Even Never Trumpers Are Warming Up to The Donald

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Iโ€™d like to talk a day about an irony. Maybe itโ€™s something thatโ€™s a paradox. Have you noticed that there are certain people who are coming out of the woodwork who are diehard Trump opponents and suddenly they say, sorta, โ€œI like Donald Trump,โ€ or they donโ€™t say it publicly or they donโ€™t write it emphatically?

And hereโ€™s what I mean.

He went to Davos, Switzerland, and I thought, โ€œWow, theyโ€™re going to destroy Don.โ€

I donโ€™t mean destroy him effectively, but theyโ€™re going to try to destroy him. And then the questions and answers were amazing. He outlined tax reform, transparency, low interest rates, targeted tariffs, more energy development, more fossil fuels, and closed borders.

I thought, โ€œWow, that is going to drive the Davos people crazy.โ€

And then the questions were, โ€œAre you sure you can send us a liquid, not natural gas? We need it in Europeโ€ or โ€œThis sounds great, but when will it start?โ€

And you start to think, these are capitalists and that they want Europe to be returned to its former grandeur. And all of a sudden, this man is saying something that is exactly opposite of the socialism that destroyed their countries and that they bought into. And now they donโ€™t have to do it. And theyโ€™re secretly but more openly even admiring Trump.

The same phenomenon happened when I was on campus, not long on the Stanford campus. A professor whom I know came up to me, and I would say that he is a moderately anti-Trumper, never Trumper maybe, and he whispered, said, โ€œWow, the end of DEI is actually not that bad, is it?โ€ And what he was saying is, โ€œThereโ€™s no more racial quotas, and maybe I wanted to be a dean.โ€ Iโ€™m saying, Iโ€™m extrapolating what he was saying. โ€œMaybe I want to be a dean, or maybe I want to get published at University Press and thereโ€™s not going to be any racial quotas anymore or discrimination, and Iโ€™m for that because the DEI is a monstrosity. There wonโ€™t be any czar that calls me up and says your syllabus doesnโ€™t have enough DEI material in it, or Iโ€™ve looked at your grading pattern and youโ€™re inordinately giving Cs to people of color. No more commissars.โ€

So even they are, you know, happy that Trump is doing this. And then we get into the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and people are really angry at Trump because, in this tragedy of the airline accident, he actually said things that were quite blunt. He said that DEI was maybe at fault, and we now know that theโ€”and I donโ€™t want to get into a critique yet of the crashโ€”but it seems like the helicopter was too low, and there was culpability, which seems like one of the air traffic controllers was not there. It seems like somebody left early. It seems like there was a mistake on giving directions about the proper elevations.

But we do know this, and Trump brought it up, and that was that the FAA consistently under Joe Biden had racial quotas, and they abolished programs and universities that encouraged people who had either expertise through the curriculum or prior military experience who would do well on meritocratic exams to try to join the FAA, and they were rejected because of their race. That is a fact, and in fact, there have been several lawsuits challenging the FAA and the first nomination to the FAA. Of course, the candidate that Biden picked didnโ€™t even know the fundamentals of aviation. He came from the Denver airport, but he didnโ€™t have any knowledge of the actual mechanics of how airports worked, it seemed.

My point is that when he did that, everybody in the media thought it was awful. But then people who probably didnโ€™t even vote for him said, โ€œWait a minute. I want to be safe. I want my daughter to be safe. I want my husband to be safe. You mean there are people in these control towers that were selected for criteria other than merit?โ€

And while it might have been illiberal or maybe inconvenient, Trump told the truth. What Iโ€™m getting at is this. This country has moved so far to the left on energy, on DEI, on transgenderism, on crime, and on the border that people even who supported it, whether theyโ€™re the people in LA that lost their homes or the people who voted for Adam Schiffโ€”and we saw what he did at the nominationโ€”they want a return.

And this man is the only person, Trump, with the guts and the backbone to not just make a transition, not to the far right, back to the center or the center traditional right that secretly, at least for now, they are happy that itโ€™s going on because they feel that they and most Americans will be the beneficiaries. And you know whatโ€™s correct? Theyโ€™re absolutely right.

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Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hansonhttp://victorhanson.com/
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

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