Tag: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson: ‘The Return Of Donald J Trump’

There Are Only Two Things That Can Stop the Re-election of Donald Trump

The Biden news cycle is disastrous—and unending: a perfect storm of his failures abroad, disaster at the border, and reasons why sky-high prices nullify the Bidenomics hype.

The Return Of Donald J Trump | Victor Davis Hanson

The bad news is interspersed with fallout from the Special Counsel’s damning report. Panicked Democrat grandees worry not over whether, but how, to remove Biden.

Then there are, of course, Biden’s daily flubs, confusions, spaciness, and creepy outbursts that grow at a geometric rate.

So there are only two things that can likely stop the reelection of Donald Trump.

One is the obviously coordinated effort of four prosecutors—Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis to rush to judgement and keep Trump in a courtroom all spring and summer, convict him, and put him in jail before the November election.

But that gambit is starting to unravel.

Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis will be taken off the case, if not disbarred or indicted herself. With her demise, her inflated indictment will likely not be taken up by surrogate partisans.

Jack Smith’s federal suit had been damaged by his obsessions with accelerating the trial for patently political purposes. Now there is a growing asymmetry in the two special counsels’ antithetical applications of the same law.

Joe Biden’s got a pass for taking out classified documents for a longer time, knowingly not reporting it, and putting them in less secure places than Mar-a-Lago, without an option to declassify them, as accorded to a president.

Letitia James’s case has received the most legal rebuke, given no other person has ever been so charged in New York for supposedly overstating real estate assets where there no injured party.

In Trump’s case no bank came forward to complain about the collateral Trump put up to secure loans—given he paid the loans back, in timely fashion and with profitable interests to the banks.

Alvin Bragg dragged up a 2005 tryst and a 2016 nondisclosure agreement to claim a campaign finance violation, in a fashion unimaginable for any candidate other than Trump.

All the prosecutors are either registered Democrats or liberals or both. There are clear ethics violations that range from prosecutors running for office on promises to get Trump, to coordinating their suits with the White House counsel or the January 6th committee.

So Trump may well find a way to be able to beat these patently weaponized indictments.

The other only way Trump might lose is—Trump himself.

He is being handed a rare gift with the Biden mental meltdown that will lead to even more damaging news cycles.

The Democratic donor class and political elite are desperate to find some bizarre way to dump Biden and appoint a replacement either before, during, or after the convention.

So all Trump must do is three simple things:

1) Enjoy the Biden doom loop and do not interrupt it.

2) Do not say something weird or crazy enough to feed the left-wing media machine that is desperately searching for a way to stop the news of the Biden hemorrhaging.

3) Do not appear unpalatable or toxic to independents and moderates whose support could give Trump an extra 3-5 percent margin—and with it some insurance over the inevitable Democratic “edge” in non-Election-Day, and thus less verifiable, voting.

Instead, in a 24-hour cycle Trump violated all three cannons.

One, in lose/lose fashion he asked rhetorically where was Hayley’s husband (an attempt to fuel rumors of adultery surrounding her years in South Carolina governance?)

That only set him up for her answer: patriotically serving his country abroad as a soldier.

Next, he trolled his critics by claiming that he had once told a NATO ally that if any still persisted in refusing to meet its military spending obligations, and still expected the U.S. to defend them, then he would tell the Russians to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any financially wayward NATO nation.

Trump likely was trying to boast in art-of-the-deal, hard-ball fashion how he got NATO countries to up their defense spending, or said it in trolling fashion to irk his perennial NATO/Putin critics.

But no matter: the media went crazy and for a day the country forgot Biden’s news noose.

Such trolling disrupted the Biden free fall. It gave the media another shot at their hysterical mongering of “how dare Trump say that”.

Sure, Hayley is accusing Trump of being near senile, crazy, and dangerous, but he has to get even not mad—by ignoring her since she is going nowhere in the primaries.

Trump thinks his prior performance-art, rhetorical threats to NATO forced many of them to act in their self-interest and spend more on defense. And that may be true. But postfacto bragging of the threats he used only fuels the media’s old saw that Trump will destroy NATO and is Putin’s puppet.

Trump is sending a life-raft to a drowning Biden, while alienating millions of disenchanted and frightened Biden voters, especially independents, RINOS, and old Blue-Dog Democrats who are all considering a Trump vote. Again, he may need them.

Trump so far is doing his best to counter the lawfare of his enemies.

