Victor Hanson: The Greatest Democrat Fear?

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

President Donald Trump’s greatest achievement within six months was simply ending illegal immigration as we had once known it — without “comprehensive immigration reform” or any other rhetorical trickery.

It remains difficult to find, much less deport, the 10 to 12 million illegal aliens who entered in the last four years.

Those who helped break the law, by design or indifference, now believe it was moral to destroy federal immigration law but immoral to uphold it.

And it is still unclear whether former President Joe Biden’s handlers deliberately sabotaged their own border for political and demographic purposes out of sheer orneriness or utter incompetence.

Many of the left’s cherished totems — massive Green New Deal subsidies, the diversity/equity/inclusion industry, biological males competing in women’s sports, and the USAID revolving door — are either comatose or in their death throes.

The historic drop-off in military recruitment reversed shortly after Trump took office.

Republican voter registration is up, and Democratic registration is down.

Abroad, Trump finds remarkable successes.

For now, there are pauses in the fighting between India and Pakistan, Egypt and Somalia, Cambodia and Thailand, Rwanda and Congo, Serbia and Kosovo, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Much credit is due to Trump for brokering ceasefires.

Iran will not get a bomb in the next four years — as seemed likely when Biden left office.

The Middle East’s current most grotesque terrorist cadres and states — Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis — are far weaker than they were when Trump entered office in January.

There is at least some engagement in envisioning the outlines of a ceasefire in Trump’s inherited Ukraine War.

The rub is finding the degree of ordnance necessary to convince Putin that increasing Russia’s casualties to more than one million will endanger his own dictatorship sooner than destroy Ukraine.

Breaking up the new three-billion-person China/India/Russia nexus hinges on ending the war.

The economy is still strong. Gas prices are at historic lows. Increases in all types of energy production proceed full bore.

Current GDP, inflation, unemployment, and the stock market — all at one time or another said to be in a crisis state — remain strong. Talk of an impending recession or hyperinflation is mostly muted.

No one quite knows either the full effects of Trump’s tariffs — especially given the injunctions issued by left-wing district justices — or of the promised over $10 trillion in foreign investments.

Much of Trump’s agenda will hinge on whether interest rates are lowered, Republicans survive the midterms, and the degree to which unelected left-wing lower-court justices can be stopped from hijacking the Constitution and de facto running the country.

As for the Democratic opposition, there is no counter agenda, no shadow government responsible leadership, and no willingness to craft bipartisan legislation.

Instead, the left’s strategy is that of the kamikaze: to destroy Trump at the cost of destroying the Democratic Party.

Otherwise, Democrats seek to prove so obnoxious in demonizing Trump that they create such mass hysteria that the weary electorate figuratively lies down, closes its eyes, covers its ears, and screams nonstop, “Make them all go away!”

Former foul-mouthed vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is now reduced to a ghoulish status. He recently boasted to an audience that rumors of Trump’s death — who survived two assassination attempts last summer — will thankfully one day prove true. 

The top of the failed ticket, Kamala Harris, wanders aimlessly without an office, constituency, audience, or ideas.

To remain viable, she knows she must continue touring and speaking.

But Harris accepts that the more anyone hears her word salads, the more they will remember her 2024 train wreck.

Head of the Democratic Party, Ken Martin, now screams that Trump is a fascist.

But by what standards does he judge? Did Trump try to take his rivals off state ballots?

Does he advocate for destroying the filibuster, the Electoral College, and the 156-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, or packing the Senate by admitting two new states?

Are local, state, and federal prosecutors — a la Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis — coordinating with the White House and DOJ to indict Trump’s current chief adversaries, such as Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, or Josh Shapiro?

Did Trumpers hire a foreign spy to concoct a fake hit dossier on Democratic grandees?

Are his subordinates now spreading it to the media?

Are 51 conservative former CIA contractors and retired spooks swearing that Newsom or Harris is working with the Russians, Chinese, or any of our enemies?

The greatest Democrat fear?

That it has so institutionalized excessive executive orders, ad hominem lawfare, lower-court usurpation, state nullification of federal law, and federal intervention in higher education, the energy industry, and the nation’s open spaces that their own legacies empowered Trump and now will boomerang upon themselves — as the public applauds the karma.