What did Donald Trump do today?

He got played by foreign investors.

Trump held a press conference today with the billionaire investor Masayoshi Son, the CEO of the venture capital firm SoftBank. He claimed that Son's promise to invest $100 billion in the United States over the next four years was a vote of confidence in Trump himself. Trump thanked Son effusively, calling him "brilliant" and promising him that "you'll have my support… you'll have our country's support."

$100 billion dollars is a lot of money, but Son's promise is much less than it seems. Venture capitalist money in the technology sector would have to come to the United States anyway—but by appearing on stage with Trump and flattering him, Son gets political leverage with a president-elect who has already promised to allow companies that "invest" enough money to opt out of laws and regulations that small home-grown businesses still have to follow.

Trump has fallen for this kind of song and dance before. He spent years repeatedly claiming credit for a "$10 billion" investment by the Taiwanese company Foxconn in Wisconsin. State and local governments then had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on what Trump called "the eighth wonder of the world," but ended up being mostly abandoned. In the end, it cost taxpayers more than half a million dollars per job created. 

It's not the first time Son has played this trick with Trump, either. In 2016, he promised $50 billion in investments. Referencing that pledge today, Trump claimed that it had been fulfilled "in every way, shape and form." It's actually not clear that tranche of investments created any net jobs in the United States. If it did, many of them have already vanished, like the ones related to WeWork, a corporate debacle so big that movies have already been made about it—and whose employees were collecting unemployment in record time. Some of its investments did better for SoftBank, like its stake in Uber and DoorDash, but "jobs" in the gig economy are famously bad deals for American workers. (During Trump's first term, the United States lost 2.7 million jobs all told.)

Masayoshi Son's willingness to appear on the stage with Trump also conceals the actual source of the money involved—sovereign wealth funds from countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and China. In effect, if SoftBank's promises come true in the sense of making lasting investments in meaningful new technologies, it will mean selling the biggest possible stake in the American technology sector to foreign governments.

Trump signaled his openness to this too, suggesting today that he had completely reversed his position on the Chinese company ByteDance retaining ownership of TikTok and the massive trove of personal information about American users it generates. He is meeting with that company's CEO, Shou Chew, this evening.

Why does this matter?

• It shouldn't be this easy to manipulate someone who wants to be President of the United States.

• Creating jobs means creating jobs, not taking credit for hypothetical future jobs.