Trump Wins Again

President-elect Donald Trump got a fine start to the New Year, as Ford Motor Co. on Tuesday scrapped its plans to build a $1.5 billion plant in Mexico and announced it will instead invest $700 million in a Michigan plant — creating 700 new jobs.

This, on a day when a Trump tweet also seemed to kill the House GOP’s ill-advised drive to weaken an independent ethics office.

And he’s still weeks from actually taking the oath of office.

On the campaign trail, Trump regularly railed against Ford’s Mexico expansion. Yet as recently as last month, Ford CEO Mark Fields was insisting the plan would go ahead. What changed?

Fields told CNN the decision is a “vote of confidence in the [US] economy,” pointedly crediting the president-elect’s “pro-growth” policies while insisting Ford “didn’t cut a deal with Trump. We did it for business.”

That makes it a cleaner win for Trump than last month’s jobs-saving Carrier deal — which, after all, did involve serious subsidies (i.e., legal bribes) to the company from Veepelect Mike Pence’s Indiana government.

Trump’s triumphant tweet on the Ford move has the right idea: “Instead of driving jobs and wealth away, America will become the world’s great magnet for innovation and job creation.”

But getting there hinges on the new president getting big things done — including corporate tax reform and moves to unleash the US energy sector, as well as a sustained drive to junk unwise Obama-era regulations.

It’s going to take massive change to launch the job-creation boom that America needs.