President Donald J. Trump is unique in American history. Never has a candidate or president suffered so many attacks — legally, politically, and physically — yet still kept rising and carrying on his fight.
To tell the story of what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “Trump Decade” (2015-2025) requires someone versed in the rise and fall of empires. It’s fortunate that Hanson is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, in addition to a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
Hanson’s newest book, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, which will be released on September 8, takes readers from the depths of MAGA despair after the 2020 election, through the wilderness years of the Biden presidency, to the resurgent campaign of 2024, and finally, to the fast-paced, counterrevolutionary second term we’re still living through today. The book ends in January 2026, but an afterword covers events through April 2026.
His erudition is evident, from chapter titles to quotes by Edmund Burke to classical allusions. He describes the Democrats as “The New Jacobin Democrats,” comparing their 21st-century excesses to the radicals of 18th-century France. Who else but a trained classicist could describe Donald Trump after a key figure in Greek literary satire?
The media never really minded all that much when prior Republican presidents called out their liberal bias. They usually either laughed off the mostly impotent charges or considered them welcome proof of their left-wing bona fides, given that the accusations were politely lodged and largely true. Yet Trump was a different sort, an uncensored, loud-mouthed populist out of an Aristophanic comedy. He answered their unprecedented effort to destroy him politically and personally with commensurate or even greater invective.
Each of the nine chapters is so dense with information that each one could serve as a college seminar. A history book club could meet for half a year, examining one chapter a week. I finally had to stop taking notes when I’d dog-eared every other page of chapter three.
Hanson does not emote; nor does he lavishly praise Trump the way an enthusiastic rally-goer would. He is as close to an objective observer as you can find in the world of commentary.
Part One covers the fall of Trump, from the 2020 election to the exhaustive lawfare. It will prove difficult for any Trump fan to relive the days covered in those four chapters: January 6 and the Pelosi commission afterward, as well as the endless lawfare. It wasn’t just the Democrats who were anti-Trump, but at least seven other entities: the media, the administrative state, the Washington political and military hierarchies, the Never Trump Republicans, popular culture, academia, and even other countries that formed what Hanson calls the “Armies of Anti-Trumpers.”
VDH takes us on a quick journey through all the stages of the four-year period of Joe Biden’s presidency, from the quick undoing of Trump executive orders to the failures of “Bidenomics” to the regrettable decision to hurriedly leave Afghanistan.
Consider what was thrown at private citizen and former president Donald Trump in that interim: five criminal and civil suits; a made-for-TV FBI raid on his home, Mar-a-Lago; the efforts in multiple states to remove Trump from the ballot; and, of course, two assassination attempts, one resulting in a death and two injuries, along with an injured Trump.
Part Two, “The Rise,” begins with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Hanson describes Trump as a Nietzschean man, one who survived everything thrown at him. The Aug. 8, 2022, Mar-a-Lago raid might have destroyed him. Yet almost immediately afterward, he moved up in the polls ahead of his primary opponents.
It’s fascinating to go back and look at the 2024 primary. On November 15, 2022, Trump formally announced his candidacy. On November 18, three things happened on the same day. Former Acting Associate Attorney General Matthew Colangelo resigned. He turned up working (at a pay cut) on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s team prosecuting Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel “to investigate Biden’s 2024 opponent.” Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade met with Biden White House counsel staff. Hanson drily recites these facts, leaving the reader to speculate on what, if any, coordination was happening at higher levels.
The rest of Part Two narrates the amazing change between Trump 1, 2017-2021, and Trump 2. In this current second term, Hanson believes that Trump truly is launching a counterrevolution to bring back what Trump views as common sense: “reciprocal fair trade, closed borders, legal-only immigration, progress in curbing or at least no increasing deficits and debt, and a fierce effort to end the recent DEI orthodoxy and the anti-prosperity boondoggles of the Green New Deal.”
Chapter 7, “The Road to a New Old America,” relives the glorious rush of the first 100 days of Trump’s second term. The administration used the tactic of “flooding the zone” to keep its opponents off-key and unable to focus on an attack. The next chapter covers foreign policy and how Trump is aiming at what Hanson describes as “Jacksonian deterrence.”
In the last chapter, Hanson looks at what it will take to keep the MAGA movement alive without Trump. He believes it can be done, thanks to the base Trump has built up, the way Trump’s legacy will “haunt and obsess” Dems, and the way the president has adopted “now-abandoned Democratic issues” such as reciprocal tariffs and tax cuts for the middle class. He warns Democrats that unless they can find a charismatic leader like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama — AND tack to the center — they “are likely to lose any election that pits them against a workman-like MAGA Republican candidate.”
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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