The Wages of Trump Fixation

The strange case of a reborn Max Boot and the folly of impeachment.

Victor Davis Hanson/American Greatness:

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

Most recently Boot declared—and then quickly retracted it only in embarrassment after popular outrage—that chief ISIS mass-murdering psychopathic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not kill himself in cowardly fashion as Trump had described: “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.”

When Baghdadi was cornered by American forces, he chose to murder three innocent children rather than surrender—consistent with his entire venomous career of ordering the beheading, burning, and mutilating of innocent captives from a safe distance. The murder of defenseless children is cowardly.

No one should know better the horrific crimes of a mass-murdering Josef Stalin than the Russian-born Boot. Stalin’s purges, orchestrated famines, gulags, show trials, liquidation of the officer class, and atrocities during World War II perhaps accounted for over 20 million Russian deaths. So how could Boot write, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump”? Twenty million dead souls don’t quite match Boot’s hatred of Trump.

After the former Republican Boot saw Trump elected, by defeating his own particular favored Republican primary candidate, and Hillary Clinton, he seemed a bit embittered: “For the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party.”

Boot lectures ad nauseam the supposedly less enlightened on the same old, same old purported evils of Donald Trump and the alleged compromised conservatives who in November 2016 saw Trump as the only advocate for conservative justices, a secure border, tax reform, greater energy development, and a tougher approach to Chinese mercantilism.

He apparently has no self-awareness that when Trump exits the national scene, Boot’s progressive overseers at the Washington Post will likely have no more need of such useful anti-Trump monotony—and thus no more need for what they see as their one-trick pony.

To his credit, Boot in rare moments of clarity seems aware of his own fixations and at least has confessed such doubts to his readers “But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in office, acting (as Sharpie gate shows) more erratically than ever. Sure, he’s not terribly popular—but he could still be reelected. I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference.”

In fact, all of Boot’s work has not made any difference. more

h/t Forcibly Deranged.