“I’m not looking at what’s best for Banner right now,” said Bronson Jones, a part-owner of the company and its chief executive. “I’m looking at what’s best for the national economy. The U.S. has been taken advantage of for too long.”

That proposition, tracing a volatile political fault line, is frequently encountered on the factory floor here, a few miles from this prosperous city’s gleaming downtown.

Casey Jackson, a maintenance technician, said he would support the tariffs even if they cost him personally. “If it comes out of my paycheck, so be it,” he said. “You got to look at the big picture. That tiny bit of sacrifice we make will create jobs.”

While the manufacturing sector is on the upswing nationally — factories have added 344,000 jobs since the beginning of 2017 — there is an abiding sense of siege among factory workers and executives alike, of having been shortchanged in the trade equation.