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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