Why Trump is Destined for an Historic 2020 Win

By Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/28/why-trump-is-destined-for-an-historic-2020-win/
February 28th, 2019

Each week, as the thundering host of Democratic seekers of their party’s 2020 presidential nomination scramble for attention and try to outflank their rivals to the left, that party rolls out a new policy proposal that lurches further away from where the solid center of American politics has always resided. The most transformative presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, to adapt a sports metaphor, moved center-field, 10 yards to the left under Roosevelt, and 10 yards to the right under Reagan, but always between the 30-yard lines.

In the five elections between 1876 and 1892, the popular vote was always very close, and the Democrats actually led four times, losing in 1880 by only 2,000 votes out of 9 million cast (James A. Garfield defeated Winfield S. Hancock). Even so, their candidate was only victorious twice; both times with Grover Cleveland. The Republicans ran as the party of Lincoln and Grant and victory in the Civil War, and kept expanding veterans’ pensions more widely among their families. The Democrats prevented the emancipated slaves from voting in the South, states they won en bloc, while they rounded up immigrant and working-class votes with their political machines in the great cities of the North and Midwest. Thus the popular vote was deceiving, as the Democrats won almost all the votes in the South and the Republicans won safely enough in the North.

But policy differences revolved mainly around the tariff—the Democrats wanted lower tariffs to get lower prices for the working and middle classes and the Republicans wanted higher tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing growth and profits.

Democrats then departed the center of the political field starting in 1896, when they nominated for the first of three times William Jennings Bryan, a Nebraskan who promoted a radical increase in the money supply by issuing silver as well as gold-backed currency: bimetallism. The Republicans won the next four elections easily, and only lost in 1912 when Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the vote, enabling Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win. His margin was over 3 percent (570,000 votes), because of the unrepresentative margin in the South, but it was still a hair’s-breadth election as he only won California (10 percent of the country’s population) by under 4,000 votes out of 1 million cast in the state. Wilson won on his slogan “He kept us out of war” but delivered his speech to Congress requesting a declaration of war less than a month after he was inaugurated the second time.

The Republicans won the three elections in the twenties quite easily and then, with the Great Depression and World War II, the Democrats won five straight terms under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Since then, the parties have alternated two-term presidencies, with the exception that Democrats receive a single term with Jimmy Carter, and the Republicans three terms with Reagan-Bush (1981-1993); the election of George H.W. Bush may be seen substantially as a reward for the public’s satisfaction with President Reagan. Thus, since Cleveland left office in 1897, there has only been one occasion when either party has not received at least two terms (Carter 1977-1981). Between Wilson and George W. Bush, the second term was one-sided, and usually a landslide: Coolidge in 1924 (25 percent margin), Roosevelt in 1936 (24 percent), Eisenhower in 1956 (15 percent), Johnson in 1964 (23 percent), Nixon in 1972 (23 percent), Reagan in 1984 (18 percent), and Clinton in 1996 (9 percent). George W. Bush and Barack Obama were narrowly reelected because—unlike FDR, Ike, LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan—they did not do especially well in their first terms.

For 2020, Democratic rhetoric and the conventional wisdom relentlessly inflicted on the country by the anti-Trump media claque holds that Trump should be easy to defeat, because his polls have never risen above 50 percent. This is meaningless chatter because it neglects to remember that Trump in 2016 was running against the Republicans as much as the Democrats. As someone who changed his party registration seven times in 13 years, Trump had no call on party loyalty. In the first six months of his presidency, the congressional Republicans sat on their hands and were not entirely averse to the voluminous musings about impeachment. In the only sensible sentence I ever heard from former Arizona senator and ardent NeverTrumper Jeff Flake, “It’s the president’s party now.”

In 2020 there won’t be a split such as that caused by Ross Perot to defeat the senior Bush in 1992 and probably Robert Dole in 1996; and Trump’s record seems certain to be much more successful that Carter’s, who had 20 percent interest rates, high inflation, unemployment, and taxes to deal with in 1980. Whatever happens with the current southern border state of emergency, Trump is putting a border in place and has won that argument. The country wants a border, without government shutdowns. Trump has worked the “Mexico will pay for it” nonsense into the facts of more favorable trade arrangements and has kept faith with his followers, unlike the Bush “No new taxes” pledge in 1988.

Trump is not going to be running as an unsuccessful president as Carter did, or even as a marginally successful president as the Bushes and Obama did. He has delivered tax cuts and reform and great prosperity, as Reagan did, and he is the first president to deal seriously with illegal immigration and oil imports and nuclear proliferation to rogue states (Iran and North Korea), since those crises arose. He has refused to be stampeded by the eco-Marxists while doing nothing to backpedal on the environment itself, and has partially delivered on trade imbalances and will almost certainly reach a much improved trade arrangement with China.

