OPINION:
The unseemly sight of nearly the entire Democratic congressional delegation sitting on their hands and clinging to their chairs throughout President Trump’s State of the Union speech makes one wonder whether they want America to succeed on Mr. Trump’s watch.
Hundreds of American companies are bringing jobs to America and paying American workers bonuses. Democrats sat stone-faced. The lowest black unemployment rate in 40 years. Democrats smirked. We are defeating ISIS in the Middle East. Ho hum. They acted like petulant 12-year olds who fold their arms in defiance and pout miserably when things don’t go their way.
It’s one thing to root against Mr. Trump and his policies and tweets when you’re in the opposition party. But in watching their behavior and listening to their whining, it is hard not to believe that to bring Mr. Trump down, they are rooting against American workers, our safety, security and general prosperity.
Many on the left are suffering from a severe case of anti-Trump derangement syndrome. ATDS sufferers crave bad news. In a bright sunny economic sky, they point to the single cloud. This is why Nancy Pelosi could only sniff that the bonuses workers are getting from the tax cut are “crumbs.”
The other day I was on CNN and I was sparring with April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks — who is to say the least not friendly to Mr. Trump. When I mentioned all of the companies that are hiring more workers and paying bonuses or raises to their employees, including as many as one million Wal-Mart employees, I thought this might elicit some positive reaction.
Instead, she rolled her eyes. “Look at all the stores they are closing and all the layoffs,” she complained. Yes 5,000 Wal-Mart workers will be mostly reassigned, while about 200 times that number will get raises.
Liberals have been protesting Wal-Mart pay scales for years agitating for higher wages, and now Wal-Mart is raising their minimum wage by $2 an hour. But the left still is unhappier than ever.
For at least two weeks the TV networks on the left praised to the hilt Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury.” They obsessed over the charge of whether Mr. Trump was mentally competent to hold office, and even called for his ouster under the 25th Amendment based purely on unsubstantiated charges in a book that has now been exposed as mostly a work of fiction, not fact.
Almost all honest scholars are admitting that the book has zero credibility and is packed with false and made-up accusations with no sources. Many of the Never-Trumpers don’t even care whether the information is true or false. They still act as if it is their Bible. They are the “Birthers” on the left.
Mr. Trump’s successes one year into office are now dismissed as a result of Obama policies, which is rich since Mr. Trump has one-by-one reversed Obama economic policies. If the economy and stock market had tanked in 2017 rather than shifted into a higher gear, liberals would have seized upon the bad news as evidence that his policies are backward failures.
But now that the policies have worked beyond even optimists’ expectations, Mr. Obama gets the credit. They are so blinded by ATDS, they can’t even acknowledge the double standard.
I remember at a Wall Street Journal editorial meeting when Barack Obama was first elected president and he was rolling out Obamacare, the stimulus plan, tax increases, a regulatory assault, and a litany of other dimwitted economic policies, one of the writers said what we were all thinking: If this program works, everything we believe on the economy is wrong.
We opposed the policies, not the man, and in the end the Keynesian big government policies were indeed a failure. We ended up with the weakest recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.
It is true opposition to Mr. Obama on the right prompted some conservatives to similarly root against American success on his watch. When the International Olympics Committee snubbed Mr. Obama’s hometown of Chicago, there were videos of conservatives celebrating the bad news. The cascade of disappointing economic data on Mr. Obama’s watch was too-often cheered by Republicans.
“Some of these people on the right are starting to put politics first and country second,” observed Rep. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Democrat, who is now a senator. “The American people are starting to wonder if they are rooting against America,” he charged. He had a point back in 2009. But, Senator, look in the mirror.
The problem for the left is the obsession with destroying Mr. Trump and standing against everything he is for, leaves them with a vacuous agenda of their own. How do you run in steadfast opposition to an economic agenda that is working?
Most Americans are not especially ideological. Americans are for what works. The United States is on a roll right now that is so economically powerful there’s no point in debating the wisdom of Mr. Trump’s policies. Their success speaks for itself and transcends political spin.
Tens of millions of Americans are starting to see the benefits in their paychecks of the tax cuts that Democrats lied would raise people’s taxes. If Trump haters continue to sit on their hands and oppose America’s comeback, they are shamefully putting political ideology over patriotism. And they are in for a long and miserable seven years.
• Stephen Moore, associate opinion editor at The Washington Times, is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks.
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