Are the ‘Deplorables’ Weary of Winning Yet?

In September of 2016 Hillary Clinton famously gave the nation a glimpse of the “bottled spider,” to borrow Shakespeare’s metaphor about Richard III, which personified her mewed up inner loathing for the peasants who declined to recognize her divine right to be President: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” Later, having declared those 30 million voters “irredeemable,” she told her mirthful audience that they should “empathize” with the other half of Trump’s benighted supporters. The voters in question ignored Clinton’s scorn and patronizing empathy, thus garnering their first big win.

Their latest victory came Friday when the Labor Department announced that unemployment in April had reached its lowest point in 50 years. Only the deplorables, you will recall, believed Trump’s pledge to cut taxes, create jobs, increase wages, increase economic growth, and keep inflation low. Our erstwhile president actually joked that Trump would need a “magic wand” to achieve these goals. Meanwhile, the Beltway expert class claimed the lethargic Obama economy was the “new normal.” Yet, as James Freeman points out in the Wall Street Journal, the deplorables were right and the geniuses at the CBO and the Fed were wrong:

[I]n their final longer-term forecasts before the November 2016 election, the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Open Market Committee on average projected four-quarter real GDP growth in 2017, 2018, and 2019 of 2.2, 2.0, and 1.7 percent, respectively. In actuality, real GDP grew 2.5 percent in 2017, 3.0 percent in 2018, and in the first quarter of 2019 grew at an annualized rate of 3.2 percent.

But most voters are less interested in statistics than in actual jobs, and that is what the Trump economy is producing. Even the legacy media have been forced to admit this reality in headlines like this one from the Washington Post: “U.S. unemployment fell to 3.6 percent, lowest since 1969.” Think about that. Unemployment hasn’t been this low since Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, Richard Nixon became President, Joe Namath led the New York Jets to victory in Super Bowl III, and Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock. Presumably, the President’s deplorable supporters consider it a win that the Trump-bashing Post had to report these facts:

The U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in April.… The unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, the lowest since 1969. The official unemployment rate has been at or below 4 percent for more than a year.… Hiring was strong across most sectors with especially large gains in business services (76,000 jobs added), construction (33,000 jobs added) and health care (27,000 jobs added).
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