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By the end of his first year in office, Trump could point to a spectacular rise in the stock market. Consumer confidence, manufacturing activity, and employment were at historic highs. New U.S. home sales saw their largest increase in more than twenty-five years, illegal border crossings from Mexico had plunged, and Trump had placed Neil Gorsuch, an outstanding conservative appeals court judge, on the Supreme Court.
The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits fell to the lowest level in forty-four years. Unemployment among African Americans and Hispanics plummeted to the lowest level in the forty-five years records have been kept. Small business optimism soared to the highest level in thirty-four years. Retail holiday sales scored its biggest increase since 2011.
Moreover, ISIS was almost totally defeated and driven out of Iraq and Raqqa, the group’s de facto Syrian capital. While President Obama claimed that ISIS was not an existential threat, FBI agents and CIA officers believe ISIS was attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out millions of Americans and bring the country to its knees. Indeed, ISIS used chemical weapons in Syria and Iraq.
By threatening Syria with consequences if it used chemical weapons and then following through with a missile strike when it did, Trump demonstrated to the world what he told me in June 2006 about what he would do if he were president: “No country would ever dare push the United States around because they would suffer the wrath.” In contrast, Obama drew a red line on Syria’s use of chemical weapons and then backed down.
As a result of Trump initiatives, Arab countries were working together to stop financing terrorists and promoting radical Islamic ideology. Both China and Russia had taken the unprecedented action of voting at the United Nations to impose sanctions on North Korea. Because of pressure he exerted on China, Trump got Chinese president Xi Jinping to order Chinese banks to cease conducting business with North Korean entities.
By denouncing the police whenever a racial controversy erupted, Obama singlehandedly made police a target of executions, perhaps his most clear-cut legacy, along with a sluggish economy, the rise of ISIS, and a doubling of the national debt to twenty trillion dollars. In contrast, Trump never missed an opportunity to praise the police and the military.
Trump’s fiery rhetoric, which horrified those in the media, and his bobbing and weaving on issues like North Korea or Russia, magnified his power. Besides the possibility of a direct nuclear hit or other WMD attack, Trump had to face the new threats of a cyberattack on the country’s infrastructure or annihilation with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
A single nuclear bomb exploded over the United States would generate an electromagnetic pulse that would destroy the chips that are at the heart of every electronic device. While military and intelligence networks may be shielded against EMP, most of the rest of the country’s technological infrastructure is not.
An EMP attack would wipe out personal computers and the Internet. Cars would not start, gasoline pumps would not work, and airplanes could not take off. Heating systems and air-conditioning would shut down, supermarkets would have to close, telephones would go dead, tap water would stop, and radio and television sets would not turn on. Banks would close their doors, and ATMs would stop functioning. Credit cards would become useless, and emergency services and hospital operating rooms would close. Financial records, including stock portfolios and retirement plans, would vanish. In the ensuing chaos, most Americans would die from starvation, and the country would be taken back to the fourteenth century.
To be sure, Trump has his quirks, but they do not compare with the recklessness of John F. Kennedy, the criminal cover-up known as Watergate that Richard Nixon engaged in, the bizarre behavior of Lyndon Johnson, or the repugnant conduct of Bill Clinton. In years past, the media would not report on the private lives of presidents and what they were really like. Today, the media continue to filter the news. Because of the liberal bias of the mainstream media, many of Trump’s achievements are either underplayed or not reported at all.
“The press is so stupid, they don’t get it,” says Trump’s friend Gary Giulietti. “They think he has some ulterior motive for what he does. There never is. Trump sees the end game and works toward that end by making a deal. That’s what he has done all his life. He’s trying to befriend you, gets you to like him, tees it up. He’s going to give you the carrot and a big stick and then he’s going to start giving you more carrots and less stick. He’s brilliant like that.”
To a sizable portion of the country sick of political correctness, a sluggish economy, and a passive foreign policy, Trump was exactly what the doctor ordered.
