Trump's Twitter tantrum fails to stop company from sending jobs overseas

Rexnord Corp. recently announced that it is laying off workers at its ball bearings factory in Indiana and sending those jobs to Mexico, even after Donald Trump singled them out for criticism in a tweet.

In December, Trump slammed Rexnord for the planned move, and thundered “No more!” in one of his signature tweets.

Rexnord of Indiana is moving to Mexico and rather viciously firing all of its 300 workers. This is happening all over our country. No more!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2016

Chuck Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999 union that represents workers at the factory, told Huffington Post, “Evidently, Rexnord must not have read that.”

To add insult to injury, Rexnord will be paying its current employees to train their eventual replacements.

Trump has spoken at length about saving blue-collar jobs, but since assuming the presidency, he has used more empty rhetoric than concrete policy to tackle the issue.

Before he was even sworn into office, he claimed to have engineered a deal to keep jobs from the HVAC company Carrier in Indiana instead of Mexico, but that story quickly fell apart. After his blustery tweets (and some inaccurate headlines from the mainstream media), the “deal” was exposed as one in which Carrier extracted sweetheart tax breaks from the state where Mike Pence was governor, in exchange for a shaky promise to only offshore some of the original jobs that were planned. And even those jobs may eventually be sent abroad.

Trump has no record of being the “dealmaker” he purports to be, and his presidency thus far backs that up. He was completely incapable of even bringing his own party together on health care, let alone attracting any Democratic support at all. As a result, Trump has no significant legislative accomplishments during his first two months in office, and is unlikely to achieve one in the first 100 days.

And when he has advocated policy changes, they directly target and hurt the voters who backed his presidential aspirations.

Tweets are not enough to change the behavior of companies; at best, they can grab headlines and antagonize. But they are a world away from the tough, unglamorous work of implementing policy. And Trump is clearly not up to the task.