The final jobs report of 2025 makes one thing abundantly clear: The critics of President Donald Trump’s tariffs were right. The detritus of a failed policy appears in every element of this jobs report.

In the seven months since Trump’s Liberation Day in April, the U.S. has created 119,000 new jobs. Compare that to the prior seven-month period between September 2024 and April 2025, which saw employment rise by 1.1 million jobs.

So far, the Trump economy is far worse than the Biden economy — if you believe the Trump administration data releases.

Since April, the unemployment rate rose from 4.2% to 4.6% and the number of workers who have had their hours cut to part time for economic reasons rose by almost 800,000. Other labor market measures tell similar stories.

The number of discouraged workers rose by 57% since April. Those who are marginally attached to the labor market saw their numbers rise by 13%, and the share of workers holding multiple jobs rose by 5% since April.

The mix of jobs tells an even harsher truth. Since the Trump tariffs, manufacturing has shed 67,000 jobs and business services that support factories have lost another 76,000 jobs. Transportation and warehousing jobs have slumped by 50,100 workers.

Manufacturing job openings are down 130,000 positions since April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private sector help wanted advertisements for production workers have sunk by a whopping 27.4% since Liberation Day.

The U.S. is in the early days of a manufacturing contraction that will run through most of 2026, even if the tariffs are lifted today. We should call it the deindustrialization of America.

All of this flies in the face of the nonsensical claims of a manufacturing renaissance or onshoring that would bring factory jobs back to the U.S. The only domestic manufacturing the Trump tariffs have boosted is the production of lies about a growing economy. At least there we’ve had a banner year.

It isn’t just that tariffs are bad. The uncertainty about tariff levels also cost us domestic jobs. Trump’s TACO-ing has caused more changes in American tariff rates in the last 249 days than during the previous 249 years.

In the wake of that monstrous uncertainty, almost no business will onshore production. Building a factory in the U.S. to dodge unknowable tariffs would be foolish. That’s particularly true because the tariffs seem likely to be ruled unconstitutional next year.

It’d be far wiser to automate away the current domestic workforce. That way, you keep the production cost savings no matter what Trump does tomorrow, and you are sure to get a state tax incentive to do so.

Tariffs aren’t going to boost manufacturing. We are in the early stages of larger job losses.

It is critical to identify those who pushed these policies. The Heritage Foundation laid out this tariff regime in Project 2025, while another think tank, American Compass, fabricated stories about the hollowing out of factory production (see https://www.heritage.org/, https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf, and https://americancompass.org/wheres-the-growth/).

It is worth noting that manufacturing GDP peaked in 2024 and then again in the second quarter of 2025 as factories pushed to meet the pre-tariff demand for goods (see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USMANRQGSP).

Voters are going to have to deal with elected leaders who brought us here.

Yet, it is important to admit that concerns for working-class Americans are real and should be part of a policy debate. Far too many Democrats have supported tariffs over the years, with the equally unschooled belief that restricting trade would make Americans better off. Tariffs are going to look a lot more idiotic by summer, so now would be a fine time to oppose them.

One silver lining: This fiasco will remind Americans of the folly of tariffs for another century or so. One way to really reinforce this lesson is to examine the effect of tariffs on those middle-class workers that Heritage, American Compass and a slew of ignorant politicos claimed they’d help.

Since April, the unemployment rate for native-born workers rose from 3.9% to 4.3%, rising faster than that for foreign-born workers. The loss of factory jobs is impacting native-born Americans far more heavily than immigrants, who tend to be better educated and more likely to work in more stable sectors, like health care.

Since Liberation Day, American men have seen employment rise by only 4,000 out of the 119,000 jobs. Women have seen almost 29 new jobs for every new job held by a man. That’s a notable achievement for an administration that made the explicit claims that they were focusing on the economic plight of working-class men.

The U.S. economy is in a clear deceleration. The economy averaged 160,000 new jobs per month during the seven months prior to Liberation Day. In the seven months since, we averaged 17,000 new jobs per month.

I’m reluctant to give former President Joe Biden credit for those strong 2024 and early 2025 job numbers. Presidents usually don’t have a short-term effect on economic performance. But, Trump and his tariff enablers in Congress are personally to blame for these worsening economic conditions. How much worse can they get?

The answer is much worse. From April to August (the latest data we have), domestic auto production has declined by more than 11%. Recreational vehicles — a stalwart predictor of economic performance — saw year-over-year sales fall 0.6% during the six months after Liberation Day, compared to 3.5% growth during the previous six months.

Both the auto and RV industries stockpiled maybe five months of imports before the full tariffs hit in August. We are now on the cusp of the real price effects of tariffs, which will spill over into almost every sector, but most heavily in manufactured goods. More jobs will disappear.

It is hard to be honest about the data and be anything but bearish for the coming year. But, as 2025 winds down, many of us will wish to forget about the terribly destructive policies that have just begun to batter the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, those policies won’t forget about us.

Note: The views expressed here are solely those of the author, and do not represent those of funders, associations, any entity of Ball State University, or its governing body.