Some conservatives have criticized the deal the incoming Trump administration struck with Carrier to keep several hundred manufacturing jobs in Indiana as “crony capitalism,” but Texas senator Ted Cruz had nothing but praise for Trump when asked about the deal on Tuesday.
Cruz praised Trump’s willingness to “fight to keep jobs here in America” and didn’t criticize any aspect of the Carrier deal:
Cruz then ducked into a senators-only elevator as he was asked if he agreed with Sarah Palin that the Carrier deal amounted to “crony capitalism.” He didn’t reply as he waited for the elevator to close. In 2015, Cruz said, “I’ve been an outspoken opponent of crony capitalism, taking on leaders in both parties.”*
Arizona senator John McCain, a leading critic of earmarks and wasteful spending, also didn’t say if he agreed with Palin’s assessment that the deal was crony capitalism. “It was a great P.R. move on his part, I think we all agree with that,” McCain told TWS. “Then the question is what were the terms of it, and we’re not all clear on that. But as far as public relations, it was a coup.” A Politico/Morning Consult poll released Tuesday found that 60 percent of voters said the Carrier deal gave them a more favorable view of Trump.
Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee also said that he wasn’t sure precisely what the terms of the deal were, but he thought it seemed like the “standard, typical kind of thing that state governments do with companies.”
“I don’t really know all the details as to how they went about that. I know that in our own state we do a lot of things to recruit businesses, just like we did with Volkswagen,” Corker told TWS. “It sounded very much like it was worked in conjunction with the sitting governor, Mike Pence, and it was one of the standard kinds of things.”
The terms of the deal, the Wall Street Journal reported, are that in “exchange for $7 million in [Indiana] tax breaks, Carrier will invest $16 million in its facilities in the state. The company will keep about 800 jobs it had planned to move out of the Indianapolis plant, but it still plans to move 600 jobs from that factory to Mexico.”
Questions have also been raised about whether the status of Carrier’s parent company’s federal contracts played a role in Carrier’s decision to keep some jobs from moving to Mexico. “Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said he would be asking more about the Carrier deal and said he would inquire whether there were promises about defense contracts,” the Journal reported.
Some conservatives have criticized the congressional Republicans for treating Trump differently than they would have treated a Democrat who made the exact same deal. “Republicans in Congress should ask themselves what they would be saying now if Hillary Clinton had been elected and then began threatening and shaming companies when she didn’t like their perfectly legal business practices,” Yuval Levin wrote on Friday. “Whatever they would have said then they should say now. I’m guessing it would have included ‘industrial policy,’ ‘central planning,’ ‘picking winners and losers,’ and ‘cronyism’ at the very least, and rightly so.”
*Update: Here’s what Cruz had to say about Trump and Carrier during the Republican primary:
