by Roger Kimball
The insanity of the Democrats and their lunatic NeverTrump fringe transformed Trump from a pariah into a victim.
A prominent theme in The Counterrevolution, Victor Davis Hanson’s new book about the “fall and rise” of Donald Trump, is the unwitting role that Trump’s enemies played in his rehabilitation from 2022 to 2024. I sense that the public memory of the assault against Trump and his lieutenants is already beginning to fade. It is worth revisiting, especially in light of the likely reaction by the Left to its astonishing (astonishing to me, anyway) victory in the midterms.
There were essentially three parts to the assault.
One was the loosely knit but ideologically uniform cadre of protesters, pussy-hat-wearing performance artists, Pecksniffian professors, professional outrage emitters for hire, and sad females of both genders who regularly congregate outside the White House and other public venues with signs protesting this week’s trumped-up Trumpian tort. They formed a sort of background obligato, slightly hysterical, utterly unquestioning, unremittingly accusatory. They thought themselves repositories of every virtuous sentiment while Donald Trump and all his works were anathema. Doubtless there are pages in some textbooks on abnormal psychology devoted to such unprepossessing creatures.
The second flank of the assault was the media, the walls-are-closing-in-on crowd who live to report the latest bombshell whose detonation would waft like a healing zephyr, cleansing the body politic of any dissent from their hate-America-first agenda of progressive nullity.
The third and most potent flank was the meticulously organized wave of lawfare designed first to neutralize Trump as a political actor and then bankrupt and possibly incarcerate him. It all began with Barack Obama, the fons et origo of the Russia collusion hoax, and spread out to embrace agents from government agencies like the CIA, the FBI, and other offices of the DOJ, as well as politicians, or former politicians, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, Ted Lieu, among others. This was the circus that brought nearly a hundred felony counts in four jurisdictions and two impeachment proceedings against the president. The media’s salivary glands got a serious workout as people tried to tally how many hundreds of millions of dollars Trump was going to be fined and serious-faced “journalists” wrote surreal articles about whether the Secret Service would accompany Trump in prison.
The assaults were all baseless but also potentially deadly. Had SCOTUS not affirmed presidential immunity, Jack Smith would probably have prevailed in his efforts to “Get Trump.” Trump could well have been bankrupted and imprisoned. Meanwhile, at least three aspiring assassins have taken shots at Trump. In the summer of 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, PA, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight rounds at the president, killing one rallygoer and ripping a hole in Trump’s right ear. Had Trump not happened to turn at that exact moment, Crooks would likely have killed him.
Hanson’s important point is that Trump owed his rehabilitation at least in part to the intemperance and implacable cruelty of his enemies. He had, Hanson said, a “unique ability to so enrage his opponents that they would inevitably reveal the very worst in themselves.” In their effort to destroy him, Trump’s enemies generated sympathy for a man being ground down on all sides by untrammeled state power while simultaneously revealing the dark, tyrannical underbelly of that power.
The Democrats kept screaming about “our democracy” while at the same time endeavoring to keep Trump off the ballot in “at least” 36 states. Is that “democratic” behavior? As I have observed several times, “our democracy” means “their oligarchy.” It also evidently means the people get to choose their leaders, but only so long as the leaders pass muster with the nomenklatura. Donald Trump does not qualify.
But this full-court press to delegitimize Trump had the unintended effect of delegitimizing the would-be delegitimizers. It also tended to highlight some of Trump’s virtues—his courage under fire, for example, his perseverance, and his determination. When Trump was forced to pose for a mug shot in the Fulton County jail, his enemies thought that image would discredit him in the public eye. It had the opposite effect, winding up on coffee mugs and T-shirts eagerly distributed by the MAGA faithful. “Far from providing the Left with an embarrassing Trump mugshot or the hit line of ‘convicted felon,’” Hanson writes, “lawfare revealed the Democrats to be warping the legal code and, in third-world fashion, using the courts to destroy their increasingly sympathetic victim.”
We know how that chapter ended. Against all odds, Trump won in 2024. His victory completed what was perhaps the greatest feat of political rehabilitation in modern times.
But a week, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson observed, is a long time in politics. The exuberance of Trump’s victory was palpable. His first 19 months in office saw a string of high-profile successes, from closing the border and resuscitating the economy to greatly enhancing America’s place on the world stage. But then came the Iran war. It came, but it has yet to depart. My own feeling, as I have written several times, is that, really, at bottom, the war is over. We won. Iran has no army, navy, air force, or air defenses. Its economy is not on life support: the plug has been pulled, and the patient is just wheezing out a final breath or two postmortem.
I thought the death certificate would have been signed by now and that the corpse would have been taken off. Those who set the price of oil had other ideas. A friend told me that last year it cost $700 to fill her oil tank. Now it costs $1,400. And it’s not just the price of oil. Henry IV of France said (or is said to have said) that he wanted there to be chicken in every pot on Sunday for his subjects. In America, chicken has largely been replaced by hamburger, the price of which has increased by some 30 percent since 2025. Why? The price of feed is largely subject to tariffs. There are fewer illegal immigrants to work the farms now. I think that securing the citizenry is worth the higher prices, but not everyone agrees. They made their disagreement known last Tuesday.
There have been many reasons adduced for the large-scale of the GOP loss in the midterms. In addition to higher prices (“affordability”), there is the war in Iran. Last spring, Newt Gingrich said that the war would need to wrap up by July 4, or the administration would be for it in the midterms. It looks like he was right. Then there are the charges of corruption in Trump’s circle. The commentator John Fund thinks it was a critical issue. Maybe it was.
But the throes of ecstasy rippling through the madding crowd of the unstable coalition of commie, socialist, Islamic, gender-questioning, pasty-faced, mouth-breathing NeverTrump sorority might well be poised to repeat its earlier mistake by overplaying its hand. Writing elsewhere about the ghastly losses in the midterms, I noted that the GOP loss of about 30 seats was average for an incumbent party. Obama, I noted, lost 63 House seats in 2010; Bill Clinton lost 54 in 1994. But another friend wrote to point out some differences between then and now. Perhaps those earlier losses provide useful context, he noted. “But you can’t make a one-to-one comparison,” he said, “because [Obama] faced pathetic, spineless, low-testosterone GOP enemies, whereas Trump faces Robespierres with guillotines.”
This is true. But, while dangerous, it is also likely to contain the silver lining that extreme behavior often brings its own reprisal. The insanity of the Democrats and their lunatic NeverTrump fringe transformed Trump from a pariah into a victim. That metamorphosis, we can see now with hindsight, was the prerequisite to his victory in 2024. Extreme behavior by the crazies is likely to contain not only the seeds of its own defeat but also the seeds of MAGA longevity.
In closing, in case you think the Left is not really unhinged, consider the performance of Scott Galloway, an anti-Trump entrepreneur and professor at NYU. In front of a live audience recently, Galloway called Elon Musk “a traitor to the West.” What do we do with traitors? Galloway didn’t flinch. He noted that the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, were “lined up against a wall,” i.e., executed. Musk, he said, deserved no less. The audience, I note, applauded. Amazing. Yes, such aspiring Robespierres might do some damage. They really are insane, power-hungry totalitarians in waiting. But their insanity will eventually call forth a salubrious counterrevolution. “Eventually.” I note that Senate terms are six years. That is a sobering thought. But it is also precisely the reason that everyone with the good of the country at heart must rally round and push back. I believe they will.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/11/08/robespierres-with-guillotines-lust-for-revenge-could-fuel-the-next-america-first-resurgence/
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