As this week got underway, Republican Rep. Jimmy Patronis appeared on Newsmax and expressed concern about the looming Supreme Court ruling on Donald Trump’s tariffs agenda. “The president has been leveraging tariffs in order to strengthen the manufacturing base,” the congressman said.
It was a curious boast, given that the U.S. manufacturing sector has been shedding thousands of jobs over the past several months. But Patronis’ claim was certainly in line with the talking points the White House wants the public to hear. In fact, in his economic speech in Detroit this week, the president appeared eager to emphasize domestic manufacturing, prompting The New York Times to note, “Nationally, the manufacturing sector has cut jobs for eight straight months, and automakers alone have cut about 28,000 jobs in the past year.”
Hours later, Trump nevertheless told Americans by way of his social media platform that the nation is currently enjoying “a Manufacturing Renaissance.”
By any fair metric, this simply doesn’t exist, at least when it comes to job creation. The Washington Post reported:
The trade measures that the president said would spur manufacturing have instead hampered it, according to most mainstream economists. That’s because roughly half of U.S. imports are ‘intermediate’ goods that American companies use to make finished products, like aluminum that is shaped into soup cans or circuit boards that are inserted into computers.
So while tariffs have protected American manufacturers like steel mills from foreign competition, they have raised costs for many others. Auto and auto parts employment, for example, has dipped by about 20,000 jobs since April.
It was April, of course, when the Republican unveiled his trade tariffs on his so-called Liberation Day. Since then, how many months have seen job losses in the domestic manufacturing sector?
That’s in contrast to the steady job growth in U.S. manufacturing during Joe Biden’s presidency. That progress came to an abrupt end shortly after Trump returned to power. If the Republican incumbent wanted to ask for Americans’ patience, fine. If he wanted to sketch out a plan about how he intends to improve domestic manufacturing, that’d be even better. But instead of these reality-based approaches, Trump appears to prefer to play make-believe, pointing to a “renaissance” that exists only in his imagination.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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