Trump: The Man Who Made the Left's "Normality" Abnormal

The elites declared American decline and defeat "normal". Trump changed all of that.

by Victor Davis Hanson
June 18, 2019

Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention.

Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.

Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.

No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.

Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance.

Yet it accepts that if it were to laun…