The tariffs were supposed to bring the factories back. Instead, according to a new analysis, they ate the factories. A report released this week estimates Trump's 2025 "Liberation Day" tariffs wiped out up to 1 million jobs nationwide and cost the average American household roughly $1,000 in a single year, and the kicker is that this finding comes from a group founded by Mike Pence, not exactly a hotbed of left-wing agitation.
The Promise Was Simple. The Results Were Not.
Trump's April 2025 tariff rollout was the biggest U.S. tariff hike in decades. The pitch was straightforward: slap heavy duties on foreign goods, make imports expensive, watch American factories roar back to life. It was the central economic promise of the second term, repeated at rallies and Rose Garden ceremonies with the kind of confidence that doesn't leave much room for being wrong.
According to the report from the Advancing American Freedom Foundation, obtained first by Fox News Digital, it was wrong. Comprehensively, measurably, expensively wrong. Researchers found a 99.9% probability that job growth slowed after the tariffs kicked in, and a better than 90% confidence level that manufacturing specifically lost jobs because of the policy. These are not fuzzy numbers from a hostile think tank. This is the organization former Vice President Mike Pence founded in 2021.
75,000 Manufacturing Jobs. Gone.
Manufacturing was supposed to be the whole point. Bring back the plants, bring back the workers, bring back the industrial heartland that feels like it got left behind starting sometime around 1987. Instead, Fox News reports, the sector shed roughly 75,000 jobs in the policy's first year, or about 6,250 positions every single month.
Richard Stern, vice president of the Plymouth Institute for Free Enterprise at Advancing American Freedom, explained why in terms that should have been obvious from the start. "Most of the Americans that are importing are American businesses, especially American manufacturers and producers," he told Fox News Digital. "So the tariffs really ended up being a tax on high-end American manufacturing." When your factory needs foreign components to build anything and you've just made foreign components dramatically more expensive, you don't get a manufacturing renaissance. You get shuttered plants and pink slips.
"You can't undo the damage. You can't undo a factory," Stern told Fox News. "There are many that closed in America because they couldn't get their hands on products used for manufacturing." Factories don't reopen on a Tuesday just because someone decides the policy was a bad idea.
Somebody Made Money, Just Not Who You Think
Here is the one thing the tariffs absolutely delivered on: revenue for the federal government. Duties climbed from $9.6 billion in March 2025 to $23.9 billion by May, according to Treasury data cited by Fox News. Total tariff collections hit $215.2 billion by the end of fiscal year 2025, roughly triple pre-tariff levels. By January, monthly collections were running $30.4 billion, up 242% year over year.
The government made a killing. American families paid for it. The Advancing American Freedom report found that about 90% of the tariff burden fell on U.S. importers rather than foreign producers, which is the opposite of how the policy was sold. The promise was that China and the EU and everyone else would bear the cost. The reality, as economists who weren't running for office kept pointing out, was that American businesses and consumers absorbed the hit. The average family paid around $1,000 more in tariff-related costs across 2025, the report estimates.
Then the Supreme Court Stepped In
The tariff saga has a legal coda that makes the economics look almost tidy by comparison. Fox News reports that the Supreme Court struck down the sweeping tariffs, and businesses are now seeking billions in refunds through a $166 billion tariff refund portal the Trump administration launched afterward.
That sounds like a resolution. It isn't really. Getting your money back doesn't reopen a factory. It doesn't rehire the workers who moved on or the suppliers who went under. The report is explicit about this: the tariffs "unlawfully taxed American families, wiped out nearly a million jobs, and were ultimately ruled illegal." That's a hat trick of failure that would be remarkable in any context.
The White House Response Was Something Else Entirely
When Fox News Digital asked the White House to respond to the report's findings, spokesman Kush Desai declined to address a single data point. Instead, he issued what might be the most revealing non-answer in recent memory: "Another useless memo is still not going to make Mike Pence relevant again."
Read that again. A report from a conservative think tank founded by the former Republican vice president finds that the administration's signature economic policy destroyed jobs and cost families money, and the official White House response is a personal jab at Pence. No counter-data. No alternative analysis. No defense of the actual policy. Just mockery. That's not a rebuttal. That's what you do when you don't have one.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what this story is. This is not a hit job from the liberal media or a Democratic opposition research dump. This is a conservative organization, founded by Trump's own former vice president, publishing a rigorous statistical analysis concluding that Trump's biggest economic policy bet was a disaster for the workers it claimed to champion. The findings cleared a 90% confidence threshold for manufacturing job losses and a 99.9% confidence threshold for overall employment slowdown. In any other context, those numbers would end a policy debate.
The tariffs weren't a complicated failure with silver linings worth debating. They taxed American manufacturers for buying components they needed, raised prices on American families, killed the very jobs they were supposed to create, got struck down by the Supreme Court, and generated a paper revenue windfall that ordinary people paid for out of pocket. The only people who came out ahead were the federal treasury and, briefly, anyone who had the political nerve to make promises in 2024 that economists were screaming wouldn't work.
The White House response tells you everything you need to know about how this ends. When your defense of a failed policy is a crack about how irrelevant the critic is, you've already admitted you can't defend the policy. The factories that closed didn't reopen because someone filed for a refund. The jobs that vanished during those months aren't coming back because the Supreme Court said the whole thing was illegal. The damage is done, it's documented, and the people who promised the opposite are busy punching down at Mike Pence. Quite a legacy.