Contrary to the assessments of Trump-haters who supposedly know something about the economy, such as Paul Krugman and the Economist magazine (which on the subject of Trump is as drivelingly hostile but not as amusing as Vanity Fair or the Daily Beast), this economy is not going to cool out appreciably in the next 18 months. As was mentioned here last week, the Democrats are going to pay heavily for the disgraceful Russian-collusion red herring.

To return to the thought at the top of this piece, the Democrats now look more like the Republicans of 1964 (Barry Goldwater) and the Democrats of 1972 (George McGovern), as the reality sinks in that Trump has demolished the post-Reagan bipartisan tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum politics of sloth, a depressing “new normal” and foreign policy impetuosity (Iraq War) or defeatism (Iran, North Korea, Syria). In the aftermath of this shock, the Democrats are like a suicide case contemplating Russian roulette with all chambers loaded, and they are the ones loading in the cartridges: open borders, a top personal income tax rate of around 70 percent, nationalized health care; legalized infanticide; a green policy that bans cars, airplanes, oil, coal, and bovine flatulence; and now reparations for African-Americans, and perhaps, says Senator Elizabeth Warren (0.5 percent American Indian), for the native people. Unless a sensible person like Michael Bloomberg or even Joe Biden—or possibly Amy Klobuchar or Sherrod Brown—gets hold of that party, the Democrats will self-inflict mortal wounds and give Trump the greatest plurality in history, (breaking Richard Nixon’s record of 18 million in 1972).

In 1944, Roosevelt focused on the spurious claim of a Republican congressional candidate that the president had sent a destroyer back to retrieve his dog in the Aleutian Islands, while returning from his Pearl Harbor meeting with General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz. FDR’s Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey, found himself running against the president’s dog. In 1940, Roosevelt just had to recite the names of three reactionary congressmen: “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” and the absurdity of the refrain helped to win him a third term.

Trump is no Roosevelt (either one), but the Democrats seem to be yielding to the ineluctable urge that possesses each party every other generation, to utter a primal scream of nonsense, get everything off their chest and out of their system, be dragged to the padded cell by the voters, and regroup back at center-field four years later. It may even be good for them—as therapy, not as government.

The Resistance is Everything They Accuse Trump of Being

By Jim Daws
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_resistance_is_everything_they_accuse_trump_of_being.html
FEbruary 27, 2019

The defining characteristic of today’s Democrats is that most unattractive of human failings, hypocrisy.  Since Donald Trump’s improbable election, Dems and their media mouthpieces have been demanding that the rest of us recognize the existential threat he poses to the nation.  Their demands are based on a litany of accused authoritarian character traits and fascistic conduct that Trump obviously doesn’t hold and in fact never committed.  The reality is the Democrats are projecting -- accusing Trump of the very outrages that they themselves practiced in their obsession to prevent and then overturn his election.

The most ridiculous of these accusations is that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. Setting aside for the moment the massive economic damage Trump’s energy policies have inflicted on Russia’s fragile economy, let’s examine the Democrat’s actions to protect us from the Russian Bear.

The fictitious dossier, written by a foreign spy citing unnamed Russian intelligence sources, was deployed to smear Trump.  When the dossier failed to defeat him, it was used to justify endless investigations, congressional hearings, and ominous news coverage that hobbled his presidency, wrecked his efforts to improve relations with Russia and greatly diminished voters’ confidence in our democracy.  Only after this witch-hunt was set in motion was it revealed that the bogus dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

In classic KGB style, Obama’s administration deployed our nation’s intelligence agencies to infiltrate and spy on their political opponents.  Using paid informants -- believed to include, at minimum, Joseph Mifsud, Stefan Halper, Henry Greenberg and Felix Sader -- the political appointees heading our FBI and CIA attempted to entrap Trump’s campaign with monetary enticements and promises of Russian kompromat on Hillary Clinton.

Fearful of being held accountable and panicked after Trump’s long-shot election, the deputy attorney general and acting FBI director then conspired to unconstitutionally remove the incoming president using the 25th Amendment, which was intended to facilitate succession in the event of presidential physical or mental incapacitation.  Since Trump suffered no such incapacity, and it was never the DOJ or FBI’s role to allege that he did, this conspiracy is rightly seen as an attempted administrative coup d’etat similar to those against Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Having failed, the same Deep State actors that committed these outrages then appointed a former FBI director to cover up their unconstitutional misdeeds. Robert Mueller organized a team of zealous Democrat partisans who promptly began a series of selective, political prosecutions -- of matters unrelated to collusion -- designed and conducted to terrorize and silence Trump associates. Under threat of financial ruin to their families and spending decades in Mueller’s gulag, many of the targets of these selective prosecutions predictably negotiated guilty pleas.

While these outrages have gone on, our very own American Pravda -- the Democrat’s mouthpieces in the mainstream media -- have published a steady stream of disinformation and propaganda designed to turn reality on its head and portray Trump as Vladimir Putin’s puppet instead of the target of Soviet-inspired tactics employed by Obama’s police state.  Long after Russiagate has been debunked by the emerging alternative media, the legacy media and leftwing cable outlets continue to perpetrate this hoax.

