Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, aptly chronicles, in engaging detail, the near demise of Trump’s first-term MAGA efforts to return America to its founding principles and the triumphant return of Trump and MAGA. As Professor Hanson notes, “Trump’s reemergence as president after four long years of political exile marked the most dramatic political comeback in American presidential history.” His successful return was based largely on the fact that no prior Republican “had been so successful at substituting class solidarity for ethnic and racial tribalism to forge a new ecumenical coalition.”
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Thus, Mr. Trump aimed to build a more traditional “melting pot” unity rather than continue the threadbare “patchwork quilt” disunity advanced primarily by Democrats.
During the past few decades, the United States has suffered an insidious revolution with increasing power concentrated in a governmental ruling class that challenged the notion of the Founders’ constitutional republic, including the consent of the governed. This left-leaning revolution was enhanced by the Obama administration and turbocharged by the Biden administration.
As promised, Barack Obama “fundamentally transformed” America. His administration’s transformations were accomplished primarily through vigorous, deleterious segregation, dividing races, sexes, social and economic classes, and rural and urban communities, and, of course, widening the gap between political parties. The ageless tried-and-true practice of “divide and conquer” worked, and America was enslaved to some of the worst characteristics inflicted on a former “liberty and justice for all” nation.
The Trump counterrevolution staged an aggressive return to admirable American ideals.
The Counterrevolution consists of a thorough account, “From One Trump Presidency to the Next,” in two main parts, namely, “The Fall” and “The Rise.” Within part one, the book travels from “Rock Bottom” through “MAGA Rebooted” through “The Jacobin Democrats” and ends with “The Armies of Anti-Trumpers.”
In “The Armies of Anti-Trumpers,” the numerous vehement opponents to Mr. Trump’s comeback and counterrevolution are identified as “the Democratic establishment, the media, the administrative state, the Washington, D.C., political and military hierarchies, academia, the Never Trump Republicans, the left-of-center popular culture, and the international community. No prior president had faced such a decade-long, organized opposition across so many influential institutions.”
Regardless, in part two, the rise of Mr. Trump and MAGA are explored in “Nietzschean Trump,” “The Campaigns of 2024,” “The Road to a New Old America,” “‘Like a Colossus’ Abroad,” and “‘Make America Great Again’—Without Trump?”
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Mr. Hanson appropriates Friedrich Nietzsche’s quip: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
“Trump’s supposedly clever and well-degreed opponents who orchestrated [the] media narratives and conducted [the] lawfare were not as astute as they believed. In fact, they proved oblivious to public opinion. They had little idea how their efforts and their own conduct insidiously alienated the public.” So, the opponents’ actions aided in jumpstarting Trump’s reelection campaign and “eventually helped reelect him as president.”
The question is whether the Trump counterrevolution and MAGA movement’s impressive inroads against leftist mayhem—such as divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion, anti-science trans-sex promotions, wide-open borders, free-for-all voting, and lackluster foreign policies—will endure.
The key argument for “the viability of the MAGA agenda without Trump is the continued mass appeal of the movement’s issues, its resonance with the working middle classes, its subjugation of racial tribalism to common class concerns, its ability to keep distant from the demagogic and racialist alt-right—and the ability of Trump’s counterrevolution to address MAGA supporters economically, politically, and socially.”
The Counterrevolution provides a spot-on, readable chronology and analysis of President and candidate Donald J. Trump and the MAGA movement from the January 6, 2021, Capitol protest through recent events in early 2026. A careful read of this book not only reveals the national fortune of the providential comeback of Mr. Trump and MAGA but also the crucial importance of the upcoming midterm elections in continuing the revival of American greatness.
Perhaps, now more than ever, liberty and justice for all Americans depend on an overwhelming majority of citizens voting to support the Trump and MAGA counterrevolution to maintain our precious constitutional republic.
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A version of this book review first appeared in The Washington Times.
