Trump Team Scrambles After Report He’s Killing Manufacturing Jobs

The labor market is slowing, but it’s all good news in the White House.

The U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May, a slight decline from April, according to a jobs report released Friday. The unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent, still within the ballpark of historic lows reached in 2023, when the unemployment rate reached 3.4 percent—the lowest it had been in more than five decades. But within the folds of the report hid a major red flag for Donald Trump’s agenda: The U.S. is still bleeding manufacturing jobs.

“GREAT JOB NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!” Trump celebrated on Truth Social.

But even the president’s favorite conservative network couldn’t hide its dismay at the slight manufacturing downturn.

“Now, 8,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in May. That’s not what you wanted to see,” said Fox Business host Stuart Varney.

“Well, we’re certainly holding steady,” said Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. “And under the Trump administration, manufacturing jobs are still up over what the last administration, under [Joe] Biden, had.

“The focus of my ‘America at Work’ tour is to increase those manufacturing jobs, and we’ll continue to stay laser focused on that as the president continues to double down on how important this is to the American economy,” she added.

“But how come we’re losing 8,000 manufacturing jobs in May, when there’s a big push to bring manufacturing jobs back to America? How come we’re losing those jobs?” Varney pressed.

Chavez-DeRemer was stuck in her script. “We’re certainly holding steady,” she insisted.

Since the beginning of April, Trump has pitched his global tariff agenda as a means to return manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores. But two months later, the president’s on-again, off-again tariffs have done little more than add tumult to American markets and trade. Investors have learned to play the market by an unflattering acronym—TACO, or “Trump always chickens out”—while administration officials such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have blundered by publicly admitting they have no intention of bringing tariffs between the U.S. and other nations down to zero.

The breakup is really official now: President Trump is getting rid of his Tesla.

Trump’s red Tesla with Florida tags will be given away or sold, according to Fox News. This comes after Elon Musk and the president’s massive argument spilled over on Thursday, as Musk lambasted Trump’s big, beautiful bill for adding trillions to the deficit, while Trump posited that Musk knew about the bill all along and was just upset that he was losing his E.V. subsidies. Now Trump is ditching his Tesla too.

While this beef isn’t particularly shocking, it’s a long way from where the two men’s relationship was just a few months ago. In March, Musk pulled up to the White House with multiple Tesla trucks and cars and did free promo with the president.

“I’m going to buy [a Tesla] because, number one, it’s a great product,” Trump told reporters then. “It’s as good as it gets. And number two, because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this. I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people.”

Musk has tweeted through the pain over the last 24 hours, calling his critics “retards” and threatening to pull his Space X program from the U.S. But Trump couldn’t seem to care less as he pushes his bill forward regardless of what his former confidant says. This is what happens when the richest man on earth gets into it with perhaps the pettiest president ever.

For months, Donald Trump and Elon Musk were practically inseparable. Now, a week after the Tesla CEO formally left the White House, the president has a new title for his ex-financier: “the man who has lost his mind.”

Speaking with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl early Friday morning, Trump added fuel to the MAGA duo’s viscerally public breakup. He did not, however, sound “angry or even concerned” about the feud, reported Karl.

“As for reports that there is going to be a Trump/Musk call scheduled for today, Trump told me he is ‘not particularly’ interested in talking to Musk although he says Musk wants to talk to him,” Karl wrote on X.

People close to the president have described Trump as “bummed” about his severed relationship with Musk.

The fiery back-and-forth between Trump and his former adviser is the culmination of differing opinions on the president’s “big, beautiful bill.” Musk has spent days trying to size down Trump’s domestic budget agenda, which aims to extend his 2017 tax cut plan for multimillionaires and corporations.

The tech billionaire has referred to the spending package as “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination,” criticizing the continuing resolution for potentially adding trillions of dollars to the national deficit. Musk has also leveraged his gargantuan fortune to influence Congress against voting for the bill, pledging to finance primary opponents to any lawmaker who votes in favor of the tax cut.

On Thursday, the stern disagreement boiled into a digital spectacle, with the two powerhouses throwing insults at each other over social media in real time until Musk claimed that Trump was mentioned in the infamous Epstein files. Musk wrote on X that Trump’s alleged involvement was “the real reason” the pedophile exposé had not yet been made public.

