I know the mantra when my side’s candidate is down in the polls: The polls are fake. I don’t trust the polls. And look whom they mostly interviewed — the other guys.

And when my guy is up: I like the polls. What about the polls, huh?

My guy now is down. And even worse, the John Stossel libertarian test — look at the betting odds, because private capital does not fool around — also concerns.

I hate to quote Pat Buchanan, even though I think like him on so many issues, because — well, y’know, I’m Jewish. Not his favorite flavor. But he notes correctly:

On July 22, 1988, after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the party nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, enjoyed a 17-point lead over Vice President George W. Bush.

Five weeks later, on Labor Day, Dukakis was down eight points, the same margin by which he would lose the election. He had lost 25 points in one month.

What had happened? During August, Republican attack groups elevated and relentlessly pounded what might be called Dukakis’ Bay State radical liberalism.

He had proudly called himself a card-carrying member of the ACLU. He had vetoed a bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance in Massachusetts’ schools. He was against imposing the death penalty. He had issued weekend passes to convicted killers such as the infamous Willie Horton, who had used his get-out-of-jail-free card to go to Maryland and rape and murder.

Vice President Bush ended up winning 40 states.

The reality is that this is a bad season for President Trump and, of course, a darned shame. For three-plus years he has been Mount Rushmore quality. One of the best there ever has been. He turned around the dead Obama economy and created the most powerful economic boom perhaps in American history. Unemployment plummeted to record lows — Black unemployment, Asian unemployment, Hispanic unemployment, female unemployment. Manufacturing was booming. He saved America’s steel and aluminum industries, and a world power has got to have home-based steel and aluminum manufacturing, free trade or not. At wartime, America cannot find itself needing to beg England for steel. He turned us from being dependent on oil from Arab Muslim dictatorial sheiks to becoming a net energy exporter. He opened part of ANWR, long overdue. He moved forward on the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota pipeline.

Everything was booming and zooming. He stared down China, even as the gutless coward LeBron James and the NBA were emasculating themselves by kneeling before the Chinese yuan when they were not kneeling at or otherwise contemning the American flag. Trump’s enemies warned that his trade war with China would backfire; they were proven ever so wrong. His enemies and opponents were wrong on so much.

“The Europeans won’t increase their NATO payments”? Well, uh, yeah, they did. “He is too stupid to renegotiate NAFTA, and Mexico and Canada never will agree to renegotiate deals to their detriment”? Well, Mexico signed the new agreement, and then Canada signed. “He will start a war with North Korea by posting tweets about ‘Rocket Man’ and threatening him that America’s button is bigger”? Well, no. Obviously the Korean Dough Boy has not become a civil libertarian, but now a door has been opened to talk to him, and he did stop his ever-intensifying nuclear rattling.

They said that Trump will end up getting us embroiled in a war with Iran if he pulled us out of the disastrous Iran Deal for which Obama and Kerry secretly sent Iran $1.3 billion after they secretly flew $400 million in pallets of cash to Tehran as ransom. But we have had no increased hostility from Iran. OK, they generated a riot at the American embassy in Iraq, reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter hostage-taking era. But this time it played out differently from the Carter approach. Instead of waiting for the rioters to come back and storm the American embassy, Trump gave the order to turn Qasem Soleimani into a firecracker. The “experts” then agreed that, wow, now America really is in trouble with the Iranian ayatollahs. That was half a year ago. Uh-oh.

He targeted ISIS, which grew from a “junior varsity” to a veritable mini-caliphate under Obama–Kerry. First he crushed their caliphate. Then he killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the mass rapist whom the Washington Post mourned as an “austere religious scholar.” Trump’s order saw him killed like a dog, whimpering and crying and screaming, then dead as a doornail. He redefined American might and American resolve. Along the way, he rebuilt the American military that Obama–Hillary–Kerry had allowed to decay with a $700 billion allocation in 2018 and $716 billion in 2019.

Under Trump, Putin stopped conquering and grabbing new lands in the way that he snatched the Crimea and part of Ukraine under Obama–Hillary–Kerry and Hillary’s bright red reset button. Trump cut a deal with Mexico to help control the southern border. He started building the Wall he promised to build. In the face of incredibly biased Obama Judges in federal court districts out west, and dominating the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Trump gamely swallowed and abided by his unfair repeated courtroom losses as the law of the land required, and he methodically set about refashioning the courts by naming exceptional conservative jurists to fill seats rapidly as they opened. In three years, he strengthened conservative appellate circuits, turned some liberal circuits over, and even balanced out the Ninth so that its balance almost is equitable.

He stared down Europe and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved America’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He recognized Israel’s long-obvious sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The United Nations Security Council had passed Obama’s Resolution 2334 denying Israel’s rights to be in the Golan or at the Western Wall or at the tombs of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and Obama–Kerry saw to it that Samantha Power, their UN ambassador, let it pass. Yet, with the flick of a pen, Trump crushed that resolution and the secretive plotting of Obama–Kerry. He pulled us out of sitting with the gang of cutthroats called the “UN Human Rights Council,” closed down the PLO office in Washington, and defunded the UNRWA, a UN agency that breeds terrorism in Mideast schools they run. His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, announced that Jewish communities (wrongly called “settlements”) in Judea and Samaria (wrongly called “West Bank”) are absolutely not illegal and are not inconsistent with international law.

