“Cutting taxes for shareholders will destroy more factories than whatever he saves by jawboning companies from the bully pulpit,” Mr. Konczal said. And incentives like the ones Carrier received only forestall the inevitable shift by multinational giants to low-cost locales like Mexico and Asia. “They will just go later after pocketing some money,” Mr. Konczal said.

Making deals with big business may prove much harder than Mr. Trump is willing to acknowledge. After all, he held off on using a stick with Carrier, and handed over $7 million worth of carrots, but the company gave Mr. Trump only half of what he wanted, with 1,000 Indiana jobs still leaving for Mexico.

Moreover, Mr. Trump is pushing back against tectonic economic forces that show no sign of easing. Besides the continuing loss of factory jobs to automation, Carrier is far from unique in shifting blue-collar jobs to places like Mexico, even as it keeps white-collar functions like sales and research and development in Indiana.

“There isn’t a silver bullet,” said Steven Rattner, a veteran financier and Democrat who led President Obama’s successful effort to rescue the auto industry in 2009. “And what’s ironic is that there isn’t a single thing in Donald Trump’s campaign platform that would help people hurt by these trends.” Mr. Rattner is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

Still, whether it’s a smart strategy or not, it is clear Mr. Trump is planning more Carrier-like standoffs after he moves into the Oval Office on Jan. 20.

“This is no one-off,” he said in an interview with The Times after touring the Carrier factory floor in Indianapolis on Thursday and greeting cheering workers. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here as opposed to doing it from my lobby in Manhattan.”

Rather than tax breaks or tariffs on a case-by-case basis, perhaps the best argument for Mr. Trump’s tactics is that they may prompt a rethinking of corporate responsibility among executives, said Justin Wolfers, an economist and New York Times contributor who teaches at the University of Michigan.