BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement’
by Anthony J. Sadar · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Over the past few decades, the United States has suffered an insidious revolution.
Increasing power has been concentrated in a government ruling class that challenges the notion of the Founders’ constitutional republic.
This left-leaning revolution was enhanced by the Obama administration and turbocharged by the Biden administration. As he promised, President Obama “fundamentally transformed” America. He and his administration accomplished these changes primarily through vigorous and deleterious segregation that divided Americans by race, sex, economic class, geography and, of course, political affiliation.
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America was subjected to some of the worst characteristics ever imposed on a nation that once promised “liberty and justice for all.”
Enter the Trump counterrevolution.
Victor Davis Hanson’s latest book, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” aptly chronicles, with engaging detail, the near-demise of Mr. Trump’s first-term MAGA efforts to return America to its founding principles. It also tells the triumphant tale of Mr. Trump’s and MAGA’s comeback.
As Mr. Hanson notes: “Trump’s reemergence as president after four long years of political exile marked the most dramatic political comeback in American presidential history.”
Mr. Trump’s 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 form a more traditional “melting pot” unity rather than continue the threadbare “patchwork quilt” disunity advanced primarily by Democrats.
“The Counterrevolution” consists of a thorough account, “From One Trump Presidency to the Next,” in two main parts, namely, “The Fall” and “The Rise.”
In Part 1, 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 2, 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 media narratives and conducted 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 helped jump-start Mr. 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.
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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 Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protest through recent events in early 2026.
A careful read of this book reveals the national fortune of the providential comeback of Mr. Trump and MAGA, as well as the crucial importance of the upcoming midterm elections in continuing the revival of American greatness.
Perhaps, now more than ever before, liberty and justice for all Americans depend on an overwhelming majority of citizens voting to support Mr. Trump and the MAGA counterrevolution. That is what will maintain our precious constitutional republic.
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• Anthony J. Sadar is an adjunct associate professor of science at Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and co-author of “Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry” (CRC Press).
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The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement
Victor Davis Hanson
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Basic Books, $35.00, 496 pages