by Victor Davis Hanson
Most Americans believe that deliberately destroying the border and allowing 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background checks, support measures, any claims of legal residency and determinable skills is uncalled for. Worse yet, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent offenders who later committed terrible crimes against American citizens?
Equally troublesome for most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every 90 days and paying 5-5.5 percent interest on nearly $36 trillion of growing national debt. Serving this debt at current interest rates exceeds the size of the annual defense budget and may soon exceed $1 trillion in interest costs, or more than 13% of the budget.
Why would the United States suspend military aid to Israel in an attempt to destroy the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacres? Why would he lift sanctions on terrorist Iran? Why would he suppress Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish homeland? Why would it prevent Israel from stockpiling crucial munitions in preparation for dealing with the existential threats posed by Hezbollah?
Why would the Biden administration cancel key pipeline projects and block mining of enormous swaths of oil and gas-rich federal lands, even if it further depletes strategic petroleum reserves? Why not pump rather than drain your own oil from strategic stockpiles?
Why would Biden’s White House counsel’s office meet with Nathan Wade, the former lead prosecutor-lover in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in Fani Willis Fulton County? Why would the third-ranking prosecutor in Biden’s Justice Department step down to preside over Alvin Bragg’s trial against Donald Trump in Manhattan? Why would Biden’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, choose Jack Smith to be Donald Trump’s special counsel – given his past failures as special counsel and known political bias?
Nihilism only explains so much. A better explanation is that the Biden administration and its executives knew there was a high probability that most of their policies would prove unpopular and could even jeopardize Biden’s re-election.
But they were also certain that the changes would be so great that the United States would either be – in Barack Obama’s infamous phrase – “fundamentally transformed” or force the next Republican administration to adopt such hard-hitting medicine that it would prove politically unsustainable and a disease would still prove largely irreversible.
After all, how would the Trump administration deal with the 10 million illegal aliens who entered the U.S. without inspection or legality? Where are they? How would they be found and deported? How many lawsuits in blue jurisdictions will it take to overcome?
The country is clinging to a border that doesn’t exist. So the left assumes it would be costly and arduous to finish the wall, end catch-and-release, insist on refugee status before entry, and deport perhaps 20 million to 30 million illegal aliens altogether. In other words, the Biden administration can sigh: “Our job is done. Whatever you think about our illegal methods, we have forever changed the concept of immigration and the demographics of this country.”
All presidents – Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden – have run deficits and significantly increased debt since the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich compromise that led to a transient period of balanced budgets. But in Biden’s case, there was no need to run a multi-trillion-dollar deficit, especially as interest rates on the national debt have tripled and servicing costs are now approaching $1 trillion a year.
After all, Biden inherited a recovering economy swamped by post-Covid-19 shutdown stimulus money, pent-up consumer demand and ossified supply chains. And then he foolishly poured gasoline into the explosive mixture, showering the country with even more federal spending. Now we have the worst of both worlds: high interest rates and almost $36 trillion for services.
But according to the left, it was worth it, given that left-wing constituencies received a huge expansion of powers that would be arduous to undo. And unprecedentedly massive debt levels such as our current burden of 123% of annual GDP are proving unsustainable. And the historical corrections are brutal: 1) major cuts in entitlements and redistributive spending programs; 2) tax increases at a time when state, local, federal and gas, sales and property taxes – as well as other “levies” – already capture half of the income of most middle-class Americans; 3) hyperinflation designed to pay off debt with inexpensive, ridiculous money, with the additional leftist claim that those who have dollars lose wealth and those who don’t gain greater access to them; 4) debt waiver. Even under Obama, we saw that liberal bureaucrats and courts frequently changed creditor orders during bankruptcy hearings. When debt becomes unsustainable, historically there are cries of “Why should the poor suffer more when the rich already have enough money and don’t really have to pay it back?”; and 5) efforts to “confiscate” private wealth by providing government “credits” in return. For example, there have already been ideas that 401k it could be absorbed by the insolvent Social Security system to obtain credit for government benefits.
Most Americans poll strongly support Israel. They oppose Biden’s triangulation efforts by returning to Obama’s venerable nihilistic agendas designed to embolden the Iran/Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthi axis to play against our established allies, Israel and more moderate Arab regimes.
By failing to prosecute nine months of domestic violence committed by Hamas supporters who broke the law, allowing left-wing campuses to normalize anti-Semitism and the promotion of terrorism, and destroying the once-close alliance between Israel and the United States, the left believes this will be a return to the pre-Obama-Biden years will be almost impossible. They hope that their legacy is a beggarly Israel completely dependent on the largesse of the United States – a condition itself based on the fundamental destruction of the idea of a secure Jewish state within its current borders.
The Biden administration has sought to limit oil and gas production — except for brief periods before the midterms and re-election, when it depleted strategic oil reserves. The idea was to accustom the public to high gasoline prices, make ineffective solar/wind/EV projects competitive with artificially costly fossil fuels, and institutionalize policies that would make it harder to reopen closed fields, resume federal oilfield leasing and eliminate costly subsidies for ineffective green fuels.
That Americans have been paying hundreds of billions of dollars more for their fuel under the Biden administration, that the auto industry is stuck with a huge stockpile of loss-making electric vehicles that the public doesn’t want, and that the entire economy has been shackled by counterproductive green mandates. was considered worth the cost of alienating society.
The left knows that neither Alvin Bragg, E. Jean Carroll, Letitia James, Jack Smith, nor Willis Fans would sue Donald Trump if he were a leftist or dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. They know that no one has been tried on such pseudo-accusations and no one will be so accused again after Trump. And they agree that no republic can long survive if the opposition party seeks to remove the names of its political opponents from the ballot.
But they also know that the left has now set a valuable precedent: defy woke progressivism and you will either go bankrupt under the indictments or face a blue city jury eager to invalidate the evidence to ensure the defendant goes to jail and goes broke.
Thus, the left believed that its recent regime was worth destroying the entire tradition of equality before the law:
1) Donald Trump lost half a billion dollars in fines and legal fees;
2) Donald Trump, who is in court, was robbed of weeks of valuable campaign time;
3) Donald Trump may now be forever disgraced as a “convicted felon”; and
4) the left has played the US Constitution and believes they have won, given that conservatives would never fall into the destructive tit-for-tat cycle.
The Biden years have done enormous damage to the country, and Biden has become one of the most unpopular sitting presidents in American history. But his programs could fundamentally change the country for decades, if not longer, and will require tough measures that may be almost as unpopular as the destruction they caused.
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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 antique warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and in 2023 he was named the Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Medal of the Humanities in 2007 by President George W. Bush and the Bradley Award in 2008.
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