“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
This week, President Donald Trump announced the greatest achievement of his four years in office: Thanks to his policies, Americans are living longer than ever before.
“We come before you bearing good news,” White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway said on Thursday. “For the first time in four years, life expectancy in the United States of America has increased. And for the first time in 29 years, the number of drug overdose deaths has decreased.”
The figures come from 2018, one year after Trump began his tenure in office. Life expectancy had fallen for the last three years under President Barack Obama, thanks to opioid deaths and suicides.
But in 2018 American life expectancy rose, from 78.6 to 78.7 years.
One-tenth of a month doesn’t sound like much, said Assistant Secretary of Public Health Brett Giroir—but multiplied by America’s population, Donald Trump added more than 25 million years to America’s life expectancy.
“Previously, our longevity has decreased. That really means that our children and grandchildren will live less long and less quality of lives than we have,” he said. “This has been reversed.”
“This has not happened through coincidence,” Conway said. “It’s happened through causation.”
President Trump’s policies improved—and extended—American life by fighting the opioid crisis, cracking down on drug trafficking, and creating a booming economy that has given Americans hope for their future.
President Trump cares about hopeless areas plagued by overdoses, which he calls the “crisis next door,” Conway said.
The number of opioids prescribed by doctors has fallen by almost a third since January 2017—the month Trump was inaugurated.
Trump officials busted 3,000 drug trafficking rings, seized $16.5 billion of drugs, and sent almost 99,000 drug traffickers behind bars in “high-intensity” areas, alone.
And the Trump administration dedicated $3.7 billion in grants to fight drug addiction. The day of the press conference, the Trump administration announced another $14.8 million to fight opioid addictions in 21 rural areas from New York to New Mexico.
The result: The number of people who died by drug overdose fell by four percent.
Part of the increased life expectancy comes from President Trump’s tough approach to China and Mexico.
In 2018, Trump confronted Chinese officials and demanded they stop exporting the deadliest opioid plaguing America—fentanyl.
The Chinese “agreed to improve their standards for prosecution for fentanyl-related trafficking,” Drug Czar Jim Carroll said Thursday.
“In every meeting I had with the Chinese, my counterpart said they heard the President loud and clear: that the flow of fentanyl into the United States was not tolerated,” Caroll said.
China did something it had never done before: It held “the first-ever prosecutions of Chinese nationals for trafficking drugs into the United States.”
President Trump’s signature issue—building a wall across the border with Mexico and increasing border security—is also saving lives, Carroll added.
Most of the cocaine, methamphetamine, and foreign marijuana come into the U.S. across the southwest border, the FBI told Congress in 2010.
“President Trump’s commitment to secure our southwest border” is “critical to stopping the flow of drugs into our country.”
Maybe the most overlooked part of the Trump life expectancy boom is the red-hot economy, stimulated by the president’s conservative policies.
Giroir cited “a nationwide study in December” that found “when an auto plant closes, opioid mortality rate among the young goes up 85 percent.”
Under Trump, unemployment has fallen to 50-year lows.
“Everything that we’re doing to increase employment, increase opportunity—these all directly affect the rates that we see and that we celebrate today,” Giroir said.
Under President Obama, federal regulations drained out $1.89 trillion from the economy. Obama’s own Energy Department forecast that just seven of the environmentalist regulations Obama proposed in 2015 destroyed 8,000 manufacturing jobs.
“The effects are dire,” said then-Congressman Tom Marino, R-P.A., during a special hearing called “Assessing the Obama Years” in July 2016. “A September 2015 study by a Princeton Nobel laureate shows shocking rising mortality among blue collar segments of society.”
“Economic stress is leading to drug and alcohol dependency and death, and to health problems and even suicide,” he said. “The (Obama) administration is dismissive.”
The Trump administration paid attention—and the results are clear.
On his nationally-syndicated radio show on Thursday, Rush Limbaugh said the president deserves credit for changing the country for the better.
“Why isn’t all of the improvements that have happened in this country culturally, socially, economically, why are all of those things not the great new normal?” he asked.
This November, voters will have a clear answer to the question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” In just two full years in office, President Trump added 25 million years to American life expectancy.
Could that convince Americans to give him four more years?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”