I remember when I was in fifth grade and kept losing tennis matches to a kid I despised. After one match I slammed down my racket and fumed to my mother that my nemesis was a really terrible tennis player. She brought me back down to earth by placing her hands on my shoulders, looking me in the eyes and saying: "How bad can he be, if he keeps beating you?"
Which brings me to the trash talking from the media and others on the intellectual left about Donald Trump in the wake of Michael Wolff's new anti-Trump screed, "Fire and Fury." The talking heads are now out in full force, once again thrashing Trump as a moron, a dangerous fool who is intellectually and temperamentally "unfit for office" and even "mentally ill." This is what they have been saying since the day Trump announced he was running for president.
The consensus among the never-Trumpers was that his chances of winning the election were somewhere between 5 percent and zero; Hillary Clinton was going to win one of the greatest landslides in the history of American politics and even deep-red Texas would go Democratic. New York Magazine called Trump during the campaign "the crudest and most vacuous presidential candidate in human memory." Then the dream team of top economists piled on and universally trashed Trump's economic agenda as a recipe for "another great depression" and a "stock market crash."
Trump not only defied the political sages by winning but also in just a year has unleashed one of the most ferocious economic revivals in modern times. The very day that the left began again hurling its latest accusations of Trump being too unstable to be president, the Dow plowed through the 25,000 mark for the first time ever. Instead of the stock market crashing as a result of the Trump economic agenda, we've had a 40 percent and $6 trillion gain in financial asset wealth since Election Day. More than 100 companies have announced bonuses or pay hikes for their workers as a result of the tax cut -- the same tax cut that pundits insister would not help working-class Americans.
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Yes, this is some moron we've put in charge of the nation's economy.
This isn't the first time the left has questioned the aptitude of a conservative president. Throughout Ronald Reagan's eight years in office, liberals dismissed the Gipper as a B-list actor who attended tiny Eureka College and who was so stupid that he thought ketchup was a vegetable. He was accused of "a penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems," and ridiculed for watching "Little House on the Prairie" reruns with Nancy in the White House at night. This simpleton won two landslide presidential elections, resurrected the stagflation-ravaged economy of the 1970s and won the Cold War. What an imbecile.
My friend Craig Shirley, one of the definitive Reagan biographers, tells me that "one similarity between Reagan and Trump is that both were always underestimated by their political adversaries."
Yes, Trump says and tweets crazy things. He exaggerates the facts. He puts his foot in his mouth. Meanwhile, he keeps winning and winning.
As my mother would say: If Trump is such an idiot, what does this say about the intelligence quotient of the elites on the left whom he keeps outsmarting?
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