Yeah, I have thought the same thing. I think the PE has been very adroit at positioning himself in the news cycle as being good for the economy since his election. For all his twitter and other controversies he’s ensured he’s in the news at least twice a week for some sort of economic message – especially one catered to working class voters. The things that stick out for me are him taking credit for the fact we’ve reached the highest consumer confidence rating in some time and for several manufacturing decisions companies have made – but there may be others. Of course, in those cases the consumer confidence has been climbing under President Obama for the last several years and most of the companies (besides Carrier – who was offered major tax incentives by PE Trump) have stated other reasons – or earlier decisions – as the cause of their manufacturing decisions.
Still, I think it’s a canny political move on the part of the PE and fits with his business experience. President Obama has overseen something like 75 months of straight job growth in the country during his tenure – I read one of the longest in history. It makes political sense to position yourself to take advantage of the results of that even if you had and have nothing to do with it. If you look at Trump’s business history he’s been very successful in inserting himself as a beneficiary of credit where he’s had very little impact – and distancing himself from his failures through the media. It will be interesting if those kind of ‘salesman/promoter-in-chief’ skills really translate well into the oval office.
I read a really interesting blog post that compared the PE’s actions to the myth of Batman in an interesting way. The guy talked about how the President trying to negotiate individual business deals 500 or 1000 jobs at a time was a terrible use of energy considering the size of the economy and how anything less than 150,000 job growth a MONTH was considered very poor growth. He compared it to Batman saying. Here’s this billionaire head of a multi-national company concerned with crime. Does he donate millions of dollars to hire more police, lobby on behalf of nation/state/city legal reform, pay for massive research in improving law enforcement procedures, start a charity to combat the criminal environment? No, he puts a million-dollar suit on and punches criminals in the face one at a time – AND WE THANK HIM FOR IT. I thought it was funny – but also kind of ruined Batman for me.
