The entertainonomics of Trumps Sprint deal.
The entertainonomics of Trump's Sprint deal. BravoKiloVideo/shutterstock.com

Yesterday, president-elect Trump took a little time out his busy-ness to inform the press that a deal he struck with Sprint, a telecommunication corporation mostly owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, would return 5000 jobs to the US. The only detail the press received about the deal is that the jobs would not be created but reverted. "They're taking them from other countries. They're bringing them back to the United States," Trump said.

What he wants Americans to see or believe they are seeing are jobs that were once American, but then became jobs of foreigners, and that now are, once again, American. Without this emotional (one would say even racial) image (getting the former white jobs back from those other people), the news about this deal would lose much of its force, which is narrativistic. In short, this is not economics. This is something new. This is the next four years. This is entertainonomics.

Under Obama, if the economy created 100,000 new jobs, it was a bad month. 150,000 was considered to be acceptable. And the months that experienced the creation of 200,000 jobs got the attention of the press between 5:30 a.m. PST—the job report is announced at this time on the first Friday of the month—and 7 a.m.. After that, nothing else was said about the matter. With entertainonomics, expect to hear lots and lots about achievements and deals whose value is not substantial but emotional. Corporations like Sprint will not find this new state of things disagreeable.