RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/anonymous-editorial-resistance-trump-administration/

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump.
The premise of efforts to undermine Trump is that the establishment has such power, prestige, and authority to overturn the verdict of the 2016 election.

On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an anonymous editorial by a supposed “senior official” in the Trump administration. In astounding fashion, the unnamed writer claimed that he/she was part of a legion of administration appointees and government officials who were actively working to undermine the Trump presidency by overriding his orders, keeping information from an unknowing Trump, or acting independently of his directives. Or as Anonymous unapologetically put it:

Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

The Times author then continues by confessing to a sort of slow-motion coup to undermine the Trump presidency:

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/trumping-right-along

EXCERPTS: “Democrats across the board, along with many “never Trump” conservatives, still do not accept the legitimacy of Trump’s election, and they have worked incessantly for the past two years to nullify the verdict of the voters for daring to elect him in the first place. Some left-wing critics, including a few Hollywood celebrities, have openly hoped for the assassination of the President or for violence against his supporters and family members, while at the same time attacking him for violating established political norms. Well-known authors have turned out one book after another purporting to show that the President’s administration is in chaos, that he is unfit to hold office, or that he has committed crimes deserving impeachment. Those lonely Trump voters—some sixty-three million of them scattered across the land—have so far waited in vain for a prominent writer to step forward to make the case for the candidate they elected in the hope that he might stem the loss of their jobs, the collapse of their communities, and the overall decline of their country.Their wait is now over, thanks to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Case for Trump, an insightful, informative, and much-needed account of Donald Trump the upstart candidate and precedent-shattering president.1 Hanson, the author of many books on the history of ancient Greece and Rome and the history of warfare, including a comprehensive history of World War II published last year, writes in defense of President Trump with a degree of depth and sophistication that readers will not find in the carelessly written and unsourced broadsides attacking the President.

“After two years in office, Trump’s vocal critics are having a difficult time denying his many achievements, including a bustling economy, foreign policy successes, judicial appointments, regulatory reforms, energy independence, and a strong effort to curb illegal immigration, to name the most obvious ones. Will he succeed in rekindling the fortunes of the American worker, taming the establishment, and re-balancing U.S. national interests against international pressures? It is still too soon to tell. But, as Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates in this fascinating analysis of the past three years, no matter how things turn out this year and next, President Trump has made a good start in addressing issues in America that have for too long been ignored by both political parties.

https://www.city-journal.org/vs-and-shiva-naipaul

In the 1970s, when the ideas of Third Worldism had reached their apex, I became enamored of the work of two gifted writers: V. S. Naipaul and his brother, Shiva Naipaul. V. S., who died last year at 85, won the 2000 Nobel Prize for literature; his comparably talented brother, Shiva, 13 years younger, died at 40 from a sudden heart attack in 1985. Both were born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and went on to study at Oxford and then make lives for themselves in England. They were the grandchildren of Hindu indentured servants brought from India to replace the slaves who had once worked the colony’s sugar plantations. Their father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a journalist and an aspiring novelist.

Intellectually and emotionally, the Naipaul brothers were caught up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in Africa and South America as a direct result of the circumstances of their birth, which gave them a different perspective on the so-called Third World from what was conventionally offered by Western devotees of dictators in Castro’s Cuba, Forbes Burnham’s Guyana, Ben Bella’s Algeria, or Nasser’s Egypt. American and European leftists looked to those charismatic leaders as charting an alternative path to independent development, apart from the West or the Soviet Union. Their thinking, unlike that of the Naipauls, did not hold up well.

From an award-winning historian and regular Fox contributor, the true story of how Donald Trump has become one of the most successful presidents in history — and why America needs him now more than ever.

In The Case for Trump, award-winning historian and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson explains how a celebrity businessman with no political or military experience triumphed over sixteen well-qualified Republican rivals, a Democrat with a quarter-billion-dollar war chest, and a hostile media and Washington establishment to become president of the United States — and an extremely successful president.

Trump alone saw a political opportunity in defending the working people of America’s interior whom the coastal elite of both parties had come to scorn, Hanson argues. And Trump alone had the instincts and energy to pursue this opening to victory, dismantle a corrupt old order, and bring long-overdue policy changes at home and abroad. We could not survive a series of presidencies as volatile as Trump’s. But after decades of drift, America needs the outsider Trump to do what normal politicians would not and could not do.

Posted: November 6, 2018https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/lust-for-destruction/

Journalist Victor Sebestyen’s Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror is a fast-paced, absorbing new biography of one of history’s greatest revolutionaries—or, if you share my perspective, political mass murderers. Scrupulously researched and vividly written, it is the first major new biography of Vladimir Lenin in 20 years and makes extensive use of the archival materials that have become available in that time. It will be an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the founder of the Soviet Union.

Much of the interest in the book has been over its revelations about Lenin’s personal life, hitherto largely unknown. Although his wife, Nadya Krupskaya, has often been portrayed as a dour helpmate in a loveless marriage who cooked and cleaned for the Iron Man, Sebestyen reveals real depth of feeling and complexity in their private lives. At the same time, Lenin carried on a passionate love affair for a decade with a beautiful French émigré, Inessa Armand, “by far the most glamorous of all the Russian émigrés in the radical circles of Paris.” His “ménage à trois” with Inessa and Nadya (who condoned the affair) was “central to Lenin’s emotional life.” According to Sebestyen, the Soviet leader was “not a monster” but, in personal relationships, “invariably kind.” He could even laugh at himself, “occasionally.” What’s more, he didn’t revel in “the details of his victims’ deaths” as did Hitler or Mao, because, for Lenin, “the deaths were theoretical, mere numbers.” I’m afraid Sebestyen may have succumbed to the temptation every biographer faces of getting too attached to his subject.

After he led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 against the crumbling Czarist autocracy, Lenin’s socialist state quickly became a totalitarian hell of mass executions, forced collectivization, and slave labor. Newly revealed details about his personal life furnish no further insight into this vast project of institutionalized terrorism. Countless men display traits of loyalty in marriage as well as lapses from that loyalty; very few emerge as political murderers on such a grand scale. The most that these details can establish is the sickening contrast between someone capable of tenderness and affection in private life and capable at the same time of mobilizing the deaths of millions.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? Nothing new there really. Just catnip.

The daughters of the American rich who invaded London in quest of titled mates tended to be spirited and good company, not milksops like the general run of British debutantes. Whatever their other attractions, the ‘buccaneer belles’ have inspired a social history par excellence.

There I was, in an airport bookshop, seeking some entertainment for another long-haul flight, clutching a paperback that had looked promising on the shelf, and so it proved to be. The cover picture was enticing, a coloured-up photograph of an 1890s belle, displaying in pastels the porcelain skin, long straight nose, fine clear eyes and the pile of preferably auburn hair that was all the go at the time, the whole a cultural ensemble for feminine pulchritude, topped off with a bunch of pink peony roses dramatising her blue straw hat. Her neck swathed in a high fichu of fine white lace, the hint of an elegantly generous leg-of-mutton sleeve on her gown and her discreet stud-pearl earrings all said “lady”, but her vaguely eager expression suggested she might be fun nevertheless.