In response to the President’s decision to drive the economy into a wall by levying extreme tariffs on essentially the rest of the world, the most common response from Trump apologists is that this is necessary for the benefit of American “workers.” I wanted to take moment to examine this argument.
Let’s start by addressing an important question: who are we talking about when we talk about “workers.” My guess is that we’re not talking about everyone who works. For example, in the last few days the person who has been pushing this argument was, a little over two months ago, celebrating the mass lay-off of Federal Workers. Further, they argued for the necessity of those lay-offs based on their own proclaimed experience of turning around “failing” businesses by… laying off workers.
I realize this feels like narrow casting, but it’s necessary in this case to unpack the shaky ground this argument is being made on. Clearly “workers” doesn’t mean everyone who works. Or even everyone who works more entry-level or lower-paid, frontline positions, which many of those government jobs were. Nor, I suspect, are they thinking about the tariffs’ impact on current service-based workers. In fact, while not all service jobs are retail, retail work remains the largest employment sector in the country today, and these tariffs will hit that sector HARD (and most likely lead to a workforce contraction) . So clearly these folks are not thinking about “retail workers.”
I guess that they are mainly thinking about manufacturing jobs. That focus on manufacturing workers as the primary workers we should be thinking of seems supported by a x/eet from another Pro-Trump account:
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson used this as a jumping-off point for a series of X/eets that pointed out the problem with this thinking. For ease of reading, I’ll quote them instead of directly embedding the long X/eets:
This seems to be a photo of an abandoned plant owned by Packard Auto, a failed 20th c car maker that over-expanded in the 1940s and got out-competed by the Big Three. Guy who voted in 2024 to go back in time and fix the business decisions of an also-ran mid-century auto maker
It’s a little mean to narrowly claim that the tariffs are designed to travel back in time and change the business decisions of 1940s Packard Auto execs. But I think it’s useful to be clear about what exactly these tariffs are supposed to do, and where they’re supposed to do it.
If folks are mad about de-industrialization, we need a bigger framework to consider why, for example, even countries like Germany that ran trade surpluses also saw declining manufacturing share of the labor force. If folks are mad about photos of abandoned plants, it worthwhile to ask why THAT PLANT was abandoned.
Using de-industialization porn from the 1950s to run Econ policy in the 2020s is … I’m sorry to say, more than mildly insane. [source]
It is without a doubt a fact that we have seen a fall-off in manufacturing via off-shoring and for other global trade reasons. That has devastated communities. I don’t question that as all. And as someone who has organized workers in the recent past, I care about what happens to American workers in all sorts of roles. I also care what happens to them while they are out of work (which is another reason why I am so concerned for the immediate future, given the Trump administration’s attack on our social safety net from all sides).
At the same time, the idea that these tariffs are a strategy to help “American workers” moving forward is simply not based on any grounded facts. First, if it were, the President’s supporters could actually present coherent arguments about how the tariffs will help (or even what the tariffs are supposed to do). Are they to solve our debt? Or bring manufacturing back home? Or get better trade agreements? No one can tell.
Let’s assume that they are to bring manufacturing back home. First, there is the question of whether or not that is even possible. Again, I’ll turn to a X/eet from Spencer Hakimian, Founder of Tolou Capital Management.
Hey Cult Boys, I got another complicated math question for you.
Please see if you can help me figure it out. I just can’t seem to.
It costs $2 to make a t shirt in Vietnam. It costs $20 to make that same t shirt in West Virginia. After you tariff Walmart 50%, and make that t shirt cost $3 in Vietnam.
Does Walmart:
A) Continue using the Vietnamese factory
B) Switch to West Virginia’s factoryPlease help.
I would welcome any Trump apologist with business experience to make the argument for “B”–especially if said WV factory doesn’t already exist. It would be great for them include why companies would make that type of capital investment given the deeply unstable policy landscape we are currently facing.
Here’s the thing, I’d also love for them to explain how option “B” creates manufacturing jobs at scale. Even the President’s own Secretary of Commerce has highlighted the flaw with that:
Robotics and other forms of manufacturing automation are going to replace much of the hand-labor that was the hallmark of mid-century manufacturing. Manufacturing could return to the US, even at scale, but that doesn’t mean that the same scale of manufacturing jobs will.
For a truly fascinating deep dive into this I recommend this X/itter thread on “Lights-out factories”–manufacturing facilities with so few people, they keep the lights off–by journalist Charles Fishman. Not only do lights-out factories exist within the US, they are increasingly being built around the world–including in Vietnam and other places to make those $3 t-shirts. I suspect that even the president’s apologists will be forced to admit that the future of American manufacturing is a move towards lights-out facilities–especially for lower-cost consumer goods.
Nowhere in Trump’s plan or his apologists’ hot takes has this question about where manufacturing jobs at scale will come from been addressed. Yes, they tell us to “think about the workers,” but that’s an emotional appeal to the past, versus a fact-based argument or strategy for the future.
One final note on this: the “what about the workers” emotional appeal is being used to attack people they see as their political enemies. Even worse, those political enemies make the apologists uncomfortable by pointing out facts they can’t address on substance.
So, I’m going to pile one last uncomfortable fact on that heap: most of those apologists were for off-shoring and so-called efficiency-based layoffs before they were against them.
I grew up in a household in the eighties and early nineties where conservative talk radio was always on. So I remember what folks like Rush Limbaugh and Bob Grant were saying about American manufacturing then. The main thrust was “nobody was buying American because other countries made better products–especially cars–better, faster, and cheaper.” And whose fault was that? American workers… the same workers we’re supposed to care about now. Tell me if this type of tough-love thinking sounds familiar:
“We talk about the value of hard work, but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance.”
That BTW, wasn’t even from Limbaugh or a modern talker like Michael (Weiner) Savage–it was VP J. D. Vance writing in Hillbilly Elegy. He held this position for the entirety of the first Trump administration.
However, now positions have shifted, and people who have laid off workers in the past in the name of turning around failing businesses, suddenly believe that manufacture can come back home and we should suddenly care about “the workers” (though given those same people’s focus on cutting debt while preserving tax cuts that are good for them are fine with regressive taxes on American Workers via tariffs and cutting the social safety net for the former workers who currently can’t find the jobs that the apologist remind us don’t exist).
One more note on Conservative Media–which I know many of Trump’s fiecest apologists marinate in–during the 80’s and 90’s at the very least, one of the most consistent mantras of Limbaugh and others were that “We have the ‘facts’ and Democrats/Libs have the “feels.” The utterly factless and feel-based defenses to the tariffs (especially from people who claim to understand business and manufacturing) is a prime example of how either things have flipped or perhaps this was a fig-leaf from the start to protect against cognitive dissonance.
