Most of the job losses in manufacturing... have been due to automation not trade. And this is in all developed economies, for example the US Europe and other places..

The height of manufacturing 'employment' in the United States was in the 1970s... the height of manufacturing output was in ~2018. Clearly, fewer humans are making more things due to automation, robots and machines. Everything else is becoming more automated, machine-like, and digitized... so why wouldn't manufacturing?

That's why manufacturing output in the US peaked starting in the 1970s before China even entered the WTO... and the US nearly makes more things than ever... just with fewer people.

But the Trump administration never mentions this.

Over the last 30 years, the US has transitioned to a 'service' economy rather than a 'goods' economy - producing services like software, cloud computing, IP, AI, financial services... and tons of technology. For example the Mag 7 is all tech companies... which produce mostly services.

Not that the US produces "all the software" obviously, but it makes the vast majority compared to Europe, and it's only recently that China has started to catch up.

And last year, as a matter of fact the total trade deficit in goods and services was approximately 900 billion in the United States. While this sounds like a lot, Apple alone is a multi-trillion dollar company so it puts the 900 billion into context.

https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/us-international-trade-goods-and-services-december-and-annual-2024#:~:text=For%202024%2C%20the%20goods%20and%20services%20deficit%20was%20%24918.4%20billion,up%20%24253.3%20billion%20from%202023.

People all over use American IT products, run Windows or Mac, read American books, watch US TV and Movies... subscribe to Netflix, all those things are services and aren't even included in the 'trade deficits' the President keeps touting.

By your own admission you have... slaves and slaves barely get paid if at all. Meaning they can't buy anything, they can't import much, they can't pay much in the way of taxes, and they have no money (capital) with which to invest.

So noone wants to buy your bonds, capital flees the country at the first chance it gets, and every economics-book says your country is 'low wage' and 'low productivity' which means your corporate bonds are junk.

Making 'expensive' 'high-wage' stuff may have its costs... but it has huge benefits including higher standard of living, and different types of work compared to working in slave-factories.