For a year now, all you have heard from our provincial #NeverTrump tribalists is how those of us who backed Trump were duped into supporting a secret Democrat, a lefty, a guy who could not wait to sell us out. Well, once again, these narcissistic #NeverTrump grifters have been exposed by reality, this time in the form of a Heritage Foundation report that ranks President Donald Trump above Ronald Reagan.
According to the Heritage Foundation, a widely-respected conservative think tank, during his first year in office, Trump adopted nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Heritage’s agenda. By comparison, Heritage says that former President Reagan enacted only 49 percent of its policy prescriptions.
“There is so much noise in this town that I think it obscures the real work that’s being done,” Heritage president Kay Coles James told the New York Times. “This administration is doing quite well in terms of advancing a conservative agenda — clearly, quite well.”
In 2016, Heritage came up with 334 conservative policies, a wish-list of sorts, for a new Republican administration. Trump has enacted 64 percent of those items. In 1981, his first year in office, Reagan scratched off only 49 percent of the items on that year’s Heritage list.
Some of those on the right who opposed Trump have been gracious enough to admit they were wrong. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway took a look back at Trump’s first year and wrote last week:
Ironically, the very lack of conservative bona fides that worried me two years ago means he’s less beholden to a conservative establishment that had grown alienated from the people it is supposed to serve and from the principles it ostensibly exists to promote. His surprising conservatism might also be the result of the absolutism and extremism of his critics, whether among the media, traditional Democratic activists or the anti-Trump right. If Trump were ever inclined to indulge his liberal tendencies after winning the election, the stridency and spite of his opponents have provided him with no incentives to do so.
On his radio show Thursday, Dennis Prager, who was not a #NeverTrumper but supported Trump as a dead-last choice in the 16 person GOP primary, was just as gracious and insightful:
I was wrong. My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong, in retrospect. I was wrong. I had friends who supported him, and I didn’t understand them. I said, “Are you not aware of what he said about John McCain? Isn’t that enough to disqualify the guy?” They perceived in him what I did not perceive in him, that these over-the-top statements – as objectionable as the statements themselves may be, and none of them defended the statements – nevertheless, what they perceived was accurate: a man who doesn’t give a damn about what the press says about him. That is the only way to govern. It is the only way to advance the principles of conservatism in the United States is to not give a damn. … He is so much better a president than Mitt Romney would’ve made. Mitt Romney would’ve awakened every day to read The New York Times editorial page to see how he’s covered. Mitt Romney gave us Romneycare in Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, the #NeverTrump tribe, those bitter dead-enders like National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and Twitter’s Bill Kristol, have dragged their wounded egos under a bridge and turned into ridiculous trolls, Vichy Republicans still sleeping with the enemy; still the same pious and sanctimonious scolds hungry to believe whatever the discredited MSM tells them; still the goofy cowards eager to surrender because the tension of battle gives them a rash.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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