In the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins writes a column headlined "Anatomy of a Witch Hunt":
as a colleague once said of Stalin, "[He] tries to force life into a ready-made framework. The more life resists . . . the more forcefully he mangles and breaks it."
Come to think of it, that's not a bad way of describing how the D.C. anthill has reacted to the unexpected, exotic, high-risk, possibly providential experiment of the Trump presidency.
We mean every descriptor. His very unsuitability, the mood of the American public that elected him, the obscure impasse of American politics that brought him to power—all these signs deserve more respect than they're getting.
His Torquemadas don't and can't know whether our democracy, in the improbable Mr. Trump, found a lever to move us forward, but there's something repugnant in their desire not to find out.
In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson makes a similar case:
We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.
The branches of this insidious coup d'état are quite unlikely anything our generation has ever witnessed.
It may not be quite so unprecedented. I can certainly recall plenty of people who refused to accept George W. Bush's legitimacy after the Florida recount and the Bush v. Gore litigation. And liberals will doubtless point to Senator McConnell's 2010 comment that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
I thought it was gracious of Bill and Hillary Clinton to attend President Trump's inauguration. There's a split in the electorate between a sizeable portion of the Democratic Party's activist base (and the press and the civil service, but I repeat myself) that wants near civil disobedience-level obstruction of and resistance to President Trump and his agenda (as Hanson details), and a sizeable portion of the rest of the electorate that at least wants to see Trump get a chance to govern, as much out of curiosity about how it might work (as Jenkins expresses) out as out of enthusiasm for the agenda or the president personally.
