Trump Has Had a Historically Great First Term

 
by Conrad Black:

As the latest Democratic assassination effort—the bunk about President Trump disparaging American war dead on the centenary of the end of World War I—fades into ignominy with its propagator, the egregious Jeffrey Goldberg, acknowledging that anonymous denunciators are insufficiently convincing, we may dare to hope that in the last seven weeks of this tumultuous campaign, some serious, legitimate questions will be addressed. One of them is that, like all incumbents, President Trump is seeking reelection on the basis of his record in office.

The demonic efforts of the Democrats (and particularly of the rabidly Democratic national political media) who are conducting their party’s campaign in the masked and highly self-distanced absence of the inarticulate nominee, to avoid a discussion of what this administration has achieved, will not make it all the way to election day.

This president is the 28th who has sought reelection after an entire, or almost complete, term in the White House, (Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, sought reelection after serving almost whole terms, having acceded to the presidency as vice presidents upon the death in office of their predecessors.) Of these 27 previous presidents who sought reelection, 18 were successful, and among the nine who were not were a number who were more than adequate in the office, including both presidents Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, and George H. W. Bush.

After an extensive review of the claims to reelection of all of these presidents, I believe that President Trump has had the most successful first term of all but three or four of his predecessors, and of those, one candidate, James K. Polk, did not seek reelection in 1848 for health reasons.

President Trump, in his rather unseemly manner of self-serving evaluations, claims to have achieved more in one term than any other president. He also claims to have done more for African-Americans than any president except Abraham Lincoln, and with Fox News Channel’s Harris Faulkner, wondered about Lincoln, to which she gently replied: “We are free, Mr. President.” This is what Trump himself describes as his “constructive hyperbole,” and he has paid a heavy price for allowing his enemies to represent his exaggerations as lies.

They are generally not lies, unlike in 90 percent of the heinous slanders his enemies have leveled against him, but they aren’t entirely truthful either. This is an important distinction: the habitual boosterism of a New York developer, though often irritating and frequently imprudent, is not remotely equivalent to the satanic defamatory calumnies of the Trump hating-media.

In assisting the cause of African-Americans, Trump ranks behind Lincoln as the emancipator of the slaves and Lyndon Johnson for passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that finally enfranchised all African-Americans and funneled billions of dollars of assistance to African-Americans through a wide variety of programs (not all of which were successful). He probably also ranks behind Franklin D. Roosevelt, who treated the African-Americans with material equality in his workfare programs, social legislation, and the Social Security system; they were segregated but at least they were equal, and that was immense progress.

Read more