Donald Trump killed two birds with one stone on Monday, simultaneously taking credit for jobs he had no role in creating and plagiarizing from an Exxon Mobil press release.
A statement released by the White House today stole an entire paragraph from an Exxon PR statement issued just an hour earlier announcing investments that were planned in 2013.
The side-by-side image of the two statements shows just how similar they are. The White House didn’t even try to pretend it wasn’t plagiarizing.
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Here are the statements side-by-side: https://t.co/oez3mNq5w2 pic.twitter.com/H0aNifPLPB
— Vox (@voxdotcom) March 7, 2017
What’s even more troubling is that Rex Tillerson, former Exxon CEO and current Secretary of State, met with Trump just two hours before the administration’s statement was issued. As Slate noted, the White House statement looks a lot like “corporate press release on behalf of Exxon Mobile.”
The line between Trump’s business entanglements and his work as president is essentially nonexistent at this point, and his free advertising for Exxon on Monday is proof of that.
It also shouldn’t go unnoticed that the president is lying when he takes credit for jobs that he is supposedly helping Exxon create. The investment plan outlined by the oil company on Monday was announced four years ago when Barack Obama was president.
“There is nothing new or newsworthy here,” said energy analyst Pavel Molchanov, according to the Chicago Tribune. “At the risk of stating the obvious, plenty of companies, across various industries, have been touting their U.S. job creation efforts in order to get on the Trump administration’s good side – even when the underlying job creation has little or nothing to do with Washington policy. This is simply the latest example of that.”
However, there was one new jobs announcement issued on Monday that the president was predictably silent about it. General Motors said it plans to lay off up to 1,100 of its workers from a plant in Lansing, Michigan.
Trump, who won the rust-belt state last fall by convincing enough voters that he would bring jobs back, has yet to comment on that development.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
