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The following is derived from a presentation by Victor Davis Hanson.
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Normalcy bias is the enemy of every nation. Today is not that different from yesterday, and tomorrow will be much the same.
But changes are occurring that are undetected and often unreported by the legacy media. When changes are reported, they are tainted with a left-leaning bias.
The eight years that Barack Obama controlled Washington, America took a radical shift to the left that rivaled that of the Franklin Roosevelt administration. The country was effectively rescued by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. While rectification was never fully achieved, Trump appears to be the first Republican president in memory to not only stall the leftward slide, but push the country in the right direction.
By the end of Obama's presidency in 2017, America stood on the edge of irreversible decline, according to historian Victor Davis Hanson. Eight years of stealthy leftward drift had ballooned debt, crippled growth, invited foreign aggression, overwhelmed healthcare, and alienated working-class citizens—conditions that Hanson described as a quiet revolution toward radicalism, normalized by elites who insisted everything was fine. The nation risked fiscal collapse, strategic vulnerability, and cultural fracture.
Enter Donald Trump.
Far from being the unprovoked disruptor critics claimed, Trump arrived as the antidote—a pragmatic populist who pulled the country back from the brink through decisive action on the very fronts where Obama had faltered. In Hanson's analysis, Trump's first term (and subsequent influence) represented a restoration: economic resurgence, military rebuilding, border reclamation, fair trade enforcement, and rejection of elite political correctness. He didn't swing America wildly right; he restored sobriety, strength, and common sense.
The fiscal crisis was stark.
Obama-era policies doubled the national debt to roughly $20 trillion, with chronic $500 billion deficits treated as "success." Growth stagnated below 3% annually—the weakest recovery since the 1920s Harding era—leaving no path to escape mounting obligations. Defense spending was slashed while taxes rose on high earners, but entitlements ballooned unchecked, abandoning the balanced 1990s Gingrich-Clinton formula. Trump reversed course with deregulation, tax cuts, and pro-growth policies that unleashed record-low unemployment, wage gains, and sustained expansion (hitting or nearing 3%+ targets pre-COVID).
Hanson credits this revival with rescuing the economy from Obama's slow-bleed stagnation.
Healthcare exemplified the disconnect.
Obamacare promised universal access but delivered chaos in places like Hanson's Central Valley California: deductibles soaring from $500 to $5,000, premiums doubling, doctors swamped (from 50 to 90 patients), and patients baffled by basics like co-pays. What Washington hailed as triumph felt like ruin to everyday Americans. Trump's efforts to repeal and replace, combined with market-oriented reforms, aimed to restore choice and affordability—easing the burden Obama had imposed.
Foreign policy had veered into dangerous weakness.
The premature Iraq withdrawal created the ISIS vacuum; Libya's chaotic intervention ("We came, we saw, he died") destabilized the region; Russia's "reset," Crimea annexation, and eastern Ukraine incursions went largely unchallenged; endless nation-building drained resources. Hanson argued these were revolutionary acts of retreat that emboldened adversaries. Trump rebuilt the military, adopted restraint in interventions, pursued pragmatic deals (including with Putin where possible), and projected strength—curbing terrorism, deterring aggression, and making America respected again rather than mocked.
Then there was identity politics and DEI.
Perhaps most crucially, Trump addressed the cultural and economic alienation Obama-era globalization and identity politics had deepened. Working-class voters in the Rust Belt and Midwest—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina—felt ignored: lectured on "privilege" by coastal elites while losing factory jobs. In Selma, Hanson's hometown, once-thriving canneries and welders paid solid wages; globalization favored high-tech coasts while inland agriculture and manufacturing suffered. Republicans had forgotten these "losers"; Trump didn't. He championed fair trade over unchecked free trade, cracked down on illegal immigration (treating identity theft as the crime it is), ended sanctuary cities, built border barriers, and rejected political correctness—echoing Martin Luther King's call for character over skin color. This resonated deeply, winning back forgotten Americans and saving the republic from elite detachment.
The fury directed at Trump—impeachments, endless investigations, talk of removal—wasn't about evidence, Hanson contended; it was backlash against a leader who exposed and reversed the prior drift. By voicing what had been politically forbidden, Trump didn't destroy norms—he rescued the country from progressive overreach that had pushed it toward ruin.
In Hanson's later reflections (including on Trump's "counterrevolution" ambitions surpassing even FDR or Reagan), the verdict is clear: Obama took America to the brink through debt, weakness, division, and elite denial. Trump pulled it back—restoring prosperity, security, pride, and realism. Whether the full rescue endures depends on sustaining those gains, but the brink was real, and the savior unmistakable.
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U.S. Treasury Historical Debt Outstanding
Bureau of Economic Analysis GDP Data
Clinton on Qaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died" — CBS News
Victor Davis Hanson: The Case for Trump — Hoover Institution
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