The fact that the so-called working class is enraptured by Trump goes back to the fact that plumbers, carpenters, truck drivers, and small business owners have to achieve practical results to survive: If a carpenter does not drive a nail correctly into a strut, he will be fired. On the other hand, a Harvard professor can spout theories without any accountability.
Those who are judged by practical results understand that Trump, like them, is all about results, as he demonstrated when he totally rebuilt Wollman Rink in New York City’s Central Park in four months—after the city had worked on the ice rink fruitlessly for six years and spent twelve million dollars for nothing. After he took it over, Trump finished the rink and opened it ahead of schedule at a cost $750,000 below his own projected three-million-dollar budget.
“Donald is a total genius, he really is,” his longtime top aide, Norma Foerderer, told me. “Here he was, this young man working out of a limo, he came to New York, and he saw this old building, the Commodore Hotel, and he decided that this could be a good hotel. And it was—for the homeless. And so he, by sheer tenacity and vision, got the Hyatt people in Chicago to support him, and they worked with him and funded it. And he built the Grand Hyatt hotel, and it began the renaissance of Forty-Second Street.”
“We are guided by outcomes, not ideology,” Trump declared in his maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
When I asked Trump in June 2006 what his Secret Service code name would be if he were elected president, he said, “Get It Done.”
Beyond the results, like Ronald Reagan, Trump has charisma and a showman’s sense of humor and flare.
“Trump speaks in a vernacular that does not sound like a politician,” Bannon says. “He speaks like a human being. He connects. Trump is totally authentic because it’s coming from his heart and his own being. That being is what connects to the working-class and the middle-class people, and it’s very powerful.”
“One of the things that Trump is supersmart about is he focuses in on a narrative like no one I have seen in politics, whether it’s about the rise in the stock market or the issue of football players taking a knee,” Priebus says. “He is focused on perception. Reality is important, but he understands that in some cases perception is more important.”
In the 2008 presidential election, the press hoodwinked Americans into thinking Barack Obama was the messiah. The press never reported that Obama had no significant achievements. As a community organizer, his only success was removing some of the asbestos from one Chicago apartment project. That did not take place until a year after he had left Chicago to attend Harvard Law School.
In a revealing passage in his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote, “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly.” Instead, he said, “I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.”
Nor did the press report until it was too late in the primary process during his first run for president that Obama had spent twenty years listening to the anti-white, anti-America, anti-Israel hate speech of his self-described friend and mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. In one of his sermons, Wright blamed America for starting the AIDS virus to kill off blacks, training professional killers, importing drugs, and creating a racist society that would never elect a black man as president. Through his church Wright gave an award for lifetime achievement to Louis Farrakhan, who has repeatedly made hate-filled statements targeting Jews, whites, America, and gays. If Trump had attended such services and not walked out, the media would have crucified him.
In contrast to Obama, just as they did with Reagan, the media portray Trump as a fool and a danger to humanity. The anti-Trump hysteria reached such proportions that a Potomac, Maryland, couple said they would forgo taking vacations because they did not want to contribute to Trump’s economy. CQ’s Keith Olbermann said on ABC’s The View that Trump has done more to harm America than Osama bin Laden and ISIS combined. Patrisse Cullors, a cofounder of Black Lives Matter, said she believes Trump is “literally” trying to “kill our communities” on a scale comparable to Adolf Hitler. Not to be outdone, Newsweek compared Trump with mass murderer Charles Manson.
But like Trump, Reagan achieved solid results, growing the economy by cutting taxes and confronting the Evil Empire, leading to the demise of the Soviet Union. The annualized increase in the gross national product of 3.5 percent during Reagan’s two terms in office showed that the Gipper knew what he was doing.
By the third quarter of 2017, Trump was closing in on that growth rate at 3.2 percent. Trump had eliminated twenty-two regulations for every new one created. With business no longer being painted as the villain by the White House, the National Association of Manufacturers released its Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey showing the highest level of optimism in twenty years. Small business owners’ optimism reached a ten-year high. The index of consumer confidence hit a seventeen-year high.
