Lou Dobbs - The Trump Century

F irst and always, thanks to my wife, Debi, for her love and support throughout four decades of love and mostly laughter, and our wonderful family, four generations of us and more on the way.

My thanks as well to all my friends and colleagues at Fox Business, President Lauren Petterson, SVP Gary Schrier, Producers Jeff Field, Alex Hooper, Eric Schaffer, Chief Booker, Anne McCarton, writer/producers Bob Regan, Michael Biondi, Bria Stone, Andrew Espitallier, and John Fawcett.

My gratitude to Harper Executive Editor and VP/Editorial Director of Broadside Books Eric Nelson, and to my good friend and agent Wayne Kabak. Thanks to Dennis Kneale for his skill and getting the book over the finish line, and to John Carney for his many contributions.

This book is dedicated to President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and the entire Trump family for their many sacrifices and great courage in service to the nation.

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LOU DOBBS is the New York Times bestselling author of six books and the host of the number one news program on business television, Lou Dobbs Tonight, on the Fox Business Network. He is also the host of the nationally syndicated Lou Dobbs Financial Reports, airing on the radio daily. Named TVs Premier Business News Anchorman by the Wall Street Journal , Dobbs has numerous Emmys, a CableACE Award, a Peabody Award, and many other distinguished honors.

DENNIS KNEALE has over thirty years of experience in journalism, from Forbes and the Wall Street Journal to anchor for CNBC and Fox Business. He is the CEO of Dennis Kneale Media, providing content, training, strategy, and investment advice.

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D onald John Trump has beaten back the haters and emerged from a cauldron of conflict to become the greatest president in Americas history. He has joined the pantheon of presidents, including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, who have set the agenda for the decades that followed, guiding our nation through some of its hardest times while shaping the future before it arrives. He has delivered on the unassailable slogan that drove his first campaign for president:

Make America great again.

President Trump has overcome legions of enemies and racked up a string of seemingly impossible victories: stoking robust economic growth, lifting wages for the lowest-paid workers, delivering record-low unemployment, bringing manufacturing jobs home to America, forcing China to the table to reform unfair trade terms, and still more.

And then it all came tumbling down, toppled by an invisible enemy, the biggest threat ever to confront the United States. Now we face a challenge like none before. Chinas problems became everyones problems as the Wuhan virus crisis cratered the world economy and wrought devastation in every nation that shut down in response to it. As this book goes to press, thousands of people are still dying and millions are being laid off from their jobs. The only certainty is the expanding regime of profound restrictions on our society, which violate fundamental freedoms of the Constitution.

This tests the very core of what makes the United States the freest, richest, most innovative, and most inclusive nation on Earth. What we do now, and how we go about pulling our way up out of this shockingly deep downturn, could determine our future for decades to come. We can arise from this global pandemic better and stronger than ever before, reigniting growth and fixing the weaknesses that have been revealed. Or we can barely crawl back to a cowering new new normal of retreat, fear, recrimination, and diminished freedom masked as protective measures imposed on us for our own good.

Whether we thrive or barely survive will rely in part on who wins the 2020 presidential election: Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

President Trump, I truly believe, is the only leader who has shown that he is bright enough, strong enough, shrewd enough, and original enough in his thinking to lead the United States out of this maelstrom. He is the essence of the right man in the right place at the right time, all for the good of our country. He is an irrepressible salesman who sets impossibly high goals so that even if he gets only halfway there, he ends up twice as far ahead as he would have otherwise. His unrelenting optimism and his skills as a dealmaker, schmoozer, and obstinate negotiator are mission-critical to the gigantic task that awaits us:

Make America grow again.

If he can win reelection to a second term, he will get the chance to score his biggest win of all: guiding us to a robust recovery after the steepest, fastest collapse in historya Great Cessation, some call it. If President Trump can win again, he would join the pantheon of Winston Churchill and Alexander the Great among the great leaders of world history. And if he falls short, well, there is no point in considering the possibility. Hes a winner the winner.

The Wuhan pandemic, Chinas culpable role in it, and our recovery from it make up the biggest story of my career. It dwarfs all else. China authored the Wuhan virus, whether accidentally or intentionally, and spread it to an unsuspecting world instead of warning anyone. China created the worst crisis for the United States since World War II and is responsible for the deadliest attack on the United States in its history.

The Wuhan shock culminated twenty years of Chinas ripping off the United States and draining away almost 4 million US manufacturing jobs. The Chinese reaped more than a trillion dollars on unfair trade, currency manipulation, brutal protectionism, extortion of US multinationals, and forbidden government subsidies of home industries.

President Trumps forcing China to sign a new trade deal fixing those ills was one of the most important wins of his presidency. If we lose President Trump, what happens to that historic deal? Or what happens when China tries to push our growing US Navy fleet out of the South China Sea? Or when the president follows through on his threat to withdraw the United States from the China-cowed World Health Organization and form a new global group that includes Taiwan, a thorn in Chinas side for a hundred years?

We should also ponder the decisions that President Trump or a weaker president would face if the Chinese government were exposed as having engineered the virus in the two government labs in the city where the pandemic first erupted.

Our nation will spend $10 trillion to rebuild from the ashes of the coronavirus. That is equivalent to half the entire output of the US economy in a year. Who best to ride herd on this gargantuan spending project for the next four years: the president who led us to one of the strongest economies of all time or Joe Biden?

Barack Obama and Joe Biden, from the end of the Great Recession in June 2009 till they left office at the end of 2016, presided over one of the pokiest recoveries ever. Growth was slack when it should have been surging, although the United States did log the longest economic expansion ever, and it continued in Trumps first three years.

For the legions of Trump haters who voted for Joe Biden, the bad news is this: the impact of President Trump is never going away . The changes he has engineered in our nations fabric will reverberate for decades. In the long term, it doesnt matter what happens in 2020, 2024, or even 2040.

The resistance has yet to realize the truth: we now live in the Trump Century. President Trump has changed everything. In government and politics, international relations, global trade, business and regulation, the national conversation, and our messaging, social media, branding, and verbal combat.