As important as propaganda to the Soviet’s control of their citizens was suppressing dissident voices.  Silicon Valley’s Democratic tech titans are engaged is a similar effort to silence opposing opinions. Using their near-total control of internet search, Google and YouTube are downranking content that they deem noncompliant with leftist dogma.  On social media, Facebook, and Twitter now regularly deplatform and censor users who speak verboten right-wing thoughts. All the while the Democrat’s media “watchdogs” orchestrate well-funded campaigns to scare advertisers away from conservative broadcasters and internet sites.

When all else failed, the Soviets engaged in violence to punish and suppress political opposition.  In America today we have  a domestic terror group, Antifa, organized in all our major cities, and boasting scores of Facebook groups, assaulting Trump supporters in the streets.  Far from condemning their actions, the Democrats and their media shills have justified and even encouraged Antifa.  In the 2016 election, as documented on hidden camera by Project Veritas, Democrats sent paid provocateurs into Trump rallies to incite violence.

In their win-at-all-costs war against Trump, the Democrats have unduly divided America, created fear and loathing among her citizens and torn at the fabric of our democracy.  Soviet-styled totalitarianism is indeed a great danger to our free republic, but contrary to what you’re being told, that threat is coming from the Democrats and not from President Trump.

The Media Will Re-Elect Trump

They would rather believe tall tales about Russia than hear what voters said in 2016.
                 
By  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. 
Wall Street Journal
February 26, 2019             

 Donald Trump’s tenure has been a pleasant surprise compared to expectations, which isn’t saying much. His administration has been as chaotic as predicted, driven by his habit of saying unscripted things. But it also has been productive of a few things: corporate tax reform, curbing regulation, injecting a semi-useful ferment into our foreign policy.

The remainder of his term was always likely to be dominated by the enormous baggage he brought with him—his business and personal history.

What was not foreseeable is the extent to which the FBI’s meddling in the 2016 presidential race, using Russia’s meddling as an excuse, would become a counter thread in the narrative of alleged Trump corruption.
       
There is a humongous irony here. Not expecting to win, Mr. Trump allowed his organization’s desultory pursuit of a Trump tower in Moscow to continue during the 2016 campaign. Make no mistake, though a report that he instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about this matter has been debunked by none other than special counsel Robert Mueller,  it remains true that Mr. Cohen lied to Congress. The lack of any other crime will not stop this episode from being central in a Democratic House impeachment hearing resting heavily on hints that there is something fishy about Mr. Trump’s attitudes about Russia.

But what is true of Mr. Trump is also true of James Comey. He also expected Mr. Trump to lose. The FBI’s own highly questionable actions during the campaign, which inadvertently helped elect Mr. Trump, were also supposed to go unexamined.

Thus we find ourselves in a place where the Mueller report will settle nothing. It can’t prove a negative, so the hunt by Democrats and the media for collusion will go on. Read any liberal pundit: Collusion now means if Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin both wanted Mr. Trump to be president, Mr. Trump is guilty. (Never mind that this stance essentially gives Mr. Putin’s trolls and hackers a veto over who can be president.)

Under Democratic leadership, the House Intelligence Committee is well on its way to becoming a Warren Commission for an alternative universe in which JFK spent a nice day in Dallas. Rep. Adam Schiff has signaled that he intends to rake through Mr. Trump’s business and bank records searching for the motive for collusion crimes that exist only in his imagination.

All this will be cheered on by backward-rationalizing pundits in the New York Times, justifying their own hysteria by portraying the routine, predictable and typically opportunistic partisan opposition faced by Mr. Trump as somehow exceptionally heroic.

A more honest rendition would notice that Mr. Trump—in many ways an accidental president—is also an unusually inexperienced and weak president, lacking even meaningful institutional roots in his own party.
Opinion Live Event

It takes no heroism to oppose him. His statements are easily mocked for not conforming to the expected hypocrisies. He supplies his enemies more extracurricular targets than Bill Clinton did. He is universally reviled by elite institutions, including the media. Except for his knack for turning their hatred into lemonade, his only asset is his rapport with an unrich, unconnected voter segment that falls far short of a majority.
Indeed, it is hard to explain how Mr. Trump can simultaneously be such a menace and such a pushover that every Democratic officeholder in the country thinks, “If only I can stumble into the nomination, I’m sure to be the next president.”

The answer, of course, is pundit vanity: Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy because writers opposing him then are very important people.

Our wonderful English language gives us a perfectly good word for major media interpretations of the Trump phenomenon. That word is fatuous. When historians weigh his well-advertised nature vs. the fantastic overreaction to his election, their first question will be: How did he become president? Voters must have had something in mind when they pulled the lever for somebody so seemingly unsuitable.

