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President Trump is making markers great again. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a delightful and timely story headlined, “Sharpie Found a Way to Make Pens More Cheaply—By Manufacturing Them in the U.S.” The subheadline added, “Newell Brands moved production without cutting employee count or raising prices.” For my entire adult life, I was told this kind of thing was impossible. The writing was on the wall. They said: America just can’t compete with lower Chinese labor costs.

In 2000, Sharpie’s pen production began moving to China. By 2018, most Sharpies were made abroad. About five years ago, a new CEO, Chris Petersen, decided to take the company in a different direction. He drew a line of defiance against conventional knowledge and initiated a vast update operation, retooling the firm’s U.S. marker factory and updating it to match the newer technologies used by the Chinese, such as by installing pen-packing robots and retraining U.S. employees.

Guess what happened?

These days, most Sharpies —93 glorious colors— are made at a single 37-year-old Tennessee factory. Mr. Newell did it without cutting staff or raising prices. He did it without layoffs, price hikes, or red ink. Wages have actually jumped 550% in five years, quality is up, orders move faster, and shipping costs are down.

The Tennessee factory runs around the clock, ceaselessly making 1.8 million fine-tip Sharpies a day.

“It’s really night and day compared to when I first joined,” Peterson said. “There’s no longer a reason to manufacture Sharpie outside the U.S.” But how?

For decades, the industrial gospel has revolved around a single input: cheap labor. You can’t win that race at home, professors assured every new business major. American labor was too expensive, regulations were too thick, and economies of scale were too tiny to compete with Asian factories. Experts warned executives that any attempt to match Chinese margins would promptly collapse under union wages and energy bills.

The experts’ verdict was unanimous — manufacturing in America was dead.

Yet the Sharpie story destroys that globalist dogma like permanent ink on a whiteboard. It turns out that foreign advantage wasn’t cheap hands— it was fresher tools. China’s manufacturing boom began with brand-new machinery, modern factory floor layouts, and digital logistics. The U.S., by contrast, was stuck with aging plants and pre-internet management systems running on 1980’s PCs. China wasn’t winning on labor; it was winning on timing.

When Sharpie retooled its Tennessee facilities with automation, real-time data, and lean processes, the cost curve flipped almost overnight. This story reveals the grotesque, irrational premise behind the globalist mantra, the false but entrenched notion that labor cost is the lodestar that eclipses all other manufacturing considerations.

Sharpie is the ideal case study. Pens are the last thing anyone expected could be made profitably in America — low-margin, high-labor, cheap materials, no luxury pricing. The “experts” swore this kind of production simply couldn’t survive stateside. But Sharpie did it anyway. By upgrading its Maryville, Tennessee plant with robotics and retraining, it turned a supposedly unviable, labor-heavy product into a triumph of domestic efficiency.

Today, millions of “impossible” pens roll off American lines each day, proving that what we lacked wasn’t muscle — it was imagination.

For months, the same globalist experts have sneered that Trump’s tariffs —designed to repatriate manufacturing— were impossible. They’ll never work. If manufacturing does come home, they scoffed, hyperinflation will come with it. In their view, America just can’t compete anymore. We’re stuck with a second-class “service economy.”

But tariffs have worked; inflation hasn’t come back; and Sharpie proves that, if American factories can compete on an even manufacturing floor —using the same tech the Chinese do— we can beat them. Sharpie didn’t just draw a line to a Tennessee factory, it completely crossed out globalist economists, who were never neutral observers anyway. They wanted manufacturing exported to the developing world, which explains their obsessive focus on cheap labor— the lone input that America couldn’t reproduce.

In truth, the foreign advantage was never labor — it was reinvestment. While China poured capital into modern factories, robotics, and logistics, America shuttered its aging plants and congratulated itself at seminars on “efficiency through outsourcing” and a “global supply chain.” We didn’t lose manufacturing to Asia; we gave it away. Marker-sniffing globalists didn’t just predict the death of American industry — they engineered it in 97 colors of ink.

Thanks to President Trump and a rainbow of delightfully colored markers, we aren’t out of the race. There’s still time to turn it around. Let’s go.