the public’s attitude toward big businesses and their chief executives was extremely negative. Just twenty per cent of Americans, Greenberg explained, had a positive opinion of C.E.O.s. Many people regarded the country’s top executives as members of a self-enriching élite, which lines its pockets by cutting wages and shifting jobs overseas.
.. “We thought we were running against trickle-down. We now find ourselves running against a nationalist message focussed on making work for people.”
.. Last week, its chief executive, Louis Chenevert, left the company with a retirement package worth a hundred and seventy-two million dollars, most of it in stock and options.
.. shutting it down and moving production to Monterrey, where workers earn about fifty dollars a week, would have juiced United Technologies’ earnings a bit. That, in turn, could have given a boost to the firm’s stock price—and further enriched the huge remuneration packages enjoyed by Chenevert and other top executives.
.. Carrier, however, is still planning to relocate six hundred jobs from the Indianapolis plant to Mexico, plus seven hundred jobs from a second plant in Huntington, Indiana, which will be shut down. Taking the two plants together, more jobs will go than will be saved.
.. “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,”
.. In his 2012 State of the Union speech, President Obama proposed a series of measures designed to discourage outsourcing. They included eliminating the tax deductions that companies can take when they shift jobs abroad, and expanding tax breaks for investment in domestic manufacturing.
.. the Obama Administration never suggested that it would be possible, or even beneficial, to stop offshoring entirely. Instead, it stressed the need to educate the workforce; develop industries of the future, such as clean energy; and retrain displaced manufacturing workers.
.. since the start of 2009, when Obama took office, the economy has created more than eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs.
Trump can’t revive industry. But his voters might still get raises.
Wage stagnation in the Rust Belt likely won’t endure through his presidency.
If Trump can simply find a way to keep the economy growing even modestly for several years, and if the unemployment rate remains low, he has a good chance of presiding over a period of sustained wage growth similar to what America saw in the mid- to late 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president.
.. They might not bring back many factory or mining jobs, but they will boost the paychecks of the men and women who lost production jobs years ago and remain angry about it today.
.. For all Trump’s railing against the “terrible” economy under President Obama, census data released in September shows that typical workers at every level, from the very poor to the very rich, experienced income growth in 2015.
.. Americans without college degrees started to see rising incomes as far back as 2013.
.. his promises to deport millions of immigrants quickly and to threaten tariffs on trading partners such as China and Mexico in an effort to revive the millions of manufacturing jobs lost in the Rust Belt since the turn of the century.
.. Most forecasters say the policies would, instead, dampen job growth by reducing the labor force and raising prices on imported consumer goods, and would possibly push America into recession.
.. There’s a good chance — which markets are already pricing in — that those plans could stoke higher inflation. The Federal Reserve could respond by raising interest rates more quickly than expected, which could pump the brakes on growth and possibly cause a downturn.
.. What Trump needs is just enough policy fuel to continue growth, without provoking a shock — from a trade war, interest rate hikes or anything else — that would send the economy tumbling.
Trump’s voters won’t mind if he doesn’t keep all his promises
Pence discussed tax reform, ethics reform, infrastructure improvements, better trade deals and a cheaper replacement for Obamacare. No mention of building walls, rounding up illegal immigrants or banning Muslims.
.. Pence’s outline was not exactly the hell and brimstone that critics warned — and Trump often promised — a Trump presidency would bring to Washington’s institutions. Nor did it sound like it would furnish the radical break with the status quo that Trump supporters say they want.
.. they liked Trump for something deeper and less specific than the promises he made — “Make America great again” meant putting strength, grit and change on their side, not enacting a particular policy agenda.
.. as long as he shows that he has their back and makes a sincere effort to get things done — even if that requires compromise — his voters say they’ll keep faith in him.
.. a comprehensive energy plan, taxes and Obamacare.
.. Presidents usually do try to keep their campaign promises, research has found, making a good-faith effort to do about two-thirds of what they said they would do while seeking the job.
.. For a lot of Trump supporters, Obamacare contributed to a sense that Washington was no longer looking out for them. They believed their concerns burdening some people with new costs for the benefit of others wasn’t heeded.
.. What was most appealing about Trump — for at least me — was that he had our back.”
For Ripepi and others, “having our back” is not about economic misfortune but rather a perceived loss of strength in the fabric of America. Not in terms of politics and policy, necessarily; he worries that his children and future grandchildren will not be able to experience the same things he did, while living in the same community that his father and his father’s father did. Will his kids be able to find livelihoods near home and enjoy the same traditions he did?
.. voters like Ripepi told me, people from less mobile, socially conservative places felt they had no voice. Under Trump, they believe they will.
.. To many voters, economic arguments were more important than Trump’s explosive rhetoric. When China subsidizes steel production, it cripples manufacturing and makes it impossible for American companies to compete, said Hughes
.. How many Trump supporters really sound, now that he’s won the election, is hopeful — the same way Obama voters sounded after his victory in 2008.
.. “If he takes it slow and steady and shows us he is working for everyone’s best interest rather than just special interests, we’ll be patient,” Hughes said.
Yes, working class whites really did make Trump win. No, it wasn’t simply economic anxiety.
We knew all along that Donald Trump drew his strength from the white working class. We knew this from the patterns in the primaries. We knew this from the nonstop polling conducted over the past 18 months. We knew this from all of the campaign-trail dispatches showing his anti-trade, anti-elite message thrilling crowds in the heartland.
.. Tuesday proved that this demographic remains a powerful force in U.S. politics — and the president-elect has thoroughly charmed the group.
.. The specks of red — where Trump won counties that previously voted for Obama — dot the Rust Belt. And these counties all had something in common. They were dominated by whites without a bachelor’s degree.
.. Even after controlling for income levels, employment levels, population size and the foreign-born population in a given county, the more white people there were who lacked a four-year degree, the more likely Trump outperformed Romney in that county. Roughly speaking, if you took an average county and increased the portion of less-educated whites by 10 percentage points, you would boost Trump’s winning margin by about three percentage points.
.. But these places have been like this for a while. In fact, Trump’s victory doesn’t seem to be linked to any recent declines in people’s economic circumstances. The economy has been getting better over the past four years. Median incomes have risen. The unemployment rate has plummeted including in regions won by Trump:
.. for politics, the economy is a state of mind.
.. Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell has pointed out, surveys show that Trump supporters are not necessarily poorer than average. It may be that many are probably doing pretty well, but they may see others in their neighborhood who are struggling and decide that the nation, as a whole, isn’t that great anymore.
.. People don’t always vote in their own self-interest — they think about what they believe will be good for the country as a whole.