In case you missed it, Donald Trump recently penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled “My Tariffs Have Brought America Back.”

If that headline is pure Trumpian swagger, then the subhead is a Gronkowskian spike of the economic football: “The ‘experts’ predicted market crashes, massive inflation, and recession. They were all wrong.” The president continues, tweaking the very nose of the editorial page that’s hosting him:

Countless so-called experts, including those featured frequently in The Wall Street Journal, predicted confidently that the Trump tariffs would crash stock markets, crush economic growth, cause massive inflation, destroy American exports, and trigger a “worldwide recession.” Nine months later, the results are in, every one of those predictions has proven completely and totally wrong. Since I was elected in 2024, we have had 52 stock market highs, with virtually no inflation. There has never been anything like it!

Trump keeps going, adding that Bidenflation and its attendant economic stagnation put us in an enormous economic hole and cost the average American family around $33,000 in unrecoverable wealth.

He then pivots to the positive, noting that Q3 2025 GDP was a “booming” 4.4%, and that the Atlanta Fed has predicted Q4 GDP to be above 5%. Our federal budget deficit is way down, as is our trade deficit. Domestic steel production and factory construction are both up, and real income for average Americans rose by thousands last year, faster than consumer prices.

These are easily verifiable facts, and they’re stubborn things. And who but the hopelessly Trump-deranged can argue about the enormous impact of targeted tariffs?

Yeah, yeah, I know: The market hates uncertainty. Of course it does. But what happens, over time, when uncertainty becomes routine? What happens when the seeming haphazardness of Trump’s tariff regime becomes predictable, when volatility becomes a more normal and less frightening occurrence, when cooler heads always seem to prevail, when things always seem to work themselves out in the end? That’s when the market’s invisible hand tends to stop trembling, and the stock market responds by racing to new heights. Call it the Trump Uncertainty Principle, even though there’s nothing quantum about it.

During the four wretched years of the Biden administration, every trading partner who walked past us on Rehoboth Beach kicked sand in our face. But now, these same unfair traders know that the U.S. is no longer a 97-pound weakling.

There’s no secret to Trump’s success. And since we’re all psych minors — whether we learned about human behavior in a barracks or on the ball field or in a classroom or on the sales floor — we all know how it works.

But for those on the Left who still don’t get it: When you think of Donald Trump’s tariff regime, don’t think of him with a big stick, just whacking away indiscriminately at other countries. Instead, think of him in a lab coat surrounded by Chinese and European and Canadian and Mexican Skinner boxes and employing the most fundamental form of operant conditioning. When the lab rats exhibit unwanted behavior, Trump denounces it and slaps them with a tariff. When they exhibit the desired behavior, Trump praises them and removes the tariff.

If it works with vermin, it’ll work with commies, right? (I know, I know. Comparing Chinese Communists to lab rats is an affront to all self-respecting lab rats, but hey.)

Of course, Trump has his economic detractors. A few days after his op-ed, the Journal’s editorial board tried to defend itself: “Mr. Trump starts by torching a straw man — to wit, that critics were wrong to say tariffs would produce a recession. We can only speak for ourselves, but we never predicted that. We said tariffs are a tax that would hurt growth, but their overall impact would depend on whether tax reform and deregulation outweighed the tariff harm.”

So the editorial board didn’t predict a recession, eh? Maybe not, but what do you call an opinion piece whose headline reads, “Will There Be a Trump Recession?” Or what about this opinion piece by Mark Skousen titled, “Beneath the GDP, a Recession Warning”?

So the editorial board is accusing Trump of “torching a straw man,” but they themselves are guilty of splitting hairs. They might not have expressly warned of a Trump recession, but they certainly floated the idea. More than once.

The board members then try to prove a negative: “The question is: How much better would the economy be now without the tariffs and their on-again, off-again imposition?”

Alas, like the age-old conundrum at the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. But the numbers as they are don’t lie. The economy and affordability under Donald Trump are worlds better than they were under his White House predecessor, and that much is indisputable.

How about giving the guy some credit instead of just coughing up bile?