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On “Liberation Day” this past week, President Donald Trump announced a 10 percent universal tariff on all imported goods and far greater ones on individual countries. His administration framed it as a course correction to make America “competitive” again. But if you listened closely, especially to his supporters, this wasn’t just about trade. It was about work and the kinds of work that still count.

Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution.

What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America’s factories with recently fired federal workers. It’s a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle.

This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to “learn to code” while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines.

What makes this iteration feel uniquely American is how aestheticized it has become. Online, there’s an industry of memes and male micro-celebrities fetishizing rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake rugged masculinity that is less about economic reality and more about identity performance. Trump doesn’t need to build a single factory for that performance to succeed. He only needs to sell the image of one.

There’s political danger to this approach. I expect it to land with a thud in places like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. It’s the kind of suburb that didn’t promise luxury, but offered enough: tree-lined streets, solid schools, and the belief that hard work and good behavior would lead to a decent life.

For the children of immigrants — and for Pennsylvanians whose parents worked with their hands in factories or kitchens or on construction sites — the promise of white-collar stability carried real meaning. We were taught to reach for security, not power: get the degree, land the job, and trade our families’ physical strain for something quieter, safer and more lucrative.

Now, those aspirations are being rebranded as betrayal. The very things that once defined responsibility and success are recast by the new right as signs of softness and elitism. In communities like mine, where the American Dream was treated with reverence, the ground beneath it is starting to feel less like foundation and more like fiction.

The American Dream is not a hammer. It never was. But Trump understands something vital about the moment: People are tired of markets and tired of waiting for politicians to fix the affordability crisis. In many parts of the country — especially in Pennsylvania — communities were hollowed out by deindustrialization, abandoned by a bipartisan consensus that viewed globalization as destiny. Wages stagnated. Towns emptied. The labor that once brought pride became precarious, then obsolete. Voters want to believe in something real — even if it’s made of smoke. That is what his tariff strategy offers: not renewal, but revenge. And revenge sells.

But nostalgia is not a plan. It’s a mirror turned backward. Trump is not bringing back the dignity of work — he’s marketing the image of it. His tariffs won’t rebuild Bethlehem Steel. They won’t revive the coal towns. But they will make life more expensive for working people, while feeding the fantasy that somewhere out there, the old America still waits if you can just hurt the right people to get there.