Trump ignorance blamed for wiping out vast swaths of US industry: 'Economic serial killer'

President Donald Trump was dubbed an "economic serial killer" for killing off companies and entire industries with his policies.

Catherine Rampell, an economics editor at The Bulwark and an anchor at MS NOW, published a column Friday questioning the 79-year-old president's priorities after his administration paid out $2 billion in taxpayer funds to arm-twist developers into halting offshore wind projects that were already in the works.

"Renewables are hardly Trump’s only victim," Rampell wrote. "Our president is basically an economic serial killer, whacking firms left and right."

"In addition to the intentional corporate executions — like the deliberate, gleeful 'murders' of these wind projects — there are a great many Trump casualties that look more like manslaughter: companies the president is killing by accident, as with the recently departed Spirit Airlines (R.I.P.)," she added. "The president simply doesn’t understand how his economic agenda of trade wars and hot wars might accidentally kill off already-weakened individual companies — or, in some cases, entire industries."

Corporate bankruptcies rose last year to their highest level in more than a decade, while farm bankruptcies shot up 46 percent in 2025, and Rampell said Trump's long-promised manufacturing renaissance has never materialized and likely never will.

"There are approximately 80,000 fewer manufacturing jobs today than there were when Trump took office last year," Rampell wrote. "Not coincidentally, steel prices here in the United States are about 40 percent higher than those in Western Europe. The increase in corporate bankruptcies last year was driven largely by industrial firms grappling with tariffs."

"The sweeping Trump tariffs have been painful enough," she added. "But lately, they have been coupled with new stressors resulting from his war with Iran."

Trump's trade war and the military operation in Iran have doubled aluminum prices since last year, which has wrecked the auto industry, and companies like Whirlpool warned the hostilities have triggered a "recession-level industry decline."

"Besides Spirit, several other big consumer-facing firms have also gone under during the Trump II era, such as QVC, Joann Fabrics, and Design Group Americas (a Joann supplier)," Rampell wrote. "As with Spirit, these business failures were not due solely to Trump’s actions; bankruptcies are rarely monocausal, and in these cases, the companies were weak to begin with."

"But Trump policies were the final nail in the coffin," she added.