VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Neither the NeverTrump Right nor the Progressive Left has yet offered a coherent defense of their de facto, three-year-long singular effort to delegitimize and ultimately remove Trump from office before the 2020 election.

We are now in the midst of a systematic effort to impeach a president on the basis of a thought crime. Trump’s purported quid pro quo sin was issuing a temporary hold on military assistance to Ukraine that supposedly transcended legitimate worries about rampant corruption—to include specifically investigating the suspicious behavior of a corrupt Ukrainian oil company and the compromised relationship of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son around it.

The anti-Trump writ is that it is impeachable even to delay to the Ukrainians lethal military assistance while citing the need to investigate the corruption of Ukrainians, including the career of Hunter Biden, whose father, the former vice president and “point man” on Ukraine, is now running for president.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The Democrats might have had a more persuasive case for impeachment if only…

1) Donald Trump had cut off all military assistance to Ukraine.

2) Donald Trump got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired by leveraging U.S. aid.

3) Barack Obama earlier had not vetoed lethal military aid to Ukraine in fear of Russian reactions.

4) Ukraine was not a notoriously corrupt country.

5) There was a special prosecutor’s report finding Trump legally culpable.

6) There was direct or written evidence that Trump had committed a high crime.

7) Joe Biden as Vice President had not spearheaded the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry is incoherent. Given the impossibility of a senatorial conviction, the only strategy is to taint the president with the brand of impeachment and weaken him in the 2020 election.

Yet Schiff seems to have no sense that the worm has already turned. Far from tormenting Trump and the Republicans by a long-drawn-out Schiff extravaganza, Trump’s supporters are beginning to feel that the longer the farce, the better the optics. Polls show that Trump is almost back to where he was in popularity when Schiff unleashed his late-September Ukrainian caper. And the point, after all, was again to drive down Trump’s popularity and render him politically inert.

From the day Schiff reemerged after his licking his wounds in hibernation, following the Mueller implosion, his efforts have insidiously gone downhill. Once Trump released the transcript of his July 25th call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, the nation learned that the Schiff’s gold-standard whistleblower was no such thing. Instead, he seems a rank partisan and sloppy leaker whose machinations and background are already boomeranging back on those who put him up to this present circus.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

Most recently Boot declared—and then quickly retracted it only in embarrassment after popular outrage—that chief ISIS mass-murdering psychopathic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not kill himself in cowardly fashion as Trump had described: “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.”

When Baghdadi was cornered by American forces, he chose to murder three innocent children rather than surrender—consistent with his entire venomous career of ordering the beheading, burning, and mutilating of innocent captives from a safe distance. The murder of defenseless children is cowardly.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News

From 1967 to 2019, Republicans controlled the California governorship for 31 of 52 years. So why is there currently not a single statewide Republican officeholder? California also has a Democratic governor and Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only seven of California’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans.

In 1994, then-Gov. Pete Wilson backed Proposition 187, which denied state social services to undocumented immigrants. The spin goes that it backfired, alienated the Hispanic community and thus marked the road to Republican perdition.

Not quite.

Prop 187 passed with 59 percent support. Wilson’s endorsement of the bill helped its passage, and his support of it aided his landslide 1994 reelection. Among minority voters, 52 percent of Asian and African American voters supported Proposition 187. Some 27 percent of Latinos voted for it.

Liberal groups immediately sued in federal court. Just three days after the measure passed, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Proposition 187 from going into effect. A month later, U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer issued a permanent injunction. Prop 187 never became law.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

From 1967 to 2019, Republicans controlled the California governorship for 31 of 52 years. So why is there currently not a single statewide Republican officeholder? California also has a Democratic governor and Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only seven of California’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans.

In 1994, then-governor Pete Wilson backed Proposition 187, which denied state social services to undocumented immigrants. The spin goes that it backfired and alienated the Hispanic community, and thus marked the road to Republican perdition.

Not quite.

Prop 187 passed with 59 percent support. Wilson’s endorsement of the bill helped its passage, and his support of it aided his landslide 1994 reelection. Among minority voters, 52 percent of Asian and African-American voters supported Proposition 187. Some 27 percent of Latinos voted for it.

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Please read the following article by my colleague Paul Gregory in The Washington Times

A review of the public record demonstrates that the Russia investigation rested on a house of cards assembled by high-level officials to prevent Donald Trump’s election or to ensure that his administration would fail. This conclusion rests on mainstream media accounts, primarily of The New York Times.

The Russia probe imposed a considerable cost in terms of international status, domestic tranquility, political paralysis and a challenge to the outcome of a democratic election. It weakened the Trump presidency to the benefit of his political opponents, and boosted Vladimir Putin’s claim of the crookedness of American democracy.

President Trump’s narrative is that political enemies launched a phony and premeditated “witch hunt” designed to remove him from the office to which he was duly elected by 63 million voters. He insists that he had no contacts with Russian officials. He and his small campaign had no time for hanky-panky with the Kremlin. His opponents did not even have the sense to know his infamous public call to the Russians to find Hillary Clinton’s emails was a joke. Mr. Trump notes that no sane person would collude with a foreign power on national television.

Mr. Trump’s opponents in media and in the national security community claim that Mr. Trump’s Russian contacts, campaign statements and actions of campaign advisers justified the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation (July 2016), the FISA surveillance warrants on a campaign adviser (October 2016-June 2017), and the appointment of a special counsel (May 17, 2017). The anti-Trump forces assert that they did everything by the book as conscientious career officers charged with defending the country.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

There are at least ten reasons why the Democratic impeachment “inquiry” is a euphemism for an ongoing coup attempt.

1) Impeachment 24/7. The impeachment “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by the president’s Ukrainian call, is simply the most recent in a long series of “coups” that sought to overturn the 2016 election and thus preclude a 2020 reelection bid. The pattern gives away the game.

Usually the serial futile attempts to abort the Trump presidency — with the exception of the Mueller Dream-Team debacle — were each characterized by about a month of media-driven hysteria. We remember the voting machines fraud hoax, the initial 2017 impeachment effort, the attempt to warp the Electoral College voting, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup, and various Michael Avenatti–Stormy Daniels–Michael Cohen psychodramas.

Ukraine then is not unique, but simply another mini-coup attempt that follows the last failed coup and will presage another coup to take its place when it too fails to remove Trump.

All of these efforts reflect a desperate effort both to reverse the 2016 election and to preclude a 2020 reelection effort, and, barring that, to drive down the Trump polls to the point of making him delegitimized. A week after Trump was elected, the Wall Street Journal reported that intelligence agencies were withholding information from their president. “Anonymous,” in a September 5, 2018, New York Times op-ed, bragged of an ongoing “resistance” of high-ranking government officials seeking to stonewall Trump. As soon as Trump was inaugurated, Washington lawyer and former Obama official Rosa Brooks was publicly raising the possibility of a military coup to remove him. Retired admiral William McRaven recently called for Trump to be gone — “the sooner, the better.”

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

For a variety of reasons, the 2020 election is going to be a referendum beyond Donald Trump’s record and his Democratic opposition.

The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election. It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.

The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse. Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!

In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it.

Targeting Traditional America

We are also well beyond even the stark choices of 1972 and 1984 that remained within the parameters of the two parties. In contrast, the Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.

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