Let me start with a confession: I’ve been around long enough to watch presidents come and go, to see the machinery of politics grind men into dust and elevate others to sainthood based on nothing more than timing and luck. I’ve seen Democrats savage Republicans and Republicans savage Democrats. I’ve seen media turn every policy disagreement into a moral crisis and every personal failing into proof of unfitness.
But I have never seen anything like what Donald Trump has endured.
Not even Lincoln, called a gorilla and a baboon by his own Secretary of War, faced this kind of round-the-clock, all-consuming, nothing-off-limits hatred. Not even Nixon at his lowest. Not even Hoover during the Depression. This is different. This is a tsunami of bias and venom washing over every aspect of public life, drowning out any possibility of fair assessment, any chance of grudging respect for actual accomplishments.
Consider what Trump has actually done, setting aside the rhetoric and the tweets and the personal style that drives some people crazy.
He signed a bipartisan bill providing permanent funding to historically black colleges and universities. Over a quarter billion dollars a year. Not a photo op. Not a speech. Money that will keep flowing long after he’s gone.
He oversaw an economic recovery that produced the lowest jobless rate for Hispanics and African Americans in recorded history. Before the pandemic hit, people who had been left behind for generations were finally finding work.
He pushed criminal justice reform that freed inmates—mostly black Americans—who had been locked up under laws Joe Biden helped write. Alice Marie Johnson walked out of prison because Trump commuted her sentence. Not because it was politically convenient. Because it was right.
He moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, something every president before him had promised and failed to deliver. Then he negotiated peace agreements between Israel and two Arab Gulf nations. Not a framework for peace. Actual peace.
He accelerated withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. He reduced drone strikes. He made the US the world’s largest producer of crude oil, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia.
He signed FOSTA-SESTA, giving law enforcement new tools to fight sex trafficking. Not a study. Not a task force. Tools that actually work.
He signed an executive order forcing healthcare providers to disclose their prices, so Americans could finally know what things cost and shop accordingly. The industry fought it. He did it anyway.
He created a White House VA Hotline staffed by veterans and their families, and held VA employees accountable for poor performance. Four thousand removed, demoted, or suspended. Veterans finally getting the service they were promised.
Under any normal president, these would be accomplishments worth noting. Under any normal political environment, opponents would grudgingly acknowledge them while disagreeing on other things. That’s how it used to work. That’s how democracy is supposed to function.
But nothing about this moment is normal.
The reaction to Trump’s COVID recovery proved that. He contracted the virus. He received the treatments his own task force had helped develop. He recovered. And the response from Democrats and media was not relief or even grudging acknowledgment. It was fury. Fury that he had disrupted their narrative. Fury that he had survived. Fury that he might benefit politically from something that should have united the country in shared humanity.
So they attacked him for not wearing a mask. Never mind that Nancy Pelosi paraded maskless through a San Francisco hair salon. Never mind that Diane Feinstein strolled through airports with no mask. Never mind that Virginia’s governor preached mask-wearing one day and walked through crowds without one the next, then tested positive and heard not a word of criticism about being a super-spreader.
The hypocrisy is staggering. And it’s not just the politicians. Chris Cuomo, who feigned outrage over Trump removing his mask, puffed on a cigar at the beach without one. I guess cigar smoke kills COVID.
But here’s the thing about hypocrisy: people notice. Americans are not fools. They see the double standard. They understand that Hunter Biden cashing in on his father’s name gets silence while Trump’s children would be drawn and quartered for the same behavior. They know that $3.5 million from the Russian wife of the mayor of Moscow would destroy a Trump but barely registers when it’s Biden.
The Democrats and their media enablers seem to believe they can keep running this play forever. Attack everything. Praise nothing. Treat every Trump supporter as a deplorable. Assume the majority will eventually come around.
I think they’re wrong. I think people are tired of being told what to think. I think they’re tired of watching elites preach one thing and do another. I think they’re tired of a political class that treats them like marks in a con game.
Trump is not the new incarnation of anything. He’s just a man who disrupts the conventional wisdom and does concrete things that benefit real people. Sometimes clumsily. Sometimes offensively. Sometimes in ways that make his enemies apoplectic.
But the reaction to him has become a sickness in American life. A derangement that proves its own pathology every time it opens its mouth. And unless something changes, that sickness is going to consume everything—including the people who think they’re fighting for decency while acting like something else entirely.