In response, Trump posted on Truth Social, “I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago. This is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress. It’s a Record Cut in Expenses, $1.6 Trillion Dollars, and the Biggest Tax Cut ever given.”

Hours later, Musk was retweeting Trump’s posts from 2012 and 2013, claiming that the deficit- and budget-minded former reality TV star had been replaced by a “body double.”

But Musk has had real influence in breaking up the MAGA block. Several Republican senators have said they oppose Trump’s bill as-is, with the majority of naysayers citing the budget’s enormous price tag as their reason why.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on yet another angry tirade against federal judges who rule against Donald Trump.

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday night, Leavitt was asked to respond to a federal judge who blocked the removal of the wife and five children of a man charged in a firebombing attack against peaceful protesters in Boulder, Colorado. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had the family arrested despite having no evidence that they were involved in the attack.

Leavitt, who regularly rails against anyone who opposes Trump, was predictably incensed.

“Well, this is just another rogue decision by a rogue judge who is trying to be—I don’t know—the president of the United States? The secretary of state? The secretary of homeland security?” Leavitt said. “Surely, these important matters of both homeland security and national security do not belong to lower district, local judges in these districts across the country.”

Leavitt’s insistence that federal judges, whom she attempted to dismiss as “local,” don’t have the jurisdiction to rule against Trump betrays a failure to grasp the whole “checks and balances” part of the U.S. Constitution.

Leavitt continued, once again complaining about another federal judge who had blocked the unlawful deportation of immigrants to South Sudan, and supposedly stranded some ICE agents in a “dangerous part of the world.” (The judge did not specifically say that the agents needed to stay overseas, which means the government is choosing not to bring them back.)

“Lower district court judges do not get to dictate the foreign policy and the national security interests of the United States of America. We can’t run a country if the executive is not allowed to freely exercise its powers, and that’s what we’re seeing take place,” Leavitt said.

Unfortunately for the Trump administration, the hits to its illegal immigration agenda just keep on coming. A federal judge on Thursday blocked the arrest and removal of Yunseo Chung, a Columbia University student and green card holder who was targeted by the administration over her involvement in pro-Palestinian protests. In a brutal hearing, U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald called the government’s position “disturbing” and “disappointing.”

“This is a new world. I’m a little taken aback,” Reice Buchwald said.

Elon Musk spent his evening calling Steve Bannon a “retard” after Bannon called for Trump to seize Musk’s companies and deport him following their fallout over the budget bill.

Musk and Trump had a highly publicized spat on Thursday that saw the president expressing his “disappointment” in Musk’s opposition to his “big, beautiful bill” on live TV, chalking the conflict up to Musk losing his government Tesla subsidies. The Silicon Valley right came to Musk’s side, while Bannon and the deep-MAGA right rallied around their leader.

“He doesn’t know anything. He’s a know-it-all. He knows some engineering, don’t get me wrong, but he doesn’t know anything about the real world,” Bannon said of Musk on his Thursday show. “Any fanboys that still exist … understand that DOGE, he didn’t find any fraud. There’s plenty of fraud out there. This is President Trump’s first complaint. Was this all B.S. with the DOGE?”

Bannon continued.

“Space X … President Trump should be taking immediately. When he threatens to take one of the big programs out of Space X, President Trump tonight should sign an executive order calling for the defense production act and seize Space X tonight before midnight,” Bannon said, responding to Musk’s threats to pull his Space X programs from the Trump administration.

“They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” Bannon later said to The New York Times, adding that he told Trump the same thing.

Multiple tech bros came to Musk’s defense on X, and the world’s richest man popped up in their replies to voice his agreement, calling Bannon multiple variations of “retard.” Musk called Bannon “peak retard” and a “communist retard” multiple times on X.

Bannon and Musk have been at odds since the H-1B visa fight, which underscored the ideological rifts within Trump’s base that are fully coming into fruition now. Bannon is the core of MAGA, resonating deeply with a right-wing populist base. Musk was simply a quick, messy fling, which he is now realizing—and not handling very well.