Looking forward and backward

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in American Greatness,

...I would prefer a supposed braggart cracking down on China, or a purported narcissist closing the border, or an alleged demagogue promising change in the Rust Belt than any more sermons from privileged gentlemen conservatives that tolerating illegal immigration “is an act of love,” or silent agreement that those manufacturing “jobs are not coming back” as Obama put it, or wonkishly boy wonder Paul Ryan being drilled in a debate by the vacuous smiling Joker Joe Biden or Mitt Romney oblivious that Candy Crowley had just hijacked his debate momentum—and with it the election.

...But all this is irrelevant when we consider what Trump did rather than what he said.

I mean not just that action matters more than rhetoric, but rather to evaluate Trump by the general past standards of presidential comportment rather than through Platonic ideals. Trump is less randy and gross in office than were reckless and sexually cruel but now revered icons like John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton. He has not weaponized the federal government for political advantage in the manner of Barack Obama (who may go down soon as the most corrupt president since Warren G. Harding).

...Trump, of “Crooked Hillary,” “lock her up,” and “Sleepy Joe” infamy, was more likely to react concretely to the plight of the inner city and the economic aspirations of minorities and the white working-class, who were not just crushed by globalization but so often ignored by their supposed champions of both parties.

...From early 2017, Trump pushed three general themes to reawaken an inert economy that only sluggishly had survived the 2008 financial panic.

One, was to deregulate, recalibrate tax incentives, and create an entirely new psychological climate that would encourage capitalists to invest, spend, and expand, rather than retreat, ride out, and hoard. The point was to go out, get busy, build, profit and not fear talk of “you didn’t build that” and “at some point you’ve made enough money” as warning shots across their bow. We forget that psychology is a great part of economic growth. After 2017, trillions of dollars reentered the U.S. economy that had been hoarded, protected, and sequestered since 2009.

Second, Trump hectored corporations, foreign and domestic, to relocate into the U.S. heartland, given that U.S. workers, energy costs and supplies, security, and the business climate were in truth more frequently competitive than abroad.

Third, Trump at least sought trade equilibrium with those nations, friends, foes, and neutrals—China, Japan, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, and Canada—who ran up huge trade surpluses, a fact in the past that was contextualized as either irrelevant or unalterable.

...The United States is energy independent of the Middle East, as is Israel—because of the expansion of fracking and horizontal drilling that a Biden-Harris Administration claims would cease upon assuming office.

...Trump’s signature foreign policy achievement is a complete recalibration of policy toward China—one deeply resented by the legions of Wall Street investors, corporate interests, celebrities, athletes, foundations, universities, and media, all deeply leveraged by Chinese lucre.

...For all the hoax of “Russian collusion,” Vladimir Putin is in terrible shape and has not fooled the administration as he did with “reset” in the Obama years. In the last four years, the United States upped sanctions on Russia, crashed the world export market of natural gas and oil so dear to Moscow, beefed up NATO spending, hectored Germany about its new energy dependence on Putin, increased U.S. military capability, reached out to frontline Eastern Europe, left an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia, obliterated Russian mercenaries in Syria, sold lethal weapons to Ukraine—even as the likes of James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, and an array of retired generals sermonized that Trump was a Russian “asset.” Translated that means the president who contained Putin they loathed, and the Obama presidency that empowered him they idolized.

...For Trump’s critics he did more psychological damage by his often coarse rhetoric than the material good he achieved with undeniable breakthroughs. For that exegesis to be persuasive, however, they would have to make the argument that the mellifluous citizen-of-the-world rhetoric of the Obama Administration far outweighed in importance the serial setbacks it caused to U.S. interests and security. Or perhaps, one could explain how, prior to 2017, China had weaponized the Spratly Islands, North Korea apparently had nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the U.S. West Coast, Iran was bragging about a new Shiite crescent, and Russia felt free to invade eastern Ukraine, absorb Crimea, and habitually since 2014 interfere in U.S. elections with impunity.

...He is a defender of the police while acknowledging the need for greater oversight, and opposed both violence in the streets, and the appeasement of it by blue state governors and mayors. In some sense, there are no conservatives, either by temperament or by political ability, eager to stop the summer madness of statue toppling, arson, spiraling crime, shakedowns, cancel culture and the vows of Antifa and BLM that all this is the beginning of a complete rewriting of American history and a radical recalibration of our shared futures.

...There was the first impeachment effort, the Beltway punditry in early 2017 calling for his removal by coup if necessary, the voting machine suits, the Clinton-Obama-Steele subversion of the Trump campaign and transition, the Hollywood assassination chic, the effort to take out former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the farce of the 25th Amendment that included the bathos of high federal officials contemplating wearing wires in private conservations with the president to the psychodrama of Professor Bandy Lee testifying before Congress about Trump’s mental state, the silly Emolument Clause gambit (Trump has lost over $1 billion while in office and taking no salary), the subversion of the FISA courts, the Russian hoax, Robert Mueller’s two-year long and $35 million witch hunt, the fabricated Steele dossier implanted in the bowels of the Obama government and media, the one-phone-call impeachment circus, the revolt of the retired generals, and what has rightly lately been called “coup porn,” the hysteria over Ukraine and the caricaturing of Trump in 2020 as Typhoid Mary, Herbert Hoover, and Bull Connor as the Left weaponized the contagion, quarantine, and rioting.

...But Americans at some point empathize with an underdog fighter on behalf of what they fear may be a fading America, even someone they are not always fond of, but who does not give up when bullied and subjected to a level of unwarranted abuse that they themselves know they could never endure. The Left never wished to beat Trump at the polls (indeed they feared such an ordeal); they instead wanted to destroy his person, his family, and everyone who followed him.

That Trump withstood such illegal, unconstitutional, and unethical venom also says something about those who dished it out—and, in the end, did so viciously and yet so impotently.

Read it all here.