Since unemployment is the lowest since 2000, the stock market is setting records, and businesses talk of expanding, Americans are perplexed at the continued sniping at President Trump.

Fire and Fury book

Trump and his staff are battling a wave of negatives in Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” Trump used a press conference and Twitter to denounce the book and slam the media for focusing on it.

Pro-Trump forces quote Maggie Haberman of The New York Times as saying Wolff “gets basic details wrong”; Alisyn Camerota of CNN as saying the book is “sloppy”; John Podhoretz, New York Post, calling it “blithe ignorance,” and Rich Lowry, National Review, saying it is “too stupid and malicious for words.”

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-back-slamming-calling-author-total-loser-book/story?id=52176166

Trump's "shoot from the hip" communications habits give the media plenty to write about.

David HarsanyiDavid Harsanyi

Conservative economists, including David Harsanyi, senior editor of The Federalist, says not enough credit is being given to deregulation and corporate tax cuts as factors that have resulted in a 4.1% jobless rate including driving unemployment among blacks to 6.8%, lowest in 44 years.

Employment gains for 2017 totaled 2.1 million according to the Jan. 5 report of the Labor Dept. of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was the seventh straight year of increases of two million-plus, it noted.

The Dow-Jones average rose 220 points Jan. 5 to a record 25,295.

“The first year of Trump, coupled with the end years of Obama, will go down as one of the greatest periods of job growth in recent decades,” Prof. Joseph Foudy of New York University told the New York Post.

Admittedly, helping the low jobless rate is that some workers have given up seeking jobs at the present time.

The business community, however, is solidly behind the Trump Administration and will do everything in its power to back policies that spur economic growth. A growing economy is good for PR, marketing and advertising.

Regs Blocked or Taken off Table

Hundreds of Obama Administration regulations have been blocked from implementation and “thousands of others” will never even be considered, says Harsanyi.

His complaint is that the liberal-oriented press “props up economists who tell them what they want to hear. Economists who obsess over ‘inequality’ rather than economic growth, about the future of labor unions, or climate change,” are the ones whose comments get picked up, he says.

“Plenty of economists are making good arguments for the free market but will never be members of the ‘economists say,’ clique” that gets quoted, he adds.

NYT Schizoid on Trump and Economy

Harsanyi is mystified at the contradictory messages that mark New York Times coverage of Trump and the economy.

He notes that after “having bombarded readers with news of a homicidal Republican tax plan for so many weeks,” NYT then said, at the start of a page one article: “A wave of optimism has swept over American business leaders and is beginning to translate into the sort of investment in new plants, equipment and factory upgrades that bolsters economic growth and spurs job creation—and may finally raise wages significantly.”