Of all the economic factors that would quash President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, a recession, and especially a recession in manufacturing, would be near the top of the list. Friday’s jobs report suggests that a manufacturing recession isn’t here yet, but it’s uncomfortably close.

America’s manufacturers added 16,000 jobs in July, but 9,500 of them were transportation equipment, mostly in the auto and auto-parts industry. The good news is that the gain is relatively large — 10% of the overall 164,000-job pickup, and larger than the 13,000 monthly average for the last year.

The bad news is that the reliance on cars for most of the gains points to the same split that last week’s report on gross domestic product did: Consumer spending is doing very well, but the impacts of Trump’s trade battles with China and other countries are showing.

Machinery and primary metals that depend on trade actually showed about 5,000 combined job losses for the month, and have basically not grown in the past year. But the car-industry gains, accompanied by strong General Motors GM, -0.37% profits, wiped them out — because consumer spending is still high, even as business investment wobbles as Trump makes his intermittent, spastic announcements about the latest tactics in trade talks.

This isn’t what Mr. I-Alone-Can-Fix-It promised, but it’s consistent with other evidence that shows Trump not delivering for the base of mostly older, white, male industrial workers in the Midwest who did so much to produce his upset 2016 win. (That and the big drop in African-American turnout from 2008 and 2012.)

Thursday, we saw the Institute for Supply Management’s purchasing-managers report for manufacturing, which showed growth was barely positive, slowing for the fourth month in a row. Manufacturers’ pricing power and inventory growth are already at recessionary levels, ISM said. Federal Reserve data indicate manufacturing is in a recession, and ISM confirms that it is at least close.

The political implications of this are large.

Slowdown in ‘flipped’ counties

A new report by the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, argues that Trump’s win came largely from flipping 207 counties (of 3,100 nationally) that voted for Barack Obama to his side. And it says the flipped-county economy has grown more slowly under Trump than either solid Democratic or solid Republican areas.

“The economic trajectory of politically important ‘flipped’ counties, which generally experienced a weak recovery prior to the 2016 election, did not meaningfully change during the first two years of the Trump administration,” the report said.

America boosted employment by 1.7% yearly in the first half of Trump’s term, a pace that has slowed notably this year.

But growth in flipped counties was only 0.7%. While there are exceptions, like New York’s Nassau County, most are erstwhile manufacturing centers like Dayton, Ohio, that have not made especially effective transitions to higher-paying service-based work. (Unlike metropolitan Baltimore, which saw factories replaced by technology, financial-services and government-related jobs, and where Trump got whipped.)

So how’s that fix going? Not too well.

The problem is, Trump’s preferred fix-it remedy is restricting trade, and that appears to be making things worse for manufacturing. The jobs report is one sign of that, aside from the carmakers.

Trump being Trump, he’s doubling down on what doesn’t work.

Consumers to the rescue

Thursday, the president tanked the S&P 500 SPX, +1.59% and Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.33% by saying the administration will slap 10% tariffs on $300 billion more of imports from China, including consumer goods that were exempted from rounds of tax hikes that helped crimp exports and investment in trade-sensitive industrial sectors earlier this year.

The point seemed to be to punish the Federal Reserve for cutting interest rates by only a quarter of a percentage point at the central bank’s meeting this week, instead of the half-point cut Trump wanted. But lower rates have done more to prod consumers than business into spending more — business is responding instead to trade policy, and pulling back.

The reckoning will come if auto manufacturers see sales and job growth slow. That’s a function of consumer confidence, which is affected by stock prices, housing prices and job growth, all either stagnant or slowing. Job growth this year is down 26% from last, PNC Financial economist Gus Faucher said. Consumers have been more confident than business lately, and their willingness to buy cars at a fast clip is propping up manufacturing as trade tensions rise.

Will it last? Here’s a clue to the president’s thinking.

By Thursday evening, Trump was at a rally 50 miles from Dayton selling his new greatest hits: Wailing on black and Latino members of Congress, leading chants of “Lock Her Up,” and complaining about crime rates that have been dropping for decades. Friday morning on Twitter, he gloated over how Rep. Elijah Cummings was the victim of a home break-in last weekend.

Of course he did. It’s his nature.

Tim Mullaney is a MarketWatch columnist.