Hanson: The Left's fevered imagination about Trump

FPI / August 27, 2019

The Left’s “pathological hatred” of President Donald Trump and his supporters has “blinded them to the actual record of governance,” historian Victor Davis Hanson noted.

“Many are the hissing heads of the polycephalic Donald Trump — at least according to the progressive Left and the NeverTrump Right, who see the president of the United States as some sort of mythical nightmare,” Hanson wrote in an Aug. 25 op-ed for the Center for American Greatness.

“The strange thing about these various hydra heads of Donald Trump is that very few of them were based on any empirical evidence. Instead, they revealed more about the conspiracist than the object of his conspiracy theory.”

Hanson listed a few of Trump’s “supposedly monstrous manifestations”:

 Trump, the profiteer

“Candidate Trump never really wanted to be president. His entire amateurish and buffoonish candidacy was designed only to enhance his brand. Once he was unexpectedly elected, Trump was more shocked than anyone, and quickly sought to maximize his profits from the Oval Office. Thus, followed the constant progressive evocation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution to prevent chronic Trump profiteering.

In reality, the Trump empire reportedly has declined by nearly $1 billion in net value, aside from the tens of millions of his own money that Trump spent on the 2016 campaign. Trump’s business interests are the most thoroughly investigated of any recent president in memory. Obama and the Clintons made millions from their presidencies; Trump may well end up losing billions.”

Trump, the Russian asset

“Trump ran for president to enhance his prior partnership with Vladimir Putin. His team connived and colluded with the Russians to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat and, in quid pro quo fashion, endangered U.S. security by giving concessions to their Russia puppet-masters. … It would be embarrassing to list all the distinguished pundits who assured us, in the frenzy of May 2017, that Trump would certainly soon be indicted, impeached, or disgraced due to his slam-dunk collusion with the Russians.

“Robert Mueller spent $32 million and 22 months to find Russian ‘collusion’ or ‘obstruction’ of such an investigation. Yet, Mueller’s hyper-partisan legal team found no instance of collusion and no proof that Trump could be legally indicted for obstruction of justice.

“In reality, and in contrast with the Obama administration, Trump slapped tougher sanctions on Putin’s circle; pumped far more U.S. oil and gas that helped lower world energy prices to Putin’s chagrin; killed scores of Russian mercenaries in Syria; vastly beefed up the U.S. military; jawboned NATO into spending more on collective defense against Russia, while withdrawing from asymmetrical short-range missile treaties with the Kremlin due to Russian cheating. All the former and current federal officials, who peddled the ‘collusion’ and ‘obstruction’ mythologies eventually were rendered as incompetent partisans who dishonestly promulgated fantasies at best and outright lies at worse — among them John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Gerald Nadler, and Adam Schiff.”

Trump, the unhinged

“Donald Trump is mentally and physically ill, unfit to be president, and thus should be removed under the 25th Amendment. He is a sick man, who can scarcely utter a coherent sentence and is suffering from pre-dementia as he rails about buying Greenland.

“In reality, Trump easily aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which calibrates pre-dementia, administered by his presidential physician — a test that Joe Biden, presidential aspirant, might have far greater difficulty passing. In terms of age, Trump seems far more vigorous than most men at 73 — and downright youthful compared to a faltering and often confused and addled 76-year-old Biden. Trump is able to speak extemporaneously for extended periods of time while holding the attention of an audience of thousands.”

Trump, the racist and white supremacist

“According to this narrative, and to paraphrase the New York Times, after the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Mueller investigation, progressive elites and the media scrambled hand-in-glove to resurrect a new narrative that might remove Trump from office — given that obstruction and collusion stories were exposed as partisan fantasies.

“Trump’s real crime in matters of race and ethnicity is that, all during his pre-presidential career and during his time in office, he simply ignored race and thus felt no compunction about deriding anyone — white, black, brown, Asian, or Latino. And such equal opportunity invective and personal disparagement are seen in our race-obsessed culture as proof of ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ by a failure to exempt the non-white.

“In reality, a recent Zogby poll suggests that Donald Trump may well attract more combined Latino and black voters than any recent Republican president. The current minority unemployment rate may well be the lowest in history — a fact quietly acknowledged by millions of minority youth who for the first time in their lives are being courted by employers. Certainly, President Trump has not used inflammatory explicit racialist language in the fashion of Joe Biden, Harry Reid — and Barack (‘typical white person’) Obama.”

Trump, the certain loser

“Trump was shocked by the improbable 2016 victory, and supposedly he has already accepted defeat in 2020. Indeed, he may prefer in 2021 to exit to an obscure retirement, defeated, exhausted, and repudiated. Meanwhile, Trump supposedly disgraced conservatism by bringing in the carnival crowd of Omarosa and Anthony Scaramucci, and thus just wants everything to go away. He will go through the motions of re-election in 2020, but privately concedes that he has failed, disgraced the country, and will be happy to leave with his tail between his legs.

“In 2020, Trump has already raised vast sums of money, will field an even more sophisticated team of data and social media analysts, and fully expects to defeat his Democratic opponent and use the ensuing four years to advance his agenda, by sealing the border, reforming legal immigration, forcing bilateral symmetry with China, addressing massive national debt, and translating his nationalist-populist agenda into Republican orthodoxy.”

Hanson wrote in conclusion that “we forgot that hydras are mythical creatures and only the delusional believe them to be real.”

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