January Jobs Report Shows Trump Is Failing On Campaign Promises to Blue Collar Workers

After President Donald Trump’s first full year of economic policy, accompanied by rhetoric aimed in part at increasing manufacturing job opportunities through protectionist policies such as tariffs, the verdict is in: Meh.

“I think it’s absolutely fair to say that the policies are not conducive to employment in this sector,” Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor at Penn State, told TPM.

The January jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out Wednesday morning and showed that the country added only 181,000 jobs between January 2025 and January 2026. That’s about 15,000 jobs per month or less than 500 jobs per day in a country. A booming economy creates about 150,000 jobs per month, Golden said. As a reminder, the United States created approximately 160,000 monthly jobs in 2024.

The first year in the job market under Trump saw the smallest increase in job creation in 10 years, except for the pandemic-related rise in unemployment in 2020. Going back further, American industries have not created fewer jobs than in 2025 since 2013 and 2014.

The first takeaway is that Trump’s so-called protectionist policies aimed at boosting U.S. manufacturing haven’t done their job, the data shows.

“If a campaign promise was to create more manufacturing jobs in the United States, that has not happened and has not been kept,” Golden said.

On Truth Social Wednesday, Trump called January’s jobs numbers “much better than expected” and echoed his continued call for lower interest rates from the Federal Reserve.

It’s true that employment numbers have beaten economists’ forecasts, already lowering expectations by about 50,000. A look beneath the surface offers insight, but the confluence of decades-old economic trends with modern economic policy makes the impact of tariffs and Trump’s deportation agenda on the job market harder to measure.

Trump has both touted the lower-than-expected inflation rate, reflecting the tariffs’ failure to significantly raise prices for consumers, as well as his nationalist claims that the tariffs would be used to protect American industry. But it doesn’t work like that. Protectionism involves increasing the price of foreign goods that would stifle American consumers and force them to purchase American-made goods, thereby boosting domestic demand and production.

“If [U.S. importers] eat it rather than pass it on to consumers, it’s somehow harder to argue that you’ve made foreign products more expensive,” Golden said.

While manufacturing has declined in the United States over the past 50 years, the industry grew during President Joe Biden’s tenure before stabilizing in 2024. Under the Trump administration, this growth has stalled and even seen slight declines. At the same time, productivity in manufacturing is increasing, meaning that there are not more individual producers, but that producers are still earning more. Economists like Golden see automation and AI as driving increased productivity in the face of declining jobs.

Tariff-sensitive industries, such as furniture, computers and electronics, plastics and rubber, and clothing, all experienced negative year-over-year employment growth, indicating that Trump’s tariff regime is one of the drivers of job loss. Retail and wholesale trade experienced negative net job growth, as did warehousing and trucking, sectors closely linked to trade and which would have been severely affected by more costly international trade conditions.

Even before the release of the January jobs report, Trump administration officials attempted to blunt the impact of potentially paltry job growth by pointing out that the administration’s deportation policies were decreasing the total number of workers in the United States and, therefore, the total number of jobs needed to show growth. This narrative is “exaggerated,” Golden said. First, the data showed that while Trump’s anti-immigration campaign may be more public and more effective, the number of people deported from the country has been about the same as under other presidential administrations.

“I think they’re trying to justify this policy,” Golden said. “From what I can see, the unemployment rate among native-born workers is about the same as among foreign-born workers,” which he said is the point where the data could reflect the impact of deportation.