Trump's manufacturing recovery is a work of fiction: analysis

President Donald Trump repeatedly claims that manufacturing jobs have boomed during his second term, but a recent report reveals the construction spike is not doing what most people want — creating large numbers of jobs.

“Industry data show that much of the recent surge in construction jobs is tied to data centers and the power infrastructure that supports them, not a wave of new factories backed by fresh investment pledges Trump has secured,” wrote Politico’s Megan Messerly and Sam Sutton. “That matters because factories tend to employ far more people than data centers, one of the main reasons communities have been more receptive to the former setting up shop in their towns.”

By contrast, Trump claimed during his State of the Union message that “as thousands of new businesses are forming and factories, plants and laboratories are being built, we have added 70,000 new construction jobs in just a very short period of time. It’s getting bigger and bigger and stronger. Nobody can believe what they’re watching.”

Even though Trump says rising construction activity means Trump’s tariff policy is cultivating domestic manufacturing, Politico reports that many of these investments are in such early planning stages that “the factory jobs that could reshape communities are likely years away” — and that is assuming the factories in question produce lots of jobs, which often is not the case with data centers.

“Not one in the last year has started under this administration where we’ve procured the first man hour of work,” Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, told Politico. Although there have been announcements of projects, “they haven’t started yet… As far as actual shovels in the ground, that hasn’t happened.”

In terms of the 33,000 job gains in January, “economists believe those jobs were just a blip in the data, driven largely by unseasonably warm weather during the period when government statisticians were collecting data. That disconnect could complicate Republicans’ argument to working-class voters looking for signs of a Trump-fueled factory comeback.”

Quoting Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, Politico reported that “whether it’s warehouses, data centers, manufacturing or a Buc-ee’s or whatever, what is ultimately going to bring stable, high-paying jobs into the community? From that perspective, manufacturing is the winner. At a data center, there are fewer jobs. There will be a few high-skilled jobs, but not a lot of them.”

He concluded, “I think that’s a very fair question of, what’s going to get you more bang for the buck, employment wise?”

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, confirmed the type of construction cultivated by the Trump administration will not be particularly fruitful in terms of creating thousands of long-term jobs.

“You’re going to get some construction jobs because of data centers and build out of power capacity and maybe chip plants — that kind of thing,” Zandi said. “But that’s going to be offset by job loss in the housing sector. Multifamily, single family completions are weak and are going to continue to fall. And they’re much more worker intensive than the data centers.”

In fact, not only has Trump failed to stimulate manufacturing job creation. According to the liberal-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, he is actually making things worse.

“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 liberal-leaning think tank Center for American Progress recently 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.”

Similarly, when Trump claimed during the State of the Union message that tariffs would one day replace the income tax, experts scoffed.

“I believe that tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax,” Trump claimed, prompting American Bridge 21st Century to tweet that “American families and businesses paid at least 90% of Trump’s tariffs last year. His agenda taxes Americans anyway you slice it.”

A moderate commentator echoed this critique.

“After a fairly sober opening, Trump is now veering into fantasy, falsely claiming that he ended taxes on Social Security and suggesting that tariffs paid by foreigners will mostly replace the income tax,” Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times posted on X. “All false.”