They never learn. It doesn't matter what accomplishments Donald Trump racks up. To his detractors, they'll always discount the good, magnify what they perceive to be the awful, and predict imminent doom for the entire MAGA movement.
Last week alone, the President had enough wins to fill presidential libraries of other presidents with four or eight years in the White House. On Friday, Trump addressed the press gaggle on the White House lawn before heading to Scotland for some golf (I'm reliably told they've played that game there for a long time) and to hold a few meetings. Some of the meetings were trade-related, but unspecified with whom, and some meetings with individual heads of state were announced, like one with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Matt Lewis, a Never Trump conservative who has a chronic case of TDS, long enough to predict 1) Trump will lose to Kamala Harris, and 2) will drive MAGA off the cliff, Thelma and Louise style, after the Liberation Day tariffs. But Matt, not having been borne out to possess the gift of political prophecy, has not yet been deterred to keep at it. He just 3) authored an op-ed that July would be remembered as the time when Donald Trump became a lame duck.
The fever swamp online was full of derision for Trump's decision to go to Scotland in the first place. Of course, they had no earthly idea of what the President's agenda was, but that didn't matter. The narrative was that Trump was wasting taxpayer money to go to one of his other resorts, Turnberry, so he could sneak in a few rounds of vacation golf.
Trump: “I’m in Scotland now. Many meetings planned.”
— PLGC (@PL67712441) July 26, 2025
Our tax dollars paid to fly him to Scotland to promote his golf course.https://t.co/IYWOSS3dOL
Even Barstool Sports couldn't resist noting that the braggadocio around Trump's golf game, which at 78 is far better than mine ever was at half his age, might be a little overstated.
Trump’s caddy with a John Stockton level assistpic.twitter.com/J50j4Gl4Gj
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) July 27, 2025
Okay, sue me. I think this is pretty funny. Did you see how thick that rough is? Some of Joe Biden's missing unaccompanied minors sneaking over the border could get lost in that stuff. I'd use my trusty foot wedge, too, if I had the chance, and I'm not preoccupied with negotiating multi-trillion dollar-plus trade deals.
This is all petty and foolish criticism. How many times did we read from the online pundit peanut gallery that there were no deals, Trump was bluffing, and any deals disclosed would be window dressing made to look like improvements without any actual substance to them? Tons, right? And returning to Lewis' prediction of doom that the MAGA base will collapse over the Epstein connection to Trump, that charge totally ignores that only true scandal out there, the proverbial Titanic hitting the iceberg of scandals - Barack Obama ordering up faked intelligence to hamstring Trump in 2016.
Missing, of course, in all the criticism and jeering at Donald Trump is what he was in Scotland to do and what he posted in the win column for the United States on Sunday. Another trade deal, this time with the European Union. And the advantage in the deal for the United States makes it approach the Edmonton Oilers deal with the Los Angeles Kings for Wayne Gretzky in 1988. The Kings got the GOAT, and Edmonton got three draft picks and Jimmy Carson. Remember Jimmy? Me, neither.
In a joint press gaggle with EU President Ursula von der Leyen, the terms of the deal were made public on Sunday. This is what 75 minutes of Trump closing the deal in person has wrought.
.@POTUS announces a landmark trade deal with the European Union: "I think it's the biggest deal ever made." pic.twitter.com/HqVK2yCTti
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 27, 2025
The 27 member states of the European Union, as of August 1st, will now open their markets to U.S. exports at 0% tariffs for the first time ever. The EU will buy three-quarters of a trillion dollars' worth of liquified natural gas. I seem to recall that until very recently, there used to be a country where the EU largely purchased that particular form of energy. It's a big country to their east that is run by a very bad man who has apparently just economically taken it in the shorts.
$600 billion dollars will be invested into the United States by the Europeans, and a lot of that promised plus-up of Defense spending for NATO? That 5% of GDP the member-states have committed to will largely include weapons they purchase from the United States. Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth. The total package comes in at $1.9 trillion dollars. What is the U.S. having to concede back to Europe? Nothing. There will still be a baseline tariff on all EU imports to the States of 15%. Call it a maintenance fee to keep us, the world's police force, in place.
