Disagree. The stuff about Art’s wife was as low as I’ve ever seen or heard anyone go in real life or the internet.
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There was worse more recently.
It’s too late for that. Turn on the lights in the backyard quick.
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You must lead a terribly sheltered life, as well as that, the comments flew right over the top of your head, which must be a familiar feeling for somebody underneath a flightpath
Very glib @Sidney. Good man.
Some people said some fairly shitty stuff about you too, i should have added.
I’m not being glib at all, I think it’s yourself who’s being glib. What shitty stuff did I say about Foley’s wife?
Gas cunts.
1 Like
There’ll be some seethe if VDH has called it correctly
I’m not sure this thread could take it.
t’would be fascinating to watch
We said that the last time, and then you get a weekend like whats just been and well, you know yourself.
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Trump will walk it.
Ivanka 2024
Can anyone sum up the last 200 posts or so?
It got ugly
I think Sid and Labane had some sort of disagreement
There’s a paywall on the NCT. Could someone please cut and paste that article?
)
monday april 8 2019
The case for Donald Trump: why the president will win a second term
In a new book, the military historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that liberal America has got President Trump all wrong — he’s the man for the moment. Interview by Josh Glancy
MAREN HENNEMUTH/ALAMY
The Sunday Times, April 7 2019, 12:01am
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People in Britain often ask me if Donald Trump can really win another term as president, the assumption being that the American people will come to their senses in 2020. To make a crude reality-TV star your president once is regarded as a misfortune, but twice? Surely they wouldn’t be so careless.
My answer is that I’m no pollster (which might nowadays be considered an advantage), but absolutely yes he can win. And if you want to know why, try reading Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump.
Second time lucky? Post-Mueller, the wind is in Trump’s sailsGETTY
Hanson is America’s leading pro-Trump intellectual. That may sound like a paradox, trying to intellectualise an impulsive entertainer, but Hanson, a classical and military historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is bringing the full weight of his erudition to bear in defence of the Donald. He’s written more than 20 books, on Homer, hoplites, Sparta, the Second World War, California. Now he’s all in for Trump.
Attempting to make a case for Trump would get you thrown out of most dinner parties and plays even worse in your average university common room. In what might be called polite company (or certainly any with a liberal bent), the president remains despised, vilified and derided, viewed as a traitor and tyrant who will destroy America for the sake of his ego, if he isn’t stopped.
Hanson takes a very different view. Here’s the essence of his pitch: Trump is motoring securely into the second half of his presidency, the cloud of the Mueller investigation into whether or not he colluded with Russia seemingly lifted, the economy flourishing and unemployment exceptionally low. Trump, Hanson argues, has been tough with China. He hasn’t started any wars. There hasn’t been a mass outbreak of violence on America’s streets and many of Trump’s most lasting changes — tax cuts, judicial appointments (particularly to the all-powerful Supreme Court) — have been as bog-standard Republican as you could possibly expect. There is plenty for conservatives to like there.
Trump, he adds, is the first president not to have been a military commander or politician before taking office. His first year was inevitably turbulent, his style is naturally volatile, but things have begun to settle down (a bit) as he gets used to the job.
Unsurprisingly, Hanson’s case isn’t playing well in Brooklyn or Hollywood, or in Washington for that matter, where one reviewer described the book as “sophistry in the service of evil”, but some people are listening. The Case for Trump made its way straight onto the New York Times bestseller list. It is dedicated to the “deplorables”, the Trump supporters written off by Hillary Clinton as beyond the pale.
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Hanson sees himself as one of these deplorables. He is not just an academic. He’s also a fifth-generation raisin farmer in California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the poorest parts of the state. I met him at a smart dinner in Washington, where the great and the good of conservative media had gathered to eat medium-rare fillets of beef, drink free red wine and hear Hanson make his case. Yet, not unlike Trump himself, Hanson looked totally out of place in the capital. He slouched, spoke in a barely audible whisper and seemed as though he’d rather be anywhere but in the swamp.
“There’s nothing I really want that they have,” he says of his many media critics. “I live in a house that I was born in, fifth-generation, 140 years old, and so it’s in the middle of nowhere and I commute to Stanford and do my business and I come home. It’s like Thomas Jefferson said, everyone needs a farm to escape adversity.” Hanson has his farm, Trump has his golf courses: both seem to derive satisfaction from their defiance of the elites.
