Economist Justin Wolfers said the U.S. economy created 162,000 jobs in August, more than most economists expected, but President Donald Trump managed to lock out the jobs he most campaigned on creating.
“This is an administration that talks about big boofy blokes in hard hats and steel-toed boots. Manufacturing coming home. The 1960s, all over again. That rhetoric is the entire justification for the tariffs,” reports Wolfers on his substack. “That, to be brief, has not happened.”
Since January 2025, the U.S. economy has created nearly a million jobs in health care and social assistance, which already compares unfavorably to job creation under former president Biden. But the even worse news, said Wolfers, is that the rest of the Trump economy has actually shed jobs.
In fact, it looks like the only thing that kept Trump’s numbers from looking even worse was the fact that the U.S. is an aging nation whose population is in need of more health care.
“This is a services economy shifting further toward services, and it’s been doing that for decades regardless of who’s in the White House or what they say about factories,” said Wolfers. “I don’t want to downplay these numbers: August was a reasonably good month for the non-health-care economy, with growth spread fairly widely. That’s a true improvement on the rest of the Trump term. But one month doesn’t rewrite eighteen.”
And almost all of it went to women, Wolfers added, with only a paltry 7 percent of jobs created in the second Trump term going to men.
“Ninety-three percent have gone to women. Over roughly a year and a half, that’s on the order of 60,000 jobs for men against 747,000 for women,” said Wolfers, admitting that he was “surprised” by that number, considering Trump’s lopsided support among men over women.
And despite that fawning support from the hyper-male world of MAGA, Wolfers said “We may be on the cusp of a male jobs recession,” under Trump.
“If your net job growth is almost entirely in health care and social assistance — well, those sectors employ women in large majorities. As a result, nearly all your net job growth goes to women. The composition of the jobs determines the composition of the workers,” Wolfers said.
And still, despite the good numbers among women, real wages are still falling, with prices far outpacing paycheck wages.
“That’s why it’s harder to put food on the table. That’s why an economy with 4.1 percent unemployment and six straight months of job growth can still feel like it’s squeezing you. A job is not the same thing as a raise,” Wolfers said.
