ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The gruesome details of the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio have come off the front page while the Epstein saga takes center stage. But America suffers from similar mass shootings every single weekend in Baltimore and Chicago, not to mention Philadelphia.

Seven were killed in Chicago on a recent weekend, with 52 wounded. In Baltimore 35 were killed in the last 30 days alone. Philadelphia suffers from the same routinely every weekend.

Those shootings in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia cannot be attributed to President Trump’s rhetoric or a “climate of hate” he creates, as Democrats allege. Rather the weekly mass shootings in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia are due to boys being raised without fathers resulting excessive welfare, and the climate of crime Democrats have created in every major city they have controlled for decades.

That is despite the strict gun control laws adopted in those cities, now another proven progressive failure. Which proves the aphorism there is nothing progressive about progressivism.

Donald Trump has not adopted or even advocated a single racist policy. Just because he doesn’t want millions from Central America walking across the border to compete for the jobs of the lowest income Americans, smuggling drugs on behalf of cartels, and human trafficking, not to mention the threat of domestic terrorism, does not make him a racist, or a “White Supremacist.” Ditto that for the millions of Americans who voted him into office.

Sensible Americans are waking up now and holding Democrats accountable for the failures of their policies. Their Mueller investigation is dead and gone now, and the inspector general has recently referred former FBI Director James Comey for prosecution.

This has been a gross disappointment for Democrats seeking a summer recess with the nation clamoring for impeachment of Mr. Trump and removal from office. Instead, Mr. Trump, the brilliant counter puncher, flipped the script on Democrats with his well-timed counterattacks on what they thought was their strength, their decades long unquestioned political lock on America’s major cities.

From San Francisco to Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, the nation’s attention has turned to the Democrats’ long established legacy of homelessness, drugs, crime, corruption, poverty and arrested economic growth resulting from Democratic political machine monopolies, and their abusive high taxation and anti-business overregulation. These anti-growth policies are the root cause of all the Third World decay that even mainstream Democrat-controlled media are now documenting in these urban cores.

Liberals returning home from Congress for the summer are not finding unruly grassroots clamoring for failed socialism. They are finding instead that voters are happy and pleased with Mr. Trump’s peace and prosperity, and his promised blue-collar boom that won him the 2016 election. That blue-collar boom was caused by the opposite of the Democratic policies that have ruined America’s major cities: Trump’s tax reform/tax cuts and deregulation, particularly in energy.

Lower cost, reliable fossil fuel energy, which America now leads the word in producing thanks to Mr. Trump’s favorable policies, is already empowering America’s recovery of manufacturing, providing good paying blue-collar jobs. In community after community across America, the “help wanted” signs are in small business windows and driving the job recruitment industries. Many jobs come with health insurance, vacations, 401(k)s, even now with bonuses.

The bottom line is that more and more people are “manning the oars” — becoming productive citizens and getting off the “free ride.” We can and must use this new rising political climate to impose work requirements on welfare, and permanently cut spending and the size of government.

That requires only voting Democrats out of Congress. Because on every issue, from so-called “climate change” to taxes, to immigration, to Medicare for All, to “reparations,” to abortion in the fourth trimester, there is no debating or even discussion with closed-minded Democrats.

Democrats are already foolishly campaigning on exactly the opposite of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth policies — repealing the tax reform/tax cuts, which Democrats do not remotely understand, and phasing out fossil fuels entirely, which they are calling the “Green New Deal.” Those tax increases and anti-growth policies will produce only renewed, interminable recession, as under former President Obama, and his record unemployment, stagnation, poverty, welfare and increasing inequality.

Instead, it is blacks, Hispanics, Asians, youth, and lower income workers who have gained the most from Mr. Trump’s most inclusive recovery in American history — his blue-collar boom. And it is precisely votes from this former Democratic base that are likely to put Mr. Trump over the top in 2020, much like blue-collar voters did in 2016.

• Lewis K. Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and Foundation. Peter J. Ferrara is a senior policy adviser for the Foundation and teaches economics at Kings College in New York.

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