Harold Wilson was right that ‘a week is a long time in politics.’ But, hey, watching the president in Grand Rapids the other night, and taking a gander at some recent polls, I am willing to ascend pretty high up the old backyard oak, shimmy along a well placed branch and say, with confidence if not quite certainty, that Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election, and win handily.
But, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chris Matthews, James Comey, John Brennan, Cher, CNN, those pathetic females on The View, college professors across the country, George Conway, Maxine Waters, Mad Max Boot, Twitter-addled Bill Kristol and writers for his novelty web site The Bulsomething all tell me that’s impossible.
A formidable phalanx of contrary opinion.
Still, I will bear up under the onslaught, even if the aspiring comic Kathy Griffin shows up with a bucket full of decapitated Trump dolls and Madonna promises to purse her lips and more if enough men vote against the president.
I admit that is quite a team on the anti-Trump side. I understand that the 30,000 cheering supporters who showed up in Grand Rapids the other day can be a fickle lot. Not only that, they are completely unrepresentative of opinion in Ann Arbor, the borough of Manhattan, the People’s Republic of Amherst, Mass., or the commune known as Berkeley, Cal.
Nevertheless, contingent upon certain realities, I am confident.
What are those realities?
Let me start with some of the most variable:
- The stock market. It stood at 18,000 and change when Donald Trump was elected President. It closed yesterday a few points shy of 26,000. I like to back up my points with proven authorities, so let me call upon Paul Krugman, economist extraordinaire, Nobel laureate and columnist for our former paper of record, The New York Times, who, when asked on November 9, 2016, when the stock would recover from the insult of Trump’s election, said ‘probably never’. Oh, well. we all make mistakes. But here’s the thing. The stock market, like the weather, does vary. It goes up. It goes down. Over the long term, it goes up, but what we’ve just seen is extraordinary, as anyone with a 401K account can tell. And here’s my point: a lot of people with 401K accounts vote. They like it when they look at their accounts and see it growing. Which, under the watch of Donald Trump, it has done, spectacularly. It could all go south. Someday, maybe someday soon, there will be a recession. But let’s also keep in mind…
- Economic growth. Last year, the US economy grew at a faster rate than anytime since 2005. The White House put it at 3.1 percent, other sources say 2.9 percent. However you slice it, the US economy is on fire, in large part thanks to regulatory reform. The crazed, deep-state bureaucracy that requires a thousand page-form to open a lemonade stand is slowly but surely being gutted. Which is one reason that…
- Unemployment is at generational lows. Black and Hispanic and Asian unemployment are at historic lows. Not only that, the employment in question has seen significant wage increases for the first time in decades. Blue collar jobs are better paid now than they have been, and not only that they are subject to…
- Lower taxes because of the cleverly designed tax cuts. I say ‘cleverly’ because, although I live in a state controlled by brain-dead fiscally incontinent, spendthrift liberals and therefore am penalized by that cleverness, the tax cuts favor those jobs and those states that have not constructed their own tax policies around tax subsidies that, ultimately, hurt states that have keep their economic houses in order. Which brings me to…
- Judicial appointments. There have been scores of federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices confirmed, all, as the president promised, of a Scalia stamp, that is of ‘constitutionalist’ persuasion. Then there is…
- The president’s long-running fight against illegal immigration, part of which involves building a wall to secure our southern border. This is an endeavor that has great symbolic as well as practical value. It was a central campaign promise, one that Democrats have labored mightily to prevent him from fulfilling, but one that he has pursued with single-minded tenacity and, lately, more and more success.
- Speaking of symbolic achievements, there is also Israel, our moving our Embassy there to Jerusalem (a move that more and more countries are making because of our example) and, just recently our recognition of Israel’s legal control of the Golan Heights.
- There is also, of course, the president’s careful resuscitation of our military and other elements of our national security, such as his recently announced determination to guard against the effects of an EMP attack, which could cripple the country. He has also been bold about Foreign policy.
- President Trump’s overtures to North Korea, and his determination to stand up to China, are risky but also necessary. The public sees that. Moreover, they see that this President, unlike the last, loves America and puts it first among his responsibilities. Barack Obama said that the America was ‘exceptional’ only in the way that Greece was exceptional to Greeks, i.e., not exceptional at all. Donald Trump knows better, he says so, and most America is not too beholden to the enervating disease of coastal elitists to understand this. They want their President to put America first, to put America’s interests first, to eschew the testosterone-free ethic of transnational progressivism. This Donald Trump has done.
A week is a long time in politics. All sorts of things can change. At one point after the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush’s approval rating was something like 88 percent. That changed rapidly. All sorts of things can happen. I think of the great opening to Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks (ca. 590) ‘A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.’ Were truer words ever written?
All sorts of things might happen to intervene against Donald Trump’s reelection. But what we have just witnessed is perhaps the most stunningly successful first two years of any administration in history. With the end last week of the long-running farce directed by Robert Mueller, and with the cold light of exposure stealing over the habitations of the purveyors of fake news and the puppet masters behind the whole ‘Russia collusion’ delusion, the President will find that a cloud has been lifted over him and a miasma of uncertainty dissipated among the public and commentators still in possession of their reason (no, not you Gabe Schoenfeld).
Psephology is not prophecy, and only a rash man would, at this distance venture a prediction. Still, I will say that if the next two years are anything like the last, Donald Trump will win in a landslide. I don’t know what the NeverTrump fraternity will do. Pretend they are Japanese soldiers stranded on some remote Pacific islands after the bad news of August 1945, I suppose. Part of me hopes they fight on in their little fox holes, sending smoke signals to their ever-diminishing band of followers, reminding one another of how dignified and decent and upstanding they are. Maybe, if they are especially good, Mitt Romney will come to their annual convention and they can tell stories about that noble maverick John McCain who single handedly prevented the evil Trump from putting paid to Obamacare and, by peddling that scurrilous bit of oppo research commissioned and paid for Hillary Clinton, almost managed to scotch the candidacy and then the President of the evil orange man.
Almost. What a sad word. Macbeth was right, they ‘have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it,’ and woe unto them because of it. I am looking forward to 2020.
