printThe New York Slimes is dismissing Donald Trump’s role in Ford’s decision to “keep an automaking plant in Kentucky.” It’s par for the course.
Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly after 9 p.m. that Ford’s chairman, William Clay Ford Jr., had just told him that Ford “will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky — no Mexico.”
Minutes later, Mr. Trump wrote in a second post: “I worked hard with Bill Ford to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky. I owed it to the great State of Kentucky for their confidence in me!” Mr. Trump won 62.5 percent of the state’s popular vote in the presidential election.
During the campaign, he repeatedly criticized Ford for moving production to Mexico, and he threatened to impose a 35 percent tariff on vehicles made there.
At play, I suspect, is the phenomenon I described in “Trump’s Not Yet President, But Nieto Is Saying, ‘Si Se Puede’”:
“… a show of unparalleled strength and patriotism—Mr. Trump’s—extinguished a bad habit [Ford’s]. The biblical proverb (generously paraphrased) worked: Act like a fearless lion before an adversary, and the adversary will retreat.”
The force of Trump, as I ventured in The Trump Revolution, is changing reality on the ground.