The Trump Counterrevolution Is a Return to Sanity

November 21, 2024

By Victor Davis Hanson

We are witnessing a historic counterrevolution after Trump’s victory, far different from his first election in 2016.

The orthodox and the supposed scripted future are now suspect. And they are likely to be dethroned—from the trivial to the existential.

Critics claim Trump has no mandate to stage such a counterrevolution. They argue that he did not win 51 percent of the popular vote or achieve a Reaganesque landslide in the Electoral College.

Yet all the initiatives he advanced and won on polled landslide public approval.

Despite being the target of Democrat lawfare for years, a defiant Trump promised to end an open border, massive illegal immigration, rising crime, and soaring prices. He pledged to slash government and its administrative state, terminate racial and gender identity politics, and restore deterrence abroad.

The people overwhelmingly wanted those messages but were waiting for an unorthodox messenger who would actually deliver them.

The Trump messenger reassured weary citizens that they were not crazy.

Instead, they had good cause to be sick of being talked down to by a media, academic, bureaucratic, and political elite that never earned nor deserved such self-appointed status.

The FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ, not the massive crowds at rallies, were the ones truly out of control.

President Joe Biden was really suffering from dementia, not those who said he was.

Criminals with weapons are as deleterious to society as law-abiding citizens deprived of them.

It is not a thought crime to believe there are two sexes—not three or four or more. No one should be forced to buy an electric vehicle, disconnect their natural gas stove, or submit to racial or gender indoctrination sessions.

Americans should speak their minds and write what they wish without worry of being censored, blacklisted, ostracized, doxxed, or shadow-banned—or jailed.

Campuses are not oases of tolerance, disinterested inquiry, and free expression.

They instead increasingly became overpriced indoctrination centers that shred the Constitution and graduate indebted students who know less—but are far more biased—than when they enrolled.

Trump and his MAGA appointees promise to slash over a trillion dollars from the annual federal budget, disbanding entire agencies.

Is the objection that an ever-expanding government—$37 trillion in debt, running nearly $2 trillion in annual deficits—should keep growing?

Trump pledges to reform the Pentagon—ending DEI Pentagon commissars and revolving-door corporate generalship.

He vows to hold the 4-star class responsible for the catastrophe in Afghanistan and to reenlist soldiers who were driven out due to draconian vaccination mandates or woke intolerance. Trump envisions changing the entire system of military procurement.

Does the status quo object on the grounds that our military leadership has been winning our wars abroad?

Is the Pentagon currently awash in eager recruits?

Has it stockpiled a huge surplus of shells, bombs, and rockets?

Trump promises historic deportations of the 12 million who destroyed the southern border and surged in without health or criminal audits.

Trump vows to rescue swamped social services and stop crimes by illegal alien felons.

Is that really worse than the Biden administration’s original massive importation of millions of illegal aliens, empowered by drug-importing and sex-trafficking cartels?

Who are the culpable? Those flagrantly mocking and breaking the law, or those vowing to enforce it?

Trump says he will deter enemies without bogging America down in “endless wars”—and did just that in his first four years as president.

Is the current alternative preferable to convincing enemies that there are few consequences to their aggression, sandbagging allies like Israel, or feeding the war in Ukraine without any plan of either winning or ending it?

The Trump revolution is also cultural and social. Shared class interests have replaced race, ethnicity, and gender chauvinism.

Athletes of all races are no longer taking a knee in protest of America’s supposed systemic racism during the national anthem. Sometimes they celebrate their scoring by doing honorific Trump YMCA/golf-swing dances on national television.

Enlistments to help craft the Trump counterrevolution are not always predicated on degrees, conventional resumes, or past lengthy government service. Race and gender do not determine qualifications alone. Nor does class.

Common sense, successful lives outside of government, and a desire to end the current nonsense count instead as better prerequisites.

For Trump, party identification, titles, and traditional prestige matter less as he is surrounded by an ideologically diverse cadre including Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Dana White, Tulsi Gabbard, and Joe Rogan.

The country no longer must apologize incessantly for its past or present but can move on—content that it need not be perfect to be better than all the alternatives.

The age of flashing pronouns, renaming iconic landmarks, statue toppling, trashing the dead, vandalizing with impunity the campus library, or spouting anti-Semitic venom is passing.

So, another name for the Trump counterrevolution is a simple return to sanity.

First published in American Greatness