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Showing posts with label Conrad Black. Victor Davis Hanson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conrad Black. Victor Davis Hanson. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Book Note: Why Trump Is a President Like No Other




Historian Victor Davis Hanson reviews historian Conrad Black’s new book Why Trump Is a President Like No Other at American Greatness. Here are a few paragraphs from the review:

Conrad Black’s erudite biography of Donald J. Trump is different from the usual in mediis rebus [the middle of things into which one jumps] accounts of first-year presidents. He avoids the Bob Woodward fly-on-the-wall unattributed anecdote, and “they say” gossip mongering. Nor is the book a rush-to-publish product from former insiders of the Trump campaign or administration. Instead, Black, a prolific and insightful historian, adopts the annalistic method in carefully tracing Trump’s earliest years in business through his various commercial misadventures, financial recoveries, and sometimes wild antics. Black’s aim is to illustrate how much of what Trump has done since announcing his presidential candidacy in summer 2015 is hardly mysterious. Instead, Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.
. . .
Black’s final third of the book is magisterial, as he recites nascent Trump achievements—tax reform, deregulation, the end of the Affordable Care Act individual mandate, superb judicial appointments, curbs on illegal immigration, expanded oil and gas production, a restoration of deterrence aboard—against a backdrop of nonstop venom and vituperation from the so-called “Resistance.” He is certainly unsparing of the Left’s desperate resort to discard the Electoral College, sue under the emoluments clause, invoke the 25th Amendment, introduce articles of impeachment, and embrace a sick assassination chic of threats to Trump’s person and family. Some element of such hysteria is due to Trump’s ostensible Republican credentials (the Left had devoured even their once beloved John McCain, as well as the gentlemanly and judicious Mitt Romney), but more is due to Trump’s far more conservative agenda and his take-no-prisoners style.

Trump’s friends and critics assure us that his incessant twittering and carnival rally-barking are suicidal. Black is too insightful to settle for such a one-dimensional critique (while often lamenting that Trump’s bluster and rhetorical excess are hurting full appreciation of his otherwise solid accomplishments). Instead, Black sees much of Trump’s targeting as comeuppance and long overdue—given a sanctimonious, corrupt media, and a gatekeeping political class that weakened the country over the last two decades of fiscal, social, cultural, and military irresponsibility.
. . .

The rest of Hanson’s review is here. It’s pretty much a rave.
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