America First, Invoice Later

America First industrial policy is supposed to arrive wearing a hard hat and humming the national anthem, not dragging a grant folder with international forwarding labels and a tariff question mark stapled to its forehead. The sales pitch is clean: jobs, metal, sparks, greatness. Then the paperwork coughs, the ownership footnotes start doing parkour, and suddenly sovereignty looks like a lobbyist-built escape room with a flag rental.

Taxpayers are told to clap for the furnace while the real heat stays in the fine print, where every billionaire-branded factory miracle becomes “economic development” if you squint through enough steam. If nobody can quickly say who owns it, who pays, and who benefits, maybe the smelter is not refining aluminum first. Maybe it is refining public trust into campaign confetti.