On Thursday, at a rough estimate, 75,000 Americans were laid off or fired by their employers. Some of those workers will find good new jobs, but many will end up earning less, and some will remain unemployed for months or years.
If that sounds terrible to you, and you’re asking what economic catastrophe just happened, the answer is, none. In fact, I’m just assuming that Thursday was a normal day in the job market.
.. Bear in mind that corporations have every incentive to go along with the spin. Suppose that you’re a C.E.O. who wants to curry favor with the new administration. One thing you can do, of course, is steer business to Trump hotels and other businesses. But another thing you can do is help generate Trump-friendly headlines.
Don’t Let Trump’s Sideshows Distract You from His Policies Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442902/republican-congress-policy-donald-trump-tweets-theatrical-interventions
What appears as random Trumpian impulsiveness has a logic to it. It’s a continuation of the campaign. Trump is acutely sensitive to his legitimacy problem, as he showed in his tweet claiming to have actually won the popular vote, despite trailing significantly in the official count.
.. The mini-interventions are working but there’s a risk for Trump in so personalizing his coming presidency. It’s a technique borrowed from Third World strongmen who specialize in demonstrating their personal connection to the ordinary citizen.
Trump’s attack on a union leader will come back to haunt him
There’s no doubt that President-elect Donald Trump’s attack on United Steelworkers Local 1999 President Chuck Jones is disturbing for several reasons. It shows his still-scarily thin skin: Hillary Clinton may have lost, but “a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons” remains as true as ever. It shows he still loves to bully critics, no matter how powerless they are, and he will continue to do so in a hair-trigger fashion when he has the powers of the federal government at his disposal. And it shows he will double down when confronted with his own lies.
.. Unlike Trump, who forgot he promised to help the Carrier workers USW Local 1999 represents, Jones has actually worked to save the plant’s jobs. Unlike Trump, who has shipped thousands of jobs overseas, Jones has fought to keep jobs in the United States. In Jones, Trump attacked someone who represents working America more authentically than Donald Trump ever has or ever will.
.. Firing back on TV at Trump is all that it takes to get his attention and get days of free media coverage for ideas that actually help working Americans. He’ll hurt himself with the voters, but he won’t be able to stop himself.
The Daily 202: The art of punching down
From a practical political standpoint: Trump doesn’t appear to fully grasp how much he elevates his opponents by attacking them.His criticisms of “Hamilton” might have ginned up his base, but they also meant that way more people heard the statement that the cast read aloud to Mike Pence than would have otherwise. His attack on “Saturday Night Live”last weekend guaranteed that millions more people watched the skit mocking his use of Twitter than would have otherwise.
The truth is that relatively few people actually watch CNN. Very few caught Jones’s interview with Erin Burnett. But every news organization in the country today will cover the back-and-forth and ensure that more voters hear the message that Trump exaggerated how many jobs he saved at Carrier.