US economic data released last week confirmed what everyone except the Trump administration expected. The US economy is stalling.

It’s doing so because of a combination of Donald Trump’s key policies: his tariffs, his crackdown on immigration, his assault on the federal bureaucracy and his unwinding of Joe Biden’s massive incentives for green energy investment.

US President Donald Trump is looking to shift the blame once again. Credit: AP

The key piece of data last week was the jobs market report for August, which showed the economy added only 22,000 jobs last month, and a revision of the June numbers, which showed employment fell by 13,000 that month – the first net loss of jobs since the pandemic. Jobs growth over the three months to the end of August was only about a third of what it was in the same period of last year.

It is disconcerting that, even as Trump has throttled the supply of immigrants and his deportations have shrunk the existing pool of labour, the unemployment rate has risen from 4.1 per cent in December, before he took office, to 4.32 per cent last month.

While, historically, August job numbers have been revised up when the Bureau of Labor Statistics gains more data, the trend is clear, and Trump, having sacked the agency’s head after accusing the BLS of rigging the June quarter numbers to make him look bad, now says the “real numbers” will emerge “in a year from now” and tried to shift the blame for the weakening jobs market to the US Federal Reserve Board.

Another piece of the economic puzzle was provided by the Institute for Supply Management’s survey of manufacturing activity. Ahead of the jobs data, it revealed that activity fell in August – the sixth successive contraction in a sector at the centre of Trump’s trade policies. He has promised a “Golden Age” for US manufacturers, but is delivering a manufacturing recession.

Trump’s tariffs are raising the input costs of........

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