Victor Davis Hanson
The myth of Biden the healer, and Trump the cruel divider, got Biden elected. But the fantasy that Biden had the answers to problems that Trump created is a far greater—and more dangerous—delusion.
"The Pavlovian “Trump did it!” sums up Joe Biden’s fallback excuse when faced with any embarrassment.
"His own completely optional, self-created, illegal immigration disaster? Trump somehow caused it, despite leaving office with a stable and secure border.
"Vaccination rates soaring? There would be even more if not for Trump’s mere 1-million-a-day vaccination rate, mere weeks after the rollout of the “experimental” vaccinations that supposedly would take “years” to develop.
"Chinese aggressiveness? Trump’s provocations again due to all his paranoid talk of travel bans, and a lab-escaped virus.
"European unwillingness to confront the Chinese? Yep, Trump’s the cause again, with jawboning our friends into paying $100 million more for their own defense.
"In truth, Trump’s atmospherics were chaotic, but not just due to his incessant tweeting and candid ad hoc outbursts—or even media hatred that led to 90 percent negative coverage by the networks, newspapers, and online social media. (Notice how few, Left or Right, use any more the adjective “left-wing” or “liberal,” since to do so is a redundancy: “the media” is now accepted as a synonym for “left-wing media.”)
"Instead, what enraged the elite was Trump’s unapologetic effort to fire up the economy to benefit Americans through massive deregulation, tax reform and reduction, encouragement of returning investment to the United States, and expansion of energy production, exploration, and delivery. The result was that on the eve of the pandemic, there was a trifecta of record-low minority unemployment and near-record peacetime low unemployment, record energy production, and strong GDP growth." . . .