Issues & Insights
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A Wartime President

During his first three years in office, President Donald J. Trump celebrated a booming economy, delivering on his central promise, “Make America Great Again.”

His pro-growth policies created millions of new jobs, with the lowest unemployment rates for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, respectively, in American history. The unemployment rate overall fell to the lowest in 50 years, since 1969, during the 1960s Kennedy boom. Wages and middle-class incomes soared to over $65,000, an all-time record, with wages for lower-income workers rising faster than for their bosses.

Hearkening back to Reagan and Kennedy, that resulted from marginal income tax rate cuts, for workers, small businesses, and corporations. That included slashing the federal corporate rate from 35% to 21%.

He achieved energy independence for the first time in 75 years, emphasizing deregulation empowering America to become the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas, while reviving faltering coal. The resulting low cost, reliable energy brought manufacturing back to America. It was a Blue-Collar Boom, breathing new hope into depressed blue-collar cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland.

Trump’s policies spurred rapid growth, set records for employment, wages and middle-class incomes, and for the first time in modern history, held trade partners accountable for their long-standing unjust practices. He pushed both interest rates and inflation down to near-zero levels.

The boom resounded in the stock market, with a parade of new Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq highs continuing into the new year. Trump’s newly renegotiated trade deals further spurred growth.

On international security, President Trump followed Reagan’s Peace through Strength policies, rebuilding, resupplying and modernizing America’s military. Trump acted boldly to push back terrorist states, most notably, Iran, and embrace crucial allies. The January 3rd justifiable drone strike that took out the most dangerous man in the world – Iran’s top General, Quassem Solemani – was arguably the most important security decision of his presidency. Trump continues to push for a Middle East peace deal; Solemani’s removal increases its likelihood.

In February, however, a lethal cloud blew in from the Far East, casting a dark shadow over this bright and prosperous world. Stemming from still mysterious causes in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus invaded America. Over the last month, this devilish disease has inflicted warlike casualties across the United States and in many other countries around the world.

The virulent and unprecedented virus is our most vicious unseen enemy, the worst in a hundred years.  The United States is at war against it. Donald Trump is leading America’s fight to win this war. He is the country’s new wartime president. And with his bold and visionary leadership, the U.S. will win.

President Trump, dauntless to his core, mobilized America to fight back against the Chinese Virus. That’s a geographic term, not racial, in the same way that the Spanish Flu was named geographically.

As history shows, Americans know how to fight and win wars. The U.S. always emerges triumphant, no matter the scope or challenge of the lethal adversity at hand.  But America wins wars when catalyzed by a great leader. President Trump is that leader now, the new American wartime president.

Like President Franklin Roosevelt’s mobilization at the start of World War II, President Trump has organized massive military-industrial and medical-health complexes to join together, rise up, and respond.  In concert with America’s governors, the president implemented crucial shelter in place guidance that saved lives. Like Roosevelt, Trump activated the Defense Production Act and is pushing for the rapid production and prompt distribution of ventilators, face masks, personal protective equipment, and medicines in this war against the virus.

The United States is being hit hard by the Chinese virus. But America’s new wartime president is fully engaged and, like President Lincoln during the Civil War, he is meeting with the fighters at the front of this new modern viral war.

Reports from the war front are grim. Hospitals are breaking down from overflow in New York.  Outbreaks are exploding in Florida and Louisiana. Asymptomatic infections are booming. Some experts predict over 100,000 deaths.

President Trump is leading from the front, addressing the American people every day, reminiscent of Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the depths of the Depression. Trump is fighting a war against this virus and for our economy. He has the mettle, the experience, and the patriotism that a wartime president must have to win. With him in charge, we will win.

Yassin Fawaz is CEO of a global political risk and business intelligence company, the Raddington Group. Fawaz is an African American leader devoted to the defense, security, freedom, prosperity, and interests of the United States domestically and across the globe.

Peter Ferrara is the Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics at the King’s College in New York. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under Attorney General Bill Barr and President George H.W. Bush.

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2 comments

  • Well said. But hospitals in the US are absolutely NOT “breaking down”. Only a very few locations are stressed, most notably New York and New Orleans. Hospitals in the vast majority of US states are empty! The huge wave of hospitalizations predicted by the “expert models” has not materialized.

  • A town in Europe encircled by the army of the National SOCIALIST Workers Party (Nazi’s); inside the town, Soldiers with Bibles in one hand and Garands in the other; bottom left, the voice bubble from the command tent: “No, General Ryan, he’s heading straight for Bastogne.”; from the right, tanks massed three wide on the road, the turrets of each painted orange.

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