The attempts to take down Donald Trump are quite real, and they are having significant consequences for the body politic.
They’re coming from nearly every major institution in the United States — from our universities to the media, from academia to the judiciary. It’s happening everywhere.
The real question is, is this really about Donald Trump as a person? Is it really about Trump, with all of his myriad foibles, mistakes, and craziness? Or is it about something broader?
I would contend that it’s about something broader, that the elite institutions in our society have basically decided that if anyone remotely Right-wing were ever to enter the presidency again, it would be an existential threat to their vision of a utopian future for the United States.
Every year, the American Political Science Association publishes a survey ranking all the American presidents, dating back to George Washington. The list demonstrates who they think was the best — and the worst.
Of course, they have dumped Trump in last place. You would assume that they would. But that doesn’t really answer the question as to whether they just hate Trump or whether there is something broader going on to truly understand how much the elite institutions hate Trump and the Right wing.
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It’s not just that they hate Trump; it’s that they despise anyone who smacks in any way of being on the Right in the United States.
Trump is just the apotheosis. He is the apex of all they hate, and they are able to stack up Trump’s myriad of craziness and foibles on top of all that they hate about Republicans.
If you look at their list, every Republican is downgraded significantly while every Democrat is upgraded significantly.
They have Abraham Lincoln at number one. The usual consensus pick among historians is Abraham Lincoln, with George Washington in the number two spot. Sometimes they are switched, but they are always the top two.
But not for the American Political Science Association.
They have Lincoln at number one, and then they have Franklin Delano Roosevelt as number two, which is pretty astonishing considering that Roosevelt presided over the Great Depression. He probably lengthened it by nearly a decade with his garbage economic policies. Roosevelt initiated many of the vast government overspending programs that have crippled America and created a welfare state that has led to a $34 trillion national debt.
FDR did some good things, including his leadership during World War II, although that was plagued by some bad leadership decisions, particularly with regard to the Yalta Conference, which ceded all of Eastern Europe to the Soviets. FDR had a bizarre soft spot for Stalin.
Putting FDR above George Washington is monumentally telling, but it doesn’t end there. The list places Teddy Roosevelt at number four. Roosevelt was a progressive and a believer in the power of big government, even though he was a Republican. They put Thomas Jefferson at number five, Harry Truman number six, and Barack Obama at number seven.
Now, there is no possible way to say Obama is the seventh greatest president of all time, clocking in above Dwight Eisenhower, James Madison, John Adams, Ronald Reagan, and everyone else. That’s insane. Obama was a terrible president. By every available polling statistic, he wildly exacerbated racial divisions in the United States of America. He presided over the complete dissolution of American power around the world, downgraded the American military, and wrecked us in the foreign sphere.
Domestically, he polarized America as no president in my lifetime has — bar none — not just on issues of race, but also on issues of culture and sexual mores. We moved from a country where in 2008, Obama campaigned as a proponent of traditional marriage to a country where, by the time he left office, there were open discussions about whether men were women.
And don’t forget: He presided over the worst recovery from a serious economic recession in American history. He spent more money than all prior presidents combined.
Yet he’s number seven on this list. Lyndon B. Johnson, who initiated the Great Society programs and spent roughly $13 trillion on anti-poverty programs to leave almost precisely the same percentage of Americans in poverty as before, is ranked at number nine. This is the same guy who lost the Vietnam War and completely rewrote the constitutional relationship between the government and the private American citizen.
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Bill Clinton is at number 12; Joe Biden is at number 14.
Biden is ranked 14 while Ronald Reagan, who led the most booming economic recovery in modern American history in the 1980s and also created the groundwork for defeating the Soviet Union, is ranked at 16.
Woodrow Wilson, the worst president of all time — a vicious racist who led us into World War I, created the system that led us into World War II, jailed his political opponents for sedition, and created the bureaucratic state — is ranked above Ronald Reagan.
Because of the framework by which our elite institutions work, they conclude with a bizarre delusion that they can’t possibly lose to somebody like Trump. Thus, they are led to believe that they can do anything they want to stop Trump.
After all, according to these people, if the 14th greatest president of all time is running against the worst president of all time, what can’t you do to stop Donald Trump?