If enough companies follow this script over the next couple of years, the number of factory jobs in the United States should stabilize, or even rise. Mr. Trump’s eventual successor may well inherit a manufacturing sector that is superficially stronger, though it will hide an underlying weakness: thousands of C.E.O.s ready to move production offshore. As soon as Mr. Trump leaves the stage, several years worth of pent-up demand for offshoring may erupt, and as these plans are followed and factory jobs return to more normal levels, expect a sharp drop in manufacturing employment.

Now imagine what all this will look like to a future policy wonk. Manufacturing jobs seemed to be scarce before Mr. Trump’s tenure, improved while he was at the helm, and then shrank sharply as soon as he left office. It might seem as though his angry tweets actually caused manufacturing to thrive.

But it would be a mistake to infer that businesses really perform better when threatened. Rather, the fluctuating jobs numbers reflect the ease with which cuts can be delayed, not prevented. Sure, a delay is, in itself, good news for factory workers who keep their jobs a little longer, but it doesn’t address their longer-term problems.

Indeed, many economists, both Democrat and Republican, fear that Mr. Trump’s policy of naming and shaming will hurt the manufacturing sector in the long run. After all, the point of the exercise is to allocate workers and machines based on presidential diktat, not market forces. He is pushing corporate leaders to please the White House, rather than their customers and shareholders.

The cost of hiring crisis managers to deal with Mr. Trump raises the cost of doing business just as surely as a tax hike would. By making it more expensive to leave the market, he also creates a disincentive for foreign companies thinking of building plants in the United States.

The difficulty with trying to use the bully pulpit to create a lasting change in corporate behavior is that words — even a president’s — don’t much alter a company’s bottom line. Corporate decisions are driven by the balance of costs and benefits, and the benefits of offshoring are typically large and enduring.

Still, for short periods, even relatively minor incentive shifts can cause large reactions when what is involved is merely a delay, not fundamental change. For example, imagine two people who love Cancún and have decided to vacation there; if the cost of a flight rises by $100, they will go anyway, because the cost isn’t enough to deter them. But if the airfare rises by $100 on Sunday, the day they had planned to go, but was to remain at the original price on Monday, the travelers may well decide to wait a day. So fewer people may fly to Mexico on the weekend, when it’s more expensive, yet there will be no long-term impact on travel. Temporary policies often look as though they have disproportionately large effects, but they aren’t meaningful.