Think back to one year ago. America was at peace. American troops were coming home from the hot spots around the world. Incomes and jobs were skyrocketing, and people had made more wage and salary gains in three years under President Trump than in the previous 16 years under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The swamp was getting drained.
Trump was not far off the mark when he boasted to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes that we had the best economy ever at the start of 2020.
The Trump pivot from the anemic growth of the Obama years was remarkable and almost instantaneous. By the end of 2019, poverty, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates fell to or below their lowest levels in half a century. Wages and household incomes had risen to the highest levels recorded in American history for every race, ethnicity, and gender.
In short, Trump was sailing toward a 40-state reelection landslide running on the traditional election-winning themes of peace and prosperity. A chicken in every pot.
The picture was so beautiful and the skies alight with such warm sunshine that I remember thinking at the start of the year: This is all TOO good. Something ominous would happen. A meteor or an earthquake or some other act of nature would jolt Earth off its axis. An act of terrorism would disrupt the calm and peace. China would start World War III.
I was right. But who would have expected the black swan to be a once-in-a-century killer pandemic?
History will judge how Trump has handled the virus. The jury is still out. If an effective vaccine is introduced in the next few months, he might be regarded by the history books as a hero.
That would be ironic because, in the wake of a loss, it will have been the virus that did him in. It wasn’t Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Russian President Vladimir Putin or CNN or the New York Times or even his antics. It was a microscopic contagious bug. COVID-19 derailed the locomotive of growth that was the commanding argument for four more years. And even with the virus, Trump commandeered a spectacular and improbable V-shaped rebound. This could be the first election since 1968 when it wasn’t “the economy, stupid.”
The virus wasn’t the fault of China. It was an act of God. A thunderbolt from heaven might have as well struck him down — pride cometh before the fall. Or maybe Trump makes a miraculous comeback, and we Republicans are just being made to suffer a bit.
But win or lose, his legacy will be that he taught us once again that enduring lesson that free-market policies are the surest path to prosperity. The actual results have resoundingly vindicated Trump’s economic strategy. Biden is threatening to undo almost all of Trump’s policies. He wants more rules and regulations, more taxes, more debt-spending, more climate change hysteria. That would be profoundly unwise.
As the economist and fellow Trump adviser Arthur Laffer likes to say: “If you reverse the policies, don’t be surprised if you get the opposite result.” In this case, that would be a poorer country. I pray that doesn’t happen, but voters may more fully appreciate what Trump has done for the country if it does.
