News on most days comes straight out of President Trump's smartphone. Everything else is scraps.
But not so Friday, when the news was dominated by the Brett Kavanaugh drama over in the Senate, closely followed by the Department of Labor's fairly significant national unemployment milestone.
It's that milestone I want to talk about.
The Department announced Friday that September's jobless rate fell to its lowest level since the Vietnam War -- with little indication it's going to shoot back up in the near term. The Wall Street Journal and any number of national networks gave the story extensive coverage.
Not only did unemployment dip to 3.7 percent, something the country hasn't seen since December 1969, but employers added 134,000 new jobs to their payrolls. OK, that fell short of a predicted 180,000 jobs, but analysts claim a good-news wartime phenomenon kicked in that explains the shortfall: In many areas there are more openings than there are employees to fill them.
The market for those seeking employment is the best it's been in 18 years, says the WSJ.
Ordinary Americans picked up on this, if you watched network news programs Friday. And guess who got the credit?
"Say what you want about President Trump, he's doing what he said he would do," said a New York cab driver on Friday, interviewed by one of the networks.
An interviewer asked a woman walking into a store near Times Square if she had heard about the newest unemployment rate and if she thought President Trump had anything to do with it. She had, and she did. "I think Donald Trump is a bad person," she said, "but some of his economic ideas are very interesting and I like the way he's standing up to the world."
She said she didn't vote for him in 2016, but "as it stands now, I will vote for him in 2020 even though I hate the way he talks. He makes me feel good about the way the country is going."
There's nothing like stout economic news to endear Americans to their president. It's news like this, and a big chunk of America's reaction to it, that confounds the Trump critics.
Mainstream media should do more of what they did Friday morning: Stop talking over their paid panelists, get out and connect with real people, find out why Donald Trump won two years ago in spite of his mouth, and why he very well could win in 2020.
They might also face up to why Twitter is working for the president, that Twitter is where he stirs what pundits call "the animal spirits." It's where he talks day after day about how the economy is the best it's ever been. Obama lowered the unemployment rate, too, but he chose to repeat negatives about the country, at home and abroad. For Trump, it's a strategy that worked, because for the last decade, Americans longed to hear the nation they love celebrated and not denigrated.
What I took away from the Wall Street Journal story is that Trump wants to increase wages for the lower class by creating many more jobs through shifting the money supply from government to the private sector. The idea is that the private sector will do a better job of spending it. This will (and already has) begun to increase wages for the lower 50 percent of wage earners. The president is also doing this by decreasing the supply of cheap labor, despite the protests of the left.
This has already created more money for those who spend nearly every penny they earn, which is bound to increase our gross domestic product.
Look what happened recently at the U.N. Most national leader speeches to the United Nations are boring homilies. "They praise themselves, pay due respect to the UN, expound upon what Miss Congeniality says in all beauty contests: 'World peace!'" said Andrew Sheng, a columnist for the South China Morning Post.
"What we got instead from Trump was raw and edged: 'America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again.'" Sheng wrote.
Trump is actually moving the dial.
Over the last quarter, he got Mexico and Canada to accept a new -- or at least newly renamed -- trilateral trade agreement. The whole world knows he's not a modest man, and God knows, he didn't disappoint, feeling further emboldened to brag about the success of his administration at the United Nations General Assembly. The world’s leaders just laughed at him.
Still, the Dow and the S&P 500 should wipe some smiles off those leaders’ faces, having risen 8 percent and 9 percent respectively for the year to date. NASDAQ is up 16 percent this year, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies, 8 percent.
An improving economy, lowest unemployment rate in 50 years -- the Trump agenda at work?
This isn't what CNN, NBC, CBS or the others is looking at. Which is too bad, because the media's jihad against Donald Trump has driven a wedge between journalists and a great many of the people. And it's left a dangerous distaste for a free press all Americans should cherish.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