The so-called deplorables are as loyal to Trump now as they were in November 2016, perhaps even more so. The media onslaught against him has been relentless. The best-funded journalists in the world have spent two years digging up dirt, with many trying to prove that he colluded with Russia to fix his election victory. And there’s certainly been plenty of dirt but nothing to sink him yet, and no collusion, according to the attorney-general, William Barr, who recently summarised the special counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report.
Moral maze: Hanson, left, draws parallels between Trump and John Wayne’s gruff antihero in The SearchersREX
“Trump’s position has never been stronger,” Hanson says when we sit down to discuss the book. “They shot their wad on collusion. They created a climate of hysteria that was ill-fated, led to all these echo chambers. Now it has collapsed. There are defections on the left, people saying, ‘We overdid it.’ There’s a vacuum. They are looking around saying if he didn’t collude, do we do [the porn star] Stormy Daniels, do we do tax returns, what do we do?”
Hanson believes that Trump’s ability to survive what the media has thrown at him has actually strengthened his position, despite the many scandals and persistently lowish approval ratings. His control of the Republican party is now almost total. “They are inadvertently turning Trump into a Nietzschean character,” he says. “The more they can’t kill him, the stronger he gets. Because people say, ‘My God, I couldn’t, at age 72, get up every morning and see them defame my daughter, my wife, my sons. My whole business, my parents. Call me Mao, call me Hitler. I couldn’t after five hours of sleep, I couldn’t do it.’ And the fact that he can do it, and he dishes it back, wins begrudging admiration even from people who are sceptical of him.”
So now, Trump turns his eyes towards the election in 2020 and the best political analysts will tell you it’s a coin toss whether he wins a second term or not. “The Democrats haven’t advanced an agenda — it’s been Mueller, Mueller, Mueller,” Hanson says. “Or these utopian policy ideas, like the green new deal. They don’t have a viable 51% agenda.” By this he means the Democrats have been concentrating so hard on trying to tear down Trump with the Mueller inquiry, they haven’t got round to coming up with a realistic political agenda that can win them a presidential majority at the ballot box.
In Hanson’s view, there are three things that really sink a president. An unpopular war, which did for Lyndon Johnson. An economic downturn, which damaged both Bushes. Or a scandal such as Watergate, which took down Richard Nixon. Otherwise, history tells us, most incumbent presidents win a second term. Having seemingly survived Mueller (though the full report has yet to be released), with an economy riding high off his tax cuts (for now) and no unpopular wars to date, Trump, for all his crudity, mendacity and divisive rhetoric, is not in bad shape. He may have lost in the midterm elections (where the Democrats won back control of the House of Representatives), but so did Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, both of whom went on to win second terms. “He’s right on track where Obama and Clinton were,” Hanson says. “History is on his side. He’s getting better at what he does and his opponents are getting worse.”
Isn’t all this just putting lipstick on a pig? What about the persistent lying, the corrupt business history (Trump University, anyone?), the slandering of Mexican immigrants as rapists, the erratic policy declarations, the cosiness with the murderous Kim Jong-un, the allegations of sexual misconduct, the cruel transgender military ban, the child separation at the border, the nasty Twitter warfare and the payoffs to a porn star? Isn’t Hanson trying to defend the indefensible? Isn’t he sacrificing his intellect on the altar of Trump’s id?
Hanson is too bright not to see the flaws. He acknowledges some of Trump’s policy failures — to build his much-vaunted wall, to pass a new healthcare act. And he admits that Trump can be obnoxious and petty. But he explains this away through his model of the tragic hero, a leader who is necessary for his time yet whose flaws deny him the acclaim he so yearns for.
He reaches for military heroes to make his point. General George Patton, dubbed “Old Blood and Guts” and put in command of a US army in Europe during the Second World War, for example, who conducted an affair with his wife’s niece. Or the US air force commander Curtis LeMay, known as “Old Iron Pants”, whose brutality and belligerence were legendary. “If you want to win a war, you unleash Patton,” Hanson says. “But if you want to have a pro-consul in Bavaria to keep the peace, you can’t have him. He’s too controversial.”
