Chapter One

The Resistance: Trump Is Hitler Times Infinity

There is a whole group of Americans whose sole political position is: "We hate Trump." From the moment he won the election, it has been total war against the president, like nothing this country has experienced before. The left is in a panic.

The liberal position on any issue can be summarized as: Where's Trump on this? Oh, that's awful. Things that never bothered liberals in the past-Russia, vulgarity, the supremacy clause-are now hateful. The things they used to hate have become beloved institutions-the FBI, the CIA, Mormons, and the Bush family.

The Resistance doesn't care about Trump's positions-they couldn't name his positions. The problem is aesthetic. Liberals can't abide having that vulgarian in the Oval Office.

Yes, liberals thought Bush was an ignorant boob, but they mostly expressed their disdain with dismissive eye rolls. They held Reagan in contempt, confused about how to respond to a confident conservative, something they'd never encountered before. No one could say Nixon was dumb, so he was mocked as weird and stiff.

Trump is something different. It's not only who he is that enrages them, but whom he replaced. Liberals absolutely adored Obama, often obscenely so. Liberal women openly boasted about dreaming of having sex with him. Even MSNBC's Chris Matthews got a thrill up his leg.

They didn't care about Obama's positions, either. He's the mirror image of Trump. Obama was cool, elegant, slender, looked great in clothes. The fact that he was black was just a super-bonus. Fanatically supporting Obama meant liberals got to have a black friend. They liked that he was against the Iraq War but would have supported him even if he weren't. To go from Obama to the crudest kind of parvenu, bragging about his wealth and IQ, with gold-plated everything, was too much. It would be like having Fred Astaire as your president and then getting Rodney Dangerfield. We get it, liberals-you hate Trump. But you've convinced yourselves that he poses some kind of existential threat when your real objection is that you think he's a douchebag.

The Resistance thinks indignation gives their apoplexy dignity. Instead of admitting they're enraged that this clown moved into Obama's house, liberals say: The nation is in crisis. On election night, NBC's Mark Halperin informed Stephen Colbert's audience, "Outside of the Civil War, World War II, and including 9/11, this may be the most cataclysmic event the country's ever seen." Since then, it's been a game of one-upmanship, to see who can issue the most shocking denunciation of Trump.

Liberals weren't always this excitable. They used to pride themselves on their detached view of the passing scene, sneering at the lowbrows' tendency to overreact. I thought the whole thing about being cool was to be cool. But since Trump's election, liberals are the ones hyperventilating over nothing and devoting their lives to demented conspiracy theories. Conservatives are the cool ones, refusing to freak out over every little thing.

Remember That Time Trump Invaded Poland?

If you're into self-dramatization, Donald Trump's presidency is perfect for you. You get to be the princess who first felt the pea under fifteen layers of mattresses. I'M AFRAID! Psychologists are treating patients for "Trump anxiety." Plodding and not-bright writers have produced lengthy historical analogies comparing Trump to Hitler, George Wallace, and Bull Connor, breathless with their sense of the inherent drama.

As I predicted, The New York Times' David Brooks was one of the first out of the box with a column on Trump's "authoritarian personality." In a deadly earnest column, he warned that Trump was making "the argument of nearly every demagogue since the dawn of time." Trump, he said, was playing on fears that had "proved to be contagious" and "move[d] populations." Like George Wallace, the GOP nominee was presiding over "less a party than a personality cult."

Trump's supporters just thought they were being lied to-which they were. They thought they were being dismissed-which they were. The ruling class can do that for only so long before people begin to notice.

Days before Trump's inauguration, John Dean said, "The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump."

Watching the rise of Donald Trump, I am struck continually by recognition of an historical epic that I had naively hoped was well buried in the past. Trump's candidacy has released all the darkest passions. Who am I talking about? A man who came to power in a faraway country about eighty years ago. I am afraid for my country. Very afraid. Very, very afraid. Very, very, very afraid.

