Don’t take it from me, though. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The company will keep about 800 jobs it had planned to move out of the Indianapolis plant, but it still plans to move 600 jobs from that factory to Mexico. United Technologies also will proceed with plans to close a second plant in Huntington, Ind., that makes electronic controls, moving 700 other jobs to Mexico.

Let’s be clear. Indiana taxpayers will be handing Carrier millions of dollars in corporate welfare, in exchange for outsourcing 1,300 jobs to Mexico. In other words, to paraphrase Trump’s own zinger, Trump is building Carrier factories in Mexico and making Indiana pay for it. If we follow the money, we discover that Donald Trump himself owns a small financial stake in United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company (PDF, page 45). It’s one of many conflicts-of-interest hanging like an orange albatross around Trump’s neck.

For a leader whose reputation is inextricably linked to his dealmaking skills (close second: his Twitter-trolling skills), this is a horrendous first outing as would-be president.

In addition to the reality that Carrier intends to send nearly twice as many jobs to Mexico as will remain in Indiana, and in addition to Trump and Pence paying Carrier $7 million in state tax breaks for doing so, the deal sets a troubling precedent. Now CEOs are further encouraged to announce plans to move factories to foreign nations, simply to extort tax incentives from our autocratic chief executive.

On top of everything else, Trump spent much of the campaign threatening American businesses with harsh penalties for shipping jobs overseas. Indeed, Trump once threatened Carrier itself, declaring, “You’re gonna pay a damn tax when you leave this country and you think you’re going to sell product because we’re all so stupid.” Decide for yourself whether Trump is really “so stupid.” But unless we’re missing something, I’m not exactly sure how giving Carrier $7 million in tax breaks is “a damn tax” or punishment of any sort, for that matter, especially since company will still fire 1,300 workers and sending their jobs to Mexico.

We should be happy, I suppose, for the 800 workers who’ll keep their jobs, but at what ultimate expense to American manufacturing? When CEOs can simply ship jobs off to Mexico and China and get paid handsomely for it by the government, it’s impossible to define this as anything but Trump’s first economic blunder. The first and quite likely least of many, by the way.