"All that is left is contempt, leavened by anger."

Roger Kimball writes in PJ Media,

...In many, maybe most (maybe all) cases I suspect you will find that Trump’s invectives were rejoinders, i.e., responses to earlier provocations and expressions of contempt. Trump made fun of “low-energy Jeb,” but wasn’t that after Jeb said some pretty disagreeable things about Trump?

In any event, however the matter of precedent shakes out, there is also the issue of extreme rhetoric feeding extreme feelings and extreme actions. Simply put, the anti-Trump chorus has worked itself into a frenzy of trembling rage and hysterical overstatement. Trump is Hitler (literally); his behavior is “treasonous” (or, as The New York Times put it, he is a “treasonous traitor”); he is a “fascist,” a “moron," a “tyrant” who (as tyrants tend to do) is taking the United States down “the path to tyranny.” Et very much cetera.

...Now in one sense this is just business as usual when a Republican is in office. Every GOP president going back at least to Nixon has been compared to Hitler. If Hitler hadn’t existed, the Left would have had to invent him. Even squeaky clean Mitt Romney was Hitler for a Day, an evil man who (maybe) once bullied a classmate in high school and later put the family dog in a cage on the roof of his car. Horrors!

All this is well-trod ground. If you’re conservative, you’re evil by definition and its open season as far as the mainstream media is concerned.

But the reaction to Donald Trump, although it began by following this playbook, has mutated into something different and more toxic.

...Think about it: Trump has actually governed not as a tyrant but as an energetic democrat. Under his watch, the economy is booming, unemployment is at historic lows, consumer confidence is skyrocketing. He has made scores of enlightened judicial appointments and is on the threshold of rescuing the Supreme Court from its long flirtation with with radical jurisprudence. He has taken major steps to rebuild our military, roll back the regulatory state, and reassert the prestige of the United States on the world stage.

I suspect that, come 2024, when President Trump completes his second successful term, Americans will indeed look back, but to the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of a second President Clinton in 2016. They will then wonder how they could have been so misguided as to have elected a naive, anti-American race-hustler like Barack Obama not once but twice, and they will thank their lucky stars that they dodged the bullet of a Hillary Clinton administration, which would have completed the anti-freedom agenda of the deep state and assured generations of economic lassitude and dependency.

...The increasingly fanatic and hysterical anti-Trump chorus would do well to reflect on that phenomenon. Their hyperbole has begotten an alarming disconnection from the real world of solid political accomplishment. The situation is pitiable as well as contemptible. But the malignancy of their vituperation disarms pity before it can even engage. All that is left is contempt, leavened by anger.

Read more here.