Then Trump got into office and his problem was almost exactly the opposite: He has a suck-up personality. I don't remember Hitler or Stalin going around saying, "These people are great. Incredible, outstanding, quality people." The Resistance is alarmed at all the nice things Trump says about Putin? This is what he said about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: "He's got a great personality. He's a funny guy, he's very smart, he's a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I'm surprised by that, but he loves his people." It's way more annoying when he says this stuff about Chuck Schumer than when he says it about Kim or Putin.

Trump is utterly undisciplined, runs his mouth, flatters everyone, and agrees with the last person he spoke to. Why, it's right out of the Mein Kampf playbook!

In May 2018, The New York Times ran a review of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's book Fascism: A Warning, titled "Can It Happen Here?" The reviewer, Columbia professor Sheri Berman, wrote, "There are worrying parallels," warning Republicans that they "must not allow the fervidness of Trump's supporters to blind them to the danger to democracy that he represents."

If that's what they're putting in the Times, you can imagine what the half-brights are saying. Unlike regular stupid people, who know they're stupid, our media and showbiz elites think they're geniuses. They have a mollusk's grasp of historical concepts. Hitler: bad; Nazi: bad; Fascist: bad. Therefore, what's the worst thing Trump could be? Hitler! Trump is just like Hitler, trying to nail Playboy Playmates! It's Hitlerian to defund Planned Parenthood (-i.e., the closest our government comes to mass, mechanized slaughter).

Most of the things Trump does are neither here nor there, but some are kind of the opposite of Hitler. Attacking other countries on a flimsy pretext actually is Hitlerian. We bombed Syria for the same reason Hitler invaded the Sudetenland.

Does anybody remember how the Resistance reacted to that? MSNBC's Brian Williams soliloquized: "We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: 'I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.' And they are beautiful pictures of fierce armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight over to this airfield. What did they hit?"

The Virtue-Signaling Industrial Complex

When the angel Obama was president, we always heard, Never before has a president met with such instantaneous opposition to his very existence! He faced "unprecedented levels of obstruction." An alleged "conservative Republican senator" (John McCain) announced that the Republican base's "hatred of Mr. Obama" was "frightening." Obama was said to be "genuinely startled by the intensity of the polarization he encountered."

POOR OBAMA!

Their showstopping evidence of the unprecedented "attacks" was that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, that his goal was "for President Obama to be a one-term president." Was that a news flash? Did the media expect the GOP to cancel the next presidential election because Obama was in office?

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pronounced McConnell's remark "deeply wrong." A Times editorial denounced McConnell's "tooth-and-claw politicking." McConnell's hometown newspaper, the Courier-Journal, issued a remorseful editorial saying McConnell had proved that he "is a partisan before he is a patriot."

Trump would trade what he's got for Obama's worst day. He'd trade it for Clinton's worst day.

A Variety writer couldn't get through a movie review of Chappaquiddick without taking a shot at Trump. "When you try to build a governing philosophy on top of lies," Owen Gleiberman wrote, "one way or another those lies will come back to haunt you. (Hello, Donald Trump! He's an incompetent bully, but his middle name might be 'Liberal Karma.')" Wait-where did Trump come in?

Olympic athlete Lindsey Vonn went out of her way to insult Trump before competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics, telling CNN that she would not accept an invitation to the White House. "Absolutely not. Nope . . . no, I won't go." (She didn't get the chance, losing all her races and heading home with one "measly bronze," as USA Today put it.)

In a column on Bill Clinton's belated comeuppance for his comic horniness as governor and president, the Times' Maureen Dowd accused him of having "Trump-level narcissism and selfishness." Weren't we talking about Clinton?

A New Yorker article on New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman's beating up his girlfriends threw in the fact that his "emotional state seemed to worsen after the 2016 Presidential election." So at least there was a mitigating circumstance.

In March 2018, a just completed pedestrian bridge at Florida International University collapsed, crushing eight cars beneath it and killing six people. Until that moment, the firm that built the bridge had bragged about being "certified minority owned" and about the all-women design team on the project. So, naturally, the most important thing to do after the fatal collapse was to virtue-signal to the Resistance. "When the board hired me," FIU's president, Mark Rosenberg, said, "I told them, 'If you give me a pile of rocks, I'm going to build a bridge, not a wall.'"

