Historically, tariffs guarantee the local market will not win.
Tariffs (the "chicken tax") are directly responsible for US trucks being so expensive. They have no foreign competition in the US.
Environmental regulation loopholes cause US trucks to be so big, which is a related problem.
It's probably possible for US manufacturing to compete directly with foreign manufacturers, but they have no incentive to do so now that Trump extended the chicken-tax to all imported cars.
It's not a loophole if you explicitly state: "This is what we are going to focus on." The CAFE regulations also regulate pickup trucks, just less stringently.
>CAFE has separate standards for "passenger cars" and "light trucks" even if the majority of "light trucks" are being used as passenger vehicles. The market share of "light trucks" grew steadily from 9.7% in 1979 to 47% in 2001, remained in 50% numbers up to 2011.[7] More than 500,000 vehicles in the 1999 model year exceeded the 8,500 lb (3,900 kg) GVWR cutoff and were thus omitted from CAFE calculations.[10] More recently, coverage of medium duty trucks has been added to the CAFE regulations starting in 2012, and heavy duty commercial trucks starting in 2014.