Beau of The Fifth Column
Let's talk about a million laid off during Trump’s golden age....
05 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Well, howdy there, Internet people. It's Belle again. So today, we're going to talk about a million laid off during Trump's golden age. According to Challenger Gray and Christmas, so far in 2025, there have been 1.17 million job cuts through November, which is 54% higher than the same 11-month period a year ago.
Chapter 2: What are the statistics behind the job cuts during Trump's presidency?
Cuts totaling above 1.1 million is pretty rare, happening just six times since 1993. We haven't seen cuts over a million since, well, the last time Trump was in office. To be fair, in this case, the last time we got above a million, it wasn't completely Trump's fault. It was in large part due to the pandemic, but not totally. However, this time, it's absolutely Trump's fault.
Many of the cuts were part of his ill-advised Doge mess. In fact, according to the report, what they're calling the Doge Impact, quote, remains the leading reason for job cut announcements in 2025. It might seem unfair to place the blame for the layoffs on Trump like that. But I want to point a little something out about the historical trends when it comes to a million or more layoffs in a year.
It doesn't happen often. It happened a couple of times in the early 2000s. It happened around 2009. It happened in 2020. So those are all easily attributable to the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID. This year's? What major disruption happened? Did the stock market correct? Nope. Not in a way that stuck anyway. Was there a massive collapse of the financial and housing markets?
Nope. Not yet anyway.
Global pandemic?
Nope.
Trump might try to pin this on AI, but the report says that's only 50,000 of the jobs. That's a number that is so relatively small that if you simply subtracted it from the total, it's still above 1.1 million. So, this is Trump's economic policies. Doge, the tariffs, and the uncertainty his indecisive nature leads to.
Trump's economic policies are bad enough to put announced layoffs at the same level as some of the worst financial disasters in modern history. But layoffs are only one half of the equation, right? What about companies announcing expansions? Trump promised manufacturing coming home and has consistently rambled about trillions upon trillions in investment.
That had to translate to new jobs somewhere, right?
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Chapter 3: How did the pandemic contribute to job losses during Trump's term?
Employers have announced 497,151 planned hires. That's down 35% from the same point in 2024. And manufacturing is losing jobs. So that actually makes the layoff numbers worse in context.
The short version here, once it's all charted, is that while administration officials are running around telling you that the economy is doing great and that it's thanks to Trump, the reality is that 1.1 million Americans probably feel otherwise. The administration line is half true, though. It is because of Trump. Anyway, it's just a thought. Y'all have a good day.