It’s not just affordability. Trump has a jobs problem, too
“The recession in the labor market has arrived."
The Joe Biden job market suddenly looks enviable.
Americans rebelled against the high inflation of Biden’s presidency, which hammered family budgets. But job growth under Biden was the strongest under any president in modern history, as Biden frequently reminded people.
We could use some of that mojo now. Job growth has slowed sharply this year, with employment falling by a combined 41,000 jobs during the last two months.
Employment growth averaged 216,000 new jobs per month in 2023 and 168,000 new jobs in 2024. The average for 2025 is just 55,000 new jobs per month.
Since June, employment growth has averaged just 17,000 new jobs per month. In three of the last six months, the economy has lost jobs rather than gaining any.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, has gradually ticked up from a low of 3.4% in 2023 to 4.6% now. It has jumped by half a percentage point since June.
There’s a lot of noise in the latest job numbers, because the six-week government shutdown delayed some of the data and made other figures uncollectable. But tuning out that noise renders a very clear signal: Hard data validates all the soft, anecdotal evidence of a vibecession and mounting job worries.
The decline in employment in October and November included bureaucratic downsizing as part of the DOGE circus earlier this year. But don’t blow that off: Government jobs are real jobs providing paychecks, and fewer federal workers means fewer people spending money.
Most of the new jobs created during the last two months were in education and health, which are among the most recession-proof sectors. Many of the sectors that typically generate growth actually contracted, including transportation, hospitality, and information services.
Trump says his trade policy—mostly steep new tariffs on imports—is supposed to revitalize American manufacturing. No sign of that. Manufacturing employment has dropped for seven months in a row, which, big surprise, correlates almost perfectly with the onslaught of the Trump tariffs, starting in April. Total manufacturing employment has been slowly declining since February 2023, with a total loss of 203,000 factory jobs since then.
“The recession in the labor market has arrived, even if the overall economy has yet to feel it,” economist David Rosenberg of Rosenberg Research wrote in a December 16 analysis. “There were far too many cyclically sensitive sectors shedding jobs to lay claim that the labor market has any semblance of vitality.”
An economywide recession, as technically defined, isn’t on the horizon. Strong spending by wealthier Americans— buoyed by rising home and stock values—might even keep overall economic growth pretty solid. So Trump will be able to cherry-pick certain things going right as he defends his economic record and tries to persuade voters everything is fine.
But Trump’s approval rating is falling and voter views on his handling of the economy have crashed. Even some of Trump’s dogged supporters think he’s bungling the economy.
Biden couldn’t talk voters into feeling better, even when the job market was booming and inflation was coming down. Trump probably thinks he has better powers of persuasion. If he really wants to one-up Biden, now’s the time.