Trump Team Scrambles After Report He's Killing Manufacturing Jobs
The labor market is slowing, but it's all good news in the White House.
The U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May, a slight decline from April, according to a jobs report released Friday. The unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent, still within the ballpark of historic lows reached in 2023, when the unemployment rate reached 3.4 percent—the lowest it had been in more than five decades. But within the folds of the report hid a major red flag for Donald Trump's agenda: The U.S. is still bleeding manufacturing jobs.
'GREAT JOB NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!' Trump celebrated on Truth Social.
But even the president's favorite conservative network couldn't hide its dismay at the slight manufacturing downturn.
'Now, 8,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in May. That's not what you wanted to see,' said Fox Business host Stuart Varney.
'Well, we're certainly holding steady,' said Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. 'And under the Trump administration, manufacturing jobs are still up over what the last administration, under [Joe] Biden, had.
'The focus of my 'America at Work' tour is to increase those manufacturing jobs, and we'll continue to stay laser focused on that as the president continues to double down on how important this is to the American economy,' she added.
'But how come we're losing 8,000 manufacturing jobs in May, when there's a big push to bring manufacturing jobs back to America? How come we're losing those jobs?' Varney pressed.
Chavez-DeRemer was stuck in her script. 'We're certainly holding steady,' she insisted.
Since the beginning of April, Trump has pitched his global tariff agenda as a means to return manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores. But two months later, the president's on-again, off-again tariffs have done little more than add tumult to American markets and trade. Investors have learned to play the market by an unflattering acronym—TACO, or 'Trump always chickens out'—while administration officials such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have blundered by publicly admitting they have no intention of bringing tariffs between the U.S. and other nations down to zero.
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