A book before its time

Richard Nixon lost the presidency by a hair in 1960 and then suffered a humiliating repudiation in the California governor’s race in 1962. He angrily told reporters they “won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” If you know American politics, then you know the rest of the story. Nixon won the tight election of 1968 and then a spectacular landslide in 1972. The highest of highs was followed by the lowest of lows with Watergate, which would consume the Nixon White House in 1974.

Former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan wrote about those events approximately 40 years after their denouement in the amazing book The Greatest Comeback (Crown Forum 2014). He had the advantage of having been present when they occurred and then having decades to sift through them.

Now, imagine there had been a writer to publish a book on the Nixon administration’s 1968 or 1972 triumphs before Watergate, but then the book came out after Watergate. The situation I have described resembles Victor Davis Hanson’s The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement (Basic Books, 496 pp.). Even the title seems premature in its conclusion. The fall and rise? What if there is a subsequent fall? And there really might be.

Hanson’s book contains an unusual May 1, 2026, special note. Clearly, either the publisher or Hanson realized that events (such as the war with Iran) were racing ahead of the material covered in the book. The perfect time for this volume would have been either immediately after Trump’s 2024 stunning victory or perhaps a decade after. We are left with a book designed to celebrate Trump’s political resurrection, yet it seems immediately outdated with a still unfolding Iran crisis and midterm elections almost certain to usher in another phase of American political conflict.

Leaving aside the severe problems with timing, the book offers an informative review of the Trump phenomenon from 2015 until now. It could have been called The Trump Decade: In and Out of the Wilderness. Hanson is an interesting writer. As an academic who has managed to comment extensively on politics while also being a serious historian, Hanson knows how to say exactly what he wants. The result is that the undiscriminating reader might experience it as one long celebration of Trump’s campaign and presidency. However, a more careful review would reveal that Hanson offers a series of selective critiques along the way. As an example, he indicates Trump’s foreign policy in the second term has taken on a utopian cast unlikely to result in success.

Overall, Counterrevolution offers a lengthy, intelligent, and sometimes boosteristic review of the Trump phenomenon as it covers almost every event and angle of the past decade. The most interesting question waits for the end of the book, which is whether MAGA will outlive Trump’s time in the White House. Hanson seems to think it will, as he gently suggests Trump’s policies are probably more popular than the man.