Because his running mate is still the governor of Indiana, and can use political power there to scare up economic favors for Indiana-based firms threatening to move production to other countries, Donald Trump is spending his pre-presidency on a public relations tour of the state, bragging about the jobs he’s saving.

First the Trump administration-in-waiting cut a deal with United Technologies to essentially halve the number of jobs its subsidiary air-conditioning company Carrier was planning to send to Mexico.

On Friday evening, he foreshadowed the next target of his elaborately staged farce.

Rexnord of Indiana is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers. This is happening all over our country. No more! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2016

Come January, Pence will no longer be governor of Indiana. Unless his successor there, and perhaps other Republican governors around the country, agree to collaborate with the Trump-Pence administration by offering big bribes to save small numbers of jobs, this particular PR coup will expire soon.



And a coup it has been! On any given month over the past several years, the U.S. economy has generated about 200,000 jobs on net, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Relative to that baseline, Trump-like opportunistic pseudo-bullying of random companies will generate a rounding-error of jobs saved. “On President Barack Obama’s watch the U.S. economy generated 8.6 million net new jobs—equal to 2,945, or about three Carrier deals, every day, including Sundays, for going on eight consecutive years,” wrote MarketWatch columnist Brett Arends. But you’d never guess that from the wall-to-wall cable news coverage and fawning headlines his antics won.