Fear

Bob Woodward's best selling book, Fear, tells us about all of the horrible, terrible, frightening, startling, ominous, unstable, ineffective, backbiting, dysfunctional, out-of-control, ... things that are the Trump presidency. The trained hamsters in the main stream media have given Woodward tens of millions of dollars in free publicity, all in an effort to promote a book that reinforces a narrative that they themselves have promoted for almost two years. There's also the small matter of the upcoming election and the trained hamsters desire to once again insert themselves (via Fear) into the blue wave they fully expect to be coming. It might work.

Nevermind that Woodward uses unnamed anonymous sources throughout; never mind that White House principals named in Woodward's book have flat-out denied saying what Woodward says they said and doing what Woodward says they did ... and most important, never mind that a dysfunctional crew that Woodward describes could never (in a million years) accomplish what this administration has accomplished. In fact, if Woodward is accurate and "the White House is suffering from a nervous breakdown," maybe all White Houses going forward should suffer similar breakdowns. After all, consider these comments from the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Remember those warnings of an economic implosion if Donald Trump was elected President? Well, instead, the economy has broken out of the 2% growth doldrums from 2009-2016, and Barack Obama is suddenly elbowing his way back into the public debate to claim credit. Yet the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report on U.S. income released Wednesday underscores how the Obama policies of redistribution retarded growth for so many years.

Real median household incomes ticked up 1.8% to $61,372 between 2016 and 2017 while the poverty rate dropped 0.4 percentage points to 12.3%, according to the Census Bureau. Income gains were strongest among Hispanic households (3.7%). The poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics fell to 21.2% and 18.3%, respectively, the lowest since at least 1972.

Incomes increased across the distribution range with the share of people earning less than $15,000 declining 0.3 percentage points to 10.7%, the lowest level since 2007. The proportion of households earning more than $150,000 increased by 0.7 percentage points to 14.7%.

Surging investment earnings have driven up incomes at higher incomes. But at lower levels the income growth appears due to more people working more. While the number of people with employment earnings rose 1.7 million last year, the number working full-time and year-round grew 2.4 million. This lifted nearly one million people out of poverty in 2017.

As AlGore might say—an inconvenient truth.

The crazy, unstable trumpsters have done more for the US economy in two years than the last four president have done in 30. But it doesn't stop there. Those same crazy, unstable, ineffective and otherwise incompetent trumpsters have begun to repair the foreign policy wreckage created by the last administration, are negotiating international trade imbalances that have plagued our country for years, and have made a stronger attempt to moderate the behavior of bad actors than anything accomplished by the past three presidents.

But all of that requires a steady and detailed examination of the facts, an examination of the numbers and a clear study of real-world accomplishments and failures. That not what Fear does. It feeds the emotional turmoil of a political party and its supporters who lost an election they knew they would win and then needed to invent reasons why they were beaten. They also badly need to demonize the winner. Fear reinforces their hysteria.