Will Trump ride off into the sunset, or play the broken hero? By Victor Davis Hanson.
One explanation of the Trump dilemma is that like all classical tragic heroes and western gunslingers, Trump solved problems through means unpalatable to those in need of solutions beyond their own refinement. It is the lot of such tragic figures to grate and wear out their welcome with their beneficiaries — but only after their service is increasingly deemed no longer needed. …
In this moment of wishing the wounded Shane would ride off into the Tetons and leave the more civilized alone, we should remember Trump’s … accomplishments …
Ended the Clinton corruption:
Trump utterly destroyed the 30-year Clinton grifting and quid pro quo machine in general, and Hillary Clinton’s endless and often toxic political career in particular. It was characterized by the despicable Uranium One sale, the foreign shake-down contributions to the Clinton Foundation, her destruction of subpoenaed emails and devices, and her blatant violation of State Department rules of personal communications.
Clinton’s failing campaign and eventual collapse in 2016 was so shocking that it all but crushed her very psyche — to the point that she had funded a foreign ex-spy to systematically and illegally destroy her political opponent. She ended up denying the very legitimacy of the election she lost. Then she topped that off by urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 verdict should he lose the popular vote. Hillary Clinton is physically, psychologically, and spiritually spent — and never recovered from her ill-fated collisions with Donald Trump. …
Reinvigorated the Republican Party to represent ordinary working people:
Donald Trump recalibrated the Republican Party to become more populist and nationalist. Previously it was shrinking and offered the Left an easy stereotype of a small club of aristocratic white corporate elites. …
Economic:
Trump’s actual four years of governance were characterized, before the advent of the pandemic, by robust growth, low inflation, energy independence, low unemployment, a rebuilding of the US military, eventual curbing of illegal immigration, the Abraham Accords, and forcing NATO to spend far more on defense. Trump saved the Supreme Court and lower federal courts for a generation. …
Fought them all:
In his furious counterassault against a vicious administrative state, bankrupt media, and crazed elite bicoastal class, Trump survived and ended up exposing and discrediting them all. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which monitors media coverage, found that after just a few months in office, Trump was the subject of the most biased coverage in modern presidential history.
While the media both thrived on him and yet sought to ruin their greatest source of income, it committed suicide through its hysteria and fixations. Trump’s “fake news” attacks were crude. But they resonated precisely because he was correct that the media had become utterly corrupt and a mere extension of the progressive project. …
But that he is still standing is a miracle in itself, given the abuse he endured that was predicated on lies, myths, and venom. …
It became a progressive parlor game to publicly dream of his assassination by explosion, decapitation, stabbing, incineration, hanging, or shooting. Joe Biden on three occasions bragged of his desire to physically beat him up.
For nearly three years he was smeared and slurred as a Russian collaborator. That was a false charge and it devoured 22 months of his presidency, until the Mueller investigation imploded. Frenzied leftist hysterics followed this implosion. His first impeachment remains a stain on democracy.
Trump, remember, did not cancel aid to Ukraine. He was prescient in warning about the serial corruption of Hunter Biden and his father’s family syndicate. …
In its politicized efforts to get Trump, the FBI blew up its reputation as a competent, professional, and disinterested investigatory bureau. …
A common denominator with all his diverse critics — Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the CNN cadre, Andrew McCabe, Robert De Niro, Adam Schiff, Howard Stern, Peter Strzok, and a host of others — was that their anti-Trump obsessions either diminished their careers or empowered Trump, or both. …
Exposed their lies:
In response to all this, and often in preemptive fashion, Trump became obsessed with the historic injustice of it all. He yelled to high heaven that the Russian collusion charge was an utter hoax. He hammered the message that the COVID pandemic never originated naturally in a wet market but was birthed in a Wuhan virology lab. He screamed that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic and a window into the Biden family’s systemic and lucrative corruption.
Trump was right on all these counts, but, like mythical Cassandra, the more he rattled off the truth, the less likely he was to be believed given the coarseness of his protestations. …
Trump, unlike Obama, did not spy on journalists. And unlike Biden, he created no ministry of truth. His supporters did not call to junk the Electoral College, pack the court, destroy the filibuster, or opportunistically add two new states. They did not radically change the voting laws through means that undermined the authority of state legislatures to end Election Day as we had known it for over three centuries.
