OPINION:
I will never forget my senior year in high school. We were playing our bitter and highly-rated rival in football and in the week before the game, the other team was trash talking us nonstop. They said we were too fat and too slow and too small to even keep the game close. “You suck, we’re great, that’s why we are going downstate,” was their abusive chant. Then we went out and beat them something like 24-0. It was sweet and it sure shut them up.
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 President Trump as a moron, and idiot, a dangerous fool, who is intellectually and temperamentally unfit for office — something they have been saying since the day he announced he was running for president.
The consensus among the deep-thinkers on the left was that his chances of winning the election were somewhere between 1-in-20 and zero. Hillary 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 Mr. Trump during the campaign “the crudest and most vacuous presidential candidate in human memory.” This utter contempt was coming from the left’s Dream Team of intellectual giants. Then their Dream Team of top economists piled on and universally trashed Mr. Trump’s economic agenda as a recipe for “another Great Depression” and a “stock market crash.”
So now Mr. Trump is not only president, but he has in just one year unleashed one of the most ferocious economic revivals in modern times. The very day that the left began again hurling its latest accusations of Mr. Trump being too intellectually unstable to be president, the Dow crashed 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 now have a 40 percent and $6 trillion gain in financial asset wealth since election day. We now have more than 100 companies that have announced bonuses or pay hikes for their workers as a result of the tax cut that we were assured would not help working class Americans.
Yes, this is some moron we’ve put in charge of the nation’s economy.
To my friends on the left, a little piece of friendly advice: when you trash talk and predict that you are going to win the game 49-0, then you better win. And if you end up losing, you’re supposed to stop the trash talking. It’s time to each some humble pie.
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 Grade B 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” who watched “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, Mr. Trump says and tweets crazy things. He exaggerates the facts. He puts his foot in his mouth. And he keeps winning and winning.
I remember when I was in 5th grade and kept losing tennis matches to a kid I despised, I frustratedly groused to my mother that my nemesis was a terrible tennis player. She brought me back down to earth by placing my hands on my shoulders, looking me in the eyes and saying: “How bad can he be if he keeps beating you?” It’s very reminiscent of the famous 1992 skit from “Saturday Night Live” where George H.W. Bush babbles on for three minutes and the Michael Dukakis character responds: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
It’s time for the left to engage in some serious self-appraisal. If Mr. Trump is such an idiot, what does this say about the intelligence quotient of the elites on the left he keeps outsmarting?
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with Freedom Works.
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