"his fallback position on any issue is always another predictable socialist bromide, a frown and two frail arms flailing in the air."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue—and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats.

Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions—closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair trade policies, restoring assembly and manufacturing jobs to the hollowed-out interior, avoiding optional wars abroad, and trying to drain the proverbial federal swamp of its careerist bureaucrats and revolving-door apparatchiks.

...In sum, for all the talk in 2016 of Trump destroying the Republican Party, he has learned how to unite it in a way unfathomable to his critics. Politicos concede that calling China to account, working to revitalize the industrial heartland, ending illegal immigration, and curbing the administrative state are becoming mainstream Republican tenets.

...Yet unlike Sanders’ radical redistributionism, Trump’s tweaking of the Republican agenda eventually achieved unity, and brought Reagan Democrats, Perot voters, Tea-party activists, and blue-collar voter drop-outs back into the party without losing the Republican mainstream.

...In contrast, Sanders’s promises to end fracking, implement the radical Green New Deal, institute a 70-90 percent top income tax rate along with a wealth tax, reparations, an open border and blanket amnesties, Medicare for all, and radical loosening of voter eligibility seem unlikely to unite Democrats in quite the same way. Little of that appeals to suburban voters and independents, and will not win them into the Democratic Party—but it will lose Sanders 10-20 percent of registered Democrats who will stay home or furtively vote Trump.

...Note that Trump was not only more consistent with his party’s values than Sanders, but more representative of the views of American voters in general. One might object that Trump is crude and off-putting and thus cancels out the appeal of his record. But is Bernie pleasant and measured?

His policy nostrums are frightening. He cannot take criticism, but becomes gruff and animated. And he is a different sort of septuagenarian than is Trump, who has a sense of humor and can be self-deprecating. Get-off-my-grass Bernie, like most true-believers and fellow travelers of mandated government redistribution, is serious 24/7. He never really addresses criticism, and his fallback position on any issue is always another predictable socialist bromide, a frown and two frail arms flailing in the air.

Again, Sanders the person gives the Sanders agenda no boost. All that can be said of Sanders is that he is authentically socialist in a way that candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren are only so occasionally and opportunistically.

In 2020 if Sanders is the Democratic nominee, the NeverSanders movement will be far larger, far wealthier, far more influential—even as it is likely far quieter—than were the vociferous but anemic NeverTrumpers of 2016.

Read more here.