"It’s not just that American manufacturing under President Donald Trump is shrinking,” argued journalist David Shuster on his Blue Amp Substack. “It’s that U.S. manufacturing is shrinking under a lunatic who never tires of boasting that he alone can make U.S. manufacturing great again.”
Despite Trump hammering former President Joe Biden on his economy in the months leading up to Trump’s election, Shuster observed that U.S. manufacturing actually grew under Biden.
“Output climbed to record levels. Investment poured into factories, supply chains stabilized following the Covid hurdles, and the dull, unglamorous business of making things regained a measure of dignity. The boost in U.S. manufacturing was achieved not with chest-thumping speeches or tariff tantrums, but with policies designed for the real world—predictability, infrastructure, and a government that did not wake up each morning looking for a trade war to fight,” Shuster wrote.
But then came Trump 2.0 and his tariffs. Shuster – a former CNN, Fox News and NBC reporter – pointed out that manufacturing has yet to recover from the wave of tariffs Trump imposed last spring.
“The result has been a manufacturing sector retreat — contracting for ten straight months, a sustained decline that no amount of Trump shrieking and podium pounding can wish away,” said Shuster, citing The Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) manufacturing index falling to 47.9 from November’s 48.2 reading, the lowest of 2025.
Shuster said Trump tariffs have hit the economy like a “recurring fever: raising costs for manufacturers, snarling supply chains, and making long-term planning an exercise in guesswork.”
Investment hides when steel, aluminum, and component costs balloon overnight and are under threat of exploding tomorrow, said Shuster. And manufacturing thrives on “boring” things like “stability, clarity, and predictability,” not Trump’s favorite attributes of “uncertainty” and “unpredictability.”
“The MAGA crowd may roar. But economists wince and U.S. factories quietly scale back,” he said.
Furthermore, protectionism is not muscular patriotism, as Trump claims. It is a tax paid by producers and passed on to consumers. It is also “absorbed by workers when factory orders diminish and shifts are cut.”
“It is nationalism for people who do not read balance sheets, including the MAGA nutjobs,” Shuster said.
Meanwhile, Trump economic appointees like economic advisor Kevin Hassett and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insist manufacturing pain is brief when confronted with hard reality and statistics, which Shuster said is the same argument "made by every economic quack throughout the industrial age: endure the harm now and trust the miracle will arrive later." But manufacturers aren't buying it.
If American manufacturing is going to recover, Shuster said it will not be salvaged “by slogans or by a deranged President Trump who mistakes chaos for strength.”
“U.S. manufacturing will recover once White House policy is grounded in economic sense rather than applause lines. Until then, Trump’s vision of industrial revival remains a noisy farce, highlighted by bluster, and collapsing under basic arithmetic,” he said.
Read Shuster’s report at his Substack link here.
