Good stories clouded by president’s actions

LATE last week, the Trump administration proposed rolling back Obama-era mileage standards for cars. It’s a move that, not surprisingly, left backers of the standards wringing their hands and declaring the end was near.

The reaction of California Gov. Jerry Brown, whose state is among several challenging the proposals in court, was typical. The proposals are “reckless” and “an assault on the health of Americans everywhere,” Brown said, and will mean motorists “will get worse gas mileage and breathe dirtier air.”

Yet the change will benefit consumers by making vehicles safer and less expensive. And the Obama administration standards were overzealous from the start. The administration wanted light vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon, which experts said translated to about 36 mpg under real-world conditions.

But as we have written before, achieving those standards would require the government, in some way, to force Americans to buy higher-mileage vehicles they don’t want. As it is, motorists prefer SUVs and pickup trucks, and that’s unlikely to change unless the price of gas skyrockets.

Undoing the Obama rules is estimated to save consumers $500 billion, and is only the latest of several bits of good news resulting from the Trump administration. Here are some others:

• The Labor Department says worker compensation rose 2.8 percent from June 2017 to June 2018, the fastest growth in about a decade. The unemployment rate remains at historically low levels.

• Economic growth during the second quarter of this year was 4.1 percent, something Trump vowed would happen and critics dismissed as not possible.

• The Senate approved and sent to the president the $717 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which includes pay raises for troops and will boost active-duty strength.

• The Treasury Department announced last month that it will no longer make nonprofits disclose the names and addresses of donors who give $5,000 or more. The former requirement left donors open to attack by individuals and groups; this change is a victory for freedom of speech.

These and other developments were cited recently by Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel, who noted that they merit applause and attention but too often get pushed into the background by Trump himself.

“The headlines?” she wrote. “Mr. Trump publicly lecturing his attorney general. Mr. Trump hashing Charles Koch. More about Russian collusion, provoked by the president’s call for the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller. China tariffs. Border strife. Michael Cohen. Paul Manafort.”

Her column appeared before Trump made another unnecessary diversion, tweeting Friday night that in an interview on CNN, the host had made basketball star LeBron James — one of the most thoughtful and classy athletes in the world — “look smart, which isn’t easy to do.”

Strassel’s point was that the president is making life difficult on his own party heading into November’s midterm elections, especially in the House where she sees centrist voters playing a key role in marginal districts — those Hillary Clinton won or came close to winning in 2016.

“The content — the results — of this administration is right there, waiting for the president to communicate,” she wrote. It would serve him and the party well to do just that.