Donald Trump spent no small amount of time cosplaying as a blue-collar worker (fry cook, sanitation worker) during his 2024 campaign in a transparent effort to polish his everyman bona fides. And he has portrayed his policies as the silver bullet for blue-collar work in the U.S. You may remember his bigoted campaign remarks about thwarting immigration to save what he called “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” implying that nonwhite people are best suited to the sort of menial labor often performed by immigrants. And just last year, Trump and the MAGA movement suggested he would oversee a spike in blue-collar work while boosting America masculinity.
As ridiculous as such claims were at the time, it’s noteworthy that they have completely fallen to pieces in the meantime. Economist Jared Bernstein explained for MS NOW in November that Trump’s tariffs helped fuel a massive loss in manufacturing jobs last year. Reporting in the following weeks showed that the blue-collar jobs crisis wasn’t confined to manufacturing but also included construction, which has been undercut by Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
This phenomenon was most recently documented in a post from economist Joseph Politano on his Apricitas Economics blog. In a post titled “America is losing blue collar jobs,” he uses data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics to argue “the administration’s desired ‘blue-collar boom’ is not happening; quite the opposite.”
Politano writes:
America is losing jobs in blue-collar industries, something that last occurred during the initial shock of the early pandemic and the depths of the Great Recession. The country is down 65k industrial jobs over the last year, a dramatic reversal from 2024, when the US added a lower-than-usual but still respectable 250k jobs. A major slowdown has hit all blue-collar sectors this year, including construction, mining, and utilities—though manufacturing and transportation are driving the vast majority of US job losses. Politano warned that the devastation to the blue-collar jobs market might be much worse than these numbers reflect. “In total, employment across trades and industry is now down 123k from the all-time peak reached in early 2025 and has been declining nearly every month since February,” he wrote. All of this might be contributing to Trump’s polling numbers on the economy, which hit a personal low in a recent AP-NORC poll. It’s certainly noteworthy that some of the demographics he has catered to with his blue-collar rhetoric, including young men and Black and Hispanic voters, appear to think less of him now than they did a year ago.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
