MIDWESTERN voters decided the election for Donald Trump. So it is hardly surprising that the president-elect would start his thank you tour in two Midwestern states. In the early afternoon of December 1st he visited Indianapolis, Indiana’s capital, to claim credit for Carrier, a local maker of air conditioners and heaters, deciding to keep some 1,000 manufacturing jobs in America rather than move them to Mexico, as planned. The same evening he celebrated his victory at a rally of thousands of raucous supporters in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Revelling in the adulation of the Cincinnati crowd, Mr Trump used the rally to blast “extremely dishonest” people in the media, who he says were in denial of his victory even after he won important swing states on November 8th. He recounted examples of how the media underestimated his pull, exclaiming, “I love this stuff. Should we go on with this a little longer?” His supporters, some clad in T-shirts reading “Deplorable Lives Matter”, loved it too.

Burying hopes that the next president would moderate his tone after his election victory, he smiled like a Cheshire cat when the crowd chanted “lock her up” and “build the wall”. He boasted about his great victory. He spoke about himself, regally, in the third person.

When he eventually returned to his script, Mr Trump repeated some of his boldest campaign promises, including building a wall on America’s border with Mexico, “draining the swamp” of corruption and the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. And he vowed to put together a team of “killers” to run the country. One of them, he revealed during the speech, was “Mad Dog” Mattis or Jim Mattis, a retired general, who will be his secretary of defence. “I love the generals,” Mr Trump said.

General Mattis is an outspoken critic of what he sees as Barack Obama’s policy of disengagement in the Middle East. He favours a tough stance in dealing with Iran though he does not want to tear up the Obama administration’s nuclear deal. He views Russia’s expansionism in Ukraine and its interference in Syria with alarm and doesn’t share Mr Trump’s conciliatory views on dealing with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. Mr Trump credits the general with convincing him that torture is not useful.

Mr Trump was on a roll throughout his 45-minute soliloquy. “The era of economic surrender is over,” he said. “We are going to fight for every last American job. It’s time to remove the rust from the rust belt!” Earlier in the day he had boasted how Carrier, a company he used during the campaign as whipping boy in his speeches attacking globalisation, had reversed its decision to close two factories in Indiana thanks to him.

Carrier will receive economic incentives to the tune of $7m to keep the factories in America in a deal negotiated by Mike Pence, who is Indiana’s governor until he takes over as vice president. Also at stake were federal military contracts worth billions for Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies—the stick that came with the carrot of the incentives. The Pentagon is United Technologies’s biggest client.

The agreement struck with Carrier is not a great achievement of Mr Trump’s, but a good deal for the Indiana firm that can set a precedent for others, pointed out Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist who was a contender for the presidency. In an op-ed in the Washington Post Mr Sanders wrote that Mr Trump is signalling to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for tax benefits and other goodies. “In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won,” he observed. “And that should send a shockwave of fear through all workers across the country.”

At the moment, however, the Carrier deal has the opposite effect on blue-collar voters in the Midwest and surrounding regions. In Orofino, in northern Idaho, where a lumber mill closed just weeks before the election, residents voted overwhelmingly for Mr Trump. They now see the Carrier deal and hope Mr Trump can help them too—like so many others in the Rust belt.

Mr Trump seems to be vaguely aware of the huge expectations of his working-class voters across the Midwest. Touring the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, he claimed that he never really meant to promise to save Carrier’s jobs. But he said he did so anyway after seeing one of Carrier’s employees profess the belief on television that he had made such a promise.