THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

By turning the few jobs "saved" through his flunky Mike Pence's efforts into profit centers for the company, The Great Orange Fungus is blustering that anyone else who tries it will be smacked down with a yuge tariff.

President-elect Donald Trump fired another warning shot Sunday at U.S. companies considering moving their operations out of the country, threatening “retributions or consequences” such as a hefty border tax if they do.

The pronouncements came in a string of early morning tweets. Trump said he intends to incentivize businesses to stay in America by lowering corporate taxes and slashing regulations, two key components of his economic agenda. But he also warned that companies with offshore factories would face a 35 percent tariff on goods sold back to the United States.

Trump’s comments follow his direct intervention in an Indiana factory owned by Carrier, which makes heating and air-conditioning units, where production was scheduled to shift to Mexico. Trump announced last week that he had negotiated a deal to keep the plant in the state. Indiana promised to provide Carrier about $7 million in incentives, while the company would invest $16 million in the factory over the next two years.

On the stump, Trump espoused an aggressively protectionist stance toward international trade, and his skepticism of the benefits of globalization resonated with many middle-class voters who bore the brunt of its downside.

But since his election, his advisers have softened some of his most heated rhetoric. Trump’s picks for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, said that they would pursue bilateral trade agreements with other countries but remained wary of sweeping regional deals. Ross also said that blanket double-digit tariffs on goods from Mexico and China — which many economists warned could spark a damaging trade war — would only be used as a last resort.

But Trump’s comments Sunday indicate that he is not backing away from one key pledge: to punish companies that offshore jobs.

“We're living through the greatest jobs theft in the history of the world,” Trump said last week.

Trump celebrated the Carrier deal with a tour of the factory last week, followed by a rally in Cincinnati to kick off his “thank you” tour.

Talk tough with this mouth and tweets but give away the store when it is time to deal. No doubt about it, Carrier exposed just what corporations can expect from Mr. Bluster.