But even deeper into the night they will wonder: How did so rich and complex a society as ours survive a pundit class so devoid of judgment, so incapable even of identifying what was interesting about the times they live in?

So here we are. The media will eventually take notice of the strange acts of the U.S. intelligence community and their role in the 2016 election. Either that, or the story of the decade will continue to be told by alternative media outlets that, for all their faults, at least provide a venue for ignored realities to be taken account of.
In the meantime, imagine you’re one of the millions who thinks four years of the Trump show is probably enough. You can only marvel at the obliviousness with which his enemies are working to assure (and even necessitate) his re-election.

The Fatuous Democrats

by Conrad Black
National Review
February 21, 2019
http://www.conradmblack.com/1448/the-fatuous-democrats
     
As the revelations of political manipulation and malfeasance in the FBI and the intelligence agencies under the Obama administration and the early Trump days oozes out of the slowly accelerating investigation of those events, and from the self-serving books of people who are prime targets for indictments, the character of the Democratic opposition is evolving in unusual and even exotic ways. The Clinton party, founded as "new Democrats" who favored the original Gulf War and whose standard bearer declared "the end of the era of big government," has been renounced as abusive of women and generally insufficiently progressive. After 25 years as the Napoleon and Josephine of the Democracy, the Clintons have been banished to the broom closet, an embarrassment from another day.

The successor royal political couple, the Obamas, isn't faring much better. He presided over the deluge of slime that his Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence agencies poured over the 2016 election and its aftermath, and that is now finally being exposed. The extent to which the former president was involved in the Clinton-email whitewash and the false applications for surveillance of the Trump campaign will become a matter of high public interest. Practically the entire Obama legacy was Obamacare, Green Empowerment and the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran Nuclear Treaty. All were disasters and all have been dismembered or repudiated. Mr. Obama was cranking up to being a long-term, high-prestige ex-president. There have not been such since Mr. Truman and General Eisenhower. President Johnson and President Nixon and George W, Bush left office in too much controversy; President Ford and President Carter were not successful enough to have great impact, President Reagan was elderly and in declining health, President Bush Senior enjoyed a bit of it, but not the great eminence of Truman and Eisenhower, two-term victorious war-time leaders identified with great enterprises such as the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO.

The Democrats placed all their bets on Hillary Clinton, and kept raising the ante in the misplaced belief that President Trump could be driven from office as a traitor, a crook, and an incompetent. They bet everything and will lose everything, and some of their prominent personalities will be doing the tap dance before the grand jury in the run-up to the next election. Their vast media claque will suffer a severe lapse of credibility and ratings, given how heavily invested they are in peddling hatred and contempt of the president, which has vastly exceeded fair comment and any acceptable standard of journalistic professionalism.

It is as these facts impend that this astonishing public marathon of Democratic presidential candidates has swarmed out of the undergrowth. Even highly informed Americans can scarcely have heard of at least half of those who are tossing their headgear into the ring. It seems that the wrong lesson has been drawn from the first election in history of a U.S. president who has never before sought or held elected or unelected public office or a high military command. This has been translated into the theory that anyone can be elected, but it misses the point. Donald Trump had been one of the most famous people in America for 25 years. He had pulled over 25 million people to his television program every week for 15 years, and had gone to great and calculated lengths to be well-known to relatively remote echelons of the voting public, such as the followers of professional wrestling. And he had polled carefully for 20 years and was aware of an immense build-up of voter discontent on bread-and-butter and social issues, and on the defeatism and vacillation of foreign-policy direction. He identified a possible majority of voters and placed himself carefully to be able to pitch to them.

This desultory parade of chipper, chirpy, wildly implausible, and unknown people putting themselves forward as the 44th successor to General George Washington at the head of the American people, as the sun sets on the impossible dream of reeling back and overturning the 2016 election, has proved a teeming breeding ground of completely unfeasible policy advocacy. An absurd ritual has developed, as unknown people pop up on our television screens, apologize for something in their obscure pasts as inadequately politically correct, and then stake out uncharted political waters. Spurred on by the ubiquitous and demiurgically verbose Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an inexhaustible storehouse of naïve political opinions, these candidates outdo each other in policy fatuities. She proposed 70 percent tax rates on the highest personal incomes, and the venerable Bernie Sanders, two generations ahead of her, chimed in at 77 per cent. He and Ocasio-Cortez still fit the comparison I made recently of them with the old Marxist guru Herbert Marcuse and the Spanish Communist La Pasionaria.

