Why the left hates prosperity

OPINION:

Here is Moore’s rule of modern day politics: The better the economy performs under President Trump and the more successes he racks up, the more unhinged the left becomes. It’s a near linear relationship. And it goes for media as well.

That’s why the monthly jobs announcements and the quarterly GDP reports, like the one released on Friday, are the unhappiest days of the year for the Trump haters. News of 3.5 to 4 percent growth and seven million surplus jobs are the bane of the resistance movement’s existence.

So with the economy flying high, the pundits who all predicted Mr. Trump would shut down the world economy, have had to continually invent new reasons that Donald Trump is the worst thing to happen to the United States since typhoid fever.

Consider the latest group rant by the left: Donald Trump has moved the GOP to the far right and has hijacked the principles of the Republican party. Whatever happened, they ask, to the good old days when moderates in the GOP used to compromise, cut deals with Ted Kennedy, and capitulate?

Liberals want a return to the days when the GOP’s standard bearers were people like George H.W. Bush, Bob Michel, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney — and most recently, John Kasich.

Think. What do all these Republicans have in common? Losing. Sure, everyone likes playing with the lovable loser who comes each week to the poker game every Thursday night and blows $200.

My intention isn’t to disparage these men. I have known all of them and respect them all — especially the noble war heroes, Mr. Bush, Mr. Dole and Mr. McCain. Bob Michel was a Republican minority leader beloved by the left for years and years, precisely because he kept the House Republicans where they belonged — in the minority.

It was only when the mean Newt Gingrich “hijacked” the party with a hard-charging conservative political and economic reform agenda that the GOP blasted out the Democrats with dynamite and won the House for the first time in a half-century.

Or consider Messrs. Bush, Dole, McCain and Romney. They all lost the White House and now are treated as statesmen and political icons. Lovable losers.

Mr. Trump’s crime is that he’s a winner. Which is why the left now pines for, as The New York Times recently put it, “principled Republicans.” The party has “lost its way and abandoned what it stood for.” Nicholas Kristof writes in The Times that “sure there are principled people left in the Republican party” — by which the left means people who oppose Mr. Trump — but “as a national movement the GOP is hollow.”

Wait a minute. Aren’t prosperity and opportunity two of the most cherished Republican principles?

What infuriates the Trump haters is that Mr. Trump figured out how to win over tens of millions of disaffected working-class voters with an unapologetic America First platform. These voters abandoned the union leaders and the party of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders in favor of an agenda of better trade deals, border enforcement, lower taxes, less regulation and more coal, oil and gas jobs.

Mr. Trump found the fault line in the Democratic coalition and exploited it like the bombing of Dresden. He persuaded blue-collar workers that they have nothing in common with the radical environmentalists, people like Tom Steyer, who have taken over the reins of the Democratic party and want to destroy their manufacturing, mining and energy jobs as a sacrifice to the gods of global warming.

Because Mr. Trump has taken on the left’s sacred cows of political correctness, victimization, open borders, and racial preferences, he’s labeled a racist, xenophobe, lslamaphobe and woman-hater.

It turns out though that a whole lot of voters agree with Mr. Trump. If Mr. Trump is a bigot for articulating his America First paradigm, doesn’t that mean the millions of formerly Democratic voters who crossed over to vote for Mr. Trump, must also be narrow-minded and culturally inferior rednecks too?

In other words, liberals really do hold the view that blue-collar voters are a gang of “deplorables.” Good luck winning back their votes. Ironically, as Democrats keep complaining that Mr. Trump’s Tax cuts only benefit the rich, actually the wealthiest counties in America are now overwhelmingly voting Democratic and the poorest counties and states are more likely to vote Republican.

Politics is a contact sport. And yes, it really all does come down to winning. There aren’t too many moral victories in politics. As two-time winner Bill Clinton used to say, you can’t change the country if you don’t win.

The problem for the Trump haters and the reason they are so spitting angry is that Mr. Trump is changing the country — for the better. Seven of ten voters rate the economy as good or great. Liberals are doubly angry and frustrated because they were so sure he would fail. Hmm. Perhaps they are the ones who are intellectually inferior.

• Stephen Moore, a columnist for The Washington Times, is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book with Arthur Laffer is: “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the Economy.”