in modern history.

The U.S. also directly subsidizes some industries. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed the CHIPS Act, which is pouring billions of dollars into American-made semiconductors.

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, would like to see both approaches. Tariffs slow the flood of cheap imports, Paul said, and subsidies spur private investment into new domestic factories.

“Tariffs alone aren’t going to revitalize manufacturing in Baltimore,” Paul said, but they could give some breathing room to a company like Marlin Steel.