The President-elect claimed that he received a phone call on Wednesday afternoon from the “head people at Sprint” pledging to return off-shored jobs to U.S. soil.
“They’re taking them from other countries and bringing them back to the United States,” Donald Trump told reporters gathered at the door of his south Florida Mar-a-Lago estate.
Trump credited the telecommunications company’s decision to “what’s happening and the spirit and the hope” and said its owner, Masayoshi Son, made the move possible.
Trump also claimed that OneWeb, a new satellite-based Internet provider, would be hiring 3,000 people. According to Bloomberg, OneWeb is backed by Son’s company Softbank, a Japanese telecom giant.
Since his election, Trump has taken credit for the overall strong economy, tweeting this week that he deserved thanks for December’s unusually high U.S. Consumer Confidence Index and for robust Christmas spending.
The President-elect has also announced several similar deals with specific corporations, including Carrier and SoftBank.
Both were not as clear-cut as they initially appeared. Trump said his intervention prompted Carrier to keep 1,100 jobs in Indianapolis, but the company never planned to move 300 of those positions abroad and is moving forward with plans to offshore another 600 jobs from a neighboring plant. He also claimed Masayoshi agreed to invest $50 billion in the U.S. toward businesses and 50,000 new jobs, but those plans were already in motion before Trump met with the Japanese billionaire in early December.
Critics of the President-elect’s job creation strategy say that an administration’s economic policies should be decided on an industry-wide basis rather than company by company.
This post has been updated.
