Did Donald Trump Seal This Deal By Writing His Name on a PowerPoint Printout?

As it became apparent that Donald Trump's purportedly heroic efforts to save Carrier jobs weren't quite as successful as he would have you believe, the president-elect took a different tack at making America great again on Tuesday, announcing a $50 billion investment in American technology start-ups by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which will purportedly create 50,000 jobs. More importantly, Trump took care to emphasize that SoftBank and its chief executive, Masayoshi Son, would never have agreed to do this if it were not for November's election results.

This may shock you, but it's not at all clear if this is true. The Post's account quotes experts who suspect that much of this money had already been earmarked for U.S. investments, and that Son may be trying to slyly curry favor with the Trump administration in the hopes of facilitating the proposed acquisition by Sprint, of which his company owns 80%, of T-Mobile. But set aside, just for a moment, the issue of whether Trump is telling the truth about all this, and take a close look at what Son showed to the assembled reporters in the Trump Tower lobby. What's that hastily scrawled at the bottom of this PowerPoint deck he's holding?

Perhaps the detail in the Post's photo will be a bit clearer.

Not to go all /r/conspiracy on you, but here's what it looks like to me. That writing at the top? Today's date: "2016 Dec. 6th." That second bit? The name of SoftBank's chief executive, "Masa Son." That leaves that final, elusive, magical line, which, by process of elimination, just might be a hastily scribbled version of the signature of one Donald J. Trump.

It's unclear what, exactly, Trump and his people hoped to accomplish with this, but it's hard to imagine writing one's name and date in this particular context for any reason other than agreeing to the terms of a contract, right? If the next president of the United States really thinks it's a sound business practice to use stray PowerPoint slide printouts to commemorate multibillion-dollar investment agreements, we're even more doomed than we thought.

h/t Max Read