Tariffs: The quest to bring back ‘manly’ jobs

President Trump and his advisers have offered many rationales for his tariff obsession, said Emily Steward in Business Insider, but a key goal is often overlooked: to “make work manly again.” MAGA world thinks that Trump’s levies on cheap imports will drive a renaissance in American manufacturing and bring back a time when men toiled with their hands in factories or mines instead of getting soft in feminized “email jobs.” The concept of testosterone-boosting jobs drew recent cheers from Fox News host Jesse Watters: “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman,” he said. The prospect of a factory boom excites internet “incels” who can’t find a wife or girlfriend, said Constance Grady in Vox. They believe it will shift the economy back to 1950s-style manly employment while shifting away from work that has enabled women to become independent. If women once again need economic support from men, these lonely dudes think, they “will be incentivized to sleep with them, and the world will be restored to its proper order.”

Trump and the “idiotic fantasists” who share his vision overlook an inconvenient reality, said Kevin D. Williamson in The Dispatch. Manufacturing, mining, and other working-class jobs are often dangerous, dull, and physically punishing. The sons and daughters of men who did them were generally quite happy to move into white-collar jobs. “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000-degree blast furnace,” Gary Cohn, Trump’s first-term chief economic adviser, reportedly told Trump when he rhapsodized over lost industrial jobs. But Trump, who’s “never been within smelling distance of a blue-collar job,” fails to understand that “people do those jobs because they do not have a lot of other choices.” In the modern economy, people do have other choices—and Trump can’t change that.

Beneath the “culture war posturing lies a real labor-market quandary,” said Henry Grabar in Slate. Men without college degrees are struggling to find jobs that pay well. But Trump’s tariff chaos won’t bring back manufacturing work now largely performed by robots and technology. This isn’t really about creating jobs, said Rotimi Adeoye in The Washington Post. “It’s about creating vibes.” Trump’s tariffs won’t revive steel plants, coal mines, and “rugged masculinity,” or deprive women of office and service jobs. He’s just feeding the fantasy that “the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.”