“Whatever the final assessment of Trump’s second term, his achievement in recovering from ignominy and surviving the efforts of an entrenched establishment to destroy him will stand as the greatest political comeback in modern presidential history.” So exults Hanson, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a Trump booster from way back. Hanson is a classicist, which he signals by suggesting Trump is “a classically tragic figure”—though he doesn’t add that classically tragic figures are always so through their own hubris and arrogance, never by accident. Hanson also tosses in Latin tags—primus inter pares, damnatio memoriae, bellum omnium contra omnes, and such—for good measure. And he faults Democrats for ignoring Thucydides’ dark warnings about Corcyra (Corfu)—an author and place one suspects are unknown to Trump and his supporters as well. Along with glib references to Shakespeare and Nietzsche, though, Hanson belatedly allows that the MAGA base is made up of white men without college degrees, and so he recites an all-too-familiar litany of talking points and grievances. The only person to die on January 6, 2021, was MAGA acolyte Ashli Babbitt, shot “apparently for the probable misdemeanor of unlawfully entering the Capitol through a previously broken window.” There were “far more violent earlier attacks…such as the storming of the same Capitol on March 1, 1954, by armed Puerto Rican terrorists.” Liberal academicians think it their charge “to indoctrinate youth in progressive ideology, as part of a greater project to fundamentally alter the nature of the culture at large.” Trump insults individuals, not “the citizen poor, minorities, women, or any particular racial or religious group as a whole.” The Epstein files are “so-called.” And so on.
