The labor market is slowing, but it’s all good news in the White House.
The U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May, a slight decline from April, according to a jobs report released Friday. The unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent, still within the ballpark of historic lows reached in 2023, when the unemployment rate reached 3.4 percent—the lowest it had been in more than five decades. But within the folds of the report hid a major red flag for Donald Trump’s agenda: The U.S. is still bleeding manufacturing jobs.
But even the president’s favorite conservative network couldn’t hide its dismay at the slight manufacturing downturn.
“Now, 8,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in May. That’s not what you wanted to see,” said Fox Business host Stuart Varney.
This is exactly what some of the biggest manufacturers of cars in America are thinking of doing. They manufacture in America but a lot of the parts are imported and would cost them a fortune to import. It’s cheaper to move factories to China, build the full part, and then ship it over because the tarrifs are higher on the individual tech parts inside the assembly than a finished product using those parts.