Politicians of all sorts have been saying lots of things for decades. The fact is, nobody as influential or as powerful as Trump ever actually did anything about most of them. In particular, the anti-China anti-offshoring sentiment.
It took Trump yelling about it from the rooftops for over 5 years, and getting over half the population as passionate about it as he was, and then Trump actually doing things about it while in office, for things to actually happen and be set in motion.
