ROOKE: Trump Admin’s Boastful Post Shows We’re Leaving Half Of Country Behind

Interesting american workers, bureau of labor statistics, father, husband, marriage, trump administration, unemployment admin September 9, 2026 0 Comments

ROOKE: Trump Admin’s Boastful Post Shows We’re Leaving Half Of Country Behind

President Donald Trump is touting Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data as a societal good without acknowledging the growing problem the U.S. faces.

BLS found that since Trump’s second term, women have accounted for almost all job growth in the U.S. While this may be a gain for women, it completely ignores the disastrous path American men find themselves on. The BLS Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey is based on the employer payroll survey used to create the monthly U.S. jobs report.

The CES found that women account for more than 100 percent of net payroll growth from December 2024 through August 2026. Men’s payroll count edged down. Since Trump’s inauguration, women gained around 747,000 jobs, while men gained only about 60,000, according to the Daily Wire’s analysis of the data.

Trump responded by praising the news on his Truth Social account, saying, “No wonder they like me!!!”

While it may have been widely praised to see female employment skyrocket in America several decades ago, Americans are now more aware of the implications for working-age men. But before we get into that, it’s important to clarify the difference between unemployment and dropout.

Official unemployment rates quantify the number of people, in this case, men, who still want to work. Those who have decided to leave the workforce highlight a more corrosive historical pattern. These are men of prime working age who are neither working nor looking for work. We typically call this labor-force nonparticipation. In the U.S., that share of men rose from about 3 percent in the 1960s to about 11 percent by 2026. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)

Historically, we know that when large numbers of men are not in the labor force, society at large suffers immensely. This is more than a story about women’s progress and definitely should not be praised by the Trump administration. When almost everyone is out of work, the societal stigma of not having a job obviously falls. But when work disappears for men while women’s employment rises, everything from marriage and family formation to self-worth is affected.

A woman’s willingness to marry a man still depends on his ability to earn. In fact, her job status only increases the pressure on her male counterpart. During the Great Depression, when male unemployment rose, the men affected were less likely to find wives. Because marriages were delayed and sometimes permanently canceled, births fell to right at replacement level.

The U.S. saw this happen again when manufacturing jobs were sent overseas, causing male employment rates to drop. Interestingly, while male employment marriage and fertility rates in the U.S., labor shocks to female-intensive sectors do not produce the same breakdown in family formation. This is likely because our society, despite heavy pressure from all our institutions, is still tightly bound to the idea of men as the breadwinner.

The identity crisis among nonworking men leads to terrible losses. What are men to do to pass their time when they are feeling lonely and worthless? Most become addicted to porn or worse.

The longer a man sits out of the workforce, the higher his chance of an opioid- or alcohol-related death and suicide. Being married can be a buffer against some of this risk, but again it’s hard to find a wife if women aren’t interested in an unemployed man. Never-married and divorced men account for a disproportionate share of those deaths.

It’s not as if men have much of a choice either. Our country has actively demonized their inherent characteristics as toxic and in need of rehabilitation. We have systematically pushed them out of every sector from education to the boardroom. We’ve imported their replacements when women weren’t available. We committed the sin of telling them they were no longer needed, and now we are praising the data showing they listened. (RELATED: ROOKE: Trump To Fix Marriage Penalty Hidden Inside America’s Childcare Fund)

This is not a win for us as a country. Faith, community, and loyalty to our country all flow from proper family formation. As it stands, it is no wonder that Christianity was replaced by gender and sex ideology as the emerging dominant religion in the U.S. Children are less likely to believe in God if their father is not active in teaching them the faith. They are also less likely to care about the community or country if their family is no longer a solid unit.

While it may seem like a small incident to praise more women in the workforce, it is yet another nail in the coffin for American men. It’s a shortsighted action that ignores the cancer metastasizing in our society.

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