Yesterday, it turns out, was the three year anniversary of Donald Trump descending the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. I missed marking the date yesterday, but two of my favorite bloggers, Don Surber and Jim Hoft, did not. The occasion is worth noting because of the scorn it engendered, and the deep contrast of that scorn with the results to date of the Trump presidency, which for any sane person are impressive.

Start with “It’s the economy, stupid,” the immortal expression of James Carville. We are in near-boom times, and the results are being felt in paychecks as well as stock portfolios. Given the propaganda we heard about the “new normal” during the eight years of the Obama presidency, as if low economic growth were somehow inevitable, a force of nature caused by unspecified but pervasive factors understood only by the The One We Have Been Waiting For, Trump’s results are shockingly impressive.

In the national security area of presidential responsibility, Trump has already helped push Iran out of Syria (a process still underway), has helped ignite a world-historic transformation of Saudi Arabia from petrodollar funder of fundamentalist jihad to a force for modernizing Islam (and containing Iranian aggression), and now has obtained a denuclearization agreement with North Korea absent first-move shipments of cash or suspension of sanctions, and subject to verification, or else the benefits to NoKO will be withdrawn (reinstatement of the war games exercises and tightening of the already tight sanctions.)

Then, there is the Supreme Court. Liberals hate what it has become, but putative conservatives in the Never Trump camp ought to, in justice celebrate the new court.

So let’s take a look at the people with egg on their faces, as they sneered.

I have to start with Kevin Williamson, then of the National Review. The words he wrote in his piece titled, “Witless ape rides escalator,” will haunt him for the rest of his career.  Luckily for him, Donald Trump has no African ancestry that we know of.  If Trump did, then the fate of Roseanne Barr would be his.  I admire Williamson’s prose writing abilities, but the level to which he sank requires deep reflection on his part, something of which I see no sign. The publication in which he wrote those immortal words also lost big as the spearhead of the NeverTrump movement. What Buckley built has been diminished. 

Other Never Trumps continue to disgrace themselves with their fanaticism, sometimes even criticizing Trump for policies they endorsed prior to his candidacy.

This video compilation by the Media Research Center is a nonstop celebration of hubris:

I could go on and on, and probably so could most readers. Donald Trump has functioned as a Rorschach test for elitism. We expect it on the left, but on the right, to me, it is more unforgivable, for conservatives are supposed to focus on results. Don Surber quotes Tucker Carlson on the disappointments we have experienced with those who once ruled the prestige roost of the right:

 "Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted," Carlson wrote

"Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents 'an existential threat to conservatism.'"