California senator Kamala Harris took the plunge and confessed to smoking marijuana and being insensitive to some women's causes when she was attorney general of California, and surged to the front of the heave to the left by calling for the nationalization of all health insurance. Though he had no apparent interest in running for president, the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, before his university-yearbook appearance in blackface or as a Klansman, preempted it — proposed the extinguishment of fully born babies, infanticide, if unspecified factors compromised their prospects. This got the more perfervid abortionists to their feet, eyes glowing and mouths ululating. Beto O'Rourke, defeated Senate candidate in Texas, the classic militant Irish-American choirboy, the bony, toothy, Bobby Kennedy look — frothing with self-righteousness like the parish boys' boxing champion — not only opposes President Trump's border, he wants such obstacles as there are removed. Y'all come to America.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez surged back into the lead, (not that she is a presidential candidate at this point, but why not?), with a fascistic green plan that declared war on all non-renewable energy, called for the retrofitting of every building in the country and the end of air and automotive travel, and incited visions of vast brigades (doubtless from what would be the innumerable masses of the unemployed), diapering the nation's cows to save the eco-system from their flatulence. The other candidates embraced "the aspiration" although the authors of the report only deviated out of environmental matters to give a fully livable minimum income to everyone, regardless of whether they had any ambition to work or not. The congresswoman was also among those New Yorkers who opposed a $3 billion tax concession to Amazon for building a technical center in Long Island City that would employ 25,000 people earning an average of $125,000 a year. She should go to night school to brush up her arithmetic. Even the socialist mayor, Bill de Blasio, took his place with the reactionaries and sided with Jeff Bezos (Amazon owner and America's wealthiest person), who may wonder if he doesn't have more in common with his fellow billionaire Donald Trump than with the gang of loopies he has been promoting among the Democrats through his ownership of the once respected Washington Post.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who has no qualifications whatever to be president, announced the establishment of her "committee" while holding hands with the moronic late-night motormouth Stephen Colbert. Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar have been less inane than their rivals, though Klobuchar had some trouble explaining on Fox News how Minnesota had to do better than it was under Trump because of its labor shortage, i.e. the absence of unemployment (2.8 percent), not normally a sign of distressed times. New Jersey senator Cory Booker seemed to spend a whole week wearing the same t-shirt in the same classroom in Iowa talking at the same seven people and comparing climate change to Nazism. Mercifully, Pocahontas is talking to herself.

Michael Bloomberg, almost the only one of them who has had a serious career, has periodically referred to the dangers of political insanity that can arise on Election Day. The third of the septuagenarian section of the Democratic marathon, with Bloomberg and Sanders, the inevitable Joe Biden, well described by my colleague on this site Jonah Goldberg as having "a hot-air balloon for a brain," announced at the Munich Security Conference that he was "embarrassed" by President Trump. The same person at the same place said nine years ago that the new Obama administration would "reset" relations with the Russia. That idea took some strange turns, but Biden knows that American political candidates don't attack their opponents when in foreign countries. It is one of those things that aren't done.

If whoever limps through the Democratic nomination process looks and sounds anything like this group and is weighed down by the hare-brained nostrums the party worthies have been spouting in the last few months, they will provide an entertaining variation on what will then be the lengthy and numerous legal trials of some of the stars of the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Never in American history has a political figure been so underestimated as Donald Trump, as will be very clear on Election Night next year. 

Thank You, Tax Reform

Kevin Hassett was right about growth in 2018. Larry Summers wasn’t.

By The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
February 28, 2019

Chief White House economist Kevin Hassett was right about growth in 2018. Former Obama and Clinton adviser Larry Summers wasn’t. Image: Getty

The American economy is a tremendous engine of prosperity when politicians get out of the way, and for proof look no further than Thursday’s report on fourth-quarter growth. It’s clearer than ever that business investment has rescued the U.S. economy by shifting into a higher gear. Tax reform and deregulation, take a bow.

Growth in the fourth quarter came in higher than expected at 2.6% after a December financial-market scare, and the internals were better than the top line. Consumer spending declined a bit but was still strong. Growth from government spending was negligible—so much for claims of a deficit-led boom in “demand.”

The best news was business investment, which contributed 0.69-percentage points to GDP growth. This is even better than it looks because housing subtracted 0.14. Housing has now been flat or worse for most of the last two years, but that may be a silver lining.

This means the expansion isn’t marked now by ever-rising housing prices, which means growth hasn’t been driven by unsustainable home building. If interest rates don’t keep rising, and assuming the labor market stays strong, the housing market should return to modest growth.

Nonresidential business investment leads to healthier growth by increasing production and labor productivity. Wage gains follow, and the expansion is able to build on itself. The savings rate increased in the fourth quarter.

The nearby table shows the growth and investment trend over the last three years. Housing and consumer spending helped the economy dodge recession in 2016, but the expansion was tired and needed a lift from capital investment. That arrived in 2017, helping to offset a housing drop-off, and accelerating into 2018 when housing growth was negative.

Thank You, Tax Reform

So what changed in 2017? Well, there was that change of Administration that brought a major policy shift—specifically, an end to willy-nilly regulation and harassment of business. Deregulation reduced the political uncertainty that had caused businesses to delay or reduce investment.

