The Target

Historian Victor Davis Hansen provides us with useful insight when he writes:

The election of Donald Trump has turned everything in the political world, from the trivial to the existential, upside down. He is the first non-politician without military experience to become president. The polls and press caricatured him for nearly two years as a classic loser. He won despite being outspent and out-organized, and without real support from his own party or the mainstream conservative press. The Left is rightly convinced that he is a danger to the postmodern redistributive state. The Never Trump Right is still invested in his eventual implosion, issuing “I warned you about him” messages in a nonstop effort of self-justification.

Trump’s demeanor, language, and comportment remain antithetical to what we are accustomed to in a sober and judicious president. Cat-like Barack Obama gracefully tiptoed down the steps of Air Force One almost like a prissy metrosexual; a grimacing Trump stalks about as if he were on a work site inspecting the cement on a newly laid foundation. Obama, with his Mussolini-like strutting jaw, conveyed collective revolutionary confidence to the Left; to Left and Right alike, the scowl from a slouching Trump suggests unrepentant payback to come ...

Trump is intent on overturning Obama’s therapeutic foreign policy, slashing federal spending, rebuilding the military, exporting fossil fuels, waging a cultural war against political correctness and the liberal media, and enforcing immigration law. In other words, from his person to his policies, Donald Trump is a revolutionary, with a huge target on his back that the foundations, universities, networks, major newspapers, Hollywood, and the coastal-strip elite will always have in their scope.

After only four days, the target becomes more and more obvious.

As I predicted before the election, Donald Trump will be resisted in his actions by the Left, but also by the Right, by the elites on both coasts, by the media, by academia, by most old-school institutions, and by those in the bureaucracy (the "deep state"). Those who worry that he'll run amuck are really saying that each of the entities I just mentioned are powerless. That, of course, is nonsense.

But if Trump succeeds in bringing back jobs, improving the economy, providing a modicum of coherence to our foreign policy, developing a more realistic approach to Islamic extremism, and establishing better control of the border, the resistance from all of his opponents across the entire political spectrum will moderate and in some cases, evaporate. It's unlikely he'll accomplish much of that, given the forces arrayed against him and his own foibles. But then again, those (including your truly) who have discounted him before have been wrong every time.

Sure, many progressives claim that Trump is a "monster" and that's the source of their angst. But in reality, the outside chance (and it is an outside chance) that Trump just might succeed in improving life for "deplorables" throughout our country is what they fear most.