by Joseph Klein
A legacy of extraordinary accomplishments.
According to a Gallup survey released on December 29th, President Donald Trump is 2020’s most admired man living today anywhere in the world. President Trump beat out Barack Obama – 18 percent versus 15 percent. Last year, Trump and Obama were tied at 18 percent each. Joe Biden ranked a distant third at 6 percent in the 2020 survey. Trump also ranked ahead of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, and the progressive left’s god like figure Senator Bernie Sanders.
The survey results were based on telephone interviews conducted December 1-17, 2020 with a random sample of slightly more than 1000 adults, ages 18+, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The results have a margin of error of ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. According to Gallup, the samples were “weighted to match the national demographics of gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, population density, and phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both and cell phone mostly).”
Democrats and their progressive left base, along with their media shills, couldn’t care less about the Gallup survey, which, after all, is only a poll. The Trump-haters are chest-thumping over their success in using universal mail-in ballots and lax election security procedures to push Biden over the finish line in the presidential election. Trump-haters also take solace in the fact that Democrat respondents in the survey split their choices for the most admired male, which lowered Biden’s percentage, while Republicans were more solidly in Trump’s corner.
The critics can scoff at the relevance of the Gallop survey all they want. However, the survey data reveal some curious results that show the fragility of the coalition that Biden has been trying to build between the dwindling number of Democrat centrists and the party’s progressive base. Biden is also relatively weak among independents.
Obama has ranked consistently high in the Gallup survey’s admiration rankings for the last decade. Biden did not register above 1 percent during the same period, until after his election in 2020 when he managed to reach 6 percent. The only other male politician besides Trump in the top ten in 2020 was Democrat-Socialist Bernie Sanders at 1 percent.
In short, a former Democrat president out of office for four years achieved an admiration ranking more than twice that of the current Democrat president-elect. The one progressive in the top ten was trampled by Obama, not to mention by Trump.
It is also worth noting that among the respondents identifying themselves as independent, Trump was the most admired by 11 percent, the same as Obama. Biden was the most admired by only 3 percent of the independent respondents.
On the female side of the Gallup survey’s most admired list, former First Lady Michelle Obama ranked ahead of Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris – 10 percent versus 6 percent. The only other current female politician in the top ten was Democrat-Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC and Hillary Clinton were each chosen as the most admired living woman by 2 percent of the respondents.
Republicans remain solidly behind President Trump. Democrats are split and looking more nostalgically to the past Obama era than to a cohesive vision for the future led by a president they can admire.
President Trump deserves to be on top of the admiration survey and should have been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year instead of the Biden-Harris duo. In four short years, Trump crashed through the stale, politically correct political establishment and scored monumental achievements. He has kept many of his promises, something unheard of in the Washington swamp.
For example, regarding immigration, the massive flow of illegal immigrants coming from Central America through Mexico has been brought under control. The Trump administration has built or heavily reinforced over 300 miles of the wall at the U.S.-Mexican border. Mexico indirectly paid for it by taking on the cost of deploying thousands of troops at Trump’s request at its southern border to deter more migration caravans and by accepting many so-called asylum seekers from the U.S.
Rather than start more wars, President Trump has tried to end the ones already in progress for years and years, including most notably in Afghanistan. Instead of being the warmonger that many of his critics had feared, President Trump turned out to be a peacemaker. He thought outside of the box in the Middle East and brought about historic peace agreements between Israel and each of four Arab countries - the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco, and Bahrain.
President Trump has also lowered tensions with North Korea. The North Korean regime had been building and testing nuclear bombs for years, as well as long range ballistic missiles, before President Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Since the first Trump-Kim summit in mid-2018, North Korea has not tested a nuclear bomb or ICBM. Obama could only dream of such an outcome with his failed policy of “strategic patience.”
Iran was on the way to a nuclear bomb long before President Trump came to office. Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal merely kicked the can down the road for a few years. Indeed, Obama has admitted that by 2028 or so, when the sunset provisions on uranium enrichment start to kick in, Iran would have nearly zero breakout time to develop enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, assuming they hadn’t cheated beforehand. President Trump did not want to wait and risk the chance that Iran would be far better prepared to defend its nuclear weapons production facilities in 2028 than it could now. So, he acted to force Iran’s hand immediately, while depriving them of the money they would use to build up their military capabilities. President Trump also decided to take out Iran’s terrorist mastermind, Qassem Soleimani.
When President Trump took office, the jihadist terrorist group ISIS still controlled large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, which it claimed as its caliphate. Trump removed the absurd constraints Obama had imposed on the U.S. military, which permitted our military forces in concert with our allies to put an end to ISIS’s territorial caliphate. Trump also approved a special operations raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ruthless leader of ISIS.
President Trump was the first president in decades to stand up to China with tough sanctions and insistence on more reciprocal trade. China has played successive U.S. administrations since its professed opening of its economy to global trade and investments. The Chinese Communist regime wants to replace the current rules-based international system with one dominated by China’s authoritarian model. To that end, the regime has been busy deftly exploiting multilateral institutions from the World Trade Organization to the World Health Organization (WHO) to the United Nations itself. President Trump instinctively understood what China was up to and took strong action to back up his tough words. After China used the World Health Organization, for example, to repeat its lies about the coronavirus pandemic, which started in China, President Trump first warned WHO to mend its ways and then pulled the U.S. out of the China-centric organization when it did not heed his warnings.
Talking about the coronavirus pandemic, the vaccines that the Trump administration managed to push forward in record time to the American people under Operation Warp Speed will most likely turn out to be President Trump’s most significant legacy. He used his business experience and contacts to forge a private-public partnership, including investing government risk money up front to incentivize the drug companies to quickly develop and manufacture the vaccines. The Trump administration cut through the bureaucratic red tape to secure regulatory approval and facilitated the distribution of millions of vaccine doses to the American people.
The pre-pandemic U.S. economy during President Trump’s watch saw record employment, a narrowing income gap, and historically low unemployment for African Americans and Hispanics. Trump achieved these astounding results by combining massive deregulation and tax cuts with shrewdly negotiated trade deals.
The current higher deficit and unemployment levels are the result of the pandemic and the severe economic disruption it caused. The Trump administration worked with Congress to address the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression in a bipartisan fashion. As a result, novel multi-billion-dollar programs were created to support businesses and their employees until the economy recovers, while the unemployed received supplemental unemployment benefits and needy Americans received direct government payments to help them stay afloat.
President Trump managed to get major criminal justice reform across the finish line, which has begun to undo the mass incarceration of African American males that the 1994 crime bill supported by Biden triggered. At the same time, Trump strongly supported law enforcement against calls to defund the police, and he confronted violent rioters with prudent shows of force.
Finally, President Trump kept his promise to place more conservatives who believe in interpreting the law as written on the federal courts, including three outstanding Supreme Court justices.
President Trump accomplished all this in the face of relentless attempts by Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media to delegitimize his presidency and have him removed from office.
Long after the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, CNN’s Jim Acosta, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and the rest of the Trump-haters fade into the mists of time, President Trump’s legacy of singular accomplishments on behalf of the American people will live on.
Joseph Klein
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/trump-deservedly-tops-gallups-most-admired-list-joseph-klein/
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