By David McCall
It was just a few years ago that Cliff Tobey and other union miners on Minnesota’s Iron Range won significant wage increases and looked confidently to the future amid a thriving manufacturing economy.
The federal government’s historic investments in infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and cutting-edgeindustries galvanized demand for American-made materials and goods, including the taconite that Tobey and fellow members of the United Steelworkers (USW) produce for steel.
Employers invested in new factories, expanded existing ones, and created more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs across the country, all essential to building stronger communities and reinvigorating the middle class.
But upon returning to office in 2025, Donald Trump deliberately derailed the boom and imposed an economic agenda driven by vendetta, not the American worker.
Instead of building on the momentum he inherited, as he repeatedly bragged about doing, Trump cut job-creating projects just to punish people, places, and ideas he disliked. He perverted trade practices, weaponizing sanctions to retaliate against countries and world leaders that annoy him for any reason.
The fallout keeps growing, observed Tobey, citing the layoffs of hundreds of Iron Range miners and more than 70,000 lost factory jobs nationwide.
“I have not seen any kind of expansion of manufacturing anywhere. If you look at the numbers, they are way down,” said Tobey, a miner for more than 20 years, noting that Trump ignores the job crisis while devoting most of his time to petty grievances and vanity projects.
“These weren’t the things he talked about on the campaign trail,” Tobey added of Trump, whose top priorities include building himself a $400 million ballroom, slapping his name on buildings, whining about losing the Nobel Peace Prize and picking fights with allies over Greenland.
“I wish he spent half as much energy trying to make things better for the working people of the country as he does trying to get retribution for himself,” Tobey said.
Trump arbitrarily killed funding already allocated under the union-backed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), prompting companies to scale back plans, put them on the back burner, or eliminate them altogether.
Among many other examples, Kore Power canceled a $1.2 billion lithium battery plant in Arizona that would have created thousands of jobs and helped to make the nation a leader in an emerging industry. Officials in California continue scrambling to find a way forward after Trump axed $1.2 billion for a hydrogen hub intended to boost energy independence and economic growth.
Trump pulled tens of millions of support for Libbey Glass in Toledo, Ohio, where USW members looked forward to the construction of modern furnaces. His callousness sidetracked a carefully planned initiative aimed at boosting employment and ensuring the plant’s competitiveness for decades to come.
In many cases, such as at Heidelberg Materials in Mitchell, Indiana, workers, community members, and companies shareda vision. They collaborated to land federal support, get projects off the ground, and chart a path forward.
But that mattered not a whit to Trump.
Trump’s funding clawback upended plans for a groundbreaking modernization at Heidelberg Materials that would have created more jobs at the cement plant while also strengthening industrial capacity and supply chains. Sadly, the company and USW members had already performed preliminary work on the project, never expecting Trump to pull the rug out from under them.
“Of all the things he’s done, none has made any sense,” observed Tobey.
Instead, as these kinds of losses piled up, Trump doubled down on the damage, resorting to overzealous and retaliatory trade practices to hurt workers even more.
Companies seek stability before investing in facilities, workers, materials, and components for their products, and trade penalties need to be strategically applied to level the playing field for American workers, not to bully other countries over Greenland or other non-economic disputes.
Yet as Tobey pointed out, Trump’s never-ending barrage of threats and here today, gone tomorrow sanctions, along with unwarranted attacks on friendly trading partners, all make for a job-killing climate.
Trump’s trade war reduced demand for the steel made with Iron Range taconite, prompting operators to lay off more than 600 miners since the spring of 2025. The downturn quickly took a toll on the rest of the community, including schoolsalready operating with razor-thin budgets.
Other communities across the country suffer similar harm.
For example, Mack Trucks laid off about 300 workers at a Pennsylvania operations center last spring while Volvo Group announced layoffs of hundreds more workers in Maryland and Virginia, all because of Trump’s trade fiasco.
John Deere laid off about 200 workers at factories in Illinois and Iowa during the summer of 2025, citing increased costs and other fallout from Trump’s policies.
Adding insult to injury, Trump wreaked this kind of havoc on working families and manufacturing towns after pledging on the campaign trail to “create millions and millions of jobs.”
He promised over and over again to drive wage growth, strengthen manufacturing, and build more prosperous communities. A year into his term, however, there’s no sign of progress.
“He isn’t working on any of those things,” Tobey explained.
David McCall is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. It was sent to The PeaceWorker and other publications on January 28, 2026