President-elect Donald Trump announced this week that some 8,000 jobs would be coming to the United States thanks to the “spirit and hope” that his election has brought back to the American economy.
“They’re coming back to the United States, which is a nice change,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
The majority of the jobs will be coming by way of the telecommunications company Sprint, which has announced that it will be opening up roughly 5,000 new positions for American workers in the coming years. The other 3,000 jobs will come via a company called One Web.
The deal is part of a pledge made by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, a billionaire who met with Trump in New York in early December. At the time, Masayoshi said his bank would be investing $50 billion in the United States and creating 50,000 jobs.
A lot of media outlets are trying to denigrate Trump’s announcement in the same way they tried to take him down on the Carrier deal. They are saying that some of these Sprint jobs were already coming back to the United States and that Trump didn’t really have much to do with it. They’re accusing him of taking credit for something that he didn’t do.
This is true to an extent; Sprint was moving some jobs to the U.S. and closing down some of their overseas call centers before this announcement.
But that really misses the point, doesn’t it? Trump isn’t out there blowing his horn for no reason. Part of this is a show, yes, but the “show” is not meaningless. The “show,” arguably, is more important than the thousands of jobs coming back to America with this announcement.
It’s the show that is responsible for consumer confidence being at its highest level since before the recession. Trump knows that you can create reality through perceptions. Suddenly Americans are pumped and energized. Companies start getting all of this positive attention from making moves perceived as patriotic. More companies want to get some of that juicy publicity. It starts a cycle that starts as trivial and symbolic and ends with something truly revolutionary.
By nitpicking the deal, the media is taking sides against the American economy. They are undermining the confidence that Trump is trying to inspire and banking on his ultimate failure. They’re still caught in “campaign mode,” and they don’t seem to understand that they’re no longer just attacking Donald Trump; they’re actively fighting to make sure he doesn’t succeed as president.
If America’s failure is their success, then what does that say about them?
