Victor Davis Hanson
The medicine is sometimes worse than the disease.
Or that is what the Left now means with its widespread attack “on affordability,” ICE enforcement, and the military.
Leftists are now not arguing that the past four Biden years did not damage the economy, erase the border, destroy deterrence abroad, weaponize the government, and divide the nation by race.
Indeed, they make no effort to defend the Biden record or provide a corrective to it. Instead, the essence of their silence on the past and its remedies is that the ten-month Trump effort to deal with those disasters is far worse than the calamities themselves.
When Donald Trump entered office ten months ago, the economy had averaged 5.2 percent inflation every year of Joe Biden’s tenure. Indeed, over Biden’s four years, prices in aggregate had climbed over 20 percent. Some food, energy, insurance, and housing costs had climbed over 30 percent.
When Trump entered office in January 2025, the monthly inflation rate was 3 percent—and it remains just that today. If Trump’s failure in ten months to undo Biden’s four-year accomplishment of achieving 20 percent price hikes is considered proof of “unaffordability,” then what are the Biden hyperinflationary years called?
The Biden combination of $7 trillion in new borrowing at the wrong time of pent-up consumer demand following the lockdowns, and supply chain stagnation, ensured a hyperinflation by 2022 of 9.2 percent.
The budget deficit averaged about $2 trillion, and the trade deficit averaged over $1 trillion. The national debt increased by $8.4 trillion over four years.
The border was nonexistent, presided over by the chronic prevaricator and impeached Alejandro Mayorkas. Somewhere between 10-12 million illegal aliens had entered the U.S. without background checks. Among them, an estimated 500,000 with criminal records had spiked the crime rate in large cities. Seventy thousand Americans were dying per year from Mexican-imported fentanyl, smuggled across the border.
The diversity, equity, and inclusion commissariat was going full bore, from requiring university applicants to write McCarthyesque “diversity oaths” to male transgendered athletes systematically destroying women’s sports. Most of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling outlawing racial bias in higher education was widely ignored. Anti-Semitism was a campus creed.
Abroad, in the most humiliating flight in U.S. history, the American military simply fled Kabul, leaving being to the Taliban terrorists billions of dollars in equipment and arms. It left thousands of civilian contractors behind but allowed thousands more of unvetted Afghans to enter the U.S., the majority without background checks.
Abroad, deterrence was shattered. China began overtly threatening Taiwan and brazenly sent a spy balloon over the U.S. It talked down to our diplomats in Anchorage like naughty schoolchildren.
Russia, taking Biden up on his vow of indifference to a “minor” invasion, attacked Ukraine in February 2022. What followed over the next four years was the greatest blood bath in Europe since the Battle of Stalingrad. There were no negotiations to end the war until summer 2025.
Most in the West were reconciled to Iran shortly possessing nuclear weapons, especially after it had brushed aside the Biden administration’s plea to reenter the silly Iran Deal.
The October 7, 2023, massacre of 1200 Israelis had set the Middle East on fire. Pro-Hamas demonstrations and riots spread throughout campuses. College administrators saw no moral difference between a democracy that was attacked by terrorists in a time of peace, and the assailed retaliating against the killers who used civilian shields to hide their subterranean entry and exit.
U.S. military recruitment was off by 40-50,000 enlistments, partly due to a suicidal dismissal of thousands of soldiers who did not take the mRNA vaccinations, many of them with natural immunity from prior Covid infections. Partly, institutional DEI biases turned off thousands who sensed the Pentagon was more interested in racial and gender quotas than battle efficacy.
What then to do about these crises?
Discussion (4)
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The damage done by the last administration will take decades to mend if even possible.
The short answer seems to be "no." The Trump Admin has reduced the symptoms of the cancer, but treatment hasn't (yet) produced much of a positive return to normalcy. The patient isn't feeling that much better but has stopped getting worse.