In a way, you kind of have to hand it to Trump: with the Carrier plant, he basically gets to say he literally saved manufacturing jobs after Obama told everyone it was impossible. Sure there is a lot of fine print, but no one cares about that, and no one will in a year or two either. They will remember the "saved" jobs, not the tax breaks it took to do it. It's a CEO move: you make sure to score a couple cheap, easy "wins" when you take over, and this colors people's perception of you permanently. Your first impression is now one of competence.

He then brings up flag burning, which causes people on the left to decry him, and all of a sudden, on the news we see liberals burning flags. So people watching the news see Trump "saving" jobs, and those on the left burning American flags.

I mean...that is pretty good optics for him, and conservatives/the GOP in general. Even though he really did not achieve anything.

The Carrier plant may not matter to Charles but I'm willing to bet those jobs were important for those people.

And yeah, we get that they will probably still be shipped elsewhere in a year or two. But when it's the only job you have those dozen or so months is better than none. Though, I have a funny little feeling our resident socialist hasn't gone very many nights without food in his belly.

Sure it's smoke and mirrors - but it looks good to the rubes and they're the ones who vote.

I'm reasonably certain that once the guy with the gold plated toilet gets a ride in his grubby 26 year old Air Force One this plan to cancel the contract will be mysteriously forgotten. They are not slated to be delivered until 2022 I guess, but I'm sure he is planning on getting re-elected.

I'm wondering if anyone has calculated how many jobs would be lost, or not created, if the planes are not built.

President-elect Kleptocrat Racist: A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

@5:

Especially ironic, given that Drumph himself claimed to have spent $100mm on his private Boeing 757 when he bought it from Paul Allen back in 2011. My guess is this is probably just a ploy to get "the Big B" to cough up for some add-ons, namely, gold-plated "Trump" logos on everything in sight.

"...he basically gets to say..."

He doesn't get to say. He was never given permission to say he did saved any jobs, any more than he gets to say he arranged the $50 million Japanese investment, or he gets to say he won in a "landslide". Nobody said he gets to say this crap. He just says it anyway. Everyone blasts out headlines that he's lying, and he keeps on lying.

It's laughable that anyone thinks you can go through life like this. He's like a cartoon character who has run off a cliff, and keeps running on thin air because he hasn't yet looked down and realized he's not on ground any more. It doesn't work. It's a TV plot mentality, like idiot savants can solve any problem. The Marx Brothers or Scooby Doo or Mater can blunder from one fiasco to another and come out on top through dumb luck.

Nope. Not going to happen like that. Watch.

Charles, you are the action buddy of writing.