The first six months of the Donald Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.
Almost daily during the tariff hysterias
of March, we were told by university economists and most of the Ph.Ds.
employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a
downward, if not recessionary, spiral.
Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself.
They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.
So, the result of Trump’s foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation—or rather a return to stagflation—and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined.
Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real
income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was
no surge in inflation. The supposedly “crashed” stock market reached
historic highs.
Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock
market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have
happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs
were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European
and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective
tariffs?
Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump’s
jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign
investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and
assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not
lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries
purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices
not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering
gargantuan deficits?
Were Trump’s art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere
starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely
agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate
rather than punitive tariffs?
Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that
our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would
agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit
margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative
market entirely?
Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.
We were told for four years that only “comprehensive immigration
reform” would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans
differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration
laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed
borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws.
When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000
foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one
would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring
or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border,
why would such a prediction be wrong?
Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations
also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would
increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had
entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of
other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at
reduced wages.
Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands
were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S.
citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only
immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry.
Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation—again to wide ridicule
from immigration “experts.” But why would not a million illegal aliens
wish to return home “voluntarily”—if they were given free flights, a
$1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal
entry once they arrived home?
Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran’s
nuclear sites was a fool’s errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle
East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It
would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran
would soon reply with nuclear weapons.
In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A 25-minute
entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a
conflagration.
As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common
sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given
that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced?
Why would Russia—bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a
million casualties—wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously
fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?
Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when
tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia
resupply Iran’s destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it
was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and
Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements?
As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have
suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been
decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated.
Why would they rush to Iran’s side to war with Israel, when Iran did not
come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis?
Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and
left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely
killing few of the enemy?
As far as the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?
Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that
Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore,
there was little need for any such preemptive action.
Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after
the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there
was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they
had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new
existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Was Trump really going to “blow up”, “destroy” or “cripple” NATO, as
our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from
six to 23 nations meeting their 2% of gross domestic product defense
spending promises?
Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump’s past correct
predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the
vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that
Russian leader Vladimir Putin did not invade during Trump’s first term,
unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn’t
NATO agree to rearm to 5%, and appreciate Trump’s efforts both to
bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine
war?
Why were our “scientific” pollsters so wrong in the last three
presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible
electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas
like defund the police, transgender males competing in women’s sports,
and open borders first born and nurtured?
Answer: the university, and higher education in general.
The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be
vastly expanded. We remember the “51 intelligence authorities” who swore
the Hunter Biden laptop was “likely” cooked up by the Russians. Our
best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden’s
multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation
spikes. Our global warming professors’ past predictions should have
ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying
beachfront communities, including Barack Obama’s two beachfront
multimillion-dollar estates.
Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller
investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy
League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Trump would be in
jail for life, given 91 “walls are closing in” and “bombshell”
indictments.
So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?
One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee
universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of
institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50%-plus
price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid antisemitism,
higher education in America has become anti-enlightenment. Universities
now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and
anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the
diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.
The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties
are 90% to 95% left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and
terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts
are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not.
Two, Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no
longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer
empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his
orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable
counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite,
our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than
correct in their assessments—if they in any small way helped Trump.
Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre
and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense
approaches to problem solving. Ph.D. programs in general are not as
rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and
evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh
non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols
are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.
The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign
enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of
dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral
smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how
isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.
But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were
increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university
economists could not run a small business. The military academies did
not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging
biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were
usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were
in their reporting.
Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators,
and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter
worthlessness.