By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Three truths fuel Donald Trump.
One, Barack Obama is the Dr. Frankenstein of the supposed
Trump monster.
If a charismatic, Ivy League-educated, landmark president
who entered office with unprecedented goodwill and both houses of Congress on
his side could manage to wreck the Democratic party while turning off 52
percent of the country, then many voters feel that a billionaire New York
dealmaker could hardly do worse.
If Obama had ruled from the center, dealt with the debt,
addressed radical Islamic terrorism, dropped the politically correct
euphemisms, and pushed tax and entitlement reform rather than Obamacare, Trump
might have little traction. A boring Hillary Clinton and a staid Jeb Bush would
likely be replaying the 1992 election between Bill Clinton and George H. W.
Bush — with Trump as a watered-down version of third-party outsider Ross Perot.
But America is in much worse shape than in 1992. And
Obama has proved a far more divisive and incompetent president than George H.
W. Bush.
Little is more loathed by a majority of Americans than
sanctimonious PC gobbledygook and its disciples in the media. And Trump claims
to be PC’s symbolic antithesis.
Making Machiavellian Mexico pay for a border fence or
ejecting rude and interrupting Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from a press
conference is no more absurd than allowing more than 300 sanctuary cities to
ignore federal law by sheltering undocumented immigrants. Is it sober and
judicious of the Obama administration to ignore immigration laws and
effectively open the southern border wide to all comers?
Putting a hold on the immigration of Middle Eastern
refugees is no more illiberal than welcoming into American communities tens of
thousands of unvetted foreign nationals from terrorist-ridden Syria. Would the
Obama administration allow a mass entrance of persecuted Middle East Christians
or displaced Ukrainians?
In terms of messaging, is Trump’s crude bombast any more
radical than Obama’s teleprompted scripts?
Trump’s ridiculous view of Russian president Vladimir
Putin as a sort of Art of the Deal
geostrategic partner is no more silly than Obama insulting Putin as Russia
gobbles up former Soviet republics with impunity.
Trump’s confusions are reminiscent of Obama’s own, though
Trump knows how to pronounce the word “corpsman,” and that there are not 57
states.
Obama callously dubbed his own grandmother a “typical
white person,” introduced the nation to the racist and anti-Semitic rantings of
the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and petulantly wrote off small-town
Pennsylvanians as near-Neanderthal “clingers.” Did Obama lower the bar for
Trump’s disparagements?
Certainly, Obama peddled a slogan, “hope and change,”
that was as empty as Trump’s “make America great again.”
Two, the Republican establishment also jolted Trump to
life.
Trump supporters apparently don’t believe that Chamber of
Commerce, Wall Street, or Republican party grandees offer many antidotes to
Obamaism.
Republicans who play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules
don’t seem to have the belly to deal with the $10 trillion in additional debt
accumulated during the Obama administration; out-of-control entitlement
spending; chaos in the Middle East; the empowerment of the Islamic State, Iran,
Russia, and China; the deterioration of racial relations; and political
correctness gone wild.
Three, Trump is a nihilist, but he is a canny nihilist
unlike any we have seen in recent campaigns.
In about a day, Trump wrecked Hillary Clinton’s planned
“war on women” talking points that had helped to win the election for Obama in
2012. Given the modern-day recognition of microaggressions and the implosion of
onetime national icon Bill Cosby, a front-line feminist warrior like Mrs.
Clinton cannot get away with enabling her husband Bill Clinton, a philanderer
and accused sexual harasser.
“If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his
terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s
wrong,” Trump declared recently.
Street fighter Trump has an uncanny ability to spot these
apparent contradictions. Jeb Bush is a good person who really was “low-energy.”
Trump’s unkind label stuck.
Politicians really do pander in shameless fashion to
big-money donors. Who better than Trump to know that? He claims he used to
lavish cash on lots of them.
Trump does not play by any political rules because he has
always made up or bought his own rules. Such a wheeler-dealer is no more
bothered by an anchorman’s raised brow than he was by a banker’s frown.
How does the establishment derail an out-of-control train
for whom there are no gaffes, who has no fear of the New York Times, who offers no apologies for speaking what much of
the country thinks — and who apparently needs neither money from Republicans
nor politically correct approval from Democrats?
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