The Blue Wave Meets Trump’s Manufacturing Boom
By Peter Navarro | November 9, 2026 | RealClearMarkets
Many charter members of our nation’s core of blow-dried and blathering commentators are blaming last week’s blue tsunami in the midterm elections on a supposedly bad Trump economy. Voters are entitled to their frustrations over high prices. But the data continue to tell a very different story about the underlying strength of Trumpnomics.
Exhibit A: Friday’s blowout October jobs report. Employers created 165,000 jobs against Wall Street’s expectation of just 65,000—more than two and a half times the forecast. Unemployment fell from 4.2 percent to 4.1 percent even as labor-force participation climbed to 61.9 percent.
Private employers created 159,000 jobs. Revisions added another 84,000 to August and September. That is not a labor market rolling over. It is gaining momentum.
As the Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, I am pleased to report that the star of this show was American manufacturing. Factories added 19,000 jobs in October and have gained 101,000 so far in 2026. Durable-goods producers added 25,000 jobs in October and 131,000 this year.
After 2025’s painful retreat, manufacturing payrolls are finally 8,000 above their January 2025 level. This is the first net gain of Trump’s second term—a meaningful turnaround, even if the rebuilding is far from finished.
Another election theme blames the Trump tariffs for inflation and the political defeat. But we learned prior to the energy price shock that tariffs don’t cause inflation—the foreigners who export to the U.S. pay for the tariffs by lowering their own prices.
As for September’s headline inflation, it was 3.7 percent—uncomfortably high. Yet core inflation was 2.6 percent. A gasoline-price surge accounted for more than half the monthly headline increase.
This is an energy price shock fueled by the war, and blaming it on tariffs is politics masquerading as economics—RINO gaslighting and Democrat spin.
Here’s the Trump truth: The Trump tariffs are turning out to be among the most consequential economic policies of this administration. Paired with tax cuts and tough enforcement against foreign cheating, they have become the catalyst for America’s strongest manufacturing renaissance since the post–World War II boom. The proof is in strong construction worker data and the factories we build, the rise in manufacturing jobs as new factories come on line, and a flood of brownfield facilities across the Rust Belt and beyond being upgraded and expanded.
Consider here that overall construction payrolls slipped 3,000 in October as residential work weakened. But nonresidential specialty-trade contractors—skilled workers essential to industrial projects—added 7,900 jobs. Their employment is nearly 120,000 higher than when Trump took office. Not every one of these jobs is on a factory site, but the growth reflects important capacity for building America’s industrial base.