Ever wonder where Trump supporters get their non-factual ideas? Here’s one, admittedly fairly small example. Salena Zito, a New York Post columnist, has a column at the newspaper’s website entitled, “Why no one is talking about Trump’s game-changing deal”. She laments that there has been little national or even local West Virginia coverage of an $83.7 billion deal to create a number of petrochemical projects in West Virginia over the next 20 years that was signed during Trump’s visit to Beijing. She quotes Jerald Stephens, 67, a West Virginia native and union rep who complains that he hasn’t heard anything about the deal, even locally, and states: “I can guarantee you if anyone not named Trump had made this kind of deal for West Virginia, it would have at least been a panel discussion or two on a cable news channel.”
The thing is, it wasn’t Trump who made the deal.
The petrochemical agreement was only a part of the $250 billion in deals reported by the White House as part of Trump’s visit to China. West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mail ran a story on those deals November 9 and pointed out that “Many of the deals weren’t broken out into separate valuations, while a large number were in the form of non-binding memoranda of understanding or involved agreements with existing Chinese partners.”
Such is the case with the petrochemical deal. It is, first of all, a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding. In addition, West Virginia University’s website, WVUToday, also carried a story about the deal on November 9 that began by noting that China Energy Investment Corp. Ltd. is a long-time partner of the university. It turns out that WVU and Shenhua Group, one of the companies forming the newly created China Energy, have been working together since 2002. Furthermore in October 2016, “WVU and Shenhua signed a partnership agreement in the areas of: comprehensive strategic cooperation to establish West Virginia as the priority area for Shenhua Group’s investment into U.S. markets; natural gas power plant development; shale gas development, including investment in upstream and downstream businesses, technologies in clean coal and power, and training.” Support for this initiative came from West Virginia Forward, a collaborative project between WVU, Marshall University, and the West Virginia Department of Commerce.
So, what was Trump’s contribution? WVUToday reports that “The signing of the strategic cooperation memorandum of understanding between the West Virginia and China Energy in Beijing was witnessed by President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.” He witnessed its signing! That’s it. That’s what Trump did for this deal.
Zito’s column goes on to laud Trump for not forgetting about his supporters in West Virginia and nearby areas of Pennsylvania by keeping his promise to bring jobs to the heartland. How many Trump supporters—or even liberal’s who stress the need to focus attention on the WWC—will ever understand that this deal had nothing but nothing to do with Trump? How many times will something similar to Zito’s column be repeated on Fox or Breitbart or right-wing talk radio? How far will such reporting go to solidify support for Trump among his base?
*Earth 2 — borrowed from MSNBC’s Joy Reid.