"The Resistance," aka "the Hissy Fit"

Trump's election has marked a tossing off of all previous norms from every institution in America: the courts, the colleges, elected officials, civil rights activists, the states, feminists, late-night comedians, the "swamp," athletes, the deep state, and, of course, the press and social media. Even the pope! These days, the minimum irreducible proof of sanity in America is to be anti-anti-Trump.

In her first post-election interview on May 2, 2017, Hillary Clinton blithely announced that she was now "part of the Resistance." It was a total break with American history-the losing side in an election is generally known as "the loyal opposition." If Donald Trump had said such a thing about Hillary-or, God forbid, about Obama-it would have been taken as a Klan reference. There would have been demands to imprison him. He's issuing a call to violence! "Resistance" is a military term! It's a "dog whistle" to the militias and the KKK!

What if Trump supporters then went on a violent rampage, donning masks and beating up Hillary supporters? I think everyone would recognize that we were in the middle of a fascist uprising. But Hillary's claim to be part of the Resistance, followed by organized violence against conservatives, seems to alarm no one-apart from the people getting beaten up.

After all, we're talking about Trump.

Hundreds of young white liberals showed up at Trump's inauguration with the stated goal of making the historic event "a giant clusterf*ck." Under an umbrella group named DisruptJ20-the inauguration was on January 20-self-described anti-capitalists, anti-fascists, and anarchists ran wild, smashing store windows, spray-painting cars, setting fires, and throwing bricks at cops and flares into police cars.

About two hundred of the rioters were arrested, but, apart from the handful that pleaded guilty, not one has been convicted. The judge threw out one of the most serious charges against them, "inciting a riot," because, under the law, "inciting a riot" is defined as "inviting Ann Coulter to give a speech." As the title of a Washington Post op-ed described the dangerousness of conservative speech: "Fiery rhetoric a close relative of violence." Is violence a close relative of violence? Trump-era rules: violence is speech and speech is violence.

The blue states are behaving like the worst Southern governors during the civil rights era. We just can't get Democrats to live under the Constitution. If their side wins the White House, federal law rules supreme. Indeed, even the president's policy choice not to enforce federal law takes precedence over a state's preference to enforce federal law, enacted over decades of compromise by Republicans and Democrats and signed into law by U.S. presidents. But if their side loses the White House, states feel they are free to disregard not only the president's policy decisions but the law and the Constitution.

When Arizona passed a law, in 2010, allowing state officers to enforce federal immigration law, despite President Obama's decision to ignore the law, professor Stephen Vladeck, then of American University, said on CNN that "as long as the federal government can show that the state law is inconsistent with and is indeed in conflict with federal policy, the state law must fail. That is exactly what follows from the supremacy clause, and the Supreme Court has recognized that really since the earliest years of the republic."

The Obama Justice Department argued in court that the Arizona law established "its own immigration policy"-i.e., enforcing the law-which was interfering with "federal immigration law," i.e., Obama's policy preference. This, the government said, crossed a "constitutional line."

Democratic congressman Luis GutiŽrrez-"I have only one loyalty, and that's to the immigrant community"-boasted on MSNBC that "the lawyers for the attorney general, the federal government, went in to see a federal judge and said, 'Supremacy Clause of the Constitution says we are in charge of enacting, developing all immigration law,' and the judge says, 'Yes, you are, federal government.'"

But if their side loses, the Constitution's majestic supremacy clause goes out the window. The blue states are not only refusing to abide by federal law on immigration, but they're killing the wounded. California's attorney general, Xavier Becerra, has threatened to go after private businesses that cooperate with federal immigration officers. Even George Wallace never threatened to go after businesses that refused to discriminate. I take it back: The Resistance governors are worse than the "massive resistance" governors. Those guys didn't know what "massive resistance" was.

Despite the clear constitutional and federal authority of the president to (1) exclude immigrants in the best interests of the United States and (2) enforce federal law, court after court has announced that President Trump cannot exclude any immigrants. He cannot enforce federal law against illegal immigrants who claim to have entered the country as minors, or for any other reason that Trump may announce in the future.

In the next few months, each and every power the Constitution bestows on the president will be subject to a judge in Hawaii saying, "I'm not so sure about that."