When That Didn't Work ...

Victor Davis Hansen (VDH) has a unique way of boiling down history to digestible bites. In this case, the history he writes about has occurred over the past 2+ years, since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. It recounts the many, many, many vicious and often deranged attempts by the "four constituencies"—Democrats, #NeverTrumpers in the GOP, the media, and members of the deep state — to sabotage his presidency, accuse him of being the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler, and harass him with the intent of removing him from office. Each of these attempts has failed, but not for lack of trying. This never-ending series of attacks on a sitting president is unprecedented in U.S. History.

VDH prefaces each paragraph describing the failed attempts of the four constituencies with "When that didn't work ..." going on to the next failed attempt and then the next. I recommend reading the whole thing.

VDH then asks the core questions about all of the failed attempts to remove Trump from office:

Are such efforts in the future to be institutionalized?

Will the Left nod and keep still, if Republicans attempt to remove an elected Democratic President before his tenure is up? Are appeals to impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, and a Special Counsel the now normal cargo of political opposition to any future elected president?

Is it now permissible in 2020 for Trump’s FBI director to insert an informant into the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee? If Joe Biden is the 2020 nominee, will the Trump Justice Department seek FISA warrants to monitor the communications of Biden’s campaign team—in worries that Biden son’s business practices in the Ukraine had earlier compromised Biden who had intervened on his behalf by threatening to cut off aid to Ukraine? Will they investigate Biden’s propensity to hug and kiss under-aged girls? Will Trump’s CIA director contact foreign nationals to aid in spying on Biden’s aides? Will National Security Advisor John Bolton request that the names of surveilled Biden campaign officials become unmasked as a way of having them leaked to the media? Will Trump hire a British ex-spy to gather together rumors and gossip about Biden’s previous overseas trips and foreign contacts, especially in the Ukraine, and then see them seeded among the Trump CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and State Department? Is that the sort of country we have now?

America over the last half century had been nursed on the dogma that the Left was the guarantor of civil liberties. That was the old message of the battles supposedly waged on our behalf by the ACLU, the free-speech areas on campuses, and the Earl Warren Court.

Not now. The left believes that almost any means necessary, extra-legal and anti-constitutional or not, are justified to achieve their noble ends. Progressive luminaries at CNN and the New York Times have lectured us that reporters need not be disinterested any more in the age of Trump—or that it might be a crime to shout “lock her up” at a Trump rally. Will those standards apply to coverage of future Democratic presidents?

No reporter seems to care that Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to work with other foreign nationals to sabotage, first, her opponent’s campaign, then his transition and his presidency, along with the wink and nod help from key Obama officials at the Department of Justice, State Department, National Security Council, FBI and CIA.

The final irony? If the CIA, FBI, and DOJ have gone the banana republic way of Lois Lerner’s IRS and shredded the Constitution, they still failed to remove Donald Trump.

Trump still stands. In Nietzschean fashion what did not kill him apparently only made him stronger.

That Trump has a non-trivial list of meaningful accomplishments, while under continuous attack by the four constituencies, is remarkable. That, in the end, may be the thing that history remembers most.