He descended from the sky last Sunday in a helicopter that could have come from heaven, landing outside a hangar in Hagerstown, Md. He would talk for little more than an hour, mostly about himself, how he is “a smart guy” and “I look really good” and “I equal love.”

To chants of “build the wall!” he said he would “talk about jobs for a second, then we’re getting the hell out of here.” He made good on both promises. He closed with a vow that no more jobs would leave Maryland, and then Donald J. Trump disappeared back into the sky.

As he spoke, jobs were leaving Maryland. Credit card processors, which had found a home in a place where people used to make pipe organs and leather car seats, were “consolidating,” as they put it. The biggest company, First Data Corporation, had let people go at their big office at the edge of Hagerstown.

But these jobs were not going to Mexico. And they were not leaving because dirt-cheap operations in China could track credit cards any better than the people of Hagerstown. They left because the company wanted “to upgrade the talent and skill sets available to us,” as it said in a news release. Where would that be? Possibly somewhere in the New York metro area, the company announced in another of its disruptive moves. Essentially, the jobs were following Trump to New York. Others were disappearing. No wall could prevent that.