When the American job market struggled badly during Donald Trump’s first term, the White House not only struggled to come up with an explanation, but it also struggled to come up with anything to say at all.
The reticence was understandable, though embarrassing: The president promised to deliver an economic “boom” immediately after taking office, and he failed spectacularly, delivering the worst job market since the Great Recession (excluding the pandemic).
The White House was in a far better mood late last week, however, when the public learned that the economy gained 172,000 jobs in May, extending a three-month winning streak and getting closer to the kind of robust growth Americans saw during Joe Biden’s presidency.
But as the political and financial sectors digest the latest data, there’s a trend that’s worth dwelling on.
In the first four months of Trump’s second term, as 2025 was just getting underway, job growth slowly improved, and over the three months leading up to the unveiling of the White House’s trade tariffs agenda, the economy averaged monthly job growth of roughly 72,000.
Then the White House-imposed “Liberation Day” arrived, launching an avoidable and unnecessary trade war. In the 10 months that followed, the U.S. job market, on average, lost 4,900 jobs per month. That’s not a typo: For the first time in several years, the economy actually started losing jobs in a sustained way.
In February, to the hysterical outrage of the president, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his tariffs agenda. In the three months that followed, the economy added a combined 565,000 jobs — more than quadruple the total for the entirety of 2025 — for an average of more than 188,000 jobs per month.