by Victor Davis Hanson
As Trump continues to point out clues in critical swing states, the various violation-inspired cases against him appear to the public to be more persecution than impeachment, and Joe Biden appears more incoherent and confused by the day, the specialist left has resorted to warning the nation about all the supposedly disastrous consequences of a future Trump presidency.
Ironically, the left seems oblivious to the fact that one of the reasons Trump is leading Biden in the polls is precisely so that voters can compare the four-year record of Trump’s previous presidency with Biden’s last 40 months.
Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Trump would conspire with oil company executives to raise gasoline prices. But even after Biden depleted strategic oil reserves ahead of the 2022 midterms and is now doing the same again as he did before the 2024 election, gas prices are on average only a third cheaper than they were under Trump.
Trump tried to replenish the reserve but was blocked by Democrats in Congress. Nevertheless, it left Biden with an almost full tank of 638 million barrels (about 90 percent full), which Biden has now emptied by about 270 million barrels to the current level of 51 percent, with levels falling further as the vote approaches.
We are warned that Trump, 77, looks haggard after long hours in court. We are told he appears to be sleeping. According to media reports, he has aged terribly. But polls show that concerns about Biden’s dementia far outweigh normal concerns about septuagenarian candidate Trump.
Why would any reasonable Biden handler bring up Trump’s alleged gait or Trump’s sometimes forgotten word when it reminds the public of the contrast with Biden, whose speeches appear to be delivered in a language other than English and whose transcripts must be heavily edited to cover up his inconsistencies?
We are told that Trump will enhance racial tensions. Blacks and Latinos are warned almost daily that Trump is a racist — even though polls show he may receive the highest percentage of the minority vote of any Republican in newfangled history and has a solid chance of winning the Latino vote outright. Strangely, the media is now attacking minorities based on the Marxist principle of false consciousness, as if they were deceived into voting against themselves, instead of being insightful critics of the Biden disaster of high inflation, environmental mania, a flood of illegal immigrants and a loss of deterrence abroad.
It was Biden, not Trump, who called an African-American journalist a “junkie” during the last election cycle and warned another podcaster, “You’re not black,” if he voted for Trump. During his presidency, Biden has sometimes referred to black subordinates as “boy,” used the petty term “Negro,” and has a long history of racist drivel and slurs, from “put you all back in chains” to references to Barack Obama being the first “clean” and “clear” ” presidential candidate who proudly reminds us that his home state of Delaware was once a “slave state.”
As Trump’s polls rose and Fani Willis’s persecution was sidelined by her own false testimony, conflict of interest, and hiring of an unqualified secret lover, hysterical cries grew that the re-elected Trump would operate the power of the government to go after his enemies.
As Jack Smith’s federal indictment has become murky over issues of presidential immunity, his failed attempts to get through the prosecutor’s office before the election, and lies within his office about tampering with evidence seized at Mar-A-Lago, warnings about arming Trump with the upcoming elections, the bureaucracy has increased even more.
Now that the jury has returned its verdict in the Alvin Bragg fiasco and his star witness, Michael Cohen, a convicted liar, has likely perjured himself again and admitted to stealing $60,000 from the Trump Organization, Trumpophobia has peaked even further.
In other words, the more evidence shows that Trump’s enemies manipulated the judicial system by impeaching him twice, trying him in the Senate as a private citizen, seeking to remove him from state ballots, rounding up former officials intelligence on the eve of the 2020 presidential debate lied about Hunter Biden’s legitimate laptop and were exposed as setting up Russian collusion by hiring a foreigner for the 2016 campaign, paradoxically, the more the left-wing media warns America that President Trump would do exactly the same, which they did by imitating their weaponization of the courts, bureaucracy, and Congress.
It’s getting weirder.
The left is warning the country that Trump will deport some or most of the 10 million illegal aliens who were deliberately welcomed by Joe Biden and his impeached Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas.
Consider the logic: The current president has destroyed a once secure border and illegally invalidated immigration enforcement for political purposes. But we should still fear his successor who will re-secure the border, return millions of recently crossed illegal aliens to their countries of origin, and restore the sanctity of federal law. In Orwellian fashion, the Biden administration is now suing irate states that are doing everything they can to facilitate enforce the immigration laws that Biden deliberately destroyed.
The absurdity extends to foreign policy. Biden’s team and the media are warning at home and abroad that another Trump presidency will tear apart the world order.
Really? Vladimir Putin has invaded neighboring countries in three of the last four administrations, but not just during the Trump years of 2017-2020. Why?
Before October 7, even Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan boasted that his Middle East portfolio was “more peaceful than it had been in two decades” – but only after Trump destroyed ISIS, eliminated terrorist Iranian General Soleimani, ended the disastrous Iran deal and cutting off aid to Hamas, recognizing the Houthi terrorists, writing the Abraham Accords, pledging full support for Israel, our only democratic ally in the Middle East, and achieving US independence from oil.
By contrast, Putin invaded Ukraine and may have absorbed much of its eastern half. The United States suffered its greatest military humiliation of the last half century, fleeing Kabul and turning over billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the terrorist Taliban, abandoning our NATO-allied forces, compassionate Afghans, and American contractors.
Hamas has killed more Jews in one day than any other since the Holocaust. There is a full-scale war in Gaza. Hezbollah has displaced thousands of Israelis with its daily attacks. And for the first time in history, Iran brutally attacked the Israeli homeland.
China sent a spy balloon across the continental United States with impunity. About 25,000 illegal immigrants from China have mysteriously entered the United States. China helped kill 100,000 Americans a year by exporting fentanyl to Mexican cartels.
In featherlight of all this, should we worry that Biden’s “knife-sharp” disastrous foreign policy will be ruined by a return to the peaceful records of Trump’s earlier presidency?
So what is Trumpophobia? The syndrome manifests itself with many symptoms.
First, the left always projects its sins onto its opponents. He accuses Trump of doing exactly what he did to avoid blame for the disasters he caused. And the left is projecting so violently because they know what they would do if it were Trump and they treated them the way he did.
Second, desperate Democrats are trying to find some outlandish way to take down both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, especially if Biden has a disastrous, historic presidential debate before the convention in June. As a result, the 2024 campaign Never the idea was to compare the years 2017-2020 with the years 2021-2024. But rather it has already turned into a de facto smear by Democrats that “Trump is even worse than Biden.” And this fixation breeds fear of what Trump might do, not what he has actually done.
Third, the left believes Biden can do more than just lose the Democrats the presidency, the Senate, and their slim majority in the House of Representatives. Its hyperinflation severely damaged the middle class. He repels them with his arrogance, thunderous speeches, thunderous, obnoxious gibberish, compulsive lying, and overall impotent appearance.
His racist condescension and pandering will not fool anyone. As a result, Biden may redefine both parties as race is replaced by shared class concerns. Rich blacks may vote for Biden because they are black and wealthy, but more and more middle-class blacks may vote for Trump because they believe his policies benefit the middle class like they do.
Public opinion increasingly agrees that the Democratic Party is the party of the very wealthy, privileged bicoastals and the subsidized needy, while the lower and middle classes feel much more confident and secure with the Republicans.
Fourth, the left fears that a better-organized and wiser Trump second term could quickly and professionally instill a conservative agenda aimed at stopping the current neo-socialist revolution.
Taking all this into account, 2024 is little more than “fear Trump or fear bust” for the left.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness and a Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is an American military historian, columnist, former professor of classical philology and researcher of archaic warfare. Since 2004, he has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Daniel Scavino Jr..
