… Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it. We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy.…
It was a promise of a better life “for the people I have met all across this nation that have been ignored, neglected, and abandoned.” He described “the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.” He promised to be the voice for industrial workers whose industries had been closing U.S. plants, especially in the Midwest.8 And throughout the campaign this message was remarkably consistent. At times during his debates with Hillary Clinton, he sounded like he was running for governor of Michigan. One of the great ironies of 2016 is that the first-timer understood the rules of the game better than the political pros. Unlike most candidates, Trump ran a campaign premised on the fact that the Electoral College really does decide U.S. presidential elections.
Meanwhile the rugged and rude Trump style inspired—or at least provided an excuse for—opponents in politics and the press to discard the normal rules for objectivity, fairness, and governmental restraint. The campaign to impeach him began almost the moment he won the election in November of 2016. On his first full day in office in 2017, hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington to protest his presidency—an event organized well before his presidency had even begun.
Trump’s critics styled themselves “the Resistance,” as if they were confronting a tyrant at the head of an invading army rather than their duly elected president. Most disturbing was the resistance movement inside the federal government, which in 2016 included at least one FBI attorney falsifying an email and duping the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into approving a wiretap on a Trump campaign volunteer. Reports from the Obama-appointed inspector general of the Justice Department and others revealed that a cabal at the FBI repeatedly misled the court in its effort to investigate Team Trump and failed to disclose that the bogus “Steele dossier” of accusations against Trump was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign or that the government already had reasons to doubt it that were never shared in warrant applications.
In December 2019 the court found that FBI personnel had provided information to the court “which was unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession.” The court ordered the FBI “in a sworn written submission” to explain what it was doing to prevent such abuses.9 In 2020 the Justice Department acknowledged that at least two of its approved warrants were invalid. In March of 2020 the court effectively banned FBI agents involved in the Trump campaign wiretap abuses from appearing before it on any other matters.10
The FBI’s surveillance of Trump associates is perhaps the worst abuse of federal power in recent history. But fortunately a more encouraging trend was also happening in America at the dawn of the Trump era. A surge of optimism among business owners was translating into plans for new investment that would eventually lead to that record-setting job market. This surge of optimism caught much of the media by surprise—but not the coauthors of this book. While many journalists were reeling from the shock of Trump’s victory in November of 2016 and predicting economic doom, Maria told television viewers that she’d be “buying the stock market with both hands.”11 Investors who acted on that sentiment enjoyed significant gains.
Trump’s trade policy was an unknown, but a president promising significant tax and regulatory relief was sparking broad enthusiasm among business owners from Wall Street to Main Street. By the time Trump took office on January 20, 2017, that enthusiasm was translating into expanding opportunity for American workers.
The National Federation of Independent Business’s chief economist, William C. Dunkelberg, reported that the month Donald Trump took office a rise in the percentage of small business owners planning to create jobs added up to “the strongest reading since November 2006.” And, unlike 2006, this burst of hiring wasn’t occurring during a housing bubble. Trump’s arrival at the White House brought still more good news for workers. Reports of increased worker compensation in the NFIB survey hit a ten-year high.12
The good news on U.S. employment would continue for the first three years of the Trump presidency as the promise of a lighter burden on American business was fulfilled. This unconventional political approach of Trump meaning what he said on the campaign trail has marked him as a Beltway oddity even more than his colorful Twitter commentary. And perhaps that is one reason why much of the Washington establishment still cannot forgive him. His presence upended their power structure.
Many of our media brethren have proven unable or unwilling to report on Donald Trump objectively, and a few have even explicitly made the case that he doesn’t deserve traditional journalistic standards of fairness. Media criticism of President Trump has been so constant and so intense that most Americans probably don’t even remember the moment in 2017 when CNN declared that the restoration of an FCC policy that had been in place for decades meant the “end of the Internet as we know it.”13 Also largely forgotten are the warnings of economic and societal catastrophe as a result of his tax cuts.
In the second month of the Trump presidency, a news report in the New York Times essentially predicted that the highest elected official in the United States would ultimately lose a power struggle with Washington’s unelected establishment. Times reporters faulted Mr. Trump for “believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to