Meanwhile, he stopped Obama’s love affair with Cuba. He pulled out of the insane “Paris Climate Accord” that imposed brutal manufacturing restrictions on America while allowing China and India to gently glide in their Pollution Paradises. He supported First Responders. He made the White House a zone friendly to religion, protecting the preciousness of life, advancing directives that stopped Obamacare from forcing nuns and others to pay for condoms and what-nots that violate their religious beliefs. He protected adoptive and foster care agencies that follow their religious consciences. In a world where Leftist preachers routinely use their church pulpits to damn America and turn Sunday Sabbath prayers into political rallies for Democrats, he made it safe for Christian pastors, Catholic priests, and Orthodox rabbonim (rabbis) to preach the actual Word of G-d from the pulpit, even when that Word is not politically correct, “only” Divinely ordained.

He undertook to fight “Sanctuary Cities” and the utter lawlessness of “The Resistance” that the Hillary-Obama sore losers launched when they lost the White House. To fight, he acted with agility, quickly realizing that the “Republican Insiders” who had recommended that he appoint people like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer meant well, but he upped his game with a new team and then an even better one. Rex Tillerson certainly was better than Wrecks Hillary-Kerry at State, but Mike Pompeo proved stratospherically better yet. Jeff Sessions was better as Attorney-General than Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, especially during his first few minutes in the position before recusing, and in many ways even after, but William Barr — wow, what an improvement!

On education his Secretary changed the cruelty of campus rules that deny accused students fundamental protections of due process. On race he converted the annual allocations to Historically Black Colleges and Universities so that they become permanent. He advocated charter schools. He oversaw massive tax reform and also eliminated the hated Obamacare individual mandate.

And Trump did all of that with one hand tied behind his back. He was forced to trust Paul Ryan to carry a ball, but Ryan fumbled. He thought the FBI existed to enforce and protect the law, not to sabotage the will of the electorate by lying to FISA courts, packing reports with perjury, and working to undermine democracy. Trump had come to drain the Swamp, assuming the FBI could be an investigatory and law-enforcement tool to leverage towards that end, not imagining that the FBI is The Swamp itself. So he ran into the corruption of James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, and Bruce Ohr. Old Communist activists and Obama holdovers like John Brennan questioned Trump’s patriotism — the same Brennan who had voted to elect Gus Hall, an outright communist, as president. James Clapper proved to be made of the same drek. And Trump was hit with a dossier full of lies. A slander of Russian collusion. The endless $32 million Mueller investigation whose findings and purpose Mueller could not even articulate when he was given center stage to do so by the House Democrats. Then the nonsense of impeachment, staged in late December like a Christmas pageant, replete with ceremonial awards of coveted Pelosi Pens. The nonsense of whether or not that Doddering Dowager would walk the House document over to the Senate. Adam Schiff and his endless lies, his “star chamber” secret hearings with leaked quotes out of context, and fabricated “transcripts” that he actually read into the House record as though they were real.

Trump achieved all he did despite three years of all that pure garbage, legislative bacteria, and political rot.

Moreover, Trump had to put up with all that detritus and swill while facing a never-ending shooting gallery of targeted libels and slanders from a media that is so biased that even its own liberals publicly call them out on it and quit on them. Claims he lost an election that he won fair-and-square by the rules of that contest. Lies from Day One that he removed a Martin Luther King bust from the Oval Office. Deliberate lies that he is a Jew-hater, with CNN putting an outright leftist with no Jewish leadership credentials on the air, with other media rushing to promote the same self-aggrandizing leftist activist, presenting to all of America an extreme leftist with a Jewish surname as though he actually were a bonafide Jewish organizational leader. Similar deliberate lies that Trump defended Nazis at the Charlottesville rally, deliberately twisting and mangling his fair, reasoned, balanced, and thoughtful comments the day after the rally, creating a living lie that will not die. Acosta accosting the woman with the mike at a White House press conference. Media ganging up on the president’s doctor, Navy Rear Admiral Ronny L. Jackson, begging for news of some illness, please, anything — at least that his cholesterol be too high. Endless whispers about replacing Trump under the 25th Amendment, maybe even sneaking in a recording device. The Democrat House calling the disgraced and disbarred Michael Cohen, an anti-Trump felon, as their first witness of the term just before he was ushered into prison. Media begging to give Michael Avenatti airtime, even promoting him as presidential material, until all of Avenatti’s wretchedness no longer could be hidden from view.

And then came the darned coronavirus.

Three amazing years. Four months of an other-worldly pandemic, the likes of which occurs once every century or two. Yes, lots unexpected has happened in the past four months. Much will happen in the next four months that also will prove to have been unexpected.