What did Donald Trump do today?

He did a live address to the nation to say he'd created jobs for .0005% of the population, 4+ years from now.

Last night, the Trump White House announced that he would give a formal presidential address to the nation from the Oval Office this afternoon at 2 P.M. Traditionally, presidents use that kind of address to speak about urgent matters, or occasions of great solemnity: the beginnings and ends of wars, or natural disasters, or in times of economic or social unrest.

In fact, Trump's address today concerned the planned construction of a steel mill in Iowa. Trump claimed it would eventually employ more than 1,700 workers, assuming it were ever built.

Iowa is the site of an unexpectedly competitive Senate race this fall. 

To put Trump's job number claims in perspective, natural population growth in the United States means that about 97,000 new jobs have to be created every month just to keep unemployment rates stable. That means that if Trump's promises of 1,700 new steelmaking jobs came true, it would replace about half a day's worth of demand for jobs.

But not until 2030 at the earliest. That was the optimistic assumption for when the plant might open.

Trump has a long history of announcing these kinds of "deals," few if any of which ever actually materialize. In 2018, Trump said that a Taiwanese tech company would open a plant in Wisconsin that would be the "eighth wonder of the world" and employ 13,000 people. State and local governments poured more than a billion dollars into infrastructure improvements for factories that were expected to make giant flat-panel video displays. Working family farms were declared "blighted" and seized by eminent domain, and homes were bulldozed. But nothing ever came of it, and the foreign company, Foxconn, repeatedly scaled down the project until virtually nothing was left beyond a few buildings rented out to other companies.

Former residential areas near the planned Foxconn plant in Mt. Pleasant, WI, after homes were seized and destroyed for factories that were never built.

Experts and local residents disputed the economic viability of the Foxconn plant at the time Trump declared it a done deal. The question, as one resident put it, was this: "Why would you come to the United States of America, and use our workforce, when your own workforce is cheaper over there [in Taiwan]?" One answer is that giving Trump an opportunity to make gaudy promises about jobs—at U.S. taxpayer expense—paid off very well for the political connections of Foxconn executives, and those were potentially far more lucrative than making television sets.

The Iowa plant is expected to cost $18 billion to build—or, at least, that's the starting price. Trump didn't say how much taxpayer money would be used to prop up the privately owned mill, and how much would be contingent on the thing actually being built. (Most of the Foxconn money was spent in advance, and ended up costing half a million dollars per job created.)

In his remarks today, which most television networks declined to carry, Trump explicitly tied the construction of the mill to his imposition of tariffs on foreign steel: "Soon after my inauguration, I imposed powerful 50% tariffs on all foreign steel, and now our steel industry is roaring back to life." It depends on what Trump means by "our" steel industry: the company that would own the mill, Mesabi Metallics, is owned by an Indian conglomerate. 

But Trump's emphasis on the tariffs is just another way of saying that when those taxes on American consumers are removed—which is an economic and political certainty, whether or not it happens on Trump's watch—the Iowa plant will be that much less competitive, if it even gets built. 

Why does this matter?

• At this point, Donald Trump may be the only person who believes in the "deals" he's constantly announcing.
  
  
• It's extremely unlikely that this will change any Iowans' votes in favor of Trump's party, but it's still corrupt that he's obviously trying to make that happen this way.