Tax reform arrived in 2018, removing the roadblock of the highest corporate tax rate in the world and inviting companies to repatriate profits held abroad. Investment picked up almost exactly as chief White House economist Kevin Hassett predicted it would. He predicted growth for the year would rise by 3.1% in 2018 on a fourth-quarter to fourth-quarter basis, and growth came in exactly at 3.1%.

Mr. Hassett made these predictions in the heat of the 2017 tax reform debate and was ridiculed by progressive economists. One quote that doesn’t age well came from Larry Summers, the former Barack Obama adviser, who wrote in the Washington Post that tax reform would make no difference unless “you believe in tooth fairies and ludicrous supply-side economics.”

When Mr. Hassett pushed back to defend the tax proposal, Mr. Summers said, “I am proudly guilty of asserting that it is some combination of dishonest, incompetent and absurd.” There are other redolent quotes, but we’re compassionate conservatives.

Modern Keynesians have somehow come to believe that tax rates and regulatory bottlenecks don’t matter to growth. This gives economists like Mr. Hassett an advantage as policy makers because they look both at economic demand and the supply created by more investment and work.

Donald Trump’s tariff policies continue to be a risk to investment and growth, and the Federal Reserve is a wild card. But the evidence of the last two years is that deregulation and tax reform spurred private capital investment exactly when a long-in-the-tooth expansion needed it to avoid recession.

After the Coup is Gone

By Julie Kelly 
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2019/02/15/after-the-coup-is-gone-by-julie-kelly/              
February 15th, 2019          
     
As the perpetrators of one of the most shameful scandals in American political history begin slowly to retreat, we are left to ponder one overarching question:

What now?

The tale we’ve been told for more than two years—that Donald Trump’s campaign team, possibly even the candidate himself, colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—has been exposed as a lie. Various investigations into this alleged conspiracy are coming up empty and the accomplices are trying to change the subject. Even more pathetically, some still are clinging to the farce, desperate to salvage whatever still remains of their already sketchy credibility.

To describe it as a witch hunt, the president’s preferred term, is too generous. The American public has witnessed a seditious attempt by powerful interests garrisoned throughout our political complex to overthrow a sitting U.S. president. The orchestrated and failed coup has exceeded the routine combat of our two-party system, where out-of-power partisans disrupt and agitate the other side. No, this has been a full scale insurrection that has violated the boundaries of law, normalcy, and civility in an unprecedented way.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit. The national news media have acted as hatchet men. Influential public officials, operating both inside and outside of government, have aided the stratagem. One of the main culprits just revealed—no, bragged—how a handful of corrupt bureaucrats plotted unlawfully to remove the president from the Oval Office based on the fantastical scheme.

It’s the kind of treachery that is supposed to animate banana republics or Soviet-style regimes—not our country.

And now that the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed this week that their two-year investigation—which involved the interrogation of 200 witnesses and a review of 300,000 documents—will find no evidence of collusion, the aftermath of this scandal is coming into view. How it plays out is anyone’s guess at this point, but one thing is evident: There is deep rage at what has happened not just to this president but to this country—and people want answers.

On his show Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson unleashed a tirade that reflected the anger felt by millions of Americans. “In the end, it was all fake, and they knew it wasn’t real, they knew they were lying,” Carlson said after playing a series of clips by Democratic leaders accusing the president of colluding with the Russians. “We’ve spent two years perpetuating a fraud and they are still doing it. What is it? It’s negligence on a stunning scale. Historians will look back on this moment in amazement and sadness. Why didn’t any responsible person in the media say anything about it, why did they collude in the charade?”

Carlson unloaded on House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the key conspirators from the beginning, insisting that Skiff's grandchildren “will be ashamed of what he did.” Perhaps they will. But only if his progeny have more integrity and decency than Schiff does which, I admit, sets a very low bar.

The cast of villains in this national nightmare is long. At the highest echelon is the Obama White House; to date, no one knows how involved the former president was in executing this scheme because not one journalist has yet confronted Obama about what he knew or when he knew it. Think about that for a moment. Barack Obama’s Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement and intelligence powers to infiltrate and spy on a rival presidential campaign then leveraged that same authority after the election to raze an incoming administration, yet not one member of the press corps has asked him one question about it.

