Trump's Tariffs Are Starting To Kill Jobs

The Trump administration believes that high tariffs will boost the prospects of American manufacturing, but one iconic truck company is now preparing to lay off hundreds of workers—because of the tariffs.

For more than a century, the Mack Trucks plant on the outskirts of Allentown, Pennsylvania, has been churning out heavy equipment to haul stuff from place to place. It is one of the largest employers in the region, providing hundreds of the good-paying, blue-collar jobs that President Donald Trump and his allies want to promote in America.

Some of those jobs are about to disappear. Mack Trucks will lay off between 250 and 350 workers over the next few weeks, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reports. A company spokesperson told the Capital-Star that the layoffs are due to “market uncertainty about freight rates and demand” and “the impact of tariffs.”

Of course, one of the impacts of tariffs is increased economic uncertainty and decreased demand for products like the ones Mack Trucks makes. That’s a tidy illustration of how higher tariffs are hurting American businesses in more ways than one: higher prices for imported goods and component parts on the front end, coupled with lower sales expectations on the back end. In an environment like that, layoffs seem almost inevitable.

As that dynamic plays out across the whole economy, the tariffs will create more losers than winners. A Goldman Sachs report published this week estimates that Trump’s tariffs will create about 100,000 new manufacturing jobs (a result of supply chains shifting to the U.S., as the president wants) but will destroy 500,000 other jobs in the process.

That would reflect what happened during Trump’s first term, when his tariffs cost about 245,000 American jobs, by one estimate.

More layoffs are almost certainly coming.

“A lot of companies are definitely going to go under, that’s for sure,” Molson Hart, CEO of Viahart, an educational toy company, told The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson this week.

“Firms expect conditions to worsen in the months ahead,” the New York Federal Reserve noted in its April survey of manufacturers, which showed “a level of pessimism that has only occurred a handful of times in the history of the survey.”

Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, a global logistics firm, warned in a series of posts on X that ocean freight bookings from China are down 50 percent since Trump’s tariffs hit. That could potentially wipe out as much as $1 trillion in economic activity if the tariffs remain in place for a full year, he estimated.

“Thousands, and then millions, of American small businesses, including many iconic brands, will go bankrupt this year if the tariff policies on China don’t change,” Petersen wrote.

The stock market might have been the first to respond to the consequences of Trump’s tariffs, but the damage was always going to be more widespread. American workers are about to end up on the front lines of the president’s trade war.

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