Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas<\/p>\n
Hillary Clinton seems to be experiencing a strange, slow motion meltdown following her 2016 loss to Donald Trump. Recently, she sent out a\u00a0Twitter video message<\/a>, recorded on her cellphone camera, with advice to feminists: \u00a0\u201cAnd let me just say, this is directed to the activist bitches supporting bitches. So let\u2019s go.\u201d At about the same time, she\u00a0appeared at the Grammy Awards<\/a>, via a video, reading a snippet about Trump\u2019s fast-food eating habits from Michael Wolff\u2019s widely discredited book,\u00a0Fire and Fury<\/em>.<\/p>\n Before Clinton ran against Trump, she was considered a cautious Democratic politician, albeit with a dubious ethical record. Yet after she tangled with Trump, she seems to be\u00a0suffering mysterious after-effects. Call it radiation sickness from Trump\u2019s toxic gamma rays. Translated, that means orthodox politicians often lose when they try dueling with the unorthodox Trump on his terms\u2014and then, making matters worse, they end up doubling down with more emotional heat.<\/p>\n Early on during the Republican primary, a conventional wisdom developed in the media and within political circles that it was suicidal to engage in ad hominem exchanges with Trump. The mainstream media meant that assessment as no compliment to Trump. Journalists sneered that the showboating Trump had fourteen years of experience in repartee and ad hoc invective on his reality television hit show\u00a0The Apprentice<\/em>. They also conceded that Trump had long ago learned that, in the dog-eat-dog world of New York real estate, and in the nasty gossip of Manhattan\u2019s celebrity scene, going on the preemptive offensive is a deterrence strategy, crude or not.\u00a0 In such a landscape, gentlemanly forbearance was not interpreted as magnanimity to be appreciated but as weakness to be exploited.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Furthermore, in 2016, part of Trump\u2019s message was that an overrated coastal elite played by stuffy rules of comportment to hide both their incompetence and hypocrisies. For Trump, the best way of radiating the establishment was saying anything to anyone at any time anywhere\u2014especially by inventing schoolyard nicknames that savagely captured an opponent\u2019s perceived weaknesses and flaws\u2014and begged for a reply in kind.<\/p>\n The media\u2019s analyses of Trump\u2019s style were true enough. But the pundits forgot a few other key reasons why the radioactive Trump melted his opponents. In every one of Trump\u2019s jousts, he was coiled and reactive\u2014a fact known to his base who defended Trump\u2019s fallout on the basis of \u2018they started it, he finished it.\u201d<\/p>\n Second, Trump\u2019s personal invective was part of a larger assault on institutions and their representatives who were increasingly perceived both as hostile to half the U.S. population and hypocritically self-interested. Because there was merit in his coarse criticism, Trump\u2019s opponents found themselves reactively defending the scarcely defensible. Being outraged at Trump often led them mistakenly to be outraged at his policies.<\/p>\n Republican establishment favorite Jeb Bush traded one-on-one jabs with Trump and was politically demolished as \u201clow-energy Jeb,\u201d unable to stand the thermonuclear heat of the Trump bombs. Bush went out as if he were a whiney losing aspirant on\u00a0Celebrity Apprentice\u00a0<\/em>without understanding why his agenda never resonated with the conservative and increasingly populist base. A suave Marco Rubio descended to joust with Trump on relative hand size. He ended up cruelly tagged as \u201clittle Marco.\u201d The boisterous rhetorician Ted Cruz duked it out Trump-style after Trump slandered his family. He ended up the sneering sobriquet \u201clying Ted Cruz.\u201d So it went in all of Trump\u2019s duels, from his clashes with Megan Kelly to those with \u201ccrooked Hillary.\u201d Even his disheveled insider Steven Bannon finally earned the sobriquet \u201csloppy Steve\u201d when he appeared to turn on his former boss. The careers of none of these people improved after unaccustomedly going nuclear with Trump<\/p>\n Conventional wisdom warns Trump that his retaliatory attacks are not presidential; that they are no longer needed now that he\u2019s in the Oval Office; that they are counterproductive; and that they turn off Independent voters, especially Independent women whom Trump will need in 2018 and perhaps 2020.<\/p>\n The counter-argument?<\/p>\n Before Trump, politicians observed Marquis of Queensberry rules of comportment while they ran up $20 trillion in national debt, left the border unsecured with 11-15 million illegal aliens residing with impunity in the United States, failed to achieve significant economic growth in over a decade, saw middle-class incomes ossify, and could not translate interventions abroad into strategic victories, while allowing North Korea to develop nuclear ballistic missiles.