Trump’s manufacturing promise backfires: Data shows 75,000 lost jobs

Even though 63 percent of Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the Republican recently depicted himself as “The Jobfather” (complete with a parodied poster of the 1972 film “The Godfather”) through the Department of Labor.

Now a group of anti-Trump Republicans are blasting the president for misleading the public about the actual state of the American economy, which he claimed would see a manufacturing boom due to his tariffs.

“Since his re-election, we've lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs and $60 Billion in annual factory construction,” The Lincoln Project posted on X on Wednesday. “Over the same period, Biden had created 625,000.”

The Lincoln Project referenced recent figures from the Department of Labor, which produced payroll figures proving manufacturing employment has fallen by 75,000 since Trump’s inauguration. Speaking with AlterNet earlier in July, one economist explained that Trump’s tariffs have in general created a climate of economic volatility.

“It's about uncertainty,” Dr. Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the administration of President Bill Clinton and principal economic adviser to Clinton's 1992 campaign, told AlterNet. “Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”

Shapiro added, “It's also about how much you're going to produce today, apart from investment, because you've got thousands of companies selling goods or services into Canada. And so there's uncertainty about whether this will lead to more conflict with Canada, which would hurt Canadian demand for US goods, or whether Canada will impose a new tariff in retaliation for ours that makes my goods less competitive there. Of course it's bad — it's bad for American workers, it's bad for American investment.”

In February the liberal-leaning think tank Center for American Progress estimated that Trump’s tariffs had cost Americans manufacturing jobs in the six digits.

“Far from the manufacturing sector ‘roaring back’ as Trump promised, the United States has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year,” Allison McManus and Dawn Le from the think tank wrote. “These actions have pushed the country’s closest trading partners to seek deals elsewhere, including with China: Canada, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union have all recently sought new agreements without the United States.”