MAGA’s Manly Manufacturing Misfire

Understanding Trump’s other big failure

According to Navigator Research, a significant number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 now regret their choice. As the word cloud above suggests, this regret is largely driven by Trump’s utter failure to deliver on his economic promises.

What did he promise? Most media attention has focused on his claim that he would bring the cost of living way down, starting on “day one.” This claim never made any sense, especially because Trump’s policy agenda — centered on tariffs and mass deportation — was clearly inflationary, not deflationary. And Trump isn’t improving his standing with his reality denial “affordability” tour, which will clearly take the form of multiple speeches in which he demands that Americans reject the evidence of their own eyes and admit that prices are falling, not rising.

But while Trump’s gaslighting on prices is a natural and appropriate target for critics, we shouldn’t forget that the main goal of his policy agenda wasn’t lower prices, it was job creation. Specifically, Trump and his economic advisers claimed — and may even have believed — that they would create lots of manly jobs for manly men. They would revive American manufacturing, they claimed, by unilaterally imposing huge tariffs and thereby breaking all our international agreements (and, whatever the Supreme Court may say, U.S. law). They would create mining and construction jobs, they claimed, by killing renewable energy and gutting environmental protection in order to promote fossil fuels. They would deport millions of undocumented workers which would result, they claimed, in a job boom for native-born workers.

My snark about “manly” jobs isn’t gratuitous. Mike Konczal has an excellent review of the way the MAGA labor market story has failed, in which he emphasizes how regressively gendered Trump’s vision was and is:

I wish I could tell you that the reason people in their twenties can’t find jobs and the reason many of us are likely to be poorer over the next few years was more sophisticated than “we’re going to turn all the girlbosses into tradwives once they see all the manly men at the USA iPhone-screwing factory.” But I don’t think it is.

Let me acknowledge, by the way, that U.S. men are having real problems. But nothing Trump is doing will help.

And even on its own absurd terms, the MAGA jobs strategy has been an abject failure — as abject as Trump’s failure to bring down prices. Here are the current official employment numbers for manufacturing, construction and employment:

Contrary to Trumpist claims that the Biden expansion didn’t create “real” jobs, the economy added a substantial number of jobs in “manly” sectors from 2021 to 2024. Part of this expansion was driven by Biden’s green energy policies, which boosted both construction and manufacturing employment.

Trump has scrapped Biden’s green energy policies in favor of tariffs and fossil fuels. But it isn’t working. Instead, employment in “manly” sectors has fallen since Trump took office. And as Dean Baker points out, there are strong reasons to believe that even these job numbers are overstated, and will eventually be revised down further.

I’ll talk about the failure of Trump’s dirty energy strategy to create jobs on another occasion. For now, let’s talk about why tariffs aren’t reviving manufacturing.

Fundamentally, Trump and those who have his ear, especially Peter Navarro, his trade czar, made two big mistakes. First, they didn’t do the math. Second, they failed to understand the nature of modern international trade.

When I say that they didn’t do the math, I mean that as far as I can tell nobody with Trump’s ear made any effort to estimate how many U.S. manufacturing jobs would be created even if the tariffs had eliminated U.S. trade deficits (which they were never going to do.)

Others, however, myself included, have done the math. (Arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias.) Back in June Robert Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics did a careful calculation that confirmed but improved on my own back-of-the-envelope estimates: Even a “successful” tariff policy would do little to revive U.S. manufacturing. Lawrence estimated that even if Trump somehow managed to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods,

the share of workers in production occupations in US manufacturing would increase by just under 0.9 percentage point, from 3.85 to 4.7 percent … the changes in employment with balanced trade would be far too small to produce a labor market that significantly increases the opportunities for men without college degrees or the many places that have not shared in US economic growth over the past five decades.

Moreover, the tariffs have not made a significant dent in the trade deficit. In fact, the deficit was bigger in the first 9 months of 2025 than during the corresponding period in 2024. Why? Because international trade is very different in 2025 from what it was in the days of William McKinley, whose tariffs Trump admires.

In the modern world nations mostly don’t sell each other completed consumer goods. Instead, the majority of trade involves sales of goods that are used to produce other goods. Last year the United States imported slightly less than $1.3 trillion worth of consumer goods plus autos, while importing more than $1.6 trillion worth of capital goods and industrial inputs. What this means in practice is that tariffs, which raise the prices of those capital goods and inputs, raise the production costs of U.S. manufacturers, in many cases making them less competitive with foreign producers.

So Trump’s plan to create manly jobs has, predictably, been a bust — a bust as complete in its way as his failure to reduce prices. The only difference is that in the case of jobs he actually tried to do something. But what he did was counterproductive.

No doubt Trump will continue to give speeches boasting about nonexistent success, telling voters that we have the hottest economy in world history, etc. But his attempt to gaslight the nation about jobs will go no better than his gaslighting on the cost of living.

MUSICAL CODA