Who is(n’t) benefitting from the Trump economy

I will leave it to the economists to say that the economy isn’t doing well, which they are saying, because it isn’t. What I will do, instead, is explain what that looks like in practical terms.

As you have probably heard, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday morning that the economy added only 22,000 jobs last month. That number is subject to revision, a process in which the bureau continues to add data over time in order to ensure that its measures are as accurate as possible. There is some (fully warranted!) concern that future revisions might include a bit of thumb-on-scale adjustment to benefit President Trump politically, but that isn’t obvious from the new numbers. In fact, a revision to the June estimate now indicates that the country lost jobs that month for the first time since the pandemic emerged. It was just such a revision that prompted Trump to oust the non-partisan head of BLS after last month’s report.

What is clear is that the rate of hiring has slowed substantially and, since April, basically flat-lined. Compare this year’s change in employment since January with the steady rates of change in 2023 and 2024, for example.

Perhaps something that occurred in April had an effect on the economy? Who’s to say.

The shifts in employment have not been evenly distributed. For example, fewer Black and White Americans are working now than were working in January, while more Asian and Hispanic Americans are.

It’s important to note that the uncertainty in the employment numbers is even larger for subsets of the population. You can see that below in the data for Black men; the whipsaw drop and surge is probably not because of big swings in employment as much as statistical randomness. That said, there are some clear patterns, with Black women and White men in particular seeing employment loss since January.

In case you missed the joke earlier, some hard-to-measure-but-probably-significant portion of the economic softness we’re seeing is a function of Trump’s off-again-on-again tariff declarations. At the time he introduced them, they were presented (sometimes) as an effort to boost domestic manufacturing. (At other times they were presented as an effort to level the playing field on trade. The inconsistency is simply part of the slapdash nature of the policy.)

You can see below, though, that manufacturing employment has declined this year. So too has employment in the government, largely because 100,000 federal employees were put out of work.

There are lots of other numbers we could look at that suggest the economy is much weaker than any of us might desire. But these are more than enough for now. Since April, the country has added only 107,000 jobs, the smallest number over any four-month period since 2000. During 2023 and 2024, the country added an average of 192,000 jobs per month. This year, under Trump, we’ve added an average of 75,000.

The economy is slowing down. Uh, as an economist might say.

Photo: Unemployed men queued outside a depression soup kitchen opened in Chicago in 1931 by Al Capone. (National Archives)