Trump’s ‘manly’ economy

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump made a straightforward pitch to working-class men: elect me, and the jobs will come roaring back. The mines would reopen. The factories would hum. The oil rigs would multiply. America would once again be a place where a man without a college degree could find honest, well-paid work and hold his head high.
It was a powerful message here on the Iron Range, where the memory of good union mining jobs is not just nostalgia — it’s family history, identity, and the reason towns like Virginia, Hibbing, and Eveleth exist. Trump carried the Range in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, in no small part because men (and a few women) who work in the pits believed him.
Fourteen months later, destructive Trump policies have left hundreds of those workers out of work with no idea when they’ll be back on the job.
Cleveland-Cliffs idled operations at Hibbing Taconite and the Minorca Mine in Virginia in March 2025, laying off some 630 workers. Cliffs cited weak demand for steel driven largely by the cratering auto industry — which has been further battered by the very tariff uncertainty that Trump promised would spark a manufacturing renaissance. We learned last week of another local victim of Trump’s policies— Minnesota Twist Drill. Overwhelmed by tariff costs, the company announced it plans to shut down, laying off 75 more Iron Range workers.
The cruelest irony arrived last month, when it was reported that Trump had accepted $37 million in donated steel from Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal — a European company — for the construction of a new White House ballroom. “Foreign steel in the White House? Are you kidding?” responded one local union leader. Al King, president of United Steelworkers Local 6115 at Minorca, called it “a gut shot.” Chris Johnson, president of United Steelworkers Local 2705 at HibTac, put it plainly: “He says one thing, and you think, ‘Good, he’s going to stick with American manufacturing.’ And then all of a sudden this comes.”
The Iron Range’s experience is not an outlier. It’s the local expression of a national pattern.
U.S. businesses have created just 369,000 total jobs since Trump took office 15 months ago — a pace roughly four times slower than during the final 14 months of the Biden administration. But buried within that already-weak number is a finding that should give every Trump voter pause: of those 369,000 jobs, 348,000 went to women. Only 21,000 went to men. That’s nearly 17 jobs for women for every one job for men.
The reason is straightforward. Nearly all net job growth has come from health care — a sector where women hold nearly 80 percent of positions. Health care alone added 390,000 jobs over the past year, more than total net job creation economy-wide. While men comprised almost 80,000 of those health care jobs, losses for men in other sectors hit hard. Manufacturing has shed roughly 82,000 jobs since Trump took office, including the auto sector which has lost approximately 18,000 jobs. Coal mining, despite a blizzard of executive orders and Trumpian pronouncements, employs the same 40,000 workers it did when Trump arrived. Oil and gas shed 9,000 jobs through August 2025, as Exxon, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips all announced significant layoffs.
Meanwhile, the wind and solar sectors — which employed many men doing physically demanding outdoor work in rural areas not unlike the Range — have been purposefully targeted by Trump for destruction. Through September 2025, the clean energy economy had lost nearly 21,000 jobs and $24 billion in investment due directly to Trump policies.
The Trump administration argues that manufacturing output is rising, productivity is up, and investment announcements are pouring in. Most of those investment promises were made by companies in negotiations over Trump’s illegal tariffs, and if history is a guide, few will ever come to fruition. Either way, promises are not paychecks. And here on the Range, we know better than most that productivity gains in heavy industry often mean fewer workers, not more.
What has emerged is what economists are calling a “jobless economy” — an economy doing well for people who own things, and poorly for people who make things. University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson noted recently that if Trump genuinely wants men to find work, he should encourage them to pursue careers in health care, teaching, and social work — the sectors that are actually hiring. The administration has shown zero interest in that conversation, preferring to keep promising a manufacturing revival that it shows no signs of delivering.
Like so many workers around the country, the 630 miners on indefinite layoff on the Range thought Trump had their back. That ballroom built with European steel tells the real story.