President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement has always been more focused on vibes than policy—but if you had to boil it down to two basic economic ideas, it would be something like this: Higher tariffs to promote blue-collar work and stricter immigration enforcement to protect American workers from unfair competition in the labor market.
On both fronts, the latest jobs report (and those from the past few months) ought to raise some questions, particularly among those who have embraced Trump's agenda.
As a whole, the jobs report was not great—read Reason's Liz Wolfe for the big picture. When you look at the sectors of the economy that were supposed to benefit from Trump's economic policies, however, the news gets significantly worse. The manufacturing sector lost 12,000 jobs during the month of August and 78,000 over the past year, according to the data released Thursday by the Department of Labor.
