Hello all, been a while. So, what did you do on your lockdown break?
Me, I have lost fifteen pounds(!) since March, trimming down to a weight I haven't seen in 15 or 20 years. Also, I helped write an entire book, one that will drive my liberal friends crazy.
It came out on Tuesday of this week: "The Trump Century," by the venerable and voluble Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs, with my assistance. Subtitle: "How Our President Changed the Course of History Forever."
And he has.
If President Trump can win re-election--and that is a primary objective of Dobbs's publishing his new book--it could well mean another roaring run upward in the stock market. For at least the next year or two, in my view.
That could help lift the S&P 500 Index, the Dow industrials, and the Nasdaq all in lockstep. Banking stocks including JPM, MS, and CITI would benefit especially well, and tech stocks like AAPL, AMZN, GOOG, and FB might continue their apparently irresistible rise upward.
A Trump win also would make history. More than a hundred years have gone by since any sitting U.S. president was able to win re-election in a year when the country was mired in a recession.
The ongoing U.S. recession, caused by the lockdown in response to the China virus that set off fear, death and government intervention around the world, has been fast on the mend. Happily.
In "The Trump Century," Lou Dobbs makes the passionate yet fact-packed argument that Donald Trump is one of the best presidents in the history of the United States of America. Published by an imprint of HarperCollins (Broadside Books, $28.99), the book is on sale now for $20.49 at Amazon, link here: https://amzn.to/2RPOetn. (I get no cut of sales, and I hope the book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, anyway.)
More importantly, Dobbs makes the convincing case that the huge changes President Trump has all but singlehandedly engineered will resound for decades to come, whether Americans re-elect him on Nov. 3rd or bounce him from the White House.
Dobbs argues that on the most critically important issues defining America’s future, politicians will be debating within the parameters set down by @realDonaldTrump himself. This litany includes:
China as the “real enemy,” as Dobbs puts it in his book. Trade. Immigration. Open vs. controlled borders. Law and order. A pro-business bent vs. burdensome regulations. How to negotiate for peace in the Middle East. The fight against ISIS. Free speech vs. political correctness. Even a politician’s speaking style—stentorian, stilted, and all-teleprompter, or the Trumpian approach of speaking to us as if we were friends having a few beers with him.
Lou Dobbs spent three decades espousing conservative truths at CNN, now owned by AT&T (T). This was back in the days when CNN strived to tell the news fairly and objectively, free of the liberal slant that has become the network’s business model. In 2011 he joined Fox News and its sibling, Fox Business Network, where I was an anchor at the time.
Albeit, Lou & I go back even farther than that. My first TV appearance ever, when I was a young reporter at The Wall Street Journal, was on “Inside Business,” the show Dobbs was hosting on CNN. It was sometime around 1986. I was so proud to be on TV that, rather than remove the pancake makeup from my face and hands after the segment ended, I kept it on and repaired back to the WSJ offices. So I would be able to share my TV triumph with anyone who asked about my polished mug.
President Trump stands as perhaps the most controversial president in American history. In some quarters, alas, he is one of the most virulently despised presidents ever to serve. But the haters, and I have mingled with some of them and monitored the views of many more, rarely talk about this president’s policies.
Rather, they detest President Trump’s personal style. My theory is they resent and decry the personal qualities in him which they fear they themselves possess: his outsized ego and braggadocio, his alacrity for bending the facts in his direction, his bent for bashing back with blunt and bitter broadsides against those who attacked him first.
This resentment and projection of their own inner flaws onto President Trump makes them blind to the real truth: this president has been right on most every major policy clash with the ultra-liberal Left and the one-sided mainstream media. As Dobbs points out in “The Trump Century,” the odds must be a million to one that a president could be right so many times in a row—and his detractors could be proven to be so very wrong.
A sampling:
- The Trump Tariffs. Experts said they would crater the economy and spark a worldwide trade war. Wrong! Instead, U.S. growth accelerated, and the tariffs offered Trump a self-created cudgel that he wielded to force China to sit down and renegotiate decades of unfair trade practices that cost a few million U.S. jobs.
- Peace in the Middle East. Lions of the Old Guard, led by Obama-era Secretary of State and Iran lapdog John Kerry, said no solution would be reached without including the Palestinians at the center of everything. Wrong! As we see lately with Israel’s signing a new treaty (the first Mideast accord in a quarter-century) with United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with more to come.
- Getting Tough on Iran. The media and the Democrats freaked out when the president pulled out of the Obama deal with Iran on nuclear weapons. And when Trump authorized the military to take out the Iranian chief of terrorism (and the head of ISIS). Literally, foes predicted a third World War. Wrong! The other day, the Iranian government offered a full prisoner exchange with the U.S. That is anything but going to war.
- Pulling out of the Paris climate accords. The president’s withdrawal would all but set the earth on fire, the media and their Dem allies insisted. Wrong! Last year, U.S. carbon emissions fell to the low levels seen in 1985, despite the 35 years of industrial development.
- The “Muslim Travel Ban.” The Trump haters called the president a racist and a xenophobe (an empty charge they leveled thousands of times). They called this temporary order unconstitutional and predicted the U.S. would become a pariah in the world. Wrong! The Trump ban affected only half a dozen or so nations—of some 45 Muslim countries worldwide. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the president’s right to impose this order.
- The U.S. Economy. The doubters insisted the eight years of poky growth in the Obama era were the New Normal. The U.S. was destined to be mired in 2%-at-best GDP growth. The manufacturing jobs we lost to overseas rivals were never coming back. Wrong! GDP growth grew almost 50% faster under Trump by his second year in office. Unemployment rates hit all-time lows for blacks, Hispanics, Asians and women. This just in: in 2019, personal income for every American grew an average of almost 7%—the highest increase in fifty years of record-keeping.
In “The Trump Century,” Lou Dobbs offers a lot more evidence of this rather amazing record of presidential successes. Few opponents of President Trump may bother to read Lou’s latest book; those who do will find it awfully difficult to argue with the facts & stats that he has laid down in the president’s defense.
And for fans of the president: read this book to learn the facts behind why your sentiments are entirely right. --DK
[Note: a similar version of this article can be read at my website, here: The Trump Century - Dennis Kneale]