The deafening silence of the President’s critics

It’s a playlist that seems stuck on repeat: Someone on the left makes a wild, baseless prediction that America’s economy will be destroyed by the Presidency of Donald J. Trump . . . only to be proven wrong time and time again by every shred of evidence.

It happened again on Friday, as the U.S. economy beat expert expectations (sound familiar?) and grew at a powerful 3.2 percent. What’s more, the first quarter of a given year is often the slowest, meaning American GDP growth in 2019 could soar even higher.

When President Trump took office in 2017 with a message of national renewal, he saw America as an engine of prosperity waiting to rev up again—a vision that most of Washington had written off years earlier. When he set the goal of returning to 3 percent growth, President Obama’s former economic adviser Larry Summers said that target was “fair enough if you believe in tooth fairies.”

Of course, that forecast pales in comparison to now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) description of President Trump’s tax cuts as “Armageddon,” or to liberal economist Paul Krugman’s prediction of a “global recession, with no end in sight.”

Yet the Trump Economy’s strongest feature is even more underreported than its impressive top-line numbers. “Blue-collar workers are beating white-collar workers,” National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow says. In other words, it’s the working class rather than the professional class that’s getting the biggest boost from higher wages. 

None of this happened by accident. President Trump’s economic agenda from day one has been to rebuild the great American middle class from the bottom up. That means lower taxes, trade deals that put our workers first, American energy leadership, the return of manufacturing jobs, and a commitment to having the best infrastructure on Earth.

By the numbers: 2019 starts off with a bang

Ben Carson: A new dawn for economic opportunity