You have to admire Donald Trump. Even before taking the oath of office, the president-elect was already hard at work restoring American manufacturing to greatness by keeping Carrier in nearby Indiana.
In fact, Trump’s economic strategy is pure genius. During the campaign, he not only faulted international trade agreements and U.S. corporations for outsourcing American jobs to Mexico and China but also demonized and threatened to deport those pesky job-stealing immigrants.
And now, with the Carrier deal, Trump has shown that his administration is willing to use both carrot and stick — or tax incentives and coercion — to keep U.S. corporations from chasing after cheap labor opportunities elsewhere in the world.
But the corporations that stay will eventually find themselves in the difficult position of needing to cut costs here at home. And, with a shrinking pool of eager immigrant labor, domestic manufacturing will have only one place to turn: automation.
And this is where you have to admire Mr. Trump’s foresight: Once the robots start replacing workers, the administration can wash its hands of the problem by putting the blame on both the heartless corporations who would rather embrace the machine than the American worker and the cold, impersonal robots themselves.
Like the Uber driver who is in the fast lane to being replaced by the self-driving car, the manufacturing jobs that Trump promises to keep in or return to U.S. soil are unfortunately temporary. For this reason, raging against the machine will undoubtedly be the next populist movement.
I'm David Gunkel, and that's my perspective.
