But less than 100 days into Trump’s second term, manufacturers across the country now fear that the president’s tariffs could actually make their economic realities worse — and understandably so.
If Trump is going to avert a financial crisis for many of the manufacturers and their employees who sent him back to Washington, he may have to abort his tariff plan — and soon.
Growing anxiety about job cuts is not irrational, given the expected rise in costs following Trump’s ongoing trade war. Thousands of Massachusetts residents go to work each day in factories on the state’s South Coast, making products that include materials that come from abroad. One such manufacturer, George Matouk Jr., operator of a fine linens factory in Fall River, has allocated money to hiring employees that may now have to be diverted to paying tariffs.
“These universal and reciprocal tariffs, which are supposed to provide [an] incentive for manufacturing investment in the United States, are actually damaging manufacturers more than helping them,” Matouk told the Globe.
“We’re talking about millions of dollars that the government is now going to be taxing us every year on materials that we require for manufacturing, job creation,” he added.
But even before Trump announced his widely criticized tariff plan, the job market for Massachusetts residents was looking less promising than some desired. The state’s total unemployment rate for March was slightly higher than the February rate and even higher than the national unemployment rate for the same period.
Trump announcing a minimum 10 percent tariff on all US imports earlier this month — on a day he christened “Liberation Day” — only exacerbated fears among manufacturers and their employees.
A plan the president was attempting to celebrate instead induced dread among those within the manufacturing industry, as the reality set in that these changes could lead to both more expensive items and fewer jobs.
The latest consumer survey from the University of Michigan showed consumer confidence dropped 11 percentage points this month to 50.8 percent — the second-lowest rating in more than 70 years. And these numbers could worsen as Americans show little hope in the job market improving in the upcoming months.
“Sentiment has now lost more than 30% since December 2024 amid growing worries about trade war developments that have oscillated over the course of the year,” Surveys of Consumers director Joanne Hsu said in a statement. “The share of consumers expecting unemployment to rise in the year ahead increased for the fifth consecutive month and is now more than double the November 2024 reading and the highest since 2009.”
Administration officials attempted to quickly make some adjustments in response to criticism of his plan from both opponents and supporters. The president’s team walked back some tariffs for a number of countries after economists at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the country’s foremost conservative think tanks, pointed out a mathematical error in the formula the administration used to calculate tariffs.
“If we are going to pretend that it is a sound basis for US trade policy,” the economists wrote about the formula used by the White House, “we should at least be allowed to expect that the relevant White House officials do their calculations carefully.”
And pro-Trump manufacturers should be allowed to expect that a president who pledged to strengthen manufacturing would make decisions that wouldn’t actually worsen outcomes for their companies. But by the looks of it, the increased employment opportunities that voters were promised are on track to be much farther off than expected. Or at worst, may never come.
