Donald Trump’s claim that “jobs and factories will come roaring back” due to his steep tariffs has been welcomed by some right-wing commentators who have argued that it will be a needed improvement for American workers’ masculinity.
The sentiment began to bubble up online after Trump announced a sweeping set of tariffs last week on nearly every other country in the world, sparking a colossal market selloff that continued into Monday.
Fox News host Jesse Watters—who regularly gives advice on what he thinks it means to be masculine—endorsed the argument on The Five Monday, explicitly mainstreaming a number of ideas that had so far been relegated to the right-wing fringes of the internet.
“When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this!” he insisted, without citing any. “And if you’re out working, building robots like [co-host] Harold Ford Jr., you are around other guys. You’re not around HR ladies and lawyers—and that gives you estrogen.”
The prior day on the same network, The Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon discussed a “crisis in masculinity” that tariffs could ultimately alleviate.
“It’s not just the destruction of the economic vitality of the working class,” she said on Fox & Friends Weekend in a segment that Watters was reacting to on The Five. “We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries to build up their middle class.”
She added: “We imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services—jobs that used to give men access to the American dream.”
The bizarre arguments came after days of discussion online about the merits of tariffs as a way to transform the American economy—one that sees the policy not as a way to usher in the “golden age” of prosperity that Trump has repeatedly invoked, but because it would return the U.S. to some version of the halcyon postwar industrial economy that is the source of their “Make America Great Again” nostalgia.
Former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos led the charge on X last week, musing that a mass return to factory work will be more rewarding for America’s men than the current knowledge-based economy.
“Men are depressed and addicted and broken because they have nothing to do. They get no stimulation or satisfaction from BS email jobs,” he claimed. “I’m telling you, white Americans will love working in factories again. Making things, in the image and likeness of God the Maker.”
This rhetoric even veered into outright misogyny at times, with some arguing that a more manufacturing-based economy would naturally offer fewer career opportunities for women. This, in turn, would force them into relationships out of necessity and boost the country’s flagging birth rates.
As one prominent right-wing influencer wrote in a now-deleted X post: “you do not solve low birth rates by giving money to women, you solve low birth rates by taking money away from women.”
“Fertility is a solved problem and tracks differential status between men and women,” another wrote, seemingly endorsing the theory.
Whether the tariffs will end up creating any of these blue collar jobs at all, however, is unclear.
The Trump administration has been giving mixed messages on the tariffs’ purpose. The president argues that they are a permanent means to address countries’ trade imbalances with the U.S., while many of his advisers argue that they are simply a negotiating tool that Trump is using to exert leverage over other nations.
The markets, meanwhile, continue to fall.
