A Truly Transformative Presidency

Conrad Black:

“…This was the lot of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who put in their tax increase and health care, respectively, in their first two years, and then were severely defeated at their first mid-terms and never moved more than a Christmas card through Congress thereafter. Republican congressional leaders Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole frustrated Clinton, and John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell drove Obama to attempt government by questionable executive regulation, leading to the extreme politicization of Supreme Court nominations.

Trump has revoked almost all Obama’s executive orders, gutted the coercive part of Obamacare, and got his two conservative nominations onto the Supreme Court. Obama’s lasting effect—apart from having admirably smashed the color bar on eligibility for the presidency—has been minimal, as has been Clinton’s. So much for the loudly proclaimed ambitions of both of them to be “transformative” presidents. At transformation, they were a bust. Trump is already ahead of them. America and the world are waiting to see if this president can hold the momentum past the midterms.

The polls consistently have underestimated him, and I don’t believe the polling organizations are unbiased. Nor have they adjusted their echelon of opinion-sampling to allow for the phenomenon of tens of millions of fervent Trump voters largely from demographic groups not in the habit of voting in such large numbers, at least not since the Reagan years. There is also the widely noted phenomenon of the resistance of Trump voters to reveal their preferences, so called “shy Trump voters”—they mistrust anyone who telephones them at home, especially on a robo-call, asking their voting opinion.

Given the polling experiences of the 2016 election, I believe that the 30 toss-up House of Representatives elections and the five toss-up Senate seats are really at least 20 Republican congressmen and four Republican senators, and that Trump gets to hurl himself at the throat of the political class he set out to dispossess for another two years. The Republican gain in the Senate will balance the reduction of the Republican majority in the House, and there will be no remaining credibility for the monstrous fraudulent confection of the Trump-Russian collusion canard that distracted the country for more than a year…”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/29/trumps-winning-demeanor/

Montage: Liberals Call for Dialed Down Rhetoric, Then Brand Trump Evil, Nazi, Worse Than ISIS

Highlights:

“This president has radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did,” said Julia Ioffe (she later apologized, but went on to say “a silent majority” of Trump supporters think racism is okay).

“The biggest terror threat in this country is white men … radicalized to the right,” said CNN’s Don Lemon.

“The same type of propaganda that you would have seen in Germany in 1938 [under Adolf Hitler], the dehumanization, turning people into infested vermin,” said former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt.

“Evil, nasty authoritarianism,” decried Howard Dean.

Steve Schmidt again: Trump’s “erratic behavior, his ignorance, could pose a profound danger to every single person in this country and literally every inhabitant of the planet earth.”

Yet more Schmidt: “This whole caravan in the last week of the election is a giant lie. This is Trump’s Reichstag fire,” a reference to Hitler’s disgusting tactic of blaming the Jews for setting the German parliament on fire when Nazis did it.

“We’re going to see if his reign lasts for 30 days or two years, or a thousand-year reich,” said legal analyst Elie Mystal, referencing Hitler’s propaganda that his would be a “thousand-year reich.”

“It’s not even a question of whether it’s presidential behavior or not, it’s not minimally human behavior,” said MSNBC analyst John Heilemann.

If President Trump is held responsible for the attempted bombing (which he immediately condemned), then who is responsible for the 2017 congressional baseball game shooting, when a Bernie Sanders supporter targeted Republicans? Republicans did not blame Sanders for that attack, but it seems many on the Left lack their good sense.

At the same time, liberal commentators are stoking the very anger they decry — just directed at Trump. Lest Americans forget, a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to assassinate Republicans at a congressional baseball game practice last year, and he nearly succeeded in killing Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). Political violence is by no means limited to the Right.

Shane Mekeland, a Republican candidate for Minnesota’s state House, blamed Democrats for inspiring the incivility that led a man to punch him out of nowhere, leaving him with a concussion and the inability to campaign outside without getting a headache.

https://pjmedia.com/video/montage-liberals-call-for-dialed-down-rhetoric-then-brand-trump-evil-nazi-worse-than-isis/

Reader Comment From Instapundit

Can you imagine if we had this blistering economy with a Democrat President?

The MSM would be covering nothing else.

Even people who are generally on the side of President Trump have come to accept that the biggest story in many, many years, and the biggest success story in the American economy that anyone can remember, and which vindicates every conservative principle about taxes and regulation in spectacular fashion, is not even news that merits being reported.

The American Wage Boom

“Raises for U.S. workers are creating very confident consumers.”

“…Compensation for U.S. workers grew at an accelerating rate in the third quarter, a sign a historically tight labor market is yielding better pay for employees…

The increase was led by improving pay for private-sector workers. Wages and salaries, which account for about 70% of total compensation, rose 3.1% from a year earlier for private-sector workers. That was the strongest year-over-year gain since the second quarter of 2008.

Total compensation for those workers increased 0.8% on the quarter and 2.9% from a year earlier… Worker compensation is now rising at a faster pace than prices. The consumer-price index rose 2.3% from a year earlier in September, the Labor Department said…”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-wage-boom-1541014725

Doug Santo