<\/p>\n Globalization before 2016 was seen only as a positive gift. It certainly was often salutary for most in the world\u2014but not always for many Americans. Received wisdom held that outsourcing and offshoring were good for the American economy. Meanwhile, companies fled the United States. More regulations and bigger government seemed fated. Free trade de facto was considered fair. Trade deficits like budget deficits were nothing much to worry about\u2014even as middle-class wages stagnated, the red-state interior was deindustrialized, and the victims were written off as losers, deplorables, irredeemables, and clingers who foolishly had not prepared themselves for the coastal \u201cknowledge based\u201d economy of the \u201cinformation age.\u201d<\/p>\n In response, half the country\u2014the more important electoral-college half\u2014felt that the way politicians had treated their middle-class, post-industrial malaise was insincere and merely palliative. Then Trump came along and offered searing radiation treatments designed to kill the metastases shortly before it poisoned the rescued host\u2014by loudly promoting seemingly archaic ideas like bringing back capital and jobs from abroad, deregulating the economy, lowering taxes, and making the United States more fossil-fuel independent.<\/p>\n Something similar happened abroad. \u00a0Most of the world\u2019s signature establishment institutions beneath the veneer of their polite nomenclature and mannered protocols were ethically, or at least administratively, compromised. The United Nations often proved itself to be an anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic organization, masquerading in tony Manhattan as the voice of global morality, subsidized by the American hosts it routinely attacked. The European Union was evolving into an anti-democratic statist project warped by German mercantilism and German cultural and political dominance on matters of finance, immigration, and foreign policy that brooked no dissent. Postwar NATO members had mostly ignored their commitment to spend 2 percent of their respective GDP on defense to share the burdens of defending Europe more equitably. Europeans had come to assume that protecting Europe was more important to Americans than it was to Europeans. The point is not that these heralded institutions are unnecessary or incapable of reform. Rather, to change they often need the sort of toxic criticism that Trump levels because they have consistently ignored more polite and diplomatic badgering from world leaders.<\/p>\n The media stereotype of Trump is that he is a crude adolescent narcissist. He is eager for even superficial pats on the head, while morose and brooding at even the slightest criticism. The more pessimistic appraisals paint Trump as an utter nihilist\u2014a wild elephant thrashing mindlessly about, destroying custom and tradition in his midst.<\/p>\n But Trump is also more than a needy egoist or anarchist. Like it or not, he sees himself on a \u201cmake America great\u201d crusade that entails radically redefining American tax policy, the regulatory federal octopus, immigration enforcement, trade protocols, the fairness of the international order, the transparency of media coverage\u2014and the very language and manners in which past pathologies were downplayed. His tweets, his televised rallies, and his blunt press-conference repartee share that common theme: What the establishment calls normal and salutary is abnormal and toxic, and the only way to treat the cancer is with radiation\u2014at least until the medicine kicks in, the patient improves, and voters see tangible improvements in their daily lives.<\/p>\n Most of the elite write Trump\u2019s message off entirely because they perceive him as toxic. But the more interesting moral and intellectual question is why more polite politicians did not do much, or never much worried, about the hollowed-out interior of post-industrial America, the effect of illegal immigration on entry-level job wages, or the deleteriousness of the growing federal regulatory bureaucracy on struggling small businesses and individual freedom.<\/p>\n Why didn\u2019t a more gentlemanly candidate such as Mitt Romney speak about \u201cour\u201d miners, \u201cour\u201d vets, and \u201cour\u201d farmers, or a more mellifluous president Barack Obama of bringing back American jobs to the post-industrial wasteland, or a more cerebral candidate Hillary Clinton of helping West Virginian coal miners recalibrate their industry? Romney was certainly polite and mannered when he reminded wealthy donors at a private gathering that 47 percent of the country would never vote for him because almost half of Americans believed they were \u201centitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.\u201d Presidential candidate Obama was once poised and steady as he explained to liberal elites in San Francisco that he lost the Pennsylvania primary because of mostly backward xenophobic clingers who were gun- and bible-crazed. Hillary thought she was calm and professional as she wrote off a quarter of the nation as \u201cdeplorables\u201d and \u201cirredeemables.\u201d<\/p>\n Morality can be defined in a variety of ways. For half the country, rude empathy in 2016 proved preferable to polite dissimulation. Of course, it would always be preferable if empathetic messages were delivered by empathetic messengers. But often they are not. And so voters then made the necessary adjustments\u2014and often allowances.