Washington Examiner:
“…President Trump is absolutely sitting on top of the world. This is the highest point of his presidency so far.
Consider what has happened in the last four days, and the reasons become clear. On Saturday, Republican senators stuck together. In voting not to prolong a farcical Senate trial with a predetermined outcome, they refused to honor the politically motivated impeachment that House Democrats brought on a flimsy pretext.
On Sunday, the Trump campaign aired ads during the Super Bowl. He advertised to a politically mixed sports crowd, but the point of the ads was not to rile up his base the way most candidates do during primary season. No, he was doing something Republicans so often talk about and so seldom do: He was reaching out to black voters, just as he would do later in his State of the Union speech, and he was doing it for real, based on actual legislative accomplishments in the area of criminal justice reform.
On Monday night, in Iowa, Trump’s political rivals fumbled away one of the best public relations moments they built into their election calendar. Given the chance to emerge from the first-in-the-nation caucuses with a front-runner and momentum enough to consolidate their party, Democrats instead failed to produce a numerical result for at least 24 hours. The results from their unexpectedly low-turnout contest are still being tallied, but the moment is now gone. Their nominating field is in chaos, and only one thing seems certain: Joe Biden, supposedly the strongest candidate to take on Trump in 2020, is wounded, perhaps mortally, by what is looking like a distant fourth-place finish.
On the same night, Trump won the Iowa Republican caucuses with more than 97% of the vote. This demonstrated emphatically that there exists no serious opposition to his candidacy within the Republican Party. If Democrats are divided, Republicans have never been so united.
As if to underscore this fact, Gallup released a poll on Tuesday showing Trump with a 94% job approval rating among Republican respondents, but, even more importantly, the survey showed him with a 49% rating among all voters, the highest of his presidency, and a 63% approval rating for his handling of the economy, up 6 points since November. A majority approved of his recent action against top Iranian terrorists in Iraq, and the share of people “satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S.” is at its highest point since 2005.
Mind you, this poll was taken during Trump’s impeachment trial and before his State of the Union speech.
Then, on Tuesday night, Trump delivered the speech. From the dais, he looked down on the very House Democrats who impeached him frivolously. He addressed the very Democratic senators who will vote out of partisan loyalty to remove him from office.
“Jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging, and our country is thriving and highly respected again,” he said. “The years of economic decay are over,” he said. “Our economy is the best it’s ever been.”
Trump described his agenda as “relentlessly pro-worker, pro-family, pro-growth, and, most of all, pro-American.” He recited one economic accomplishment after another: the lifting of 10 million people out of welfare, the record low levels of black poverty and unemployment, the surge in job creation far over and above all projections made during the Obama era, etc. It’s as if he were saying to those Democrats, “Go ahead. Impeach this. Vote to remove this from office. I dare you.”
Tomorrow, Trump will be acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial, which is what a majority wants, again, according to Gallup’s poll. For the next nine months, he will boast that the vote to acquit him constitutes his exoneration. He will argue that Democrats’ socialist policies threaten to plunge the nation back into economic weakness and foreign policy chaos.
Trump has never had it better. His approval rating was at its highest point before the speech. It may rise yet afterward. His opponents are divided and confused, and the economy continues to run strong. As long as it does so, it will be making the best possible case for his reelection.
Did Democrats ever expect impeachment to turn out like this?…”
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