By Publicola
President Trump’s already booming economy is poised to get another burst of momentum. Recently, the Institute for Supply Management calculated its January 2026 index at 52.6, which is its strongest reading since 2022. Since it is used to provide a snapshot of the manufacturing sector’s overall health, the metric is an important gauge of the labor market. The 52.6 reading from January is a pivotal rebound from last month’s reading, and its first expansionary print in 12 months – following 26 consecutive months of contraction from October 2022 to September of last year.
The uptick to above 50 signals expansion of the manufacturing sector. The expansion is attributed to several key factors, including a resurgence of demand after the holidays, enhanced stockpiling by companies anticipating future tariffs, and extensions of pro-manufacturing incentives such as the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The latest figure for 2026 suggests that manufacturing will once again be a key contributor to Gross Domestic Product growth this quarter, adding potentially hundreds of thousands of new jobs to the national economy.
These positive headwinds further signal that President Trump’s economy, which showed incredible resilience all throughout 2025, is set for an even greater rebound in the coming year ahead. The Biden years were defined by consistently high inflation and open borders, which had the dual effects of dampening wages and slowing growth. The policies that were enacted under the last regime were designed to inflict maximum harm on the economy, while deflating the buying power of the American worker. This is why Biden opened America’s borders to the third world, while offshoring jobs and artificially weakening the dollar at home through predatory monetary policies that kept interest rates persistently high and thereby limited the purchasing power of the average consumer.
President Trump, by sharp contrast, has undone the ravenous policies of his predecessor: policies as illegitimate as the regime under whose namesake they were enacted. The astonishing uptick in economic activity has been largely – albeit not exclusively – driven by the President’s tariff policies. The tariff is something the President routinely praises as the most beautiful word in the English language. While they were used on a case-by-case basis in the first Trump administration, and mostly as a hedge against China’s rise, it was in the second administration where they truly reached their full potential.
Under trade agreements brokered by the President, whose terms have been hashed out under a revitalized Commerce Department led by Howard Lutnick, the new tariff policy of the second Trump term has yielded remarkable success. These results have been particularly outsized in select industries like biotechnology, semiconductors, computer chips, and the emerging so-called “rare earths” market. As it so happens, many, if not all, of these industries fall under the general umbrella of manufacturing: they are the building blocks that comprise what is generally considered “the manufacturing industry.”
The President and his administration have found new ways to retool and revitalize the economy, in ways that were once inconceivable. It was long the popular view among economists and academics that Americans could no longer expect GDP growth above 1 or maybe 2%. That had been the status quo under Obama, and returned with a vengeance as the status quo under Biden.
The President has managed to shatter records, with GDP growth cracking 5% over the last quarters of the previous fiscal year. This has been the combined result of extending the 2017 tax cuts while honing the tariff strategy to maximize domestic production, while getting adversaries and allies alike to finally pay their fair share on the global arena.
The infusion of investment across a multiplicity of sectors has revitalized America’s manufacturing core. New factories are being put up from Arizona to Texas to New York, each one pouring billions of dollars into the domestic economy across fields as wide-ranging as pharmaceuticals to semiconductors. Over the last few years, there has been an especially strong push for technological innovation – to maintain America’s dominance over foreign competitors like China and Russia. With Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, two rapidly emerging areas, now dominating much of technology manufacturing, companies heavily focused on these fields, like NVIDIA and Meta, have pledged hundreds of billions of dollars into building AI infrastructure at home.
Meanwhile, foreign governments, such as UAE, Qatar, and Japan, have also pledged upwards of a trillion dollars apiece for factories in the United States. These investments are expected to unleash seismic ripple effects across America’s economy and create thousands of new jobs along the way.
The manufacturing boon under President Trump is just getting started. The supply being rerouted back into the United States today will have multiplier effects long into the future. The warehouses now being built will be tomorrow’s sources of raw goods, innovative technologies, and serve as the catalysts for reinvigorated domestic – and global – supply chains. The United States figures to once again be the global industrial leader, a position fortified by emerging technology sectors. This strength was made possible by President Trump’s pro-tariff and pro-worker policies, which overhauled the collective wisdom about market trends and economic possibilities for the twenty-first century.
And we are still just at the beginning stages. Elon Musk himself recently predicted that the next thirty-six months will be the greatest period in modern history for wealth creation. The reason for this extremely optimistic forecast is in large part due to President Trump’s policies, which have laid the groundwork for such growth, opening doors that were simply not possible a few short years ago. Rather than being a socialized system saddled with taxes and regulations that put non-citizens in the driver’s seat and relegated American workers to second-class status in their own countries, for the first time in years, American interests have become the chief priority.
The American Dream has been reawakened, and that will have lasting impacts on America’s international standing for decades to come. A stronger America leads to a stronger, more prosperous, and indeed more peaceful world order. The American economy is the backbone for such a calculus – and a strengthened American worker, situated at the heart of that economy and given free rein over his destiny – is the fuel that will keep America running (and exceptional) for generations to come.
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