The ‘Art’ Of Trump

Prepare to be shocked. It turns out that Trump’s great big tremendous Carrier deal that was going to ring in a new era of American greatness, um, hasn’t:

More than 600 employees at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis are bracing for layoffs beginning next month, despite being told by President Trump that nearly all the jobs at the plant had been saved. The deal, announced with great fanfare before Trump took office, was billed not only as a heroic move to keep jobs from going to Mexico but also as a seismic shift in the economic development landscape.

Nearly seven months later the deal has not worked out quite as originally advertised, and the landscape has barely budged.

Like everything else about Trump, it was all bullshit. In exchange for $7 million in ”incentives,” Carrier would agree to keep at least 1,069 people employed at its Indianapolis plant, It turns out that only 730 of the positions Trump ‘saved’ were the kind of manufacturing jobs that are going to make America great again. The rest were engineering and technical positions that weren’t going to be outsourced in the first place. Anyway, six hundred people are getting the ax in spite of Trump’s awesome deal-making skills. Go figure.     

Not to be outdone, Carrier spun some silky corporate bullshit of its own. They claim to have offered the workers other jobs in the company, the only trouble is that they forgot to tell the workers: 

… union officials say they have heard nothing from the company about any job offers elsewhere within the company. All they have received is the official notice, as required by federal law, that the first round of cuts — 338 jobs — will take place on July 20, with an additional 290 employees terminated on Dec. 22, three days before Christmas.

That last bit about 290 employees being canned on December 22nd is particularly charming in light of Trump’s boast about the workers that “They’re going to have a great Christmas!”

Pure Trumpian bullshit, like the mother of all bombs (MOAB) that he dropped in an empty patch of scrub in Afghanistan. It’s all theater designed to dupe his base and keep the punditry tweeting while he, Ivanka and Jared loot the country blind, our very own homegrown, all-American Duvalier family.

Charles Pierce uses this incident as an opportunity to make an observation about Trump’s cynical but shrewd modus operandi:

This, apparently, is the way things are going to go. He's going to lurch from photo op to rally to photo op, proclaim victory over something, celebrate his own greatness, and then move on to whatever the next thing is. It's the George Aiken Victory In Vietnam strategy toward governing the entire country: Declare victory and then get out. Nothing is real, except in the immediate moment, when the cameras are hot and the ovations, rapturous. Actual results are irrelevant.

But of course. He’s never been a success at anything other than empty self-promotion and reality TV. It’s what he is and what he does. He’s an ignorant fraud and a con-man taking advantage of the fact that the average American has a third grade knowledge of civics and the attention span of a squirrel monkey.

He knows with the unerring sense of a predator that all he has to do is bluster and howl and tweet about any minor accomplishment and the media and Big Public will be fooled and distracted just long enough for him to make tracks to his next con.

And it will always, always, always work because Trump knows what every successful con man knows. People want to believe in the bullshit they’re selling. All he has to do is set up the scam and his victim’s wishful thinking and self-delusion will do the rest. Even if his swindles are exposed it doesn’t really matter. His cultists will just insist it’s fake news and the whole cycle will begin anew. Of course, the fact that the opposition party is run by inept weaklings who can’t even tie their own goddamned shoes doesn’t hurt either.