Donald Trump went to Michigan this week to calim his reckless trade wars have strengthened U.S. manufacturing. Like everything else Trump says, that claim is pure bullshit:
Trump claimed his 25% tariff on imported automobiles has caused a surge in the American auto industry, with relevance to Michigan’s extensive automotive history. However, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the motor vehicles and parts industry has decreased since the beginning of the president’s second term. Trump highlighted General Motors $6 billion investment in American factories, while Ford Motor Company is dedicating $3 billion to Blue Oval Battery Park, a manufacturing plant for electric vehicle batteries announced prior to Trump taking office in 2024. Trump claimed the country’s trade deficit has decreased by 71% due to his implementation of tariffs, though reports indicate it has remainedsteady since the beginning of his second term [Dominic Apap, “Trump Claims Auto Industry Is ‘Stronger Than Ever Before’ During Rally at GM Proving Grounds,” The Michigan Daily, 2026.07.30].
Contrary to White House claims, manufacturing jobs posted a brief gain during Joe Biden’s Presidency, but Trump has been dismantling that progress:
According to the [National Association of Manufacturers] report, every state has seen a positive impact on employment from the OBBBA [2025 budget reconciliation bill], and the White House says this proves Trump’s legislation has “delivered a powerful manufacturing resurgence in every state.”
However, Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, called the report “completely out of touch with reality.”
“I have no idea how they came up with these numbers on jobs and wages,” he told Newsweek, pointing to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) showing that investment in factory construction has “slowed sharply since Trump took office.” Inflation rates and GDP growth, according to Baker, similarly prove that “you would be hard-pressed to find a single economic measure that has improved since Trump took office.”
Other industry groups have blamed the legislation for wiping out jobs in many sectors, such as the pro-clean energy advocacy group E2, which in a recent analysis estimated that this had cost the country nearly half a million jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in energy investments and tax revenue since being signed into law.
And payroll figures from the Department of Labor likewise show that manufacturing employment has declined rather than improved since Trump returned to office. The economy added around 3,000 manufacturing roles last month, though this modest gain is one of the few positive readings over the past year and a half.
All told, the economy has lost 75,000 manufacturing roles between January 2025 and June of this year. Over the same opening period of Joe Biden’s presidency, the economy had gained some 625,000. Payrolls did decline significantly toward the end of Biden’s tenure, however [Hugh Cameron, “Trump’s Manufacturing Boom Claim Collides with Federal Jobs Data,” Newsweek, 2026.07.22].
Tariff-obsessed Trump simply isn’t smart enough, creative enough, or attentive enough to fight the generation-spanning trend of manufacturing jobs going to China or, importantly, to robots:
“Manufacturing has not revived to a significant degree,” said Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi. He said it’s a trend that started in the 1980s. “The job losses continue. Tariffs and other policies that have been put in place have not reversed that.”
But tariffs may still be helping U.S. manufacturers, said economist Laura Veldkamp at Columbia Business School. “[Tariffs] made it more profitable for American manufacturers to set up and produce here,” she said.
Tariffs on imports diminish the competitive advantage of using lower-cost labor in places like Mexico or Malaysia. So more goods are made in the U.S. now: “Manufacturing output has gone up 1.1% over the last year,” Veldkamp said.
But the industry is doing more with fewer people.
“Manufacturing activity is very mechanized, automated. So even if you see a pickup in output, and we’ve seen that particularly in the tech sector, in the defense-aerospace industries, doesn’t translate into jobs, because these factories just don’t employ a lot of people,” said Zandi at Moody’s [Mitchell Hartman, “Trump Says His Aggressive Trade Policy Is Bringing Back Factory Jobs. Is It?” Marketplace, 2026.07.28].
Donald Trump is not bringing back manufacturing jobs. His reckless policies are having the opposite effect.
We are living in the Twilight Zone. Not even all the gold decorations in the White House can fix the damage.