President Donald Trump‘s latest economic overture to voters mirrors former President Joe Biden‘s messaging spin, which largely failed to resonate with the public and led to significant Democratic losses in the 2022 midterm and 2024 general election cycles.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to reverse inflation and lower prices across the board immediately upon entering office. And while prices have started to recede from the post-COVID highs of the past four years, the president’s tariffs, fully implemented as of last month, risk new inflationary spikes through the end of the year.
Furthermore, the president has received four consecutive negative jobs reports, despite claims from top administration officials that Trump’s policies would revitalize American manufacturing and usher in a blue-collar boom.
The August report, published Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claimed just over 20,000 jobs were added to the economy last month, roughly 50,000 below expectations. Furthermore, the administration revised down June’s job report to the first negative monthly posting since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and found that, in total, the economy has shed roughly 42,000 manufacturing jobs since April.
Meanwhile, Trump and top economic aides have spun these middling-at-best jobs numbers as a remnant of the previous administration.
“It’s been a couple of months. And with the manufacturing sector,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We can’t snap our fingers and have factories built.”
“The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ which has full expensing for factories and equipment, was passed on July 4th,” he added. “Many companies were holding back then. So, we are going to see construction jobs. And we are going to see manufacturing jobs.”
Trump suggested Thursday, the night before BLS published the August report, that it will still take some time before BLS starts reporting “real numbers.”
“In a year from now, you’ll see job numbers that are going to be absolutely incredible,” the president claimed.
As of Monday, Trump’s economic approval rating, as tracked by the Real Clear Politics aggregate, was more than 12 points in the red, compared to positive ratings as high as 62% in some polls when he re-entered office in January.
The director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, Peter Loge, told the Washington Examiner that Trump’s slight shifts in economic messaging over those months illustrate “what every president before him has learned the hard way, that the global economy is beyond their control.”
“Politicians try to guess what public opinion will be next year based on what they see today, something political scientists call latent opinion,” he said in an interview. “Elected officials will vote, in part, on how they think voters will feel in the future. Public opinion about the president’s policies today matters for the newscycle and the handful of elections this year, but what really matters is what elected officials think the voters they need to get reelected will believe a year from now.”
Loge additionally claimed that “as long as Republicans are more afraid to oppose Trump than they are to support him, they will continue to support his policies.”
“If it is politically more dangerous to support the president than it is to vote against him, then elected officials will vote against him,” he concluded. “President Trump has to make sure his policies are popular enough that taking him on isn’t worth getting shouted at and politically threatened.”
Still, White House officials maintain that the recent spin isn’t simply political and pointed the Washington Examiner to several “positive” indicators that Trump’s policies will drive a domestic manufacturing resurgence.
“Jobs are obviously a lagging indicator,” one senior White House aide said of the August numbers, instead pointing to core capital good shipments and new manufacturing orders, both outpacing expectations in July, the most recent data available. Both metrics had steadily declined across Biden’s final two years in office.
That aide additionally pointed to “total industrial production” surging in June to its highest levels since 1919, when the government began tracking the metric.
Bessent told the Washington Examiner in an interview last week that Trump’s policies, specifically his tariffs and tax cuts, would drive “a big economic pickup in 2026.”
TRUMP ORDERED WHITE HOUSE PEACE VIGIL TO COME DOWN. IT’S STILL THERE
“As we’ve seen for the past two decades, three decades, four decades, working Americans have gotten left behind, and now it’s time for the blue-collar boom. I call it parallel prosperity. If you were to say what’s the new economic paradigm, parallel prosperity,” he claimed. “Because for the past, since 1980, the stock market’s done great. The high-end Americans have done great. Working Americans have not, and the stock market can continue doing great. Wall Street can do great, but now it’s Main Street’s turn. So it’s not either or, as many people say, it’s Main Street and Wall Street, and now it’s time for a Main Street catch-up.”
