ROGER KIMBALL: Trumponomics is Working.

All the accredited experts have been wrong about Trump. He came back to office last year on a platform of common sense. They don’t teach that at Harvard. But in the real world it works like magic. Just a few days ago, the jobs report for January came out. “Unexpectedly,” the economy added 130,000 jobs. The green-eye shade chaps predicted 55,000. Another bright light: the government lost about 42,000 employees: that’s 42,000 paychecks that taxpayers will not have to pick up going forward. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3 percent – a number that, when translated into English, means close to full employment. Inflation rose just 0.2 percent in January, and fell to 2.4 percent on an annual basis.

The jobs report “strengthens the case for higher US Treasury yields and a rebound in the dollar over the coming months,” Jonas Goltermann, a senior economist at Capital Economics wrote. Can someone get Jerome Powell on the phone for me? Trump’s aggressive deployment of tariffs was supposed to wreak havoc on the economy. All the experts said so. But growth was 4.4 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and is estimated to have been above 5 percent in the fourth. Wow. More misery for the doomsayers. More goodies for the middle class.

Until Donald Trump swept back into office, the left in this country wielded an implacable one-way ratchet to torment the populace. “Affirmative action,” DEI, climate hysteria, smothering regulatory excess: the people in charge delighted in making people’s lives more burdensome.

Government has been run this way for many decades. Occasionally, a Republican would get into office and attempt to tamp down the administrative state. The left didn’t mind because whatever modest reforms were effected could be undone in a nonce once the “right people” got back into office. They never lost their one-way ratchets. That was a major reason that government always got bigger, that the left’s hobby horses never went away, that the regulatory environment became ever more stultifying and surreal. Men in women’s bathrooms? It’s mandated by Title IX or whatever, my friend. Cars that turn off and restart at every stoplight? We have to save the environment, you peasant, and where is your mask and vaccination affidavit?

Trump has smashed the left’s one-way ratchet. It can’t get purchase anymore. It just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and Trump has made that clear.