CNN’s Matt Egan was left stunned Tuesday after new data showed President Donald Trump’s tariff policy was having the “exact opposite” effect on domestic manufacturing than he promised.
“That was a dismal jobs report on Friday, but it was especially grim for those industries most exposed to tariffs,” Egan said, who went on to break down job losses detailed in Friday’s jobs report by industry.
According to the report, 6,000 jobs were lost in August in mining and logging, 7,000 in construction, 12,000 in manufacturing and 11,700 in wholesale trade. Egan noted that the August’s job numbers were “not an anomaly,” and saw similar trends starting in April, the same month Trump kicked off his so-called reciprocal tariffs.
“U.S. manufacturing, it's lost jobs four months in a row,” Egan said. “You go back to April, that was the month that those sky-high tariffs were first announced, employment was unchanged during that month, so this is of course the exact opposite of what the White House is looking for.”
Friday’s jobs report showed just 22,000 new jobs being added in August, far less than the initially projected figure of 75,000. The report also saw unemployment tick up from 4.2 percent in July to 4.3 percent, and job numbers from June and July revised down by a combined 21,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.
“They're trying to engineer this American manufacturing renaissance, they're trying to cause a jobs boom – that has not happened,” Egan continued. “Economists say, at best, that effort is off to a slow start, but at worse, it's actually backfiring completely, that it's been counterproductive.“
