Watch: College Students Can't Help But Admit Trump's Economic Success
We all have our YouTube guilty pleasures. Mine, I’ll confess, are Campus Reform videos.
You’ve seen them before. Someone with a microphone goes onto a college campus — certainly not a difficult place to find liberals — and manages to either make them sound foolish through rhetorical legerdemain or force them to admit the right side of the aisle has done at least something right since the Harding administration.
This was one of the latter, as students at Michigan State University had to admit that the Trump administration was doing something right for the economy.
The interviewer was speaking about former President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Illinois in which he took credit for the economy created under President Donald Trump.
The former president claimed that “by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high, and the uninsured rate hit an all-time low, poverty rates were falling. I mention this just so when you hear how great the economy is doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started.
“I’m glad it’s continued, but when you hear about this economic miracle that’s been going on, when the job numbers come out, monthly job numbers and suddenly Republicans are saying it’s a miracle, I have to kind of remind them, actually, those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016 and — anyway. I digress.”
So, what did Spartan students think of that claim? Surprisingly little, at least from the sampling we got from the video.
“Um, he’s been out long enough now that it’s not been on him anymore,” one student said. “It’s more on Donald Trump, so I guess he’s more in the wrong.”
“I would probably unfortunately side with Trump for this one,” another sheepish-looking student said. “I think that he has done, like, a lot for the economy that Obama didn’t do such a well — good job on. But — yeah, so I’ll side with Trump on that.”
“I feel like all presidents do this,” another said. “They’ll sort of take credit for something that’s happening down the line.”
And perhaps one student stunned it up most wisely: “I feel like once a president’s done, they hand it off.”
Thank you, young woman, wise beyond your years.
Obama’s presidency lasted from January 2009 until January 2017. That’s exactly how long you can serve unless you take over for another president — the 22nd Amendment specifically limits presidents to two elected terms of four years or 10 years total if they take over for another president during their presidency.
That’s the perplexing thing about Obama’s tenure in office — for some reason, he seems to think the most important time of his presidency didn’t actually happen during his presidency. Instead, he remains convinced that the start of the Iraq war in the spring of 2003 to the fiscal crisis of autumn 2008 was more important than anything he did during the financial crisis or in the Middle East. Meanwhile, when it comes to the recovery, that period from January 2017 to the present is all him.
Students, at least, aren’t buying it. And when you can’t get college students, you’re going to have even more trouble foisting that tired “long game” argument on other Americans.
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