Trump's job market was absolute sh-t in 2025

The jobs market in 2025 was a bust, with growth virtually stagnant thanks to President Donald Trump's idiotic tariff policies, which left companies in a state of paralysis.

In December, employers added a meager 50,000 jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday, coming in below economists' expectations of 70,000 jobs.

Worse, however, is that the BLS revised the October and November reports down by a total of 76,000 jobs—negating Decembers' gains and capping off what was a terrible 2025 for the labor market.

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“The hiring that we’re seeing is very, very slow,” William Lee, chief economist at the Milken Institute, said in an interview on CNN. "We're barely breaking even in terms of offsetting the new entrances into the labor force, so the unemployment rate is showing signs of actually drifting up because the pace of hiring is so low."

Ultimately, the economy added an average of just 49,000 jobs per month in 2025, according to BLS data. That's far lower than the average of 168,000 jobs created per month in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden's presidency.

And almost all of 2025’s gains came before April, when Trump announced his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs that raised taxes on imports from nearly every country on earth.

Heather Long, the chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a post on X that 2025’s job gains were the worst since 2003 for any year that didn’t feature a recession.

“And nearly 85% of the job gains happened by April. There was little hiring the rest of the year,” Long wrote.

The year also ended with a 4.4% unemployment rate, among the highest it's been since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Even more concerning is that nearly 1 million people in the United States had to take on part-time work in 2025 because they couldn't find adequate full-time employment.

"These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs," the BLS report said.

Ironically, aside from government jobs—which Trump cruelly slashed with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—one of the industries that fared the worst in 2025 was manufacturing. The manufacturing industry lost jobs on net in 2025, shedding 75,000 employees. 

Trump’s tariffs were supposed to bring more blue-collar manufacturing jobs to the United States. But the data reveals that the tariffs did nothing of the sort. Instead, they kept inflation high and paralyzed the job market, making the economy feel even worse for the very people who helped put him back in office.

"The labor market story of 2025 is that, since liberation day, 121% of all new private sector jobs have been in health care. During that same period 161,000 blue-collar jobs have been lost,” Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Institute, wrote in a post on X. “Whatever tariffs were meant to do for workers hasn't happened.”

It’s no wonder Americans are unhappy with the economy and giving Trump terrible marks for how he’s shepherded it.

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