Add this deal to the Japan agreement last week, opening up the Japanese market for the first time to U.S. exports, including agriculture and livestock, and the deals with Indonesia and Vietnam, and you can even throw in the trade deal with China last month, all of which are far much more fair to the United States than anything previously negotiated, Trump has just ensured another couple trillion in investments, and a wide open world for U.S. farmers, ranchers, and manufacturers to conquer.
How lopsided a deal for the U.S. was Trump's negotiations with von der Leyen? Even the assembled media couldn't believe what they were hearing.
🚨 WOW! Trump's deal with the European Union today is so insanely amazing for the US that the reporters in the room were shocked and asked - "WHAT are the US concessions? WHAT is the US giving up in the deal, if ANYTHING?" pic.twitter.com/CEb5kRtmj2
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 27, 2025
What a MASSIVE vindication for…
A bewildered reporter, reading the fact sheet and listening to Trump outline what was just agreed to, asked von der Leyen what concessions the U.S. made. She couldn't see any. Von der Leyen's response did not indicate any concessions were made by the Americans at all. Instead, she agreed with Trump's original premise that the EU had been getting the better of trade with the United States for a long time, and it was finally time to make things even.
Trump just won again. Not too shabby for a lame duck president, right, Matt Lewis? How ridiculous do the critics from the gallery seem now? If you tell me we're going to get a deal like this, and all it's going to cost is sending Trump abroad to let him play golf first, I'll take that six days a week and twice on Sunday.
I still on principle don't tend to be too big a fan of tariffs as an economic strategy. They strike me as a tax, which slows down economic growth. But the way Donald Trump has used them as an attention getter, as a bludgeon to show he's serious about reshaping international trade, and our rightful place as the hub of all that trade, seems to be panning out in one amazing deal after another. The rest of the EU states still have to ratify the trade, and there's plenty of heartburn medicine going around the old continent right now, but they'll sign onto it, even if they don't like it. Why? Because they can't survive without American dollars buying their stuff. They know it, and Donald Trump knows it. The game was over at that point.
The Dow's lowest closing number of 2025 was on April 14th. It closed at $36,708.51, reflecting almost a $5,000 dollar drop since the announcement of Liberation Day tariffs. Trump has had a very nuanced approach to which tariffs would stick, and which ones he would pare back. And the haphazardness of it all still drives people crazy. I get it. There's a case to make that taking the easy road, not making too many waves, the market would still be where it is right now or even higher. And speaking of higher, on Sunday afternoon, the pre-market trading, reflecting the news from Turnberry on the deal with the EU, was that the Dow was set to open higher than its all-time record of $45,014.04. The Futures bulls are pushing hard at the gates, with the implied Monday morning open to be at $45,255.
Sure, maybe we could be enjoying all this prosperity without the tariffs. But without them, the threat of them, or the stunt of applying them for a day, a week, a month in some cases, what's the odds that all these countries would have been just as agreeable to new trade deals this favorable to the United States? Trump has just made this country trillions of dollars in the last few weeks in trade deals alone. And when you factor in all the capital investment from those deals and measure the secondary and tertiary effects from those capital investments, the economy is on the brink of growth the likes of which I've not seen in my lifetime.
The thing about Monte Hall's, and now Wayne Brady's Let's Make A Deal, and with Howie Mandel's Deal Or No Deal is that behind one of those showcase doors is an alpaca instead of a Alpha Romeo. Inside one of those suitcases is $1 instead of $1 million. Donald Trump's use of the tariffs, thus far, has served to take the possible disaster outcomes off the board entirely. You cannot point to one deal thus far that the United States has cut that puts us in a weaker position than before Liberation Day. Not with Japan, not with China, not with Indonesia or Vietnam or the UK, and certainly not now with the EU. And only this past week, the Australians decided to open their markets for the first time to U.S. beef.
Why is it so hard for Never Trump, Inc. to tip their cap just once when it's so demonstrably obvious that the President is delivering remarkable things for the American people? My gracious, in a couple months, I can't wait to take a look at polling of Trump's job approval with farmers and ranchers. If it's not around 90%, I'll be amazed. And the EU buying three-quarters of a trillion in LNG? Holy frack, Batman. Good thing we're beefing up our energy sector.
Happy Monday. Hope you enjoy the winning. Here's to even more this week, being I'm still not yet tired of it.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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