The story has rather got lost in the midst of Donald Trump’s statements this week about his fabled wall, the merits of torture, and all the other stuff that has underlined the frightening nature of his arrival in power – but on Monday, the new president hosted a remarkable meeting.

In the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Trump held talks with the leaders of US trade unions: among them, the presidents of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the Smart (it stands for sheet metal, air, rail and transportation) Union, and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Despite US unions overwhelmingly backing Hillary Clinton – the carpenters, for example, recently warned that “Trump’s legacy will ruin America” – all was apparently warmth and cordiality.

“The respect that the president of the United States just showed us … was nothing short of incredible,” said Sean McGarvey, president of the umbrella organisation North America’s Building Trades Unions. He then praised Trump’s plans for infrastructure, trade and energy policy, and looked ahead to the administration “putting America back to work”, with “the middle class jobs our members and all Americans are demanding”.

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Welcome, once again, to the element of Trump-ism that liberal dismay drowns out, but which partly accounts for the fact that this most unqualified of presidents is in office – and which, for all his dismal approval ratings, is surely playing pretty well in the post-industrial places whose support took him over the line in November.

Understand that, and you may realise why his loudly ridiculed inauguration speech may have sounded potent and promising to millions of Americans. Through the same prism, moreover, you might be able to discern something too often overlooked: that amid Trump’s lies and bigotry, there may lurk a political project of spectacular daring. In the way it put Trump on political ground long assumed to belong to the Democrats, one US columnist said the summit with the unions represented a “great act of political larceny”. The same applies to his economic policy on the whole.

Put simply, Trump and his people want to eat the American left’s lunch. At the same time, they intend to shred the Republican party’s ingrained belief in laissez-faire economics, reset rightwing politics – somehow bagging “60% of the white vote, and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote” – whereupon a new dawn will break and “we’ll govern for 50 years”. The quotes come from the interview Trump’s infamous strategist Steve Bannon gave to the writer Michael Wolff, a few days after Trump was elected. “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he said. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy… With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up … It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution – conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Trump puts this in his customary way, with a familiar sense that he hasn’t fully thought things through: “We are going to put a lot of people back to work. We are going to use common sense and we are going to do it the way it is supposed to be done.”

On the face of it, half this project rests on visions of America’s threadbare infrastructure being rebuilt, and gleaming roads, bridges and airports standing as monuments to Trump’s reign. The remainder seems to be all about bringing home manufacturing jobs said to have been shifted abroad, using a mixture of protectionism, the lifting of regulation, loud threats to errant corporations, and the engendering of a new patriotic spirit.

Whether the infrastructure plans will materialise is partly down to politics: essentially, whether Republicans in Congress will endorse a huge burst of the kind of economic interventionism they have been trained to hate for the best part of 40 years. It also rests on simple maths, and how on earth Trump and his people might square the kind of fiscal activism not seen since the 1930s with his plans to slash taxes.

Trump has vaguely talked about public-private partnerships and tax breaks for infrastructure companies; by way of calling his bluff, Democrats in the Senate have drawn up a $1 trillion infrastructure plan they say could largely be funded by the federal government. But there is undoubtedly something worth discussing here: America’s fabric is in a mess, you can just about imagine squads of newly hired workers restoring it, and the huge economic stimulus that would create.

But Trump’s plans for a renaissance of manufacturing work are something else. Ford and General Motors, he said this week, were “gonna build plants back in the United States” and thereby “bring jobs back to America, like I promised on the campaign trail”. But how? It is one of the more overlooked facets of the modern American economy that many manufacturing businesses are already coming back to the US because automation means that labour costs are no longer a deal-breaker: a robot is even cheaper than a Chinese worker, so “reshoring” is a rational choice.

Manufacturing businesses depend less and less on workers. Among plenty of examples, one in particular highlights the contrast between Trump’s plans and reality: in Buffalo, a traditional Democratic stronghold where voters in the suburbs backed Trump in large numbers, a General Motors factory runs night and day, making engines for such hugely popular cars as the Chevrolet Tahoe. This might suggest a portent of where Trump might take the US economy, were it not for the fact that the plant employs 400 fewer people than 10 years ago.

In the words of a recent report in the Financial Times: “In places like Buffalo there is evidence that US manufacturing has a bright future. It just does not look like a future that will include millions of jobs.” This is a truth that eludes dozens of politicians (including Trump’s new friend Theresa May, whose just-published industrial strategy is smattered with promises of “good” and “secure” jobs, but no credible idea of how they might be created). If Trump’s plans for jobs somehow work, he will become even more formidable. If they don’t, their failure will not just take down his political project, but arguably threaten a much bigger idea: that old-fashioned, secure jobs are still a viable economic option, and that politicians can deliver them.

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If this is a delusion, it applies just as much to the Democrats as to the new Trumpite Republicans (witness the pledge in Clinton’s 2016 platform of “a full-employment economy, where everyone has a job that pays enough to raise a family and live in dignity”). Across the world, in fact, what remains of the left and centre-left remains stubbornly wedded to visions of crowded production lines and the glories of the archetypal worker.

A more future-fit politics, built around the declining importance of paid employment and the need to rebuild policy accordingly, has yet to take shape; for the moment, the left and the hard right are awkwardly united not just in their disdain for globalisation, but also in their belief that politicians can get their countries back to an idyll of factories extending to the horizon and jobs for all.

Trump, of all people, may be about to test that idea to destruction. In other words, watch out lefties: this most reckless, nasty, dangerous man is playing not just with his chips, but yours too.