The Killer Wind from Hurricane Donald

They said it couldn’t be done, and even if it could, Donald Trump wouldn’t be the man to do it. But a fresh wind from somewhere is blowing through the jungle where the timid, the fearful and the politically correct cower in the shade of the no-no tree.

If the Donald were elected, wise men confidently told us, the economy would collapse, America’s friends abroad would die of diplomatic shock, rivers would run backward and the sun would never shine again. Oh, dear. Woe is us.

But suddenly, it’s woe that’s in retreat. The stock market is booming, Americans are smiling again as investor confidence grows and the Donald’s critics who were only yesterday predicting that the world would end by Christmas are no longer so sure. The world might stumble on until Easter.

First Carrier, the iconic air-conditioner manufacturer, decided that well, maybe, it wasn’t so important after all to move everything to Mexico. Maybe it could stick around in Indiana. This upset the naysayers no end, who complained that handing out tax breaks to companies just to stay here and create jobs for Americans was a catastrophic idea, even though the several states have been doing that for years in the endless pursuit of jobs.

Now United States Steel says it has thought about things, maybe it should accelerate its investments in the United States, and bring back workers it laid off when it, too, sang in the Greek chorus of doom and gloom.

“We already structured to do some things,” says Mario Longhi, the CEO of U.S. Steel, “but when you see in the near future improvements to the tax laws, improvements to regulation, those two things by themselves may be a significant driver to what we’re going to do.”

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