The Stock Market vs. The Media – Whom Do You Trust?

While the stock market rockets to new highs virtually every twenty minutes, the media continues to gasp with more and more dismay at Donald Trump’s picks to fill his cabinet.

Today, as the Dow approaches 20,000, the Washington Post is moaning about the president-elect’s choosing too many generals for important positions, as if all military minds automatically think alike. The Post certainly wouldn’t say that about, say, Muslims. Nor would anybody who’d actually read a history book.

But never mind. Look at it this way. Whom would you trust — people who put their money where their mouths are (i.e. investors) or people who put their mouths where their mouths are? (Notice I didn’t pick another notable orifice. This is a family column and tries to set an example.)

Now, as well all know, past performance is not a… etc., etc., but things are looking remarkably good for the moment, which is upsetting our liberal media friends all the more. How’re they going to react if U.S. Steel CEO Mario Longhi actually does bring back 10,000 jobs, as he indicated on CNBC he might under the new Trump tax program?  Oh, the vapors… the vapors. Lena Dunham may have to move to Canada after all.

But speaking of military minds, the selection of retired Marine General John Kelly the head the Department of Homeland Security seems a good one. Kelly knows the southern border and is strong on illegal immigration and, perhaps more importantly, counter-terrorism.

The left and the media are complaining, of course, but the truth is they have misjudged (deliberately, I think, in the case of the media) Trump’s immigration position from the outset, ignoring the purposeful theatrical exaggeration of his entire campaign (while profiting from it) and taking (or pretending to take) him literally in every instance when his supporters did not.  While on the road, I asked those supporters on multiple occasions whether they thought Trump was going to send all eleven million illegals home and found not one person who thought he would. The press — that’s another matter.

Now the Associated Press is making a big deal of his “softer” line on immigration, but didn’t you always know he would take one? It should be no surprise to anyone that Trump intends to get rid of as many criminal aliens as possible and then let the others blend into society — but (Chuck Schumer take note) without ever getting full citizen rights, meaning the vote. To give people the vote who came here illegally would not be “fair” (as Barack Obama might put it) to those who waited in line.

Will there be a wall and will Mexico pay for it? Doubt it, but there will be border security — or something close to it — for the first time ever and the citizens of Mexico, forced to improve their own governance for once, could profit from it as much as we will, if they are willing to face reality..

But the most exciting, to me, appointment so far is Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  That’s real change.  The author of the AP article — Jonathan Lemire — characterizes Pruitt as a “climate-change denier,” the repellent term used by the self-righteous to associate those who  question the extent of anthropogenic global warming with those who deny the Holocaust. I don’t know the breadth of Lemire’s scientific background, but few of the reporters I met following the campaign had much of one. Trofim Lysenko — who’s that?  They’re quite similar to the people you meet at cocktail parties who insist that Armageddon is only months away if we continue our profligate ways, but meanwhile they’re going to get in that last vacation in the Seychelles. Want to share a jet?

They learned everything they knew about climate change from “experts.”

Pruitt is going to be a helluva challenge to the self-satisfied conventional wisdom of these folks. I guess the Al Gore visit at Trump Tower was just that — a visit.

Meanwhile, in case you’re interested, as I type this, 7:09PM Pacific Time, Dow futures are up 22.  Asian markets are up too. Could be another good day in Trump’s America tomorrow — or not. Whichever it is, I’m going long.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His latest book is I Know Best:  How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If  It Hasn’t Already.