Top investor obliterates Trump's 'golden age' claim with brutal graph

President Donald Trump claimed that his return to the White House would bring about a "golden age of American manufacturing," but as leading economist Steve Rattner pointed out, his actual record falls well short of that claim, and a simple graph proves it.

Rattner is a prominent investor and economic analyst, best known for his time as the lead adviser on former President Barack Obama's auto industry recovery task force. He also currently serves as an analyst for MS NOW and an opinion contributor for the New York Times, providing expert insights into hectic economic moves under the Trump administration.

On Monday, he took to X to share a graph charting the growth in American manufacturing jobs under former President Joe Biden and the same growth under Trump. While these jobs were consistently growing under Biden, Trump's numbers are actually in the negative, as of July, thoroughly deflating his campaign trail boasts.

"Trump claimed his tariffs would bring about a golden age of American manufacturing," Rattner wrote in the post. "Yet since his re-election, we've lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs. Over the same period, Biden had created 625,000."

The much-touted economic growth numbers under Biden were notably boosted, especially early on in his term, by the fact that the country was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the economy regaining much of what it lost in 2020. Still, as Rattner's graph demonstrated, his number remained in the positive throughout the rest of his term.

Trump argued that his tariff plans would be responsible for returning significant manufacturing operations to the U.S., but so far, they appear to have done considerable damage to the sector instead. In an earlier post from Sunday, Rattner shared another graph showing the federal government's tariff revenue over the course of Trump's second term, which has now dropped into the negative after the tariffs were halted by the Supreme Court, and the damage is only just getting started.

"President Trump used to brag about all the money we were making from tariff revenue," Rattner wrote. "Last month, that trend flipped to a $26 billion loss as the government started paying back the tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal. The refund bill is just getting started."