A prominent theme in The Counterrevolution, Victor Davis Hanson’s new book about the “fall and rise” of Donald Trump, is the unwitting role that Trump’s enemies played in his rehabilitation from 2022 to 2024. I sense that the public memory of the assault against Trump and his lieutenants is already beginning to fade. It is worth revisiting, especially in light of the likely reaction by the Left to its astonishing (astonishing to me, anyway) victory in the midterms.

There were essentially three parts to the assault.

One was the loosely knit but ideologically uniform cadre of protesters, pussy-hat-wearing performance artists, Pecksniffian professors,  professional outrage emitters for hire, and sad females of both genders who regularly congregate outside the White House and other public venues with signs protesting this week’s trumped-up Trumpian tort. They formed a sort of background obligato, slightly hysterical, utterly unquestioning, unremittingly accusatory. They thought themselves repositories of every virtuous sentiment while Donald Trump and all his works were anathema. Doubtless there are pages in some textbooks on abnormal psychology devoted to such unprepossessing creatures.

The second flank of the assault was the media, the walls-are-closing-in-on crowd who live to report the latest bombshell whose detonation would waft like a healing zephyr, cleansing the body politic of any dissent from their hate-America-first agenda of progressive nullity.