Companies are learning the Trump lesson: Give the man something to brag about, even if it’s not true. And if you give him news he doesn’t like, prepare to be publicly trashed, 140 characters at a time. NBC showed both sides of this simultaneously, drawing a classic angry-Donald response with a report on how companies are pretending that Trump deserves credit for good news planned before the election. 

A spate of companies have recently announced that they’ll be adding jobs or deciding against cutting jobs, with those announcements giving implied or explicit credit to Trump. That way, they get on his good side. But, NBC showed, if you look past the headlines—and Trump’s self-congratulatory tweets—it turns out there’s nothing new here:

GM said its plan was approved before the election, but told Bloomberg it was "accelerated" under pressure from Trump, for example.

Wal-Mart's job creation plans are in line with its normal annual increase, and come after it has closed 269 under-performing stores and cut thousands of jobs.

The combined Bayer-Monsanto U.S. R&D spending pledge is roughly what the two companies are already spending, CNBC reported.

And Sprint's jobs were part of a previously announced commitment by its parent company to create 50,000 jobs in the U.S.

Well, Donald Trump was not just going to sit around listening to that! How dare NBC point out that his precious jobs claims were based on nothing much? Obviously, he could not open his Twitter app fast enough, calling NBC “totally biased” and the story “fake news.” “Came back because of me!” he insisted. (You can just imagine his bottom lip sticking out and his jowls quivering as his little fingers scrabbled across the keyboard putting this important message out.)

Are companies playing Trump, or is Trump playing the public? Either way, the blueprint is clear. Trump will claim credit for a steady stream of jobs that would have been created with or without him, or that are nothing more than normal, incremental growth. And as, over time, the media learns to treat his claims skeptically, Trump will use Twitter (and Breitbart, and Fox) to attack the media for the fake, biased act of looking past what Donald Trump says and reporting the facts. And America’s workers will be left to sort out the difference between what they’re seeing reported and their own economic realities.