"Donald Trump might be in the unique position of being a bit more quiet in order to let his opponents speak for, and thereby reveal even more of, themselves."

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

...For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.

So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.

Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.

Trump in 2020 might have controversially slurred his future Democratic rival as a socialist, radical late-term abortion advocate, open borders chauvinist, a Medicare destroyer who wished to make it free for everyone, or wacko environmentalist intent on banning gas and diesel engines.

Now he won’t have to smear anyone: the Democrats have largely done that to themselves. Policy-wise the 2020 choice will be between Trump’s mostly doctrinaire conservatism, spiced with populist trade and immigration agendas, and what is a now a new Democrat orthodoxy of Bernie Sanders’ adolescent socialism and incoherent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Neverland something or other.

...In contrast, some of the Green New Deal Democrats are self-described socialists and embrace all sorts of positions antithetical to the Democratic traditional base: anti-Israel, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-firearms, even anti-infant. Or put another way, an independent voter is likely to have more in common policy-wise with a MAGA hat-wearing Trumper at a Midwest rally than with hooded Antifa street protestors or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest racialist rant about “Latinos” having some sort of ethnic entitlement to cross the U.S. border illegally.

...Donald Trump was lucky in having such a motley crew of enemies. Or were these liberal embarrassments in part due to Trump’s own political cunning in helping to rip off the thin veneerto reveal something quite ugly beneath?

And now? Donald Trump might be in the unique position of being a bit more quiet in order to let his opponents speak for, and thereby reveal even more of, themselves.

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