The Renewed Epidemic of
Trump-Derangement Projectionism.
By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One – June 18, 2024
Biden’s favorability is now consistently below 40 percent. His brain and body freezes are routine.

Biden’s word salad and fantasy spins do not even merit the news. His lectures about the “convicted felon” Trump are over, along with his rants about the evil Second Amendment—given Hunter’s felony gun convictions.

If Hunter is convicted of an open-and-shut case of not filing on a huge million-dollar-plus tax obligation, Biden will also be told to stop the “make them pay their fair share” income-tax demagoguery.

So, we have reached the point where no one assumes Biden is cognitively fit to continue in office; no one believes that Biden’s family did not sell the Biden name for influence overseas, raking in millions of dollars by subordinating American interests to his own.

No one thinks that Biden has not weaponized the DOJ to go after political opponents. And no one denies that none of Biden’s political initiatives poll below 50 percent. And so panic sets in among the Left about what to do with him—a man who is not able to handle almost any other job in America, apparently, except the presidency.

Leapfrog Kamala? She only seems enthused when virtue signaling her DEI dislike of Israel. Otherwise, it is the same old, same old: the cackles, the wash, rinse, spin cycle of word repetition, and odes to school buses. Her race and gender supposedly ensure her renomination, but the Democratic elite value power more than ideology and may also have to ease her out if Joe looks hopeless after the debate. In an open convention, she would not win the delegate count.

The national polls show a tight race, but in the swing states and on issues, voters seem to have had it with Biden. The result is again rolling panic.

Sometimes, the hysteria over losing power is expressed by shameless pandering for votes—asking Mexico suddenly to close the border, suddenly canceling more student loans, suddenly draining more from the petroleum reserve, suddenly leveraging the federal reserve to lower interest rates, suddenly ordering Ukrainians to refrain from hitting Russian refineries, suddenly turning on Israel for Michigan Islamic votes, and suddenly slapping tariffs on Chinese cars for Michigan UAW votes.

Sometimes there is poll panic (can Biden go below 30 percent?); Biden debility panic (can he even make it to the convention?); Harris panic (she makes Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle—the left’s old bugaboos—look like Socrates and Aristotle).

And sometimes there is just realization that the Faustian bargain of using the shill of good ol’ Joe from Scranton to mask the neo-Marxist agendas of his handlers is no longer viable without a replacement fix in sight.

So, without alternatives, the result of all the above is a new epidemic of projectionism. The Left obsessively is already accusing an elected Trump in 2025 of going after his enemies in a way the Left most certainly would have if it had suffered what it has dished out to Trump. The Left believes when they sought to kill the proverbial king, they only wounded him, and thus, he will return the favor in the manner that they are sure they would too.

There are also more pragmatic aspects to the Left’s projection of their own sins onto Trump:
One, the more they accuse Trump of planning to punish his enemies by destroying the Constitution (as they would), all the more the “moderate” Right begins to lecture on the need to turn the other cheek, to not fall into a tit-for-tat cycle, to remember they are the Marquis of Queensberry Rules party, and thus to avoid being libeled by the mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment Left. So, the Left then achieves deterrence by scaring off Trump from retaliating.

Two, by accusing another of precisely the crimes you are planning and committing, you become the prosecutor rather than the defendant. How can one be a criminal when he is always scanning the horizon to find criminals? And who knows the mind of the criminal and the nature of his crimes better than the master criminal himself?

Part Two – June 19, 2024
Much of the screaming about tyranny, Trump fascism, internment camps, etc., is also ego-driven. AOC, in her selfies, believes that she must be Trump’s numero uno target (No one cares about her psychodramas).

The barking Michael Cohen sounds like a disaffected Putin thug warning about Trump pushing people off buildings.

Rachel Maddow, apparently given her own sense of genius, beauty, and influence, believes she may be Gulaged. After all, what would the Trump opposition do without Rachel Maddow?

The madwomen of The View also vie to see who will be sent off first to the detention center.

Jane Fonda is screaming about her exile on January 20, as if she were back on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.

Barbra Streisand is back again with promises, promises of leaving the country when Trump takes over.

Robert De Niro—who brilliantly portrayed creepy Max Cady (Cape Fear), Travis Bickel (Taxi Driver), James Conway (Goodfellas), and Sam Rothman (Casino) simply by playing his own repugnant self—is still screaming about a Third-Reich America to come and has been reduced to shouting at MAGA supporters on the street.

I say all this projectionism is insane because:
We have seen the mass hysteria before in 2016. Remember the election denialist Hollywood commercials begging the electors to violate their oath and as faithless electors flip to Hillary to save the country? Or recall Rosa Brooks’ Foreign Policy article in 2017 outlining how to get rid of a freshly elected but supposedly fatally dangerous Trump by impeachment, 25th Amendment, or military coup.
Trump has a record in 2017–2020 of not weaponizing the government, not locking Hillary up, not going after the corrupt Bidens, and not politicizing the military;
The only ones who have sought to destroy democratic norms as we know them are the projectionist Left. So, consider who has been involved with…

ü Removing Trump from state ballots
ü Using 5 federal, state, and local courts to bankrupt, jail, and destroy Trump
ü The Russian collusion hoax
ü The laptop disinformation farce
ü The two first-term impeachments, the moment the Democrats gained the House
ü The Senate trial of private citizen Trump
ü The collusion of the FBI and social media
ü The warping of the FISA court
ü The packing of the January 6 committee
ü The FBI lying about the authentic laptop
ü Crying to pack the court
ü Screaming about ending the filibuster
ü Scheming to end the Electoral College
ü Dreaming of making the Senate popularly elected like the House
ü Wishing to bring in two more states with four more leftwing senators

If you do not take an interest
in the affairs of your government,
then you are doomed to live under
the rule of fools.
Plato