“Are you better off than you were last year?”

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

It’s that time of the year when media outlets write up the people and trends who defined the year while ignoring the man who redefined it.

2017 was the year that the United States of America got up off its knees. It was the year that we stopped following the world and started leading it. It was the year that our booming economy accomplished the impossible. It was the year that we became a great nation again.

And one man is responsible for that.

President Trump promised to make America great again. And every day, it’s happening. Factory workers and small businessmen, farmers and ranchers, soldiers and police officers are waking up to a renewed America. Time chose a social justice hashtag as its ‘Thing of the Year’. We’re choosing the man who turned the country around as our “Man of the Year”.

When President Trump promised 4% economic growth, the media herded together economists to prove it couldn’t happen. CNN surveyed 11 economists and Bloomberg asked 80 economists. They agreed it was impossible. 2% growth was the best that we could hope for. And we would have to get used to that.

And then the GDP growth estimate for the fourth quarter of 2017 approached 4%.

Americans are realizing that maybe we don’t have to just get used to dividing up the last torn shreds of a failing economy between leftist crony billionaires and their officially entitled victim groups.

Maybe we can do better.

The S&P 500 Index has gone up 20% this year and the Dow is up 25%. Holiday shopping season sales are up almost 5% over last year. Consumer confidence is at a 17-year high. The unemployment rate is at a 17-year low. The manufacturing industry just had its best month of job gains for the year.

All of this isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents. It’s the knowledge that things are getting better. You can’t fake it. The media spent eight years promising a recovery that no one believed in. Obama announced that the recovery had happened more times than he ended the Iraq War. And just like the end of the war, it never happened. It’s happening now because people are living a better future.

Call it… making America great again. Not for government officials, but for ordinary Americans.

Obama made life great for government bureaucrats. In the era of hope and steal, the bedroom communities of Washington D.C. became the wealthiest counties in the country. Americans lost their jobs, veterans lost their lives and the government bureaucracy grew fat on their misery.

While the VA was killing veterans by putting them on waiting lists to save money, it paid out $142 million in bonuses. The EPA did its best to kill the economy while profiting from its misdeeds. It paid 8 employees $1 million to do nothing. One EPA employee managed to rip off the government to the tune of almost $1 million while pretending to be a CIA agent. Now the free ride for the swamp is finally over.

Under Obama, the IRS handed out $100 million in bonuses to its employees. Tens of thousands of dollars went to Lois Lerner who had targeted conservative groups. Under Trump, the former IRS commish, on whose watch the targeting happened, is warning that tax reform will be a disaster for the IRS. Meanwhile after tax reform, millions of people across the country are getting $1,000 bonuses.

That’s what the Trump economy looks like.

Obama spent us deep into debt and told us to hope. Trump isn’t telling us to hope. He’s actually delivering. That’s why his political opponents are so afraid and so desperate to bring him down. Incumbents rarely lose elections. And incumbents with a booming economy at their backs are bulletproof. The Democrats have bet everything on their Russia conspiracy theories because they know that Trump will be able to ask Americans the same exact question that Reagan did in 1980 and 1984.

“Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?”

And they know what the answer will be. Especially once the tax cuts kick in. That’s why they’re afraid.

“Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?”

We can see those answers right now. You won’t see them on CNN which is breathlessly thrilling leftist #resistance viewers with the latest Mueller coup leaks. You won’t read about them in the New York Times. But you can see it in shopping malls, at the United Nations, in the front lines of the war against ISIS and Al Qaeda, in the faces of police officers and the bright eyes of children receiving their presents.

Today we can ask, “Are you better off than you were last year?” And it’s easy to see the answer. You don’t look for it in the soaring rhetoric of a politician or the tea leaves of the experts. It’s there in the busy aisles of big box stores, the crowded planes, the bustling factories and the booming market.

It’s a spirit that’s in the air. It’s not hope. It’s reality.

And it’s why President Donald J. Trump is _Front Page_’s Man of the Year.

Obama’s rise to power was a revolution against America. Trump’s first year was an American revolution.

The Obama revolution paid out its benefits in stolen money. Trillions were stolen from taxpayers, homeowners, car owners, workers and small businessmen and redistributed to his friends and political cronies, to migrants and the welfare class, to Iran and other Islamic terrorists, and to the Green Mob.

Trump’s revolution is taking the government boot off American necks. Its benefits are paid out by putting an end to the political oppression, repression, thievery and exploitation of the past. That mea ns lower taxes and fewer regulations. It means that our troops can decide how to kill terrorists and Israel can decide what its capital is. And you can decide how to spend your own money.

Whether you’re in Alaska or Florida, deep in the Maine winter or basking in seventy degree temperatures in Arizona, take a deep breath of that air. It tastes of freedom.

The new American revolution wasn’t accompanied by rifle fire. Instead it came when millions of Americans voted for their freedom. And, for the first time in some time, freedom followed.

That’s why the economy is booming. It’s why there’s a new spirit of confidence in the air.

Free people can solve more problems than any government agency. They can create more wealth than any government bureaucrat. Government doesn’t make America great. Americans make it great.

The Trump revolution has unleashed millions of Americans to renew our nation’s greatness.

And that is why we recognize President Donald J. Trump as the man whose impact on this country defined the past year. It was a year of revolution, of liberation, of industry and achievement.

It was a year that made America great.