Trump's publicity stunts end up making America weaker

DOES anyone still remember the Carrier deal? Back in December, president-elect Donald Trump announced, triumphantly, that he had reached a deal with the air-conditioner manufacturer to keep 1,100 jobs in America rather than moving them to Mexico. And the media spent days celebrating the achievement.

Actually, the number of jobs involved was more like 700, but who's counting? Around 75,000 US workers are laid off or fired every working day, so a few hundred here or there hardly matter for the overall picture.

Whatever Mr Trump did or didn't achieve with Carrier, the real question was whether he would take steps to make a lasting difference.

So far, he hasn't; there isn't even the vague outline of a real Trumpist jobs policy. And corporations and investors seem to have decided that the Carrier deal was all show, no substance, that for all his protectionist rhetoric, Mr Trump is a paper tiger in practice. After pausing briefly, the ongoing move of manufacturing to Mexico has resumed, while the Mexican peso, whose value is a barometer of expected US trade policy, has recovered almost all of its post-November losses. In other words, showy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitute for actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effect can be to squander a government's credibility. Which brings us to last week's missile strike on Syria. The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the …