WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s vaunted “Liberation Day” tariffs have worked — if liberating Americans from their jobs was the actual goal.
The nation’s manufacturing sector, the very one Trump purportedly wanted to help with his import taxes, has instead been losing jobs every single month since he announced them in April. In all, there are now 67,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than when he imposed tariffs on most imports.
That result is exactly the opposite of what Trump promised and predicted when he announced them on April 2.
“We created 10,000, already in a few weeks, new manufacturing jobs and that took place in one month, numbers that they haven’t seen in a long time,” Trump said, lying, to cheering supporters in what was still the Rose Garden, prior to his having paved it over. “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country and you see it happening already.”
His overall jobs numbers are just as grim, according to statistics compiled by his own Department of Labor, particularly compared to predecessor Joe Biden’s robust record on that front. Over four years, Biden’s economy added more than 4 million jobs per year, or 336,225 per month.
“It’s not just tariffs,” said University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers. “It’s also uncertainty, chaos, incompetence, and a radical and idiosyncratic approach to economic policy.”
Trump’s White House aides and press office did not respond to HuffPost queries about his jobs record compared to Biden.
Even discounting the first two years, which largely just recovered the jobs lost during the COVID pandemic, the economy under Biden’s stewardship still picked up 2.1 million jobs per year from February 2023 through January 2025, an average of 178,042 per month.
In contrast, the economy has added only 499,000 total jobs since Trump returned to office, or 49,900 per month. Most of those jobs were added in his first three months. From May, the month after he announced his tariffs, through November, the net number of jobs added is 119,000, or just 17,000 per month. Several months saw net job losses.
“There’s a huge difference in job creation rates in the two presidencies. Some part of it is that Trump has chosen a smaller America, literally, and population growth has shrunk. As a result, we don’t need as much job growth today,” Wolfers said. “Perhaps the best metric is the unemployment rate, which has risen relentlessly through 2025. That coincides not just with tariffs, but also a sharp rise in uncertainty and a sharp fall in business and consumer confidence. It’s not too hard to connect the dots. Economic policy has been chaotic, incoherent, run by fools, and poorly implemented.”
Trump’s usual approach to discussing his jobs records is to lie about it, just as he does with the cost of living and, recently, grocery prices. In fact, Trump’s tariff policies have increased food inflation dramatically. In Biden’s last year in office, inflation on grocery items had fallen to 1.8%. After Trump imposed tariffs, the food inflation rate jumped to 3.1%, according to a HuffPost analysis.
Andrew Bates, a former spokesman in Biden’s White House, said his boss predicted this would happen if Trump won.
“The Trump tariffs that Joe Biden and Democrats warned against are an historic sales tax hike on working people that’s raising costs and scrambling supply chains,” Bates said. “One year into the Trump administration, it’s an objective fact that Republicans inherited the strongest job creation record of any country after the pandemic and replaced it with recession-level job loss.”
During a prime-time address that the White House asked that the television networks carry live last week, Trump began his 18-minute diatribe by claiming that he had “inherited a mess,” with inflation “the worst in 48 years and some would say in the history of our country.”
In reality, Trump inherited an economy growing steadily, with inflation down to 3%, strong jobs numbers and a low unemployment rate — just as he did at the start of his first term in 2017.
Over those four years, Trump also initiated a trade war, although primarily with China. The result was a mini recession in manufacturing and agriculture. This time around, his trade war has been against the entire rest of the planet, and the effects have been more pronounced.
In a new article by Vanity Fair, his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, conceded the harm his tariff policy has wrought: “It’s been more painful than I expected,” she said.