Just days before American businessman and former reality TV star Donald Trump added ‘President-elect of the United States’ in his resumé, the 70-year-old firebrand delivered a rousing speech to his supporters in Tampa, Florida. Supplementing his key message that Americans are losing jobs to countries overseas, Trump pinpointed Singapore as one of the many nations stealing jobs from the United States.
Just a week after the demagogic personality was voted to be the United States 45th president, it was revealed earlier today that the Trump campaign had actually outsourced work to Singapore. Oh, the irony.
Specifically, the Trump campaign outsourced a job to a 15-year-old Singaporean: East View Secondary School student Hrithie Menon. According to a TODAY report, the teen had been tasked by Trump’s team to help create a presentation on Prezi that’s meant to be shown to youth as part of his presidential campaign. And she did, completing the whole thing in two hours and sending it to her clients, who later shared Hrithie’s work across various colleges and university campuses in the United States.
Honestly, this is all great for the teen — an experienced digital service freelancer who charges around US$100 a project — and quite a significant addition to her portfolio, regardless of political leanings. Her parents, both media and marketing industry veterans, seem pretty proud of Hrithie, whose biggest client is the soon-to-be President of the United States.
But! Therein lies the irony of team Trump outsourcing work to Singapore while their boss stands (or maybe just portraying himself to be) against the very same practice. Given that his big rhetoric is opposed to companies shipping jobs out of the United States, getting a Singaporean teenager to do his work for him is just the latest incident of his alleged insincerity in the issue:
- In 2005, Trump wrote a blogpost on Trump University stating that outsourcing isn’t such a bad thing after all.
- The Donald J. Trump Collection that includes ties, suits and shirts, were found to have been made in China, Bangladesh, Mexico, Indonesia, and many other countries not the USA.
- Despite bashing Ford Motor and Nabisco for building plants in Mexico (and thus taking away jobs from Americans), Trump has no problem in investing heavily in other countries by building Trump Towers in many other foreign countries.
We’ve contacted both Hrithie’s side and the Trump campaign, and await their comments.
