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The central promise behind President Trump’s border taxes was straightforward: slap tariffs on imports, make foreign goods more expensive, and watch factories spring up across America. The Wall Street Journal now reports the rain came, but the mushrooms didn’t.
US manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 200,000 positions since 2023. Tens of thousands of those losses came in 2025 alone, the very period when tariffs were supposed to be working their magic. Manufacturing payrolls shed another 8,000 jobs in June 2026.
The tariff math isn’t mathing
A 10% Section 122 duty on $1.2 trillion in imports took effect in February 2026. Roughly $120 billion in additional costs got layered onto the US economy through higher input prices for businesses that rely on imported materials, components, and finished goods.
The WSJ found scant evidence of reshoring benefits. Companies aren’t rushing to build new factories domestically. They’re just paying more for the same stuff they were buying before, then passing those costs along to consumers.
Manufacturing, the sector these policies were explicitly designed to revive, continues to contract. Not flatten. Not plateau. Contract.
Legal headwinds compound the policy mess
The tariff strategy hit a significant legal roadblock when the Supreme Court invalidated several emergency tariffs in February 2026. That ruling didn’t kill the broader tariff agenda, but it introduced serious uncertainty about the durability of Section 122 measures, which now face their own legal challenges.
During Trump’s first term, tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Chinese goods had some success in temporarily leveling off job losses. But they never reversed the overall trajectory of decline. The sector was already shrinking before the tariffs. It kept shrinking during them. And it’s shrinking now with a fresh round layered on top.
What this means for crypto and broader markets
For crypto specifically, the WSJ analysis found no substantial connection between tariff policies and digital asset prices. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been trading largely independently of trade policy dynamics throughout this period.
During the early tariff escalations of 2025, crypto markets initially sold off alongside equities on broad risk-off sentiment. But the correlation appears to have weakened as digital assets developed their own price drivers, including institutional adoption flows, ETF dynamics, and protocol-specific catalysts.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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