<\/p>\n A final thought. Trump\u2019s radioactive invective left enemies on the campaign trail, and during his first-year efforts to enact his agenda, in a permanent meltdown. To the degree he pivots occasionally and lets his solid policies speak for themselves, his still seared and exasperated enemies nonetheless remain permanently red-hot\u2014even as Trump seems to be cooling down and reasonable. Patients usually do not keep damning the side-effects of past therapy once their health improves, but rather slowly begin to acknowledge its utility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas Hillary Clinton seems to be experiencing a strange, slow motion meltdown following her 2016 loss to Donald Trump. Recently, she sent out a\u00a0Twitter video message, recorded on her cellphone camera, with advice to feminists: \u00a0\u201cAnd let me just say, this is directed to the activist bitches supporting bitches. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1130,1123,1092,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Qq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9534,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/this-election-year-features-more-than-one-presidential-race\/","url_meta":{"origin":10938,"position":0},"title":"This Election Year Features More Than One Presidential Race","author":"Megan Ring","date":"October 20, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Town Hall A presidential campaign is figuratively called a \"race.\" Two runners sprint toward the Election Day finish line for the prize of the presidency. But the 2016 presidential campaign has spawned lots of weird races. The first sprint is one between embarrassments and scandals.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9366,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-long-trump-summer\/","url_meta":{"origin":10938,"position":1},"title":"A Long Trump Summer","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"When have voters faced a choice between two such unpalatable, unprincipled candidates? By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Before summer is over, we may see things now scarcely imagined that will make Brexit seem anticlimactic. Trump\u2019s Attack Mode I think the following is an accurate statement: No major\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "UK"","block_context":{"text":"UK","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/uk\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9441,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-trump-bump\/","url_meta":{"origin":10938,"position":2},"title":"The Trump Bump","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online No one knows how long Trump can stay on message. (He turns out to be an effective teleprompted speaker who, unlike Obama, can go off the script for brief moments without stuttering and seeming confused.) No one knows how long he can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10229,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-nightmares-and-the-realities-of-never-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":10938,"position":3},"title":"The Nightmares and the Realities of Never Trump","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 30, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness Rarely in the last half-century have so many elite conservatives and intellectuals been so estranged both from a Republican administration and from those who voted for it\u2014neither have they become so animated in their antipathy and disgust for a sitting president. During the 2016\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "McMaster"","block_context":{"text":"McMaster","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/mcmaster\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11461,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/could-trump-win-20-percent-of-the-african-american-vote-in-2020\/","url_meta":{"origin":10938,"position":4},"title":"Could Trump Win 20 Percent of the African-American Vote in 2020?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 19, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The provocative Donald Trump certainly seems to be disliked by a majority of African-American professional athletes, cable-news hosts, academics, and the Congressional Black Caucus. Yet there are subtle but increasing indications that his approval among other African Americans may be reaching historic highs for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10714,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10714-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":10938,"position":5},"title":"11\/06\/2017 From An Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 6, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"11\/06\/2017 From An Angry Reader: Professor Davis, \u00a0 In your recent article \u201cThe Method to Trump\u2019s Madness\u201d, you claim Trump\u2019s insults are retaliation to those who have said things against him. 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