Former administration officials who pulled all the strings, including ex-FBI Director James Comey, ex-CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper continue to attack the president, even accusing Trump of being a traitor and a Russian asset. Members of both the Obama and Bush administrations have become media celebrities by legitimizing the collusion fantasy on cable news shows and opinion pages. NeverTrump Republicans who long ago should have been run out of the public square for their consistently-wrong analysis on nearly every political and policy issue over the past two decades have earned earn rock-star status on social media from Democrats and liberals eager to exploit  their nonstop rants about Trump-Russia as proof “even Republicans” are suspicious.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have diverted time, money, and attention away from critical issues that matter to Americans in order to chase after a ruse that most, if not all, knew was a head fake from the start. It will be impossible to measure how many opportunities to fix illegal immigration or health care or entitlement reform over the past two years were lost while our political leaders across the country were mired in a nonexistent crisis. And probably that was the point. The Justice Department has diverted needed resources to a special counsel probe that has nothing to do with the safety and security of the American people.
Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s investigation has not yielded one indictment related to collusion, yet it has wrecked countless reputations and livelihoods. Gutless elected officials have cowered in the presence of representatives from this ostensible fourth branch of government while Trump-Russia propagandists demand that every politician swear his allegiance and fealty to the almighty and unaccountable Robert Mueller. Any hint of disagreement with the special counsel is portrayed as either cowardice or insubordination.

But no entity has acted more recklessly and destructively than the national news media. From publishing illegally leaked information intended to destroy anyone in Trump’s orbit to ambushing elderly supporters of Donald Trump, the media have defiled their industry to a degree that will be unrecoverable. False reporting has been corrected quietly (when it is corrected at all) and without any consequence.
Sex-for-Trump-Russia-Scoop arrangements result in promotions.


Consider these numbers: Since May 2017, the New York Times has cited the Mueller investigation 4,392 times and posted nearly 1,200 articles, columns and editorials about Russian collusion since January 2017. The Washington Post has cited Robert Mueller 4,162 times and posted 1,100 pieces about Russian collusion just in the past 12 months. CNN has devoted more than 3,000 articles and news segments to Robert Mueller since he was appointed. Those are just the results of a few cursory searches.


But we will never know the total amount of air time, column inches and social media chatter that have been dedicated to a fabricated conspiracy peddled by a media infrastructure desperate to believe it was true and maliciously trying to convince the public of a lie in a vain attempt to satiate their own appetite for political revenge against Donald Trump.

So, what now? Who will pay the price for unleashing this ordeal on the American public? Which lawmaker will
be rebuked and censured for pretending to have evidence of malfeasance that never happened? Which former high level official will be charged for abuse of power?

What journalist will be fired and permanently jettisoned from the industry for intentionally misleading readers and viewers? What editor or media owner will be held accountable for publishing illegally leaked information that exacted real harm on innocent people? When will NeverTrumperers who accused more astute observers of this scheme of being “conspiracy theorists” going to apologize?

How will people harassed by the media and investigators restore their professional standing, squandered savings and mental wellbeing? How can the president regain the time in his term that has been lost to this craven insurgency?

These are only a handful of the questions now arising from the wreckage of the failed Trump-Russia collusion gambit; the answers might be just as infuriating as the questions themselves.

Donald Trump’s Annihilation of the Democratic Party

By Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/06/donald-trumps-annihilation-of-the-democratic-party/
February 6, 2019 

The nadir of the amoral egotism of what might broadly be called “Me-ism” has been reached by the avant garde of the Democratic Party in their race to the bottom of the electoral depths. The renunciation of any notions of sacrifice, patriotic pride, the spirituality of life, or the recognition of anything except the smash-and-grab politics of endless atomized grievances and instant gratification of convenience, has reached what must, in its way, be the end of history.

The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, led the way downwards with an unctuous statement on the virtues of delivering children, assuring their survival as live babies, and then determining in discussion with the mother (of course) whether they deserved to be allowed to survive.

This was an attitude that appalled a large section of opinion in 5th century B.C. Athens. In espousing it, far more than the utter moral vacuity of the cutting edge of the Democratic Party has been exposed. When running for governor, Northam called his opponent a racist and President Trump a “narcissistic maniac.”

The Bigger Fight

The informal, spontaneous, emergent strategy of the Democrats is finally erupting and foaming from the mouths and nostrils of their legislators and candidates in a mighty outburst of opportunistic consciousness. This is a delayed reaction to the destruction of their monopoly on political power by the Trump phenomenon, compounded by the recognition that Trump can’t be impeached and will do everything he promised if he can get a firm enough grip on the apparatus of political power.


The supreme struggle for the commanding heights of American politics, the battle of Verdun or of Stalingrad, has come over immigration. The decades-old understanding between machine Democrats vacuuming up easy Latino votes and largely Republican employers exploiting the cheap labor of illegal Latino immigrants enabled Donald Trump to forge a new coalition of the threatened working class, the middle class exhausted by more than a decade of flat-lined purchasing power, the silent majority of disinterested patriotic Americans, and the legitimate immigrants who do not want their ability to climb the socio-economic ladder as American immigrants have done for 240 years to be undercut by swarms of illegal migrants with no sense of choosing a new country and determining to accept that country’s values and work within them.

Democrats rejoice in proclaiming that Trump didn’t drain much of the swamp when the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. They know perfectly well that the Republicans in the Congress were NeverTrumpers. The only senator Trump had at the outset was the subsequently hopeless attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who could not have done more to assist the cover-up of Democratic skullduggery if he had co-authored the Steele dossier.

