Caffeinated Politics

It is not unusual for a president to seek out foreign policy when the stubborn and often embarrassing issues at home make for unrelenting headlines. With the economy not producing lower grocery prices, or more optimism for people wishing to be new homeowners, or when new Jeffrey Epstein documents show a troubling linkage with a sex predator, Donald Trump finds himself flexing power overseas, being more able to shape the narrative.

In that sense, Trump is no different from those who preceded him in the Oval Office. President Richard Nixon traveled to Egypt in 1974, only two months before he resigned from office due to Watergate. He met with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and ties between the two nations were re-established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Nixon was treated as a hero in both Cairo and Alexandria.  Currently, Trump is applauded by many Venezuelans.

But then Nixon had to return to the political reality in the United States. So it is with Trump. After months of playing on the world stage, the American voters wait for action domestically.

With Gaza still an unraveling zone of anger where bomb craters exist where families once lived, to Ukraine, where the belligerent Russian military still strikes at will, to Venezuela, where a power grab for oil will unsettle the entire region, Trump must face his own people who know the economy is not functioning as he promised it would when on the campaign trail in 2024.

When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he promised a “Blue-Collar Miracle,” fueled by aggressive tariffs and a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy. But as we enter the first week of 2026, the cold reality of the data is setting in. Far from a manufacturing renaissance, the American factory floor is seeing the very lights go out that the administration promised to keep burning.

For all of Trump’s childish antics and bizarre theatrics, the stubborn facts face his White House daily. Over the last seven months, the manufacturing sector has not just cooled; it has entered a definitive slump. For a president who staked his reputation on being the ultimate champion of the American worker, the savvy businessman, the powerful master, the current trajectory is a fundamental failure of his economic architecture.

According to recent analysis from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, manufacturing employment was down by approximately 73,000 jobs year-over-year as of November 2025. As we have read in the financial pages of the newspapers over the past couple of weeks, preliminary data suggest the “official” monthly governmental reports might actually be undercounting the damage from Trump’s policies, namely his tariffs. Some estimates indicate the drop in manufacturing employment could be as high as 208,000, representing a 1.6% decline in the total sector workforce since June 2025.  

The administration’s “America First” trade policy, characterized by sweeping tariffs which leading economists railed against in the last presidential election and continue to point out as stupefyingly ignorant, was supposed to force production back to U.S. soil. Instead, it has (not surprisingly) increased the cost of raw materials, leaving domestic producers unable to compete globally.

The Economist wrote about the matter this week in very clear to understand terms so that Trump might understand it, should he read them.

If you want your tariff rate to be zero’, said Mr Trump, ‘build your product right here in America.’ … Nearly a year on, however, the Trumpian manufacturing renaissance is conspicuous by its absence. The two-year manufacturing contraction is now hitting its third, and factories have continued to shed jobs … And it is not just that Mr Trump’s moves are failing to revive American manufacturing. Under the hood, there are signs that they are actively hurting it.”

Trump can claim that all is rosy with the economy, but the news from a variety of sources presented in this column proves otherwise. Factory construction, adjusted for inflation, has plummeted by more than 10% from its 2024 levels. Snarky, though it surely sounds coming from my desk, it is reasonable to write that businesses don’t build new factories when the rules of trade change with every whim of the moment presidential tweet.

While the administration claims its racist immigration crackdown is opening jobs for native-born workers, the Washington Post reports that the unemployment rate for native-born Americans actually climbed to 4.3% in late 2025. This figure represents an increase from the 3.9% rate observed for native-born workers in November 2024, indicating a weakening labor market for this group despite Trump’s desire to talk of a job-creating boom.

One of the tragedies of the past year is that the very workers who were deluded by Trump in 2024 when he told them they were “forgotten” are once again being left behind. The administration has prioritized grand geopolitical gestures—like the recent military madness in Venezuela—over the granular, difficult work of stabilizing prices and lowering costs for American manufacturers.

If the goal was to “Make America Wealthy Again,” the current reality is a shrinking industrial base, record-high unemployment over the past four years, and a manufacturing sector that is more fragile than it was a year ago.

This bodes ill for the Republican Party in this year’s midterms.