{"id":13864,"date":"2021-08-06T07:00:30","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T14:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=13864"},"modified":"2021-08-06T14:12:37","modified_gmt":"2021-08-06T21:12:37","slug":"eeyore-corner-trumpistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eeyore-corner-trumpistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Eeyore\u2019 Corner: Trumpistics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image by smshoot @ Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ VDH’s Blade of Perseus<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part One: Trump, RIP?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In January-February 2021, Trump\u2019s future was problematic. He was kicked off social media. And without his accustomed megaphones, Trump for the first time in years was unable to reach supporters and the public at large. Thus, the hate-Trump media filled the void and alone took over most of Trump\u2019s ability to communicate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following January 6, the insurgent Parler, surging with millions of new subscribers, was ambushed by Amazon, Apple, and Google, which, in Night-of-the-Long-Knives fashion, removed it from their apps and links.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note that Trump\u2019s strongest traditional media supporters were no more. Rush Limbaugh, at his peak in terms of analysis and fired-up resistance to socialism, passed away on February 17, after a year-long and heroic fight against cancer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Drudge Report had flipped\u2014the causes remain under dispute\u2014and went from pro- to hate-Trump. Fox News was in turmoil: the Left attacked it fiercely as Trump loyalists; some Trump loyalists attacked it fiercely for letting the likes of Chris Stirewalt and Chris Wallace dominate Election Coverage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The January 6, 2021 Capitol riot prompted a firestorm of \u201cTrump did it\u201d furor. The moribund Never-Trumpers, deflated after the sex and grifting scandals of the Lincoln Project and wrong consistently about their predictions of Trump administration policy failures, got a second wind with the enlistment of Liz Cheney and The Ten who voted to impeach Trump. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even some in his own party blamed Trump for the loss of two Republican Senate seats in Georgia, due to his obsessions with the November 3 vote count. They blasted Trump for his failure to barnstorm the state, keep silent about himself, and remind America that those two races were all that was left in the way of the Socialist steamroller. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Biden was still doing the \u201cGood Ole Joe from Scranton\u201d schtick. Under the pretext of appearing only periodically to smile and wave, he was again winking and nodding that he was not the Disrupter Trump, and so was given an enthusiastic honeymoon. Because of the ravages of onset dementia, Joe in January 2021 was not even Joe of August 2021. Eight months ago he could still manage to cobble sentences together without the now accustomed brain freezes and incoherence. In other words, in January 2021, Biden was not picking food matter off his chin and eating it\u2014after receiving instructions from staff to clean up his appearance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all the damnation of Trump, newly inaugurated President Biden for a brief few weeks, before his agendas could do damage, was also inflated by the fumes of Trump\u2019s first four years:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) The economy was in a rapid recovery. Natural consumer pent-up demand meant no longer any logical need for more government cash. Inflation and unemployment were low. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) Biden immediately lied and said there were no vaccinations until his inauguration (since November, 2020, 17 million had been vaccinated). He indeed claimed virtual authorship of Operation Warp Speed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden did a 180 on the vaxes: if on the campaign stump (is that the wrong word for Biden\u2019s basement?) Harris and Biden had once said that any inoculation tied to Trump was dangerous and thus they would hesitate to become vaccinated, they now became inoculation zealots. Again, it was as if their own brilliant February 2021 initiatives had created the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson-Johnson shots out of thin air. That the American, or part-American, brands outperformed their Chinese, Russian, and European rivals was due solely to Biden\u2019s genius. And as more of the nation got vaxxed, and the spring and summer warmth depressed the virus, Biden pointed to the declining cases, as if to say \u201cSee, what happens when Dr. Fauci can work with a like mind?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3) The border, finally closed under Trump, was not yet fully porous. (E.g. it takes some time to walk there from Central America or Southern Mexico or to fly into Mexico from Nigeria or Uganda to head north.). So Biden sounded \u201cempathetic\u201d as he trashed Trump\u2019s supposed harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration, while quietly enjoying the calm of the closed border, all the while loudly claiming he was not anti-illegal immigrant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4) The Middle East was also inert. China was still under some suspicion about the virus and laying low. Dr. Fauci cloaked himself in Bidenism and had dodged the initial bullet of revelations about his own funding of the Wuhan virology\u2019s gain-of-function research. The hostile world\u2014Iran, North Korea, Russia, China\u2014was still sizing up the \u201cbig guy.\u201d And our friends (e.g., the UK and much of the former British empire, the EU and the Westernized nations in Asia) said they were relieved that Trump, the firecracker, would not go off anymore at summits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5) The Republican swamp sighed relief. The beltway became more emboldened in nixing any more mention of a Phoenix-like Trump resurrection. Mention of Trump became a sort of Napoleon taboo\u2014as if he was not so much on nearby Elba temporarily, but more permanently on far off St Helena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6) Slashing pipelines, stopping new fossil-fuel federal leases, closing ANWAR, and bad-mouthing fracking\u2014as demand for gas was only slowly recovering\u2014had not yet much effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7) The rising crime rate was propagandized by the media as 1) small potatoes in comparison to the \u201carmed insurrection\u201d of January 6; and 2) an organic result of overzealous good citizens who got a bit robust after the year-long lockdowns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8) Remember, we were still in the Hunter Biden, the victim, narrative. Those damn Ruskies, not content with colluding to hand the election to Trump in 2016, had snuck into Hunter\u2019s house, fabricated a hard drive, and dumped it off at a repair shop. You laugh at one such scenario? Our best and brightest CIA, NSA, DNI officials swore it was \u201cRussian disinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9) The Left was giddy that they had not only impeached Trump twice, but tried him in the Senate as a private citizen! The New Democratic Party now had de facto majorities in both houses of Congress, and unleashed their woke Kraken as never before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Add it all up, and Trump was supposedly RIP. Or so we were told. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But now? In the eighth month of 2021, and with a good seven months to distill Joe Biden\u2019s genius? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ VDH’s Blade of Perseus Part One: Trump, RIP? In January-February 2021, Trump\u2019s future was problematic. He was kicked off social media. And without his accustomed megaphones, Trump for the first time in years was unable to reach supporters and the public at large. Thus, the hate-Trump media filled the void and […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-3BC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12916,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumpism-without-trump-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":13864,"position":0},"title":"Trumpism\u2014Without Trump?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 5, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021 disgraced and forever ruined politically.\u00a0 Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12481,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-needs-to-scale-the-real-wall-of-2020\/","url_meta":{"origin":13864,"position":1},"title":"Trump Needs to Scale the Real Wall of 2020","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 13, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Donald Trump is trying to break through a 2020 wall.\u00a0 By January 2019, after over three years of failed efforts to impeach him, sue him, indict him, impoverish him, and destroy him, the Left had failed. 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This conclusion rests on mainstream media accounts, primarily of The New York Times. The Russia probe\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10945,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-year-of-achievement-the-case-for-the-trump-presidency\/","url_meta":{"origin":13864,"position":5},"title":"A Year of Achievement: the case for the Trump presidency","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 7, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president \u2014 much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "NATO"","block_context":{"text":"NATO","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/nato\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13864"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13869,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864\/revisions\/13869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}