Progressives Bearing Gifts

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous past, and the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and the nation’s quarter-century weariness with the Clinton scandals, crimes, money-grubbing, and hypocrisies.

For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.

So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.

Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.

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Trump’s Re-Election Chances May Be Better Than You Think

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

What are Donald Trump’s chances for re-election in 2020?

If history is any guide, pretty good.

In early 1994, Bill Clinton’s approval rating after two years in office hovered around a dismal 40 percent. The first midterm elections of the Clinton presidency were an utter disaster.

A new generation of younger, more conservative Republicans led by firebrand Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Republicans also picked up eight Senate seats in 1994 to take majority control of both houses of Congress.

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Obama’s Utterly Hypocritical Response to Trump’s Criticisms of His Record

by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO – The Corner

Obama-Budget-Plan-jpgPresident Obama just said this about Donald Trump’s disparagement of the last seven years: “In the echo chamber that is presidential politics, everything is dark and everything is terrible.” Presidential candidates “don’t seem to offer many solutions for the disasters that they perceive, but they’re quick to tell you who to blame . . . I’m here to say there’s nothing particularly patriotic or American about talking down America, especially when we stand as one of the few sources of economic strength in the world.” In 2008 candidate Obama, then in Trump’s current contender position, said this about a lame-duck sitting president, while more or less kept talking down both America and its then-current government for most of the campaign: The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents — No. 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic. In Obama’s world, when you attack a sitting president, you do so on grounds that he is unpatriotic; when you are a sitting president you defend yourself from those who do what you did, also on grounds they are unpatriotic. In Obama’s alternate universe, adding $4 trillion is unpatriotic and irresponsible, but adding $9 trillion “by his lonesome” is exactly what? And if Obama as a senator voted to shut down the government over that accruing $4 trillion, what should do the Senate do about double that amount?

What Makes Donald Run?

He’s giving fed-up Republicans something other candidates are not.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned Off the Public

If there were not a Donald Trump, he would likely have had to have been invented. 

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Shot and chaser: Democrat activist Jorge Ramos of Univison badgers Donald Trump; is (temporarily) deported from presser by Trump’s security. (AP Photos/Charlie Neibergall)
Shot and chaser: Democrat activist Jorge Ramos of Univison badgers Donald Trump; is (temporarily) deported from presser by Trump’s security. (AP Photos/Charlie Neibergall)

Why did the illegal-immigration issue launch Donald Trump’s campaign? Why did his recent tense press conference exchange with Univision’s Jorge Ramos please even some of Trump’s liberal critics? What is it about illegal immigration that has finally turned off so many Americans?

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Donald Trump and the Other Class Warfare

When democratic masses tire of being condescended to.

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Photo via FrontPage Magazine
Photo via FrontPage Magazine

The rise and continuing popularity of Donald Trump reminds us that “class warfare” is an eternal constant of democracies, for as Plato said, every city is in fact two cities, “one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” But possession of wealth is not the only factor in this eternal conflict between the few and the many. The masses of course resent the elites’ greater wealth, but even more they dislike the assumption of superior wisdom and virtue that elites have always claimed as justifications for their status. It is this galling assumption and the anger it arouses in people that Donald Trump has brilliantly exploited.

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Absurd—and Not-so-Absurd—Immigration

Trump’s plan of mass deportations en masse is unworkable, but that’s not an argument against weeding out criminals and those without work histories in the U.S.

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Photo via NRO
Photo via NRO

In the discussion of Donald Trump’s agenda for dealing with illegal immigration, lots of his proposals are said to be absurd. But are they all?

Mass Deportations?

Targeted deportations are not the same as mass deportations. Trump may want all of the latter, but just as absurdly the Democratic Party seems not to want any of the former.

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How Long Will Trump’s Cathartic Candidacy for Fed-Up Conservatives Last?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Donald Trump and the Fed-Up Crowd

Watching Trump’s rise, America’s middle class “fed-up crowd” is enjoying the comeuppance of an elite that never pays for the ramifications of its own ideology.

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Yeah, I kind of love this guy —->@unsavoryagents [1] Ha ha #LosAngeles [2] violent crime up 26% wake up! #SanctuaryCity [3] pic.twitter.com/4TtvwVWY5C [4] — RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) July 10, 2015 [5]
Yeah, I kind of love this guy —->@unsavoryagents [1] Ha ha #LosAngeles [2] violent crime up 26% wake up! #SanctuaryCity [3] pic.twitter.com/4TtvwVWY5C [4]
— RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) July 10, 2015 [5]
Donald Trump — a former liberal and benefactor of Democrats — is still surging. But his loud New York lingo, popular put-downs of obnoxious reporters and trashing of the D.C. establishment are symptoms, not the catalyst, of the growing popular outrage of lots of angry Americans who are fed up.The fed-up crowd likes the payback of watching blood sport in an arena where niceties just don’t apply anymore. At least for a while longer, they enjoy the smug getting their comeuppance, as an uncouth, bullheaded Trump charges about, snorting and spearing liberal pieties and more sober and judicious Republicans at random.

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