M.A. Rothman@MichaelARothman
𝗩𝗗𝗛: 𝗪𝗘 𝗔𝗥𝗘 𝗪𝗔𝗧𝗖𝗛𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗚𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗥-𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗢𝗟𝗨𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 𝗜𝗡 𝟵𝟬 𝗬𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗦
Victor Davis Hanson just put the Trump era in its proper historical context — and the scale of what he's describing should stop you cold.
The last time America saw a president attempt to fundamentally restructure the nature of government was Franklin Roosevelt from the left during the New Deal in the 1930s. What Trump is doing from the right is that consequential. Not a policy adjustment. Not a pendulum swing. A structural counterrevolution.
The border is closed. DEI is being dismantled and Trump is winning the argument publicly. Iran no longer poses a nuclear threat for the foreseeable future. Universities are competing with each other to cut deals with the administration rather than defy it. The institutions that enforced left-wing ideological dominance for decades are retreating on multiple fronts simultaneously.
But Hanson's most important insight is the one about power. The left exercises power even when they control nothing — no White House, no Congress, no governorship. They do it through universities, through media, through HR departments, through accreditation bodies, through regulatory agencies, through the permanent bureaucracy. They impose an agenda that the majority of Americans oppose — on immigration, on DEI, on gender ideology, on crime — because they captured the institutions that don't require winning elections.
What Trump is doing is attacking those institutions directly. And that's why the reaction is so unhinged. This isn't Democrats upset about losing an election. This is an ideological class watching the infrastructure of their unelected power be dismantled in real time.
Hanson's warning is worth heeding: brace yourself. The resistance coming will be frantic and fierce precisely because the stakes are existential for the left's ability to govern from the shadows. They know if this counterrevolution succeeds, they'll have to actually win elections to impose their agenda.
And they know they can't.
