The Case for Trump

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I've been watching Victor Davis Hanson (“VDH”) from a local angle for a long time. When I was in high school, my father would refer to his mother, Pauline Davis Hanson, as a “liberal kook.” At that time she was a local judge and my father was a Juvenile Hall teacher who did not like her lenient treatment of his students. Later, when she was on the Court of Appeals, I interviewed before a panel of judges that included her and I always wondered if my father's interactions with her, and my father's influence was the reason I didn't get that law clerk position.

So, years later, the irony of her son rejecting her mother's political heritage and sounding more like my old man tickles my imagination. VDH, in fact, mentions that he has become the black sheep of his family in “The Case for Trump.” I think I can attest in my extremely peripheral way that this is true and that Pauline Davis Hanson stood out as a particularly leftwing member of the local judiciary in largely conservative Fresno county.

I think I can understand VDH's gravitation to a conservative political position. Like him, I went to an elite academic institution and was exposed to the condescension of the left. The contempt for my people, the people I had left back home, had the opposite effect from inviting me into elite circles in common disdain for the unwashed “deplorables.” I get that sense, at least, from VDH.

VDH experienced the same cultural divide and class disdain that I experienced. We are both, in our ways, not far removed from working-class backgrounds, in his case farming, in mine it was appliance repair, both from the utterly de classe Fresno area. We are both proud of our background and are not willing to mock our class to buy favor from the elites.”White Working Class” by Joan C. Williams provides a powerful discussion of this phenomenon.) VDH explains:

“The great universities—the Ivy League, Cal Tech, MIT, Berkeley—are on the coasts. They hone the skills necessary to do well from globalized commerce and trade. When I dine on University Avenue in Palo Alto, the food, the ambiance, and the people's diction and dress might as well be on Mars, so foreign are they when compared to eating out in my rural hometown, three hours—and a world away—south of Fresno, California.”

This book is a palliative for the irritation caused by the anti-Trump book. In those books, we are assured that if Trump is not “literally Hitler,” then, he is, at least, a dangerous, proto-dictator and his supporters are crypto-racists motivated by fear of being usurped by those they had previously oppressed. See, for example, “The Know-It-All Society” or Timothy Snyder's “On Tyranny.”

“The Case for Trump” is a reality check. We experienced the leftwing's repeated insane abrogation of normal behavior since 2016 but we are repeatedly told that somehow Trump threatens democracy. I write this during the week that the Democrats are engaging in their insane and unprecedented “impeachment hearings.” This impeachment investigation follows the Mueller Report's exoneration of Trump from the three-year elite obsession with “Russian collusion.” But the elite apparently had impeachment scheduled for the fall of 2019 and lost no time in deciding that Trump had engaged in a “high crime or misdemeanor” because he had a conversation with the Ukrainian president that involved a request to investigate Ukrainian involvement in the American elections of 2016. What we've learned is that one of the Democrat candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden, shut down an investigation into a Ukrainian company that was paying his son and his son's company over a million dollars a year for providing no services.

As an American voter, I find Trump's behavior reasonable. I also question why Democrats were able to concoct a three-year unlimited investigation into Trump by a team of Hillary Clinton supporters but this obvious questionable political deal is considered off-limits.

So, it is useful to have VDH recite chapter and verse the insanity that the “Resistance” has engaged in, from trying to suborn the electoral college into reversing the election, to advocating that Trump's cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment, to applauding a purported cabal of bureaucrats undermining the president's actions directly. Hanson lists the numerous incidents that constitute the “assassination chic” that becomes popular when a Republican is in office. He observes:

“There were very few repercussions for talking about killing Trump. Snoop Dogg and Kathy Griffin assumed that there was zero chance of ever ending up on a no-fly list for a few weeks for normalizing the rhetoric of violence against the president. They also knew even better that there was an unspoken asymmetry in such dark humor or morbid speculation. Had the presidents been reversed, and a Madonna or the Shakespeare in the Park players considered metaphorically or ritually blowing up or stabbing Barack Obama in anger over his “tea-baggers” crude sexual smear or his insensitive joke about the Special Olympics or his campaign advice “to get in their faces” or “take a gun to a knife fight,” their careers likely would have been over. In contrast, in August 2013 conservative officials at the Missouri State Fair voted to ban for life a minor rodeo clown who dared to appear with an Obama mask on during a bull-riding contest. For all their supposedly edgy hipness and spontaneous cool, actors and celebrities calibrated carefully the politics of what they said and did.”

And this bit of readily-forgotten political history concerning the McCain funeral:

“Usually ex-presidents do not blast their successors at funerals. A prior president customarily does not hit the campaign trail to level charges against a sitting president. State funerals are not regularly transmogrified into pep rallies. And anonymous members of an administration usually do not have the connections to publish lead New York Times editorials that channel Bob Woodward's sensational but unsourced allegations. A cynic might have believed there had been some sort of collusive effort ahead of the 2018 midterm election to create a simultaneous and force-multiplying demonization of Trump—almost as if there was a common effort coordinated by the major media, journalists, establishment politicians, and supposedly dozens of officials within the government. But that idea would not completely be a conspiratorial conclusion, because Anonymous boasted of the presence of such an organized “resistance” inside the government.”

VDH also offers some good insights into the creation of Trump by the incompetence of American elites who have moved away from most Americans in their globalism.

I found the real “value-added” in the book to be VDH's discussion of Trump as the “tragic hero.” The person who comes into town to clean up the problems but then must leave because the town does not want to remember how its problems were solved:

“At the end of The Magnificent Seven, the village's old man bids farewell to what is left of the Seven: “The fighting is over. Your work is done. For them, each season has its tasks. If there were a season for gratitude, they'd show it more.” The surviving gunslingers would no longer be magnificent had they stayed on in the village (“They won't be sorry to see us go, either”), settled down to age, and endlessly rehashed the morality and utility of slaughtering the outlaw Calvera and his banditos. As Chris rides out, he sums up to Vin their dilemma: “The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.” I doubt that president emeritus Trump will attend many future solemn ceremonial assemblages of ex-presidents.”

This is an excellent look at history-in-the-process-of-becoming.

It would be good if those inflicted by Trump Derangement Syndrome could give this book a fair read.