Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Recent regional special elections have seen Democratic candidates win a number of special election races.
Now energized left-wing politicos remind the nation daily that every incumbent president, except three over the last century, has suffered substantial midterm losses in Congress.
Polls show Trump suffering an average 11-point negative unfavorability rating.
So Democrats promise to soon stop all new legislation and end Trump and his counterrevolution itself.
But the left will never offer any alternative agenda on the economy, the border, crime, or foreign policy.
Instead, the new Democrat-Socialist Party views the Biden disaster of 2021-2024 not as a result of his puppeteers’ toxic policies of open borders, 21 percent aggregate inflation, dead-end green energy subsidies, DEI mandates, trans fixations, and an appeasing foreign policy that led to wars abroad and emboldened China.
Instead, they now blame those catastrophic years on Biden’s own enfeebled state—as if he were merely a hapless, debilitated messenger for their otherwise superb radical message.
So absent a positive agenda, Democrats will simply run all their state and federal campaigns as if Trump, their Satanic monster, is on every ballot.
Their Trump obsessions result in three now well-worn strategies.
The first, of course, is still more chaos.
The left believes that the unending 2020 riots cost Trump the election.
Ever since, they have sought to concoct a nihilist replay—whether the Tesla hysterias, the perpetual threats of government shutdowns, tough-guy talk of open insurrection against the federal government, or the current, performative-art, anti-ICE violence in Minneapolis.
They concede most Americans still support Trump’s closed borders and legal-only immigration, but hope they want a return to “normalcy” even more.
The more violence, Nazi-invective, and sheer craziness the left can instill—storming church services, ramming ICE vehicles, taking over the streets, or boasting of armed resistance—the more they believe that voters will blame not them, the instigators, but Trump, the target of their insurrectionary madness.
In Democrats’ blinkered reckoning, voters supposedly would prefer 10,000 illegal aliens methodically and daily swarming the border instead of seeing Minneapolis in utter neo-Confederate revolt.
Second, Democrats seize on every Trump art-of-the-deal excess or coarse putdown.
They scream that narcissistic Trump’s new ballroom has wrecked the White House. Or madman Trump was on the verge of fighting our NATO brethren in Greenland. Or cruel Trump wrecked our relationship with the lovable and blameless Canadians.
Democrats grant that voters sincerely like Trump’s secure border, the new trade agreements that correct past asymmetries, a rearming NATO, a defanged Iran, and the end to Maduro’s communist thugocracy—but not Trump’s messy art-of-the-deal means to achieve those desirable ends.
They scream that Trump talked crazily of making Canada a 51st state, not that it was finally shocked into promising to pay what it owed back in NATO contributions, securing its side of the border, and addressing its massive trade surpluses with the US.
So, Trump needs to avoid the very melodramas the left wants to exploit, which detract from his own undeniable accomplishments and the Democrats’ previous disastrous record.
Third, Democrats still rely on their ossified partnerships with the media, academia, and popular culture to mouth the old talking points.
So we are told ad nauseam that Trump caused the “affordability” crisis.
Or Trump is still Putin’s puppet.
Or Trump was an Epstein groupie.
Or Trump’s trade war crashed the economy.
Behind this stale Democrat boilerplate lies a deep fear that the Nietzschean Trump, just as he beat all their lawfare ambushes, will also do the impossible and avoid losing the Congress in November.
And they should fear.
Trump’s catalysts for a booming 2026 economy are already in place.
No one can now stop massive deregulation, new tax cuts and incentives, recalibrated tariffs, unprecedented foreign investment, record energy development, and the new emerging technologies.
All that is needed before the midterms is not controversial new initiatives, but more focus on the current boom in GDP, lower inflation, and increased purchasing power—all in contrast to Biden’s inflation disaster.
Voters still support closed borders and deportations of criminals and the millions who swarmed in under Biden.
But the best way to remind them of a secure border is to concentrate on partnering with red and purple state and local law enforcement for the next few months.
Each week, the thousands of systematically deported criminals in these jurisdictions will contrast with the thousands of violent offenders who are sanctuaried and protected in failed blue states.
And without the smokescreen of the ICE psychodramas, there are a lot of Democrat fears—like the vast Somali fraud in Minnesota, the even greater welfare scandals emerging in California, and the antics and verbiage of the hard left, like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the herky-jerky Gavin Newsom, who turned California’s natural paradise into a manmade purgatory.