Trump worked tirelessly to get a historic $1.5 trillion tax cut for individuals and businesses through the House and Senate, even calling members of Congress at three a.m. from Asia to solicit their support. The bill narrowly passed with only Republican votes, giving Trump the first major legislative achievement of his presidency. The most sweeping tax overhaul in three decades, the tax cut was expected to stimulate the economy, attract more businesses to the United States, incentivize companies to bring back profits stashed overseas, and put more money in people’s pockets. Significantly, the bill also did away with the penalty imposed by Obamacare for not buying health insurance, jeopardizing the future of Obama’s signature legislative achievement.
Democrats and the mainstream media desperately looked for any corner of the tax plan that would raise taxes. In fact, the plan cuts taxes for 80 percent of Americans. Only 5 percent of Americans would see a tax increase of more than ten dollars, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. But the biggest charade was the claim made by Democrats and the mainstream media that “Republicans delivered the biggest gains to the wealthy,” as the Washington Post said in the second paragraph of its lead story. That’s because as it is, the top 20 percent of Americans who file a tax return pay 95 percent of all income taxes. If you make more money, a cut in the tax rate will save you more dollars than if you make less or pay no taxes at all. If the Post had cited that fact in its story, its claim in a news article that the wealthy would benefit more than others would have been exposed as liberal propaganda.
Citing the tax cuts, companies ranging from AT&T and Comcast to Walmart, FedEx, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines announced bonuses for employees of $1,000, pay hikes, new hiring, and billions of dollars in new spending on infrastructure. Betraying their elitism, Democrats and liberal media outlets that claim to champion the middle class derided the $1,000 bonuses as a “PR stunt” (Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen) that throw “pennies” at workers (Vanity Fair) and are “crumbs” that are “pathetic” (Nancy Pelosi).
The cherry on top came a month after the tax bill was passed. Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, said it would take advantage of the tax bill’s provisions by bringing back to the United States nearly all of the $252 billion in cash that it held abroad and said it would directly contribute $350 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years. That includes $30 billion in capital spending, including a new domestic campus, generating 20,000 jobs. And Apple said that following the new tax law’s provisions, it will pay $38 billion in taxes on the money it returns to the United States. Liberal icon Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced as well that the company will issue stock bonuses of $2,500 to each of its 84,000 employees.
On the morning of Trump’s election victory, Paul Krugman of the New York Times predicted that the stock market would crash that day and “never” recover. Indeed, Krugman wrote that with Trump in the White House, “…we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.” The same day that his story appeared, instead of collapsing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 256 points and surged to an all-time high shortly before the closing bell. A year after Trump was elected, the Dow was up 28 percent. The increase in the Dow a year after Trump was elected was the largest postelection bump since 1945.
Most remarkably, by the first anniversary of Trump’s presidency, the Dow was up 40 percent since his election.
In most people’s minds, that speaks for itself, but liberals and the mainstream media tried to undercut Trump’s record of achievement by saying only wealthy people can invest in the stock market. But over the years, the Gallup poll has found that more than half of all Americans own stocks either directly or through stock market funds such as 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts (IRAs), along with pension funds. According to Crain’s, the stock market boom could mean that New York City may be able to pump the $10 billion it contributes annually to pension funds for police, teachers, and other city employees into worthwhile projects like improving the subways.
Contrary to the scary image of Trump liberals like to portray, unlike Obama, Trump made sure that services like the national park system remained open during a three-day government shutdown that the Associated Press and other mainstream outlets blamed on the Democrats.
From mourning those who jumped to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center, the country had gone to creating politically correct “safe spaces” on college campuses, where the supposedly tolerant and compassionate left considered any praise of Donald Trump to be hate speech, and to a media world where any criticism of a person of color is slammed as racist. Thus, when Trump hit back at the black father of University of California at Los Angeles basketball player LiAngelo Ball for suggesting that Trump had had nothing to do with freeing his son from jail in China where he had been charged with shoplifting, Joe Scarborough said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “of course, there’s racist overtures here where the black man was not appreciative of what the white man did for him.” Antipolice sentiment on college campuses became so vicious that Brooklyn College in New York advised New York City police officers to use bathrooms out of sight of students to avoid possibly offending them. Summarizing the sentiment, a student said the NYPD “made safe spaces not feel safe.”
