Trump's Pink Economy

The Only Work is Care Work

Trump officials, sagging under the weight of relentless bad headlines, must be breathing a sigh of relief as the January job numbers came in much higher than expected, with 130,000 jobs added. But if you look a bit under the surface, you find a reality that’s a little more difficult for them to brag about. 2025 had some of the weakest job growth on record outside of an official recession. And most of the job growth in that year and this January has been in care work: healthcare and social services; 60 percent of all jobs in last month’s spike are in those fields. That’s important work, but it betokens an aging and ailing population.

Care workers are the heart of the new working class. We’re seeing on a national scale what Gabriel Winant described in his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. The great irony here is that Trumpism was supposed to be a renaissance for American manufacturing, a return to macho producerism lionized in the AL-generated 1930s-style propaganda slop pumped out on government Twitter accounts. Meanwhile, manufacturing, after experiencing a modest rebound with Biden’s industrial policies, has slumped. In fact, if you remove care work from the picture, the US actually lost jobs in 2025. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the 2025 numbers from +584,000 jobs to +181,000. For context, in 2024, the economy added about 160,000 jobs a month.

Apparently not!

Of course, the types of people who do this work tend to be women, people of color, and immigrants. You know, the very sorts of people the Trump people denigrate daily.

But it would be a mistake to call it only a pink economy. It’s also a gilded one: Consumer spending, which is buoying the economy, is now driven entirely by the rich. No wonder Trump is hemorrhaging working-class voters.