The Carrier Kerfuffle (Updated)

What do you think about the deal announced with Carrier to keep 1,000 of the 2,000 jobs it had planned offshore in the state of Indiana? I don’t know enough about Carrier or the conditions in Indiana to make a judgment. I don’t think I’d want Illinois to cut such a deal but my general rule is that other states can do any blame fool thing they want to. It’s their business.

What amazes me is that this action is so poorly understood. As I see it Trump is doing a couple of things. First, he’s doing what smart CEOs do: he’s getting results immediately. He’s building a case that he’s a guy who gets things done and can be trusted to make good on his promises.

Second, he’s dominating the news cycle. They say that Oscar Wilde pointed out that you can judge the character of a man by his enemies and the news media have fully demonstrated that they are Mr. Trump’s enemies, casting themselves into disrepute while doing so by an utter disregard of ordinary journalistic standards. Another quote, this one attributed to P. T. Barnum: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

And also importantly, Trump is changing the subject. He’s distracted the media from major issues (like his conflicts of interest) to minor ones like whether the state of Indiana should be offering subsidies to companies to keep their operations in-state.

Update

See Charlie Cook’s take on the matter at National Journal:

Put­ting aside the spe­cif­ics of this case, the mes­sage is that Trump will be seen by many as de­liv­er­ing on his loud prom­ises dur­ing the cam­paign that he was go­ing to save Amer­ic­an jobs—and he did so even be­fore he was sworn in­to of­fice.

His ac­tions raise an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion. When com­pan­ies con­duct cost-be­ne­fit ana­lyses of keep­ing fa­cil­it­ies in the United States versus shift­ing to lower-cost coun­tries, is there a polit­ic­al cost factored in­to that equa­tion? In re­cent years there have been plenty of pub­lic of­fi­cials of­fer­ing car­rots for at­tract­ing plants and com­pan­ies, but not a lot of wav­ing sticks warn­ing what might hap­pen if they shut fa­cil­it­ies down.

Is Don­ald Trump go­ing to start telling com­pan­ies: “If you keep or in­crease jobs here, you might be pleased with our policies that af­fect you in the fu­ture; if you shift them else­where, you might not be so happy with what we do, or don’t do for you.” No threats, just a subtle, “I’m watch­ing you.” The men­tal­ity for so long has been, “glob­al­iz­a­tion is good, don’t get in the way of glob­al­iz­a­tion” has come to mean that there are no con­sequences to shift­ing jobs abroad, that it was poor form for a pub­lic of­fi­cial to, in ef­fect, threaten a com­pany that ex­ports jobs. That may be what Trump is go­ing to do.

Buckle your seat belts, we’re in for a bumpy ride. Donald Trump may actually be a populist. That should be enough fright all but the most entrenched of elites.