A union leader and a Republican president squabbling over whether the president has muscled a private entity enough for labor is pretty much the perfect ending to the conservative Twilight Zone episode that is 2016.

Chuck Jones, the union boss, objects to Trump’s Carrier triumphalism on two grounds. One: Contrary to what Trump says, it’s not 1,100 jobs that have been saved, it’s 800. There are 300 jobs that were going to be moved in-state, but never to Mexico. Two: There are still 550 jobs at the plant that are moving to Mexico. Trump and Pence prevented some outsourcing but not all of it. Why this guy would want to spoil Trump’s political victory by challenging him on the hard numbers is unclear to me, but you can spitball your own theories. Maybe he’s trying to impress upon union members that they can’t trust the new collective-bargainer-in-chief to protect their interests the way they can, supposedly, trust the union to. Or maybe he figures that, by making a public stink about those 550 jobs headed south of the border, he can pressure Trump to pressure Carrier into bringing those jobs back too. Trump’s going to learn quickly that, having intervened once in a particular case to prevent outsourcing, he’ll be expected to intervene repeatedly. And if he doesn’t, there’ll be more Chuck Joneses on TV calling him on it.

Needless to say, Trump didn’t like what he saw. Here’s how he responded last night after Jones’s interview with CNN.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/806660011904614408
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/806678853305384960

Said Drew McCoy, “I wish Trump were as tough on say, Putin, as he is with random Americans who piss him off.” Yeah, but give him time. Eventually Russia will cross some line that makes Trump look weak and then we’ll have a real Twitter feud to watch.

While Trump and Jones bicker over just how much intervention by the president in a business’s decisionmaking is a truly successful intervention, here’s George Will articulating the concerns of the three remaining conservatives in the GOP:

Responding to political threats larded with the money of other people, Carrier has somewhat modified its planned transfers of some manufacturing to Mexico. This represents the dawn of bipartisanship: The Republican Party now shares one of progressivism’s defining aspirations — government industrial policy, with the political class picking winners and losers within, and between, economic sectors. This always involves the essence of socialism — capital allocation, whereby government overrides market signals about the efficient allocation of scarce resources. Therefore it inevitably subtracts from economic vitality and job creation…

Indiana’s involvement in the Carrier drama exemplifies “entrepreneurial federalism” — states competing to lure businesses. This is neither new nor necessarily reprehensible. There are, however, distinctions to be drawn between creating a favorable climate for business generally and giving direct subsidies to alter the behavior of businesses already operating in the state. And when ad-hoc corporate welfare, including tariffs, becomes national policy, it becomes a new arena of regulation, and hence of rent-seeking, which inevitably corrupts politics. And by sapping economic dynamism, it injures the working class.

All Jones is doing here is playing the game, knowing that Trump’s investment of political capital in the fate of Carrier is now a sunk cost for him. If Jones can spoil some of Trump’s political profit, maybe he can squeeze an extra investment out of him by getting him to lean on Carrier again to keep those other 550 jobs in Indiana. Surely Mike Pence can find some extra tax breaks somewhere.

By the way, Jones claims that he started getting death threats last night after Trump tweeted this attack on him, which he shrugged off on grounds that it’s nothing he’s not used to as a union boss. That’s at least twice now, though, that a target of Trump’s wrath has been threatened by random people afterward; the other, much more famous, example is Megyn Kelly. Trump should know at this point that this is apt to happen when he starts sparring with someone. People will ignore it in Kelly’s case since she’s a rich celebrity and can protect herself, but if some crazed fan takes a shot at Jones or some other rando who crosses Trump in the future, what will he say when he’s asked why he didn’t refrain from public fights with average citizens knowing the risk it might present to them? This isn’t something the right would have tolerated from Obama.