The U.S. economy created 162,000 jobs in August, more than most economists expected, according to economist Justin Wolfers — but President Donald Trump has failed to deliver the kind of jobs he most campaigned on creating.

"This is an administration that talks about big boofy blokes in hard hats and steel-toed boots. Manufacturing coming home. The 1960s, all over again. That rhetoric is the entire justification for the tariffs," Wolfers wrote on his Substack. "That, to be brief, has not happened."

Since January 2025, the U.S. economy has created nearly a million jobs in health care and social assistance — a figure that already compares unfavorably to job creation under former president Joe Biden. Worse still, Wolfers noted, the rest of the Trump economy has actually shed jobs.

The only apparent factor keeping the headline numbers from looking even worse, he argued, is that the United States is an aging nation whose population requires ever more health care. Health care has been one of the most reliable engines of U.S. job growth for years, in part because the sector's demand is driven by demographics rather than business cycles — a trend documented in Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing health care and social assistance routinely among the largest monthly job gainers.

"This is a services economy shifting further toward services, and it's been doing that for decades regardless of who's in the White House or what they say about factories," Wolfers said. "I don't want to downplay these numbers: August was a reasonably good month for the non-health-care economy, with growth spread fairly widely. That's a true improvement on the rest of the Trump term. But one month doesn't rewrite eighteen."

Manufacturing employment has been on a long structural decline in the United States for decades; factory payrolls peaked in 1979 and have trended downward since, even as manufacturing output has grown through automation — a backdrop that has long complicated promises of a large-scale industrial jobs revival.

The gains have also gone overwhelmingly to women, Wolfers added, with only about 7 percent of the jobs created during the second Trump term going to men.

"Ninety-three percent have gone to women. Over roughly a year and a half, that's on the order of 60,000 jobs for men against 747,000 for women," Wolfers said, admitting he was "surprised" by that figure given Trump's lopsided support among men relative to women.

Despite that enthusiastic support from the hyper-male world of MAGA, Wolfers warned that "we may be on the cusp of a male jobs recession" under Trump.

"If your net job growth is almost entirely in health care and social assistance — well, those sectors employ women in large majorities. As a result, nearly all your net job growth goes to women. The composition of the jobs determines the composition of the workers," Wolfers said.

And even with strong employment numbers among women, real wages continue to fall, as prices rise far faster than paychecks.

"That's why it's harder to put food on the table. That's why an economy with 4.1 percent unemployment and six straight months of job growth can still feel like it's squeezing you. A job is not the same thing as a raise," Wolfers said.