Trump is pushing “Made in the USA.” Is it working?

Jonathan Morrissey is a construction salesman in Tennessee. Since President Donald Trump took office, Morrissey says, tariffs have cost him about $50,000.

“That’s money I have not been able to make because my products have gotten more expensive, and you can’t turn around and give it all to your clients—you have to eat some of it,” he says.

Trump campaigned on a sweeping promise to bring back “Made in the USA.” The goal: Build more factories, produce more goods domestically, and provide more jobs for blue-collar workers. The carrot: Primarily “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025, when Trump implemented sweeping tariffs to discourage employers from looking abroad for cheap labor and raw materials.

But although manufacturing output rose slightly last year, the trade deficit in manufactured goods landed near the record high—meaning Americans are still importing far more than they’re exporting. And although average hourly wages in the sector are increasing, more than 80,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in 2025. These paradoxical results make it tough to analyze the effect of Trump policies. But with 9 out of 10 Trump supporters saying economic issues were important to their vote in 2024, a verdict on U.S. manufacturing growth could be a major decision point ahead of the midterm elections.

Campaign promises, White House policies

In 2019, during his first term, Trump invited manufacturers to the White House to showcase domestically made products in a celebration of “American labor, American goods, and American grit.” Displays featured Zippo lighters, Nokona baseball gloves, and Airstream trailers.

At the time, U.S. manufacturing output had still not fully recovered from the 2008 recession. And 2019 and 2020 marked another manufacturing plunge, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although output has since rebounded and held relatively steady for four years, it has not matched the all-time high achieved in 2007.

Now in his second term, Trump hopes to encourage more growth. He has signed executive orders to boost domestic investment and crack down on products falsely claiming to be “Made in the USA.” But his most powerful tool was tariffs. Most major trading partners were hit with the Trump tariffs, which soared well above 100% on certain Chinese products.

In a February 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court overturned most of the president’s tariffs—everything Trump had implemented under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump has sharply defended his tariffs, calling them the foremost catalyst of economic growth. He also vowed to reimplement them in other ways, beginning with a 10% global tariff and a plan to raise that to 15%.

But despite the incentive that tariffs create to manufacture products at home instead of abroad, it’s not always simple for U.S. businesses to decrease their imports.

Camden Spiller is the CEO of Maddox Industrial Transformer. His products contain a magnetic core typically made of laminated steel. Although he estimates that 80% of his supply chain is domestically produced, steel is one product he believes won’t be mass-produced in the United States anytime soon.

“Nobody’s going to spend a billion dollars to bring in a new steel plant when they’re going to be running that plant with clean American energy, which costs many times what dirty coal in China can compete with,” Spiller said. “The size of investment we’re talking about is not something where you can get a return on investment in the three years remaining in this administration.”

On social media in January, the White House celebrated an increase in domestically produced steel. It shared a graph showing steel production in 2025 appeared to be twice as high as production in 2024. But a closer look at the vertical axis revealed the increase was only a little more than 1 percentage point, equal to about a million tons of steel. According to Spiller, the increase was so small as to be insignificant.

“That’s the kind of problem that can really only be addressed with a long-term commitment to prioritizing an American supply chain,” he said.

Running a trade deficit

The United States hasn’t run a trade surplus since 1975. American consumer demand is high, and many products can be made far more cheaply in other countries than in the United States.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. trade deficit crept up as online shopping increased and medical imports rose. Then, early in 2025, the trade deficit spiked to a record high as businesses rushed to import before Trump tightened restrictions. Liberation Day substantially cooled that enthusiasm, yet 2025 still saw a near-record deficit.

Trump wants to reduce the trade deficit, which he views as a national security threat. One of his main targets is China, which has accounted for the largest chunk of the deficit. Thanks to Trump administration actions, the deficit with China fell 32% last year.

Trump has accused China of committing the “greatest theft in the history of the world” via its trade practices. Spiller from Maddox Industrial Transformer keeps a watchful eye on China, too, since it’s his main competitor. He noted that it’s difficult for domestic suppliers to compete with state-subsidized Chinese goods.

A 2024 International Monetary Fund paper found a significant uptick since 2009 in Chinese government subsidies in the manufacturing sector. These subsidies substantially increased exports in metal products, furniture, and cars, according to the paper.

Spiller sees China’s subsidies as creating an unequal playing field—one that tariffs are intended to even out.

Federal Reserve data suggests that only about 75% of available U.S. manufacturing capacity is currently in use. That suggests room for growth, but only if there’s a customer who can afford to buy.

But where are the jobs?

With the recent growth in manufacturing output, it may seem strange that the sector is also experiencing a loss in available jobs.

Part of the reason is because there’s a powerful, cheap alternative to human labor entering the market: artificial intelligence.

“If you’ve got all sorts of robotics or artificial intelligence, work has become more efficient,” said Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “So we are getting a little bit more manufacturing output, but we’re not getting the jobs.”

It’s unclear who, besides AI, might be looking to fill these jobs. A 2024 Cato Institute survey found that 80% of Americans agreed it would be better if the United States had more manufacturing jobs. But among those respondents, only 25% said they would prefer to work a factory job than to continue in their current occupation.

Spiller said there’s no shortage of trade laborers looking for work. “We’re seeing tremendous, tremendous volume of applications on any of our manufacturing jobs,” he said. “So we’re really encouraged about the appetite for good-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States.”

But in the construction business—a field that, like manufacturing, often involves manual, repetitive labor—Morrissey said many of his workers aren’t U.S. citizens in the first place. Trump’s policies, intended to create more jobs for citizens, might have the wrong audience in mind.

“I’m here at a job site, and there are eight concrete guys,” Morrissey said. “They’re all Hispanic. They all work hard every day. They send money home to their families, they pay taxes on Social Security that they’ll never see. And there aren’t any young white or black kids ready to do these jobs because they’re hard. They’re hard on your body, and it’s cold. But these guys get out and do it every day.”

It’s easy to see why U.S. jobs are attractive. Wages for domestic manufacturing jobs average nearly $40 per hour—a record high, and nearly $2 above the U.S. average for all sectors. By comparison, manufacturing wages in Mexico—a popular U.S. offshoring destination—average only $4.80.

The difference is not only enough to draw foreign workers, it may be enough to prevent companies from bringing manufacturing back to the United States, even with Trump’s tariffs.

What’s next for the Trump economy?

During his State of the Union address, Trump announced his verdict on his policies: “We’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it.”

Voters seemed less sure. A January Pew Research Center poll showed slightly more than half of Americans say they support few or none of Trump’s policies.

The economic verdict remains mixed. At times, even officials can’t agree. After the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a paper in February saying that American firms and consumers were bearing the brunt of roughly 90% of tariffs, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC the paper’s authors should be disciplined for partisanship. In February, the White House reported 615,000 new jobs since Trump took office—but only after Trump fired the Biden-appointed commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming she was doctoring the jobs reports for political purposes.

Although inflation cooled in January and February, gas prices across the country have risen sharply amid the war with Iran. All this economic uncertainty could prove particularly challenging for the Trump administration if upcoming midterm election results reflect a desire by voters to change policy course yet again.

“If [Trump] put the tariff on and you knew that was going to be the rule of the game, that would be fine,” said Lachman of AEI. “But what he does is he keeps changing. So it’s difficult for [firms] to make investment decisions because they don’t know what the inputs are going to cost.”

Morrissey said that, if anything’s permanent, it’s not the policies—it’s the higher prices Americans must now pay for their imports.

“I’ve done this for 20 years,” he said. “After a price increase, yes, there have been minimal decreases. But you never go back to the original price.”