Hello all, been too long a lapse since I have posted to my own website. Part of the delay owes to lockdown anxiety: preoccupied with finding work that actually pays. ;-> And now this:
The venerable television anchor Lou Dobbs, in his new book published this week, “The Trump Century,” 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.
I know this well, as I assisted Dobbs in writing and editing his new book. Published by an imprint of HarperCollins (Broadside Books, $28.99), it is on sale now for $20.49 at Amazon, link here: https://amzn.to/2RPOetn. For true-red Dobbs fans, you also can buy his book at https://loudobbsshop.com/. (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.
A Litany of Successes
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 are friends having a few beers.
Lou Dobbs spent three decades espousing conservative truths at CNN, back in the days when it 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.
Most Controversial President in History
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.
Trump: Right on Most Everything!
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