The decade-old age of fables like Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, or the pangolin/bat cause of COVID is not over; it is just hitting midstream.

For much of April, amid stock downturns, in the classical paranoid style, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal news reporters and the liberal press that Trump had either a) guaranteed an inevitable recession, b) engineered a losing trade war he likely regretted, c) crashed the stock market, d) lost his once majority favorability ratings, e) mostly had a failed first 100 days, or f) all of the above.

Some of us thought these diagnoses and prognoses were absurd. How in mediis rebus, during a radical counterrevolution never quite seen before, could anyone issue such bleak predictions? Would these same observers have said the U.S. was doomed to lose World War II after the bleak first five months of mostly failure in the Pacific, or North Africa, after the utter U.S. army disaster at the Kasserine Pass?

When the Biden administration compiled two consecutive quarters of negative GDP—the supposedly classic definition of a recession—most of these same pundits assured us that the data was meaningless and irrelevant. The same left-wing media throng insisted Biden was in his cognitive prime until hours before he abdicated from the ticket under pressure. They swore to us that Robert Mueller's "walls were closing in" on Donald Trump, who would legitimately go to jail, buried by 93 lawfare indictments.

As for their polls showing that Trump was all but through after three months in office, almost all of them were not just off in the 2016 presidential race, but again in 2020. And given the chronic temptation to warp polls to create Democratic momentum and fundraising, they rigged their polls yet again in 2024—even when they knew in disgrace that they were ruining their brand. A former Harris campaign official just admitted that internal polls never showed Harris ahead—even as the majority of polls predicted her victory.

So why would anyone believe any of these people? Take the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll assured us that 45 percent of the public gave Trump an F for his first 100 days, with only 42 percent expressing approval of his job so far.

But this is the same bunch that also assured us in its final authoritative 2024 election poll, on the very eve before the voting, that Kamala Harris would win the race by 4 points—a lead proverbially "outside the margin of error." (The next day, she lost the popular vote by 1.5 percent or 2,284,952 votes and the Electoral College by 312-226). The public broadcasting polling partnership was off 5.5 points, perhaps suggesting that it wished to aid the Harris campaign more than either adhering to professional and ethical norms or fearing to lose what little was left of its reputation.

As soon as the Washington Post and the New York Times issued their dismal Trump bias polls, observers quickly pointed out they had, by intent, vastly underpolled those who voted for Trump in 2024. In contrast, the polls with the best 2024 records had Trump's 100-day approval ratings near even or positive: Rasmussen was 50-49%, and the joint national surveys by Insider Advantage and Trafalgar Group had Trump up at 100 days, 46-44%.

As far as the supposed economic and stock meltdown, the March and April monthly economic reports showed that job growth was not only impressive but well above market expectations, with special emphasis on permanent rather than part-time jobs, even as the number of federal workers went down.