WOW. Never-Trump National Review bending the knee: "Donald Trump was a joke until nominated, unelectable until elected, incompetent until he succeeded on most fronts, and about to be impeached until he debunked the collusion nonsense; he has had a very successful year."

In the end, his 2017 was quite a success.

Those who are still predicting that Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office are now like exotic and endangered creatures. It is like an absurdly slow dance, in which the steps are so infrequent and tentative that it is hard to remember how far participants have come since the music started. Two years ago, virtually the entire commentariat, and most of its readers and listeners, were splitting their sides at the gigantic impending farce of the Trump candidacy for the Republican nomination. Eighteen months ago, those same people had almost entirely shifted their immense mirth to the mighty Hillary Clinton avalanche that was already starting to rumble down whatever it was that President Obama renamed Mount McKinley.

The BBC was asking itself (i.e., its viewers, including any Americans watching its World Service) whether Trump was going to pull out then, to avoid the unprecedented thrashing he was about to receive at the polls (which none of the polls, even the more rabidly anti-Trump polls, then predicted). Wacky leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, with the unshakeable confidence in mind-reading that seems never to desert such people, announced that Trump would quit because he never wanted or expected to be nominated, and it was all a joke that had got out of hand.

These were not unrepresentative opinions. Trump was attacking the entire political establishment, the whole Washington sleaze factory, all factions of both parties, all the Bushes, Clintons, and Obama, the national media, the lobbyists, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the limousine Left from the Hamptons to Silicon Valley. Of course the Trump campaign was insane and impossible, and was doomed to be a ludicrous fiasco, a gigantic, comical clown act that misfired horribly.

On Election Night, Nobel prize–winning (for economics) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the stock market would “never recover” from the Trump victory. (It has set a new all-time high more than 90 times since.) The alarms about effective Russian intervention in the election and the confected creation of the Trump collusion myth were born with indecent haste. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, was soon solemnly announcing that there had been a thousand Russian agents actively assisting the Trump campaign in key swing states and that they had delivered Wisconsin, a complete fabrication (if he really believed this whopper, I have some oceanside property in Oklahoma to sell him).

A year ago, efforts were still underway on recounts, especially in Wisconsin (which resulted in increasing Trump’s margin of victory by 131 votes), and there was national television advertising, costing millions of dollars, directed at the 306 people who had been chosen to cast Electoral College presidential votes for Trump, to break their pledges. (Seven electors did so and voted for third candidates, but five of the defectors were from Mrs. Clinton.) Plans were underway to disrupt the inauguration, and engage in widespread civil disobedience; the new Democratic National Committee chairman pledged “scorched earth” obstruction; Bruce Springsteen, singing to bemused Antipodeans in Perth, Australia, crooned, “We are the Resistance!”; Madonna (who had generated a slight rise in Trump’s poll numbers by promising to fellate wavering male voters who went for Hillary) spoke of wanting to “blow up the White House.”

Veteran black-activist congressman John Lewis said Trump was “illegitimate,” and the ancient and unfeasible congresswoman Maxine Waters screamed “Impeach 45,” for causes that would become apparent as the process proceeded. Talk shortly turned to that option. As the president and his wife and party left Washington on May 19 for Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, and Brussels, ABC political commentator Nate Silver rated the chances of impeachment at 25 to 50 percent, and David Gergen — a former assistant to Presidents Reagan and Clinton, and a very knowledgeable man until he joined CNN and was infected by acute Blitzeritis – said, “We are moving into impeachment country.”

A long sequence of crises was fanned by the Trumpophobic media: Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and the Statue of Liberty were (according to Schumer) weeping over the fate of Yemenis and Libyans not allowed onto aircraft bound for the United States. The president’s expressed thought over the Charlottesville riot — that Antifa and the extreme section of Black Lives Matter that applauded the killing of white policemen might be as odious as the Klan and American neo-Nazis — was proof that Trump was a quasi-genocidal racist and apologist for slavery. Trump virtually dismantled NATO by not specifically mentioning the collective-security clause in his speech there; was signing the death warrant of the planet when he pulled out of the asinine Paris Climate Agreement; was going to blow up the world with Kim Jong Un; and so forth, ad nauseam. And all the while, the Russian-collusion fraud festered and grew, born of Clintonian denial and frenzied finger-pointing, and reinforced by the Steele dossier — a pastiche of scurrilous gossip and malice from the most dubious sources, including in the Kremlin, cited by Mrs. Clinton in her absurd memoir of the election as proof of her opponent’s treason.

She writes how she was betrayed by the country and most people in it, but not by the husband with whom she has enjoyed a storybook Pleasantville marriage. It only emerged after the publication of her book that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had commissioned the Steele dossier, and had spent $10 million on it from Democratic campaign funds. (According to former party chair Donna Brazile, Mrs. Clinton had rigged the nomination from her rival Bernie Sanders.) The Clinton campaign desperately shopped the Steele dossier to the American media in the last days of the campaign. This was the all-time dirty trick of U.S. political history, and when the rock was lifted and she was exposed as the sponsor of it, Mrs. Clinton instantly switched gears and called it “campaign information.”

This last year, after the year of his nomination and election, has been the second round of Donald Trump’s war to crush and expel the American political establishment. This year he has won over the congressional Republican party, which had almost entirely opposed him, to toil in the enactment of his program. Together they have achieved the greatest tax reform and reduction in over 30 years, largely emasculated Obamacare, put a rod on the backs of those states that elect incompetents like Jerry Brown and the Cuomos and lay the resulting state income taxes off on the whole country, repatriated trillions of dollars of corporate profit, exonerated over half the people from personal income taxes, reduced the return of 80 percent of taxpayers to a postcard, and produced conditions for 4 percent GDP growth next year. The Obama apologetics that a flatlined economy with a shrunken work force and a burgeoning multitude of Medicaid-sedated idleness was the new normal has been debunked; it is the abnormal recent past.

…

It is distressing to read and listen to the nonsense in the Canadian media about Donald Trump. It is too early to predict whether he will be a successful president or not. But no one relying on the Canadian media would be aware that he has more than doubled the economic growth rate, reduced illegal immigration by about 80 per cent, withdrawn from the insane Paris Climate accord, helped add trillions to U.S. stock market values, created nearly two million new jobs, led the rout of ISIL, and gained full Chinese adherence to the unacceptability of North Korean nuclear military capability. He will probably pass the greatest tax cuts and reforms since Reagan, if not Lyndon Johnson, by Christmas, and may throw out the most unpopular feature of Obamacare, the coercive mandate, with it.
He can be a tiresome and implausible public figure at times, and the reservations widely held about him, in the United States and elsewhere, are understandable and not unfounded. He is, however, the most effective U.S. president since Reagan. In the 20 pre-Trump years, over $5 trillion and scores of thousands of American casualties were squandered in Middle East wars (while most Iraqis were handed over to Iranian influence), an immense humanitarian refugee tragedy was provoked, along with the greatest world economic crisis since the 1930s, American GDP per capita growth and capital investment shrunk by 75 per cent, the work force lost over 15 million people, millions of unskilled, illegal migrants were admitted, and the national debt of 233 years of American independence more than doubled in the last seven years of Obama. Those 20 years were the only time of absolute decline in American history, as well as a period of prolonged economic stagnation. Americans, unlike the older great nations of Europe and the Far East, have never experienced such setbacks and stagnation, and don’t like or accept them. It was in these circumstances that this unusual president was elected.

It is distressing to read and listen to the nonsense in the Canadian media about Donald Trump