The Daily 202: Trump’s Midwest swing today is the unofficial kickoff of his 2020 reelection campaign
James Hohmann
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump is coming back to the Midwest today for the first time since the election to take a victory lap in the region that gave him the presidency. The billionaire businessman quipped throughout the campaign that America is going to win so much when he’s president that people are going to get tired of winning. This morning he flies to Indiana to tout the first such win, a deal he cut with Carrier to keep 1,000 jobs in the U.S. that were otherwise going to Mexico. (He’ll tour a plant that will no longer be closing.) From there, he flies to Cincinnati for a blowout rally at U.S. Bank Arena, the first stop of a “Thank You Tour” that will also take him to Iowa and Michigan in the coming days.
-- Like so many issues throughout 2016, from Trump’s support for waterboarding to his proposed Muslim ban, there is a wide chasm between elite skepticism of the Carrier deal and the unadulterated excitement of Trump’s base.
Intellectuals, conservative economists and good-government experts have many substantive concerns about the agreement and the secretive process in which it was negotiated. The real reason that the jobs are staying appears to be that United Technologies, which owns Carrier, is one of the largest defense contractors and worries about losing billions a year in high-margin business with the federal government if it doesn’t placate the incoming president. While Carrier publicly attributes its reversal to an aid package offered by Indiana, a state economic development official said yesterday that the company rejected similar terms before the election.
You know who doesn’t care that Trump might have shaken down a federal contractor to score an early political victory? People who live in the Rust Belt and want good-paying jobs. The non-college-educated, blue-collar workers who voted for Trump, who feel that free trade is bad for them and who believe government has been working for others – not them. More fundamentally, the vast majority of Americans will see nothing more than the headline that just says Trump saved 1,000 jobs. For the president-elect, that is mission accomplished.
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