More than anything, Trump stood for restoring American values that consider men and women in the military and police officers to be heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. to be a patriot, and free speech to be among our most precious freedoms.
Unlike Michelle Obama, who said during her husband’s campaign, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” Melania Trump is proud to be a U.S. citizen and gives Trump wise advice that impresses his aides. Greeting the world’s celebrities as Trump’s wife, she was perfectly prepared to take on her new role as first lady.
After his firmness and defense buildup led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, many in the press—such as CBS’s Lesley Stahl in a tribute to the late president—acknowledged that they had been wrong about Reagan. Indeed, in a 2011 Gallup poll, Americans rated Reagan as the greatest U.S. president, followed by John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Bill Clinton.
Whether on the right or the left, almost no journalist or pundit gave Trump any chance of winning the election. “I honestly believe that Trump would crash in the general election like so much blue ice from an Aeroflot jetliner,” Jonah Goldberg of National Review and Fox News said. Dana Milbank wrote in his Washington Post column, “I’m so certain Trump won’t win the nomination that I’ll eat my words if he does. Literally: The day Trump clinches the nomination, I will eat the page on which this column is printed in Sunday’s Post.” “The chance of his winning [the] nomination and election is exactly zero,” James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic.
Well, almost no journalist or pundit gave him any chance. Back on January 20, 2011, I wrote a column headlined “Don’t Underestimate Trump for President.” In a January 6, 2016, article, I predicted that he would win the presidency.
Like Reagan, Trump will eventually be seen as one of America’s greatest presidents. Instead of leading from behind, the famous characterization of President Obama’s approach by one of his aides, Trump led from strength. Instead of knocking America, as Obama did when he apologized for American “arrogance,” Trump is a cheerleader for the United States, telling government and business leaders at Davos that “America is open for business and competitive once again.” Trump did not build an empire worth billions of dollars by being an idiot, a nut, or a bigot.
Throughout history, unconventional thinkers like Copernicus have been laughed at, only to be proven right in the end: The earth does indeed revolve around the sun. If Trump’s words often get him in trouble, he is simply following his own advice in The Art of the Deal: “The final key to the way I promote is bravado,” he said. “I play to people’s fantasies.”
For those who want to succeed, “I would tell them to dream, and to have a vision and a goal,” Norma Foerderer said. “Think about what you want to do, love it, and if you love it enough, you’ll realize your dreams. That’s what Donald’s done.”
Trump’s actions, as opposed to some of his words, are indeed making America great again and changing the rules of the game.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My wife, Pamela Kessler, is the love of my life and my partner in writing books. A former Washington Post reporter and the author of Undercover Washington: Where Famous Spies Lived, Worked, and Loved, Pam contributes vivid descriptions to my books, preedits them, and provides wise counsel throughout.
Whether interviewing Donald Trump on our way to Mar-a-Lago or visiting the FBI laboratory and firing range or the Secret Service training facility, Pam accompanies me. Her descriptions in this book and my previous books are the best writing in them. She has also come up with the titles to many of my books, including this one.
None of my twenty-one books would have been possible if Pam had not strongly supported my risky decision when we were both at the Washington Post to leave the paper to write books.
My children, Rachel Kessler, an independent New York public relations consultant, and Greg Kessler, a New York artist, are a source of pride and support. My stepson, Mike Whitehead, a musician, is an endearing part of that team.
Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media, has been my agent since 1991. His counsel and support have been critical to my book publishing career.
This is my fourth book with Mary Reynics, executive editor of Crown. I am so lucky to be the recipient of her brilliant editing suggestions and astute publishing judgment. Tina Constable, senior vice president, and Campbell Wharton, associate publisher, round out a team unmatched in the book publishing world.