So, the Pew Research Center polled more than a dozen allies and, guess what, the allies — from the UK and France to Germany, Japan and Australia — don’t like Donald Trump.
I know, you are as astonished as I am. The Pew Research Center is reporting that people abroad — and not only people abroad, Americans, too: really everybody — dislikes Donald Trump. ‘The United States’ image has soured within the international community, hitting all-time lows among key allies,’ Business Insider reports in its précis of Pew’s findings.
Other key points: ‘The results showed that people have less confidence in Trump as a leader than Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping’ — sounds bad, what? — and a majority say that Trump ‘mishandled’ the US response to the Chinese virus. (Actually, Business Insider says ‘coronavirus’, but we all know that, like so many things these days, it was ‘made in China’.)
Then there follows a flurry of numbers followed by the word ‘percent’ or the percent symbol (and here I was told that there would be no math): ‘In Canada, one in five people expressed confidence in Trump, a drastic drop from 51 percent who held that view a year ago.’ Not Canada! ‘Germans gave the US some of “its worst ratings”,’ the authors note, with ‘only 10% who said they have confidence in Trump, compared with 13% in 2019 and 86% in 2016 while Barack Obama was president.’
How should we think of this steaming pile of partisan obloquy?
Badly. We should think badly of it. Why? Because it is all emotion and no evidence.
Item: 86 percent of Germans ‘had confidence’ in Barack Obama. Any sane person, I submit, should close any report that contains that statement and back slowly away. Barack Obama was a disaster as a president. Not a passive disaster like a bombed out building but an active one, like an irradiated garbage dump or an outbreak of foot and mouth disease.
Obama was bad in his policies and bad in the example he set. Bent on fundamentally transforming the United States of America, he made us poorer, less free and less secure. He weakened our military, opened our borders, and injected the toxin of identity politics into tissues of American life. He will never be held to account for it, but he was also the spider at the center of the effort, first, to deny Donald Trump the presidency and then, when that failed, to delegitimate and ultimately destroy his administration by weaponizing the police power of the state against him.
The Pew Research Center tells us that people disapprove of Trump’s handling of the public health crisis created by the spread of the Chinese virus. But in fact, the US response under Trump’s direction has been nothing short of magnificent. He early on saw the threat and actively moved to contain, canceling all flights from China to the US at the end of January, a decision for which he was roundly excoriated by the Democrats, including the basement-dwelling Joe Biden, as ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’. In short order, he mobilized American industry to produce in lightning speed the medical materiel the country needed. Taking advice from the best experts, he may have overdone the lockdowns and the ‘abundance-of-caution’: protocols, but the point was he was taking the advice (contradictory though it sometimes was) of the best experts in the country. At his urging, the FDA green-lighted a host of new effective new therapies culminating in the Manhattan-project-like effort to develop a vaccine in record time.
On the economic front, he oversaw a host of innovative new plans to help businesses and individuals who had been hurt by the shutdowns. It was only because of his steady hand on the tiller that the economy recovered in record time, quickly regaining the 10,000 points it had shed in the market and steadily bringing back jobs.
As a matter of public record, the US response to the Chinese virus, notwithstanding the deadly bungling of political quacks like Andrew Cuomo, has been among the very best in the world. Why is that? Because of the leadership of Donald Trump and the talent and dedication of the people he surrounded himself with to deal with the problem.
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Meanwhile, President Trump has just overseen a world historical peace deal in the Middle East, bringing Israel together with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Other Arab countries will soon follow. The Abraham Accords will echo down the corridors of history long after the partisan yapping of anti-Trump pollsters has been forgotten.
The same is true of the President’s contribution to the resuscitation of American self-confidence. We see this in his muzzling of the Title IX fanatics who had under Barack Obama turned college campuses into an Orwellian gulag. We see it in his recent executive order forbidding the Marxist indoctrination of ‘Critical Race Theory’ in federal agencies and his moves to stymie the anti-American propaganda of the 1619 Project in schools. All such initiatives are part of a larger left-wing effort to teach Americans to hate themselves , their cultures, and their history, and the President is right to oppose them. And we will see a more positive form of opposition later today when the President hosts a conference on American history at the White House.
The latest Pew poll would be merely comical were it not part of that effort to undermine not just Donald Trump but also the healthy patriotism and self-confidence of Americans who regard the achievements of this great country unapologetically and with pride. It will soon be forgotten as the bickering static it represents is overwhelmed by a great electoral victory and the confident progress of those who embrace what is best about the country and are determined to make America great again.
