Amid new reports of shrinking manufacturing activity and employment, the Trump administration is struggling more than ever to justify its economic policies. Those policies, restricting trade and immigration, now coincide with fewer Americans working in manufacturing than at any point since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This outcome would be bad for any administration, but it’s particularly problematic for one that’s promised a manufacturing boom with policies that restrict trade and immigration. As Cato scholars (and many others) have repeatedly pointed out, the share of manufacturing employment in the United States has been declining since at least the 1940s due to higher productivity. So, promising a manufacturing job revival might not have been the best idea.

Regardless, a new Wall Street Journal article points to another reason that making this sort of promise was likely a bad idea: Politics based on a false economic narrative.

The article notes that the gradual slowdown in manufacturing is “in some ways” part of “decades-long trends” that “helped empty out Midwestern cities.” This so-called hollowing out of the Midwest is, of course, a very popular explanation for Donald Trump’s rise to political power. Supposedly, manufacturing “boomed from the 1940s up through the 1970s,” and then the bottom fell out because a blind adherence to free market ideology, including free trade, decimated US manufacturing. It destroyed all the “good” jobs, and “hollowed out” the middle class.

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