Is there no limit to the animosity of the left for President Trump?
Victor Davis Hanson:
One wonders if anyone on the left will read this which reveals so much of what they did that was wrong. They seem to tune out anyone who is not on their side of the argument. But, I do recommend it for Republicans to understand what they are up against and what ammunition their political adversaries have given them.
When indictments of Manafort, Flynn and some minor Trump officials followed that had nothing to do with the original mandate of collusion, the press cheered them as appetizers for the main course of impeachment to come. It was considered unpatriotic to suggest that Mueller did not find Russian collusion in a sea of collusion—at least as evidenced by a prior Obama hot mic quid pro quo promise to calibrate U.S. policy on European missile defense to Russian behavior conducive to Obama’s 2012 reelection, or huge Russian-related donations to the Clinton Foundation roughly at the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped to facilitate sales of some U.S. uranium to Russian companies. Trump is said to be paranoid, uncouth, reckless, and crude. And he has been at times. But no prior president has been under investigation for 80 percent of his first two years in office, by an investigatory team that is so patently compromised by conflicts of political interest, and so unable to find collusion or wrongdoing in a sea of what is likely to turn out to be FBI, CIA, and Justice Department criminality in 2016.There is much more.
The methods of rhetorically assassinating Trump all have been tried out by progressive celebrities, politicians, and academics: decapitation, high explosives, nightly ritual stabbing, hanging, death by elevator, death by escalator, shooting, incineration, and fisticuffs. The reason that Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Robert De Niro, Kamala Harris, or Snoop Dogg have been lately quiet about killing Trump is that the various ways to do so have long ago been exhausted.
Trump as Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin is now old hat. Trump as traitor was boring long ago. What can one say after she has compared Trump’s agenda to Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, and 9/11? If the tax cuts, immigration policy, or NATO and Russian summits are equal to killing 3,000 Americans, what is left to the imagination? If talking sloppily about Putin is tantamount to the Holocaust, then what exactly was the Holocaust, a bad press conference? And if we are to believe that anything Trump has done is equivalent to starting a war that killed 65 million people and engineered the Final Solution, then among our 325 million fellow Americans perhaps a few dozen will watch CNN or MSNBC talking heads lecturing on the Führer, and conclude the only patriotic thing to do is to eliminate this new incarnation of Hitler.
Progressives are urged to go to stores, gas stations, restaurants and confront Trump Administration officials, in a sort of Obama-like “get in their faces” or “take a gun to a knife fight” advice to make life miserable for anyone who would dare work for Trump.
A former Clinton aide has organized adolescent noise-maker rallies near the White House, ostensibly to make so much racket that Trump will not be able to sleep in the presidential bedroom. Restaurants have refused to serve Trump appointees.
There is no respite from the war against Trump. The NFL, the NBA, late-night comedy shows, cable news, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, books, and music have all found ways to turn their genres into anti-Trump theater.
There is no respite; there is no refuge—not the Super Bowl, not the Emmys, not the Grammys, not the Oscars. Almost every aspect of American culture has been weaponized to delegitimize Trump.
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Trump is not a George H.W. Bush or Mitt Romney. He knows no etiquette. He is no gentleman. He is a bruiser, brawler, exaggerator, and performer. What created President Trump was not just “The Apprentice” or the Manhattan real estate market (such a résumé only honed his pugilist skills).
Rather, half the country was tired of Republicans grimacing as they were portrayed as throwing grandmothers off cliffs. They were tired of seeing political commercials of bodies of the murdered dragged behind trucks, or charges that Republicans cruelly put their pets on their car roof. They were tired of the anti-Semitic and racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a presidential candidate’s personal pastor, being off limits, but not the supposed senility of John McCain who in 2008 was pilloried as a doddering multi-millionaire who forgot how many houses he had owned. In 2012, it was Mitt Romney’s wife whose sins were wearing equestrian clothes.
Given the growing furor over half the country as demonized clingers, deplorables, and crazies, if Trump did not exist, a don’t-tread-on-me street fighter would have had to be invented. Progressives have gone ballistic that any opponent would reply to them in kind. Think of “Caddyshack,” when uncouth Rodney Dangerfield burst into smug Ted Knight’s country club.
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One wonders if anyone on the left will read this which reveals so much of what they did that was wrong. They seem to tune out anyone who is not on their side of the argument. But, I do recommend it for Republicans to understand what they are up against and what ammunition their political adversaries have given them.
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