by Victor Davis Hanson
As Trump continues to show leads in critical swing states, as various lawfare-inspired cases against him seem to the public to be more persecutions than prosecutions, and as Joe Biden appears daily more incoherent and lost, the left on spec has resorted to warning the nation about all the supposedly catastrophic consequences of a future Trump presidency.
Ironically, the left seems oblivious to the reality that one reason Trump leads Biden in the polls is precisely because voters can compare the four-year record of the prior Trump presidency to Biden’s last 40 months.
Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Trump will conspire with oil executives to spike gasoline prices. But even after Biden drained the strategic petroleum reserve before the 2022 midterms and is now again doing the same as the 2024 election approaches, gas prices have averaged only one-third cheaper than under Trump.
Trump tried to top off the reserve but was blocked by Democrats in Congress. Nevertheless, he left Biden a nearly full reservoir of 638 million barrels (about 90 percent full), which Biden has now drained by some 270 million barrels to the present 51 percent full—and the levels are falling further as voting nears.
We are warned that 77-year-old Trump looks haggard after his long hours in court. He seems sleepy, we are told. He has aged terribly, the media tell us. But polls show that concern over Biden’s dementia greatly outweighs normal worry over septuagenarian candidate Trump.
Why would any sane pro-Biden handler bring up Trump’s supposed gait or occasional forgotten word when that only reminds the public of the contrast with Biden, whose speeches seem delivered in something other than English and whose transcripts must be heavily edited to airbrush away his incoherence?
We are told that Trump will increase racial tensions. Almost daily, blacks and Hispanics are warned that Trump is a racist—even as polls show that he may well receive the highest percentage of minority votes by any Republican in modern history and has some chance of winning outright the Hispanic vote. Oddly, the media is now attacking minorities on the Marxist principle of false consciousness, as if they are deluded into voting against themselves rather than being perceptive critics of the Biden disaster of high inflation, green mania, a deluge of illegal aliens, and loss of deterrence abroad.
It was not Trump, but Biden, who, during the last election cycles, called one African-American journalist a “junkie” and warned another podcaster, “You ain’t black,” if he voted for Trump. And during his presidency, on occasion, Biden has referred to black subordinates as “boy,” uses the ossified term “Negro,” and has a long history of racist drivel and smears, from “put y’all back in chains” to referencing Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” presidential candidate to proudly reminding us that his home state of Delaware was once a “slave state.”
As Trump’s polls climbed and the Fani Willis persecution was sidetracked by her own false testimonies, conflicts of interest, and the hiring of her unqualified clandestine paramour, hysterical cries mounted that a reelected Trump would use the powers of government to go after his enemies.
As Jack Smith’s federal indictment became calcified over issues of presidential immunity, his failed efforts to ram through the prosecution before the election, and his office lying over tampering with evidence seized at Mar-A-Lago, tired warnings of Trump’s weaponization to come of the bureaucracy mounted even more.
Now that the jury is out in the Alvin Bragg fiasco and his star witness, Michael Cohen, a convicted liar, has likely again perjured himself and admitted to stealing $60,000 from the Trump organization, Trumpophobia has further peaked.
In other words, the more evidence mounts that Trump’s enemies have manipulated the court system in the manner that they previously impeached him twice, tried him as a private citizen in the Senate, sought to remove him from state ballots, rounded up ex-intelligence officers to lie about the authentic Hunter Biden laptop on the eve of the 2020 presidential debate, and were exposed concocting the Russian collusion yarn by hiring a foreign national in the 2016 campaign, paradoxically, the more the left-wing media warns America that a President Trump would do exactly what they have been doing by emulating their weaponization of the courts, the bureaucracy, and the Congress.
It gets stranger still.
The left warns the country that Trump will deport some or many of the 10 million illegal aliens that Joe Biden and his impeached Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas have deliberately welcomed in.
Consider the logic: the current president destroyed a once-secure border and, for political purposes, illegally rendered immigration law enforcement null and void. But we are still supposed to fear his successor, who would resecure 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 exasperated states that are doing their part to help enforce immigration laws that Biden has deliberately shredded.
The absurdity extends to foreign policy. Team Biden and the media are issuing warnings here and abroad that another Trump presidency would tear apart the global order.
Really? Vladimir Putin has invaded neighboring nations in three of the last four administrations, but did not only during the Trump 2017-2020 years. Why?
Before October 7, even Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan preened that his Middle East portfolio was “quieter than in two decades”—but only after Trump’s destroyed ISIS, took out the terrorist Iranian general Soleimani, ended the disastrous Iran deal, cut off aid to Hamas, designated the Houthi terrorists, crafted the Abraham Accords, pledged full support for Israel, our only democratic ally in the Middle East, and achieved U.S. oil independence.
In contrast, Putin invaded Ukraine and may well absorb much of its eastern half. The U.S. suffered its greatest military humiliation of the last half century in fleeing from Kabul and handing over billions of dollars in weapons to the terrorist Taliban, abandoning our NATO-allied forces, sympathetic Afghans, and American contractors.
Hamas killed more Jews in a single day than any since the Holocaust. A full-scale war rages in Gaza. Hezbollah has displaced thousands of Israelis with its daily attacks. And for the first time in history, Iran has attacked in force the Israeli homeland.
China, with impunity, sent a spy balloon across the continental US. Some 25,000 Chinese male illegal aliens mysteriously barged into the U.S. And China has helped kill 100,000 Americans a year through its fentanyl exports to the Mexican cartels.
Given all that, are we supposed to worry that “sharp as a knife” Biden’s disastrous foreign policy will be ruined by a return to the peaceful record of the earlier Trump presidency?
So, what is Trumpophobia? The syndrome displays a number of symptoms.
One, the left always projects its sins onto its opponents. It accuses Trump of doing precisely what it has done, as a way of avoiding blame for its self-inflicted disasters. And the left so vehemently projects because it knows what it would do if it were Trump and was treated as he has been by them.
Two, desperate Democrats are scrambling to find some bizarre way to depose both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, especially should Biden have a disastrous, historic preconvention June presidential debate. As a result, the 2024 campaign has never been about comparison of 2017-2020 to 2021-2024. But rather, it has already descended into the Democratic de facto smear that “Trump is even worse than Biden.” And that fixation instills fears of what Trump might do rather than what he actually has done.
Three, the left feels Biden may do more than just lose the Democrats the presidency, Senate, and its close margin in the House. His hyperinflation seriously damaged the middle class. He turns them off with his arrogance, screaming speeches, loud, obnoxious gibberish, compulsive lying, and generally impotent appearance.
His racial condescension and pandering fool no one. As a result, Biden may well redefine the two parties as race is replaced by shared class concerns. Wealthy blacks may vote for Biden because they are black and wealthy, but more and more middle-class blacks may vote for Trump because they feel his policies benefit the middle class like themselves.
The public increasingly agrees that the Democrat Party is the party of the very rich, the bicoastal privileged, and the subsidized poor, while the lower and middle classes feel far more confident and secure with Republicans.
Four, the left fears a more organized, savvier Trump second term might hit the ground running‚ and thus rapidly and professionally instill a conservative agenda to stop the current neo-socialist revolution.
Given all that, 2024 for the left is little more than “Fear Trump or Bust.”
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Daniel Scavino Jr..