Hanson also compares Trump to John Wayne’s blemished hero Ethan in the classic movie The Searchers. “When they want to find Natalie Wood they call for John Wayne, but you don’t want to build a society around John Wayne.”
This is not dissimilar to how many of Trump’s most ardent supporters rationalise his presidency, seeing him as a flawed but necessary instrument, a battering ram against liberal domination of American culture. It also draws on Henry Kissinger’s view of Trump, that he “may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. If you believe in Trump’s overall purpose, as Hanson does, to break the smug coastal elite stranglehold over America, to explode assumptions over globalisation and American decline, then the outrageousness is a necessary, or at least acceptable, part of the package.
Tough at the top: from left, George Patton, Curtis LeMay and Franklin D Roosevelt were all deeply flawed, like Trump, but nevertheless effective, Hanson arguesALAMY, REX
Hanson is more convincing when he points out that there have been plenty of imperfect residents of the Oval Office. Indeed, many of its most esteemed Democratic inhabitants had flaws that might outrage modern liberals. Americans often forget their history, particularly in the age of Twitter, so Hanson is keen to remind them what biographers have written about the likes of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt.
“Imagine if Trump was doing what FDR did, having Ivanka arrange trysts with his mistress while he was president … he’d be [pilloried]. But that’s what Anna Roosevelt was doing when FDR was having an affair with Lucy Mercer. Or if he was exposing his genitals to colleagues, as LBJ is said to have done in Robert Caro’s biography of him. Or if he was bedding young virgins on the presidential bed like JFK was. I won’t get into Clinton. Or he made a fortune by dubious means in the way that LBJ did while he was president. Or if he came out of the mob machine at Kansas City, as did a very good president, Harry Truman. I don’t think Trump has yet written a letter to a music critic who trashed his daughter and said he was basically going to emasculate him in crude terms, the way Truman did.”
The problem Trump faces, Hanson believes, is one of aesthetics and class as well as politics and policy. “I think a lot of this fixation is on Trump’s comportment, his Queens accent, the way he dresses, the orange skin, the hair, his boisterousness,” he says. “But if you actually look at his record within his presidential tenure, it’s within the parameters of presidential behaviour in the past.”
So where does Hanson’s Trumpophilia come from? What’s a Trump supporter doing in the high towers of liberal academe? Why is he a conservative in a family of Democrats? The answer seems to be a deep-seated rage at what he views as liberal hypocrisy. “I always thought that people in academia lived one type of life and advocated another,” he says. “Elites never wanted to live with the ramifications of their own ideology. I always thought with the Republicans or the conservatives that they were pretty much what they said they were. Agree or not, it was pretty much what they thought and what they lived. This progressive stuff, though, God, it is so embedded with falsity and hypocrisy.”
Hanson’s politics make things awkward at family gatherings. “The fact that I wrote a book for Trump, I think that’s beyond the pale,” he says. “I notice that they really don’t want to talk to me, so I would say I’m kind of ostracised. I say that without feeling like I’m a victim, it’s not like they call me up and yell at me. I just feel that, for their sake, I don’t want to embarrass them. So I don’t want to go to a Thanksgiving or Christmas and make them feel uncomfortable. I really love my family, so for me there’s a disconnect.”
Things aren’t much better at work. On the day we spoke, Hanson says he received 20 pieces of hate mail. “I won’t mention names, but people don’t say hello to me,” he says. People tell him that as a professor he ought to know better. “Why would I know better? I’ve farmed for a number of years. I failed at farming and did pretty well at academia. I think farming is a lot harder than being a tenured professor.”
What to make of Hanson, then, and his Case for Trump? Some of it is quite convincing. Other parts felt like a wilfully blind apologia. But while I was reading the book, my mind kept going back to New York and the day after Trump’s election in 2016: the shock, the confusion, the profound incomprehension that suffused a city in mourning. No one could believe what had happened. Yet unless those people start seriously engaging with the likes of Hanson, unless they start properly listening to what he is saying, even if it is just to critique him, then in two years’ time they could easily feel that bewildered devastation all over again.
The Case for Trump by Victor Davis Hanson is published on April 25 (Basic Books £25)
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Thanks a lot, that was great.