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President Donald Trump spoke on Friday from the Oval Office, giving Americans an update on the state of manufacturing in the United States and delivering a dose of excellent news: domestic manufacturing is becoming stronger every day.
“During the first full month in office, we’ve not only stopped the manufacturing collapse, but we’ve begun to rapidly reverse it and get major gains,” the president told reporters.
He said his administration had created 10,000 manufacturing jobs in February alone, and explained these were “private sector manufacturing jobs.”
The president contrasted this against the Biden administration, who he said saw a loss of “more than 110,000 manufacturing jobs, or 9,000 jobs every single month” over the past year.
Importantly, these job gains affected native-born American workers, the president explained. “Under the first full month of President Trump, an incredible 93 percent of all jobs were in the private sector,” he continued.
He also said foreign-born jobs dipped by 87,000 during this rise in jobs for American-born employees.
“These are incredible numbers, and they’re very early,” Trump said.
In fact, it’s also worth noting that a total of 367,000 native-born Americans joined the workforce in February, according to data from Rapid Response 47, while 66,000 foreign-born left.
The president also invited White House Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett to comment on the development. Hassett pointed out that these gains were, incredibly, simply due to an anticipation of future policies.
“People are clearly expecting the Golden Age,” Hassett explained, noting reciprocal tariffs would go into effect in April, and that big tax cuts hadn’t even been passed by Congress yet.
“This is just out of the expectation of your future policies,” he remarked.
Hassett also described what was happening as a “glimpse of the Golden Age to come.”
President Trump remained firm that his tariff policies on trade were a major driver of this economic uptick, which has thus far secured over $1 trillion in investments for America, ranging from Apple manufacturing to Taiwan chip production plants.
The president also slammed Canada for tariffing American dairy and lumber “250 percent,” and accused them of “ripping us off for years.”
“That’s not going to happen anymore,” he added. “…They’ll be met with the exact same tariff unless they drop it.”
Trump said he was considering implementing a reciprocal tariff on those two products “as early as today or we may wait until Tuesday.”
The president further added, “Look, our country’s been ripped off by everybody – that stops NOW.”