Remember that guy who promised us an unprecedented American manufacturing renaissance? Well ...

Every week, Dan McCarthy at Canary Media provides us with a new chart. This week it’s about our Outlaw Prez’s promises of huge gains in manufacturing, which he asserted would be advanced by his big beautiful tariffs. Instead, his efforts are helping to kill cleantech projects:

Clean energy manufacturing was on the upswing in the U.S. Then the first year of Trump 2.0 happened.

After years of increasing investment in factories to make batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and more — a surge prompted by the Inflation Reduction Act — the trend reversed under the Trump administration last year. Companies spent a total of $41.9 billion on cleantech manufacturing facilities in 2025, down from $50.3 billion the year before, per fresh figures from the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project from Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. [...]

Cancellations nearly matched factory announcements last year: Firms unveiled a total of $24.1 billion in new cleantech manufacturing projects, but scrapped $22.7 billion worth.

McCarthy notes that other matters may also be affecting these cancellations, such as the “gravitational pull of the data center boom” that has attracted gigantic wads of investment that might otherwise have gone to cleantech. Whether that’s the case or not, it seems highly likely that Trump’s policies, motivated by his loathing of renewables, will reduce U.S. cleantech investment even more in 2026. It’s tempting to call this myopia. But it’s far more malicious and calculated than that.