The War Between Trump’s Chemotherapy and the Biden Cancer

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

Chemotherapy can be a life-saving though sometimes toxic effort to eliminate lethal cancer cells before they kill the patient. As such, it can serve as a bitter metaphor for the often-controversial efforts of the Trump administration to undo the metastasizing damage caused by the Biden administration. The left and the media, however, wish to convince America that the remedy for four years of either catastrophe is worse than the catastrophe itself.

Take the border. It was literally destroyed over the last four years. After welcoming in some three million illegal aliens per year—none with legal permission, health audits, or criminal background checks—there was no sign that the then-current or a second Biden administration was ever going to stop radically altering the demography of the U.S.

It was apparently not enough for Biden and his puppeteers that there were a record 50-million-plus foreign-born U.S. residents, comprising nearly 16 percent of the population, among them likely more than 30 million illegal aliens. What number would have been sufficient for a putative eight-year Biden administration—40, 50, or 70 million illegal aliens?

How could any subsequent lawful administration ever undo such nihilism? Would anyone try to round up 500,000 likely criminal aliens, house by house?

Ferret out violent illegal aliens from sanctuary cities, our modern version of nullificationist Confederate states defying federal law?

How does one even find 12 million people illegally admitted under Biden?

Did the left assume that the optics of just letting in millions of impoverished illegal aliens were at least better than any later effort to round them up?

After all, fueling the lawlessness only required passivity, but restoring lawfulness mandated arrest and occasionally force.

The media did not cover the rapes, murders, and assaults of illegal aliens. Nor did it care about poor American citizens vying for swamped social services amid the illegal flood of illegal aliens. It fixated only on the unpopular chemotherapeutic task of belatedly enforcing the law, securing the border, and deporting the illegal entrants.

It was likewise easy to allow the cancer of appeasement and laxity to spread abroad. That was an effortless matter of dropping sanctions to beg theocratic and terrorist Iran to reenter the “Iran Deal.” Or asleep-at-the-wheel appeasement meant a quick skedaddle from Afghanistan, without worry about the mayhem, chaos, and billions of dollars of weapons abandoned to the Taliban—or the signals it sent to Vladimir Putin or communist China.

Joe Biden nonchalantly claimed the decision to resist a Putin invasion of Ukraine hinged only on whether it was a mere “minor” attack. And it was far easier to mouth a bombastic and empty “Don’t” to Putin’s planned aggressions than to craft a real strategy to deter him.

In contrast, the chemotherapy needed to kill the cancer of lost deterrence proved hard, painful, and dangerous. Sticking by democratic Israel as the world piled on against it was not easy. Bombing the Iranian nuclear infrastructure would incur domestic hysteria. Trying to engage, cajole, and threaten Putin to stop the killing in Ukraine might threaten a wider war amid nuclear threats.

DEI easily materialized throughout the U.S. After all, we were told the good racism of today was needed to fight the bad racism of yesteryear, with civil rights legislation, public opinion, and the Supreme Court be damned.

But what about the chemotherapy antidote needed for the cancer of a rapidly growing and institutionalized bias and prejudice cloaked with euphemisms and disguised as social justice?

To stop the new DEI racialism, we had to warn our elite universities, the multibillionaire corporate boardrooms, the woke-entrenched media, and the weaponized government commissariat that they, not their targets, were the real racists. It meant explaining that the DEI crowd, not their opponents, had violated the Constitution and a Supreme Court ruling, and that they were destroying a once meritocratic America. Four out of five Americans polled expressed their opposition to DEI. Yet the 20 percent who did not usually hold the greater institutional power, and so it was no easy task to stop them.

It was easy and popular to hire more employees and expand USAID, the State Department, or HHS—patronage without worry over the cost of bureaucratic bloat and stasis. But to economize, save the taxpayer money, streamline the government, and lay off workers? That was a controversial chemotherapy, damned as cruel, needless, and dangerous.

Likewise, it sounded virtuous, clean, and utopian to fast-track the Green New Deal. It sounded so virtuous in the abstract to save the planet, keep us healthy, and power us with renewable energy. As part of that lie, the media never covered the spiraling cost of electricity and gasoline and the catastrophic effect on the poor. They rarely reported that one in four Californians could not pay their electricity bills, fill up their tanks at $5.50 a gallon, and heat their homes as the price of propane and natural gas soared.

Few talked about how to power the essential power-guzzling AI industries on the horizon or the economic surcharge that came with unreliable and expensive green power.

Instead, the chemotherapy of providing affordable and plentiful energy—more nuclear, natural gas, petroleum, and clean coal power and fuel—was the only feasible way to transition to new energies without destroying the economy. Yet such traditional sources of power were cheaply damned as destroying the planet, shortening lives, and enriching the greedy.

Note: in all these cases, our progressive doctors never apprised us, the patients, that their policies were not only killing us but that they either did not care or had alternate solutions.

Again, at what number would Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas have stopped illegal alien entries? Until bankruptcy? Until the American poor could not find an appointment in any ER in their neighborhood?

When would the Biden administration have stopped its appeasement? Was $50 billion in US arms not enough for the Taliban? Did Iran’s henchmen in Syria and Iraq have to attack 200, 300, or 400 U.S. installations before it warranted retaliation?

How far did the Biden administration have to go to beg Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal? Another $400 million in cash bribes sent to Tehran on another nocturnal pallet.

By 2025, was the Biden administration planning to grant the terrorist Houthis the entire Red Sea? What would China have to do to warrant the Biden administration’s attention? Send over five more spy balloons, add another $100 billion to its trade surplus, or dress down American diplomats at two or three more Alaska mini-summits?

Perhaps send over 200,000 more students to appropriate more U.S. technology? Buy up land across from the White House?

What was the logical end of DEI in a multiracial democracy? DNA badges to verify special racial privileges? A separate dorm and graduation for each of 20 or more tribes? Another one million DEI commissars to monitor our minds? Still more Professors Kendis to lecture us on the good racism? Indoctrination camps for those unqualified for DEI status? Surgery teams chosen by demographic percentages?

Had the Green New Deal kept going, what was the eventual endgame? Two-hour power outages a day? $9 a gallon gas? Offshoring AI industries? Winter thermostats rigged to stop at 55 degrees? Not a natural gas stove in the U.S.?

Oncologists who must administer toxic chemotherapy are often seen as scary people. But they are never as dangerous or deadly as the metastasis itself.