But only he can stop himself from gifting Biden and hurting himself—as he interrupts

Victor Davis Hanson: ‘Joe Biden And His White House Handlers Continue To Peddle Misinformation’

“Oh What a Tangled Web Biden Weaves, When He First Practices to Deceive”

Joe Biden and his White House handlers continue to peddle misinformation if not lies about his removal of classified files.

The worst is that Biden—supposedly so unlike Trump—came forward willingly as soon as he realized that he had unlawfully, but inadvertently, removed and possessed classified files. And thus he cooperated fully and promptly with federal authorities.

The truth is far, far different.

Biden removed files improperly both as a Senator and Vice President.

He held some of them in his unlawful possession for perhaps at least 14 years without a word to authorities, dating back at least to his departure from the Senate on January 15, 2009 when he resigned to become Vice President—or if not longer over his some 36-year Senate career.

In fact, in 2017 Biden was fully aware that he had wrongly removed these classified files. As Hur noted, there is a taped conversation on record between Biden and his ghostwriter to just that effect. Biden, at home in Virginia, was recorded as remarking, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs”.

And yet Biden apparently did nothing. He never came forward to any federal authorities for nearly the next five years.

So given that knowledge, why did the attorneys belatedly disclose Biden’s possession of the files on November 2, 2022? Civic virtue? Altruism? Respect for the law?

Hardly.

Otherwise, Biden would have disclosed his unlawful possession at any time during either the intervening prior years when he was a private citizen or during the first 18 months of his presidency, when he knowingly still possessed classified files and still did nothing about it.

In truth, Biden would likely never have come forward, save for one insurmountable problem: Merrick Garland had likely decided to appoint Jack Smith as a special prosecutor to investigate the Trump files that the FBI had swooped into Mar-a-Lago looking for 3 months earlier on August 8, 2022.

In other words, knowing that Smith or a generic special counsel would very quickly be appointed (Smith was sworn in a little over two weeks later, on November 18, 2022), suddenly Biden and Co. preempted that announcement, in fear that Biden had done virtually the same thing as Trump—albeit without presidential declassification power and for at least 14 years in possession of classified files.

Had the attorneys and Biden not come forward, Trump and others would have asked whether Biden had not also removed files. So to get out in front of the formal announcement of the Smith appointment, they preempted, misleadingly and disingenuously, preening that civic virtue had prompted Biden’s “voluntary” disclosures and “cooperation”.

A final note: one of the more disturbing moments in Biden’s catastrophic press conference was his flare up at Hur’s revelation (“How dare he bring up that!”) that in formal interviews an enfeebled Biden had not remembered the general date of his son’s tragic death from a glioblastoma brain tumor on May 30th, 2015 at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC.

Biden went on to vent at Hur.

But Hur was simply documenting his analysis that Biden was severely cognitively impaired, and not as VP Kamala Harris claimed, gratuitously smearing Biden.

But who exactly had serially lied about Beau Biden’s demise, by claiming that he had died while on duty in Iraq, serving in the Delaware National Guard as a Judge Advocate?

Joe Biden.

He has still a bad habit of directing attention away from grieving families of fallen soldiers, by claiming that he too experienced the same nightmare.

Biden had been pilloried in the media to cease such false narratives about his son’s tragic premature death due to natural causes back in the United States, years after his deployment in Iraq.

But to no avail, he continues spinning such myths as he did repeatedly as late as last year.

Sadly, doctoring family tragedies for his own purposes is not new to Biden, as Jack Fowler noted in 2019.

The tragic death in a December 1972 traffic accident of his first wife and daughter, and the injuries of his two sons, was raised for decades by Biden—but in a completely false context of blaming an innocent truck driver, Curtis Dunn for the death.

Dunn was innocent of any culpability. No matter, Biden in his serial retelling for years repeatedly smeared Dunn as drunk driver (“an errant driver who stopped to drink”) who had killed his wife and daughter.

Biden finally gave in to the repeated pleas for decades from the truck driver and after his death, his family.

Or as a 2010 Mark Bowden Atlantic essay on Biden noted:

“For many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and their daughter in December 1972 as drunk, which he apparently was not. The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add in a baseless charge? The family of the truck driver has labored to correct the record, but Biden made the reference to drunkenness as recently as 2007, needlessly resurrecting a false and painful accusation.”

By Victor Davis Hanson