Now Trump has banished the worst of the Never Trumpers from the congressional Republican delegation, and won the rest over by friendly persuasion—except for Mitt Romney, who virtually terminated his useful career as a senator two days before he was sworn in with an article on the president’s character. The piece confirmed about Romney what his predecessor from Utah, Orrin Hatch, had called him: “a well-oiled weather vane.” It showed, too, that he was a treacherous one. Despite Romney and the chronically bumptious Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Trump’s allies are now in control of the Senate and its committees and the unearthing of the misconduct of the Obama Justice Department, intelligence services, and the Clinton campaign—as the attorney general-designate has pledged—are about to begin.


Democrats Backed Into a Corner

The Democratic House of Representatives has taken its stand on immigration. Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), they claim to favor border security but are reluctant to do anything to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants. The entire Democratic media echo chamber has gone to maximum decibel levels denouncing the time-honored solution of an “immoral” wall, and claiming the problem is wildly exaggerated and chiefly occurs at airports. They are backing themselves into the corner of “sanctuary cities” where police are instructed to ignore federal immigration laws and census-takers are enjoined from asking the citizenship of the country’s residents, as the Constitution requires.

This is insurrection and the pervasion of the immigration question, around 20 million people who entered the United States illegally, has corrupted the Democratic Party as its leaders balk at rational solutions. These include the establishment of a border, the deportation of serious law-breakers illegally present in the United States, a generous treatment for the people who entered blamelessly as children, and an expedited path to citizenship for the great majority of illegal entrants who have been constructive and law-abiding residents.
With battle joined on immigration, the Democrats have lashed out at the rich, including the close pals of the Clintons and Obamas in Wall Street and Hollywood, and are calling for a return to pre-LBJ, almost World War II-level tax rates, (of the confiscatory levels that drove Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party). La Pasionaria of the movement, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and the modern Herbert Marcuse, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), are both calling for top tax rates in the neighborhood of 70 percent. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, junior U.S. senator from California, surged to the fore by calling for the nationalization of the entire health insurance industry, and, effectively of the entire gigantic field of health care. Never mind single-payer healthcare, this is no-payer health care. Doctors of America would become de facto federal employees.

Exalting Atrocities

The Democratic train is now roaring off the tracks and down the third rail which politicians used not to touch, out of a lingering sense of self-preservation. The logical coruscation of this dispersal—this flight from the political center to the left, to stage a goal-line stand of the die-hards against the Trump ogre, grinding relentlessly forward, heedless of the semi-daily announcements by most of the national media of his imminent collapse in legal shambles, is to repurpose abortion as the end of the policy rainbow.

Abortion is too intrusive, too inconvenient; let the children be born and then the mother can decide whether she wants to be a mother after all, or kill the child, or give it up for adoption.

This was the logical end of the nonsensical Roe v. Wade decision that childbirth is exclusively a matter of a woman’s control over her body: it decided correctly that the state does not have the power and should not seek the power to inflict childbirth on a woman who does not want to have a child. But it ignored the real question of when the unborn attain to the rights of a person. That is why the decision is vulnerable and the Democrats, in cold terror that it could be overturned, are in panic and are moving the battle-lines forward to the position of Ralph Northam, far from a natural oracle of moral opinion this past week.

To hell with control over their own bodies! Women will decide in post-natal calm whether to kill the child. It is to this unspeakable assault on every principle and value that has guided, inspired, and undergirded American civilization, where the Democrats are arriving at their last post.

#MeToo was justice by denunciation. Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had to be believed over Judge Brett Kavanaugh because she was a woman. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) saved the balance of evidence and of probabilities, and rebutted justice by mere unsubstantiated denunciation. The Democrats are moving on: women will not only cause the rejection of male candidates for high positions, but have them prosecuted, which in the corrupt American justice system in 95 percent of cases means imprisoned. For good measure, the warrior-queen sisterhood will also decide, after birth, whether their children will be allowed to survive. Life is not remotely sacred, it is to be encouraged if convenient and snuffed out if not.

A Frenzy of Extremism

Donald Trump’s greatest achievement may be the total annihilation of the Democratic Party in its present mutated and degraded form. The Democrats have been allowed to slither to their present state of moral degradation with the witless and spineless collaboration of look-alike Republicans who are easy to defeat, like McCain and Romney, or can be survived, like Reagan and the Bushes, or destroyed, like Nixon.

Faced with a Trump they could not defeat and cannot destroy, Democrats appear to be entering a frenzy of primal extremism. If the Democrats go to the voters next year as the party of infanticide, open borders, a 70 percent top personal income tax rate, and the practical abolition of private health care, they will vanish more quickly, and with less distinction, than the Whigs, who at least had serious leaders like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln before their party imploded. This thronging riff-raff of Democratic presidential aspirants couldn’t lead the country across Washington’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, and won’t get an invitation to try.