Politicians of all stripes are always claiming success, because admitted failures are rarely re-elected, and (just in case you haven’t stumbled across on your own) Trump appears to be striving for an Olympic medal in this event1, taking credit for a number of job creations and movements with little excuse, as Kevin Drum (among many others) [insert your adjective here, such as gleefully or in horror] notes:
The skepticism in these headlines turns out to be warranted. Trump did indeed desperately try to take credit for this, and you will be unsurprised to learn that he was lying. First of all, Sprint announced these jobs back in April. Here’s the Kansas City Star: “Sprint Corp. is launching a nationwide service to hand-deliver new phones to customers in their homes. The Direct 2 You service, which first rolled out in a Kansas City pilot, will lead to the hiring of about 5,000 mostly full-time employees as it spreads nationwide.”
Second, the Japanese owner of Sprint, Softbank, announced in October that it was creating a huge tech investment fund.
Third, in December, Softbank’s CEO announced the fund again after a meeting with Trump, and said that one part of the whole package was the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Today, Sprint reluctantly conceded that its 5,000 jobs were part of the previously announced 50,000 jobs.
And finally, these jobs were announced yet again today.
That makes four times these jobs have been announced. Donald Trump was responsible for none of them.
Let me move off on a more general tangent, though. It’s inevitable, even good, to fail. It indicates you’re working on a hard problem. Programmers fail all the time. So do artists. Other professions may fail less often (which reminds me of a horrid anecdote from many years ago, as I heard a software guy from India moan that he should have gone into civil engineering, as buildings were always falling down in India and no one was ever punished for it).
And governing is no different. Sometimes you try something hard and it fails. But a politician may not get re-elected if some project she or he champions fails. So then they go off and bury it.
It’s a conundrum. Almost makes term limits sensible.
