Historian: Trump Most Impactful President Since FDR

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has been the most impactful president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

When it comes to politics, James Carville and Paul Begala taught us that "its the economy stupid."

By those metrics Donald Trump leaves George W. Bush and Barack Obama standing still. Under both presidents the rich got richer and the poor got poorer with a rigged, crony capitalism system in place. Now, in one year, we have 1.7 million new jobs, unemployment is at the lowest in 17 years, and the stock market has broken records 80 times in one year.

We have a reformed the Internal Revenue Code. It was Ronald Reagan's stellar achievement, but it took him five years — and a massive re-election landslide to get it. The list goes on.

We are becoming energy independent. Both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter would have given their right arms for that. It was considered an impossible prospect in the 1970's and 1980's. Illegal immigration has dropped like a rock.

Isis has been driven out of its cities and wiped off the maps of the Mideast. Trump has also  transformed the judiciary, not only the Supreme Court, but 12 lower federal circuit judges. This is the most in a first year of any presidency in American history. And yet, it is not as easy as it looks. I worked for a president whose first pick was an ideological disaster.

So it has been a spectacular, breathtaking year. Of course, you wouldn't know it if you depended on the corporate, Democratic news machine. One study shows that 90 percent of media stories are attacks on Donald Trump.

And all of this is coming at a time when the corporate, Democratic, media is losing its power; its stranglehold on the American people. We now have options, Twitter, Live Streaming and YouTube. As corporate media's audience shrinks, they have become increasingly desperate and shrill. The more they demand control, the more their audience collectively turns them off.

Ginned up scandals have not worked. Lord Melbourne once observed, "The problem with a scandal is that sometimes the mud gets on the wrong person."

Attempts by the media to create an issue out of "Russian collusion" have resulted in more intense examination of the Clinton years and now, unbelievably, the role of Jill Stein.

The idea of obstruction of justice has led to revelations about a politicized FBI. When I dared to mention Andrew McCabe on CNN last May, I was banned from the network. But finally, this week, the Congress called him in to testify under oath.

The campaign against sexual assault has led to calls to revisit Bill Clinton's untouched list of women and now the Lisa Bloom scandal, with women receiving money to attack Trump. If the Democratic Party, with their allies in Hollywood, actually become the party of moral values, it will be the equivalent of a triple axle, triple toe move by an Olympic skater.

Sometimes the media narrative is immediately discredited. All the networks proclaimed that Trump's tax reform would result in companies paying off debt and awarding their executives big bonuses. None of it, they said, would reach the common man. But immediately after the measure passed AT&T and Comcast announced $1,000 bonuses to all employees.

Nevertheless, the media's relentless attacks have taken their toll. As they carefully point out, Trump's year end approval rating is the lowest for the last month of the first year in office since that of Eisenhower's. But even then they cherry pick their dates and numbers, like a good high school debater.

To provide a  better guide, Trump's lowest rate has been 33 percent. Harry S. Truman dipped to 22 percent, Richard M. Nixon 24 percent, George W. Bush 25 percent, Jimmy Carter 28 percent, George H.W. Bush 29 percent and both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, both, reached 35 percent.

Yes, Donald Trump is vulnerable. He is disrupting years of bi-partisan corruption on Capitol Hill. It's been a rigged system. So he has critics and enemies — in both political  parties . That's not to mention the boardrooms of some of America's biggest corporations.

It's all moving toward the 2018 elections, and an attempt by the media to take back the election they lost to a wayward and willful electorate — who dared to defy them.

The Democrats will be trying for impeachment. If they win enough seats in the House of Representatives they will be able to do it. And if they win enough seats in the Senate they will be able to convict Donald Trump and remove him from office.

Contrary to what many Americans may think, they do not need evidence of Russian collusion or obstruction of justice or any other crime. They only need the votes.

We are in for another year of high drama. Fasten your seat belts.

Doug Wead is a presidential historian who served as a senior adviser to the Ron Paul presidential campaign. He is a New York Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and adviser to two presidents, including President George H.W. Bush. He is the author of "Game of Thorns: Inside the Clinton-Trump Campaign of 2016," which is due to be released on Feb. 28, 2017. Read more reports from Doug Wead — Click Here Now.