We may be in the midst of the greatest political comeback in American history — which follows, by eight years, the greatest political stunt in American history.
That stunt was Donald Trump’s first win, in 2016. The comeback — and it will still be a staggering story even if he comes up just short — is his extraordinary performance over the past four years following his defeat in 2020.
I am not here going to adjudicate Trump’s sins or errors, though I am so mindful of them that I did not vote for him and wrote in someone else.
No, I am here to represent hundreds of millions of slack-jawed people around the world, gaping in wonderment at the fact that Trump got to this place on Election Night 2024.
Think of it. This is a man who was impeached (for a second time) two weeks before leaving office in 2021. In the years that followed that second impeachment, he was pursued by a state attorney general, two local prosecutors and a federal special prosecutor.
He was indicted 91 times in three different criminal courts and found liable in two civil courts. He has been convicted (ludicrously, in my view) of 34 (ludicrous, again) felonies.
He has had his home raided by federal agents. He has seen his eponymous business effectively shut down by a Manhattan judge.
He has been the subject of relentless and limitless hostile press coverage that dwarfs any negative characterizations of any other human being of our time.
And yet here he is, on the cusp of becoming president of the United States for a second go-round.
His utter refusal to be bent or broken by his enemies and his critics and his determination to redeem himself by recapturing the office he lost has no parallel that I can think of — not in American history, anyway.
And he did it fair and square. He declared again in a Republican primary contest, bested his rivals, secured his party’s nomination and then just went about doing whatever the thing is that he does.
He let the GOP choose and on Election Day he let the American people choose.
They chose him knowing every single thing I just wrote about him, and after rejecting him.
Why? Well, there’s the rub. He did get somewhat more popular, but not overwhelmingly so, to be sure.
What happened was that the American people chose Joe Biden over him and clearly decided they had made a catastrophic mistake.
Biden won a narrow victory in 2020 that should have caused him to enact a modest agenda.
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But a stupid Trump tantrum over the Senatorial runoffs in Georgia in 2021 handed Democrats and Biden a Senate majority, and boy, did they go to work.
They passed a stimulus package, the comically titled Inflation Reduction Act, and an infrastructure bill — and added trillions of dollars in government spending not only to the federal debt but also to an economy that found itself awash in monetary paper.
Inflation spiked. Everything became more expensive and economic growth was relatively slow.
Meanwhile, the world caught on fire.
Biden’s sudden pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021 became a world-historical humiliation for the United States, and gave Vladmir Putin the idea that he had a free shot to invade neighboring Ukraine — starting a war on European soil for the first time in 80 years.
And as Americans dealt with the fallout from all this, Joe Biden began to fail cognitively.
The clear signs of his mental degradation began in January 2023, and I know this because I talked about them almost daily on my podcast from that month until this one.
An infirm president was provided shocking cover by his panicked staff and his feckless vice president until the public could be hidden from it no longer in the June 27 debate.
Whereupon the old man was simply discarded like a Kleenex and his feckless vice president became a candidate of a manufactured joy and an unwillingness to say anything about anything.
Trump, meanwhile, was talking about things. About the border crisis, and the economic crisis, and the global crisis.
He might not be the best person to address or fix these problems, but he was the only person who leveled with the American people about the mess we are in — and in these cases, we’re talking about a mess he really did not have a role in making.
He barreled through his disgrace and then provided the American people with a stark choice.
There’s never been anything like it. Love him or hate him, he bestrides the narrow world like a colossus.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary.
