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NEW YORK — Whenever liberals see Donald J. Trump strolling through Palm Beach, they should disturb his peace just long enough to yell two words at him:
“Thank you!”
While they never will admit it, the now-former president secured numerous policy objectives that leftists advocate. However, Trump answered liberal prayers through conservative means. This, of course, makes him “worse than Hitler,” as Refuse Fascism organizer Sunsara Taylor told Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson.
So, which Leftist bullseyes did Trump hit with Rightist bullets?
–Cut CO2! Reducing perfectly natural carbon dioxide (or “carbon pollution” as Obama smeared it) approximates Holy Communion in the Left’s Church of Climate Change. The Left should be thrilled that CO2 emissions fell 2.9 percent between 2018 and 2019.
Why?
Fracking!
Yes, center-Left boys and girls, that dirty, nasty, evil fracking that you hate more than steamed spinach yields abundant natural gas. As skyscrapers, power plants, and buses switch to gas, they respectively yield 32 percent less CO2 than with heating oil, 50 percent less versus coal, and 88 percent less beside diesel. This helped push energy-related U.S. CO2 output into a post-1985 pit.
–Stop income inequality! For years, the Left screamed for an end to American paychecks in different amounts. If only we all earned the same, they dreamed.
Under the income-inequality-hating Obama-Biden Administration, the relevant Gini Coefficient actually increased from 0.466 in 2008 to 0.481 in 2016 — 3.218 percent more “unfairness.”
Under the Left’s despised “Donald Trump,” Gini advanced from 0.481 in 2016 to 0.489 in 2017. But then Gini fell two consecutive years, to 0.486 in 2018 and 0.484 in 2019 — 1.033 percent less “unfairness.”
Credit Trumponomics. Tax reductions, regulatory relief, and a pro-business tone ignited robust economic growth, buoyed the modest, and never bashed the moneyed. A rising floor, not a falling ceiling, squeezed Gini the right way.
–Fight for 15! The Left loves the $15 minimum wage so much that it wants to impose it nationwide — even on employers who cling by their cuticles amid lockdowns and layoffs.
Regardless, Trump helped American workers enjoy $15-per-hour wages voluntarily. Under the Trump/GOP Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), numerous employers shared their tax savings with employees. Americans for Tax Reform reports that at least 45 employers hiked their minimum wages to $15 per hour, including major job creators such as Charter Communications, JP Morgan Chase, and Met Life. Cigna and at least two other enterprises hiked hourly wages to $16 — all without government mandates.
–War on Poverty! President Lyndon Baines Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1964. SNAP, TANF, VISTA, and other tax-fueled acronyms became costly beads on the Left’s collective social-spending rosary. Five decades and some $16 trillion in federal outlays later, Manhattan Institute scholar Brian Riedl calculates, Trumponomics chopped the poverty rate from 11.8 percent in 2018 to 10.5 percent in 2019 — its nadir since federal estimates began in 1959, five years before the War on Poverty. Trump’s policies graduated 4.2 million from poverty and cut Obama-Biden’s 22 percent black poverty rate in 2016 to 18.8 percent in 2019 — a record low and its first-ever reading below 20 percent.
–Urban renewal! Since the 1960s, liberals have pushed to revitalize low-income, minority, inner-city communities. TCJA’s incentives (e.g. capital gains tax: 0 percent) have lured $75 billion in private investment and created some 500,000 new jobs in 8,764 Opportunity Zones in such neighborhoods.
–No more wars! Since at least the 1960s peace movement, liberals typically have been dovish and conservatives hawkish. Regardless, President Trump rebuilt the military that Obama-Biden neglected and then pursued a Reaganite policy of Peace through Strength. Trump brokered four Middle East peace deals with Israel and its Islamic neighbors. He also was the first American president since Jimmy Carter to launch no new war. Hence, Trump earned four Nobel Peace Prize nominations.
As former President Trump encounters Lefties in Greater Mar-a-Lago, he should offer them these two words:
“You’re welcome!”
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Bucknell University’s Michael Malarkey contributed research to this opinion piece.
