There’s something big missing from Trump’s post-war manufacturing fantasy

Many Trump supporters are celebrating his new tariffs on the hope that they’ll make America great again by bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. “For four years, Americans couldn’t afford groceries, let alone a house,” Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner wrote on X last Wednesday, “This Liberation Day, @POTUS is bringing manufacturing and jobs back. President Trump is making the American Dream achievable again!” That same day, Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana said in a CNN interview that, “The decision by President Trump today to impose reciprocal tariffs will be so good for Indiana.” Banks went on to talk about his father’s job at plant making axles for cars, saying, “Those are the manufacturing jobs that President Trump is bringing back from overseas.”  

The problem is: those who credit manufacturing jobs for a glorious past America mistake correlation for causation. They think their parents and grandparents had the “good life” because of jobs in manufacturing. In reality, their parents and grandparents had that life because of unions, pensions, high marginal tax rates, and strong social policies — with a little post-war exceptionalism and a lot of racism and sexism thrown in.