Donald Trump’s return from political exile has the shape of myth, writes Terry Scambray in the American Thinker — except in this case, he argues, the myth happens to be true. Scambray’s essay centers on a new book by Victor Davis Hanson, The Counter Revolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, which casts the president as a figure shaped less by branding than by decades of bare-knuckle business combat.
According to Scambray, Hanson — a classicist, historian, and farmer — devotes his analytical range to explaining how Trump built a movement that rescued America from what the author characterizes as progressive nostrums and the “barbarous hand of Marxism.” The Odyssey parallel is deliberate: like Odysseus enduring diversions and obstacles on the long road home, Trump’s own return is presented as an epic, one Scambray insists is grounded in real events rather than literary invention.
The Manhattan Forge
The book’s foundational claim, as Scambray describes it, is that Trump’s political instincts were forged long before he rode an escalator into what one writer dismissively called the “abyss of politics.” Hanson writes that Trump made his money by making things — and by fighting constantly to do it. In the real estate jungle of Manhattan, that meant years of battles with suspect politicians, self-interested community activists, a passive-aggressive tabloid press, radical environmentalists, unyielding union bosses, unpredictable prosecutors and judges, ruthless business rivals, cutthroat regulators, and no-nonsense bankers.
Hanson cites a striking measure of that combat: Trump was known for having sued more people and companies — and been sued by them — than any other prominent Manhattan businessman, with roughly 3,500 cases in federal and state courts, about 1,900 as plaintiff and 1,450 as defendant. Scambray reads Trump’s much-discussed self-confidence through that experience, paraphrasing Frank Sinatra’s line about making it in New York as making it anywhere.
From what Hanson calls a Hobbesian war of all against all, Scambray writes, Trump drew two conclusions: as a builder he depended on bankers, whom he admired, but he also understood that those bankers were distant from the raw urban elements — food, fuel, shelter, safety — that ultimately make a city or nation run. Hence his respect for what Hanson calls the “muscular classes” — not sculpted gym physiques, but working men, whose biceps are often overshadowed by their waists.
That affinity, per Scambray, explains Trump’s bond with producers and makers, including the Teamsters. He once told the union he could have built with non-union labor but refused to — a political maneuver, Scambray allows, but also a pragmatic calculation for a builder who recognized that in New York, nothing gets done without the Teamsters’ imprimatur.
Tariffs, the MAGA Base, and a Coalition of Winners
The essay credits Trump with recognizing that blue-collar wages were eroding through the import of foreign workers and the export of American factories — something Scambray says his own working-man father understood fifty years ago. Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which Scambray says he has used to geopolitical advantage and to grow federal revenues, are framed as the opening move in his appeal to the middle class.
Hanson writes, as quoted by Scambray, that Trump always believed working-class whites might return to vote for a “populist nationalist traditionalist who combined cultural conservatism and advocacy for high-paying jobs” — and so the MAGA base was born. Though MAGA grew out of the pitchfork wing of the Republican Party, Hanson argues Trump’s earthiness gained more traction than Pat Buchanan’s strain of populism.
Scambray also notes Trump’s alignment with middle-class heroes like Mike Tyson and professional wrestling champions, blended with marquee billionaire associations — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and most notably Elon Musk, described here as a genius and trillionaire supporter. The book, in Scambray’s telling, functions as a handbook on coalition-building and deal-making, which he calls the essence of republican governance — explicitly contrasted with Machiavelli’s The Prince, advice for an authoritarian controlling an elitist system. That elitist system, Scambray writes, resembles America’s “experts,” who have accumulated power over the past century: the technocracy of bureaucratic fiefdoms and a three-million-strong federal administrative state that Hanson ties to a Democratic paradigm of more taxes for more government employees for more power over the citizenry.
New Jacobins and the Lawfare Thesis
Hanson’s argument, as relayed here, is that MAGA did not operate in a vacuum. He calls the contemporary left “New Jacobin Democrats” — avatars, in his framing, of French revolutionary fanatics who substituted lawfare, election interference, and weaponization of federal agencies for the guillotine. Scambray traces a party arc: after the electoral disaster of George McGovern, Democrats swerved right and won with Bill Clinton, but winning proved insufficient for the Jacobin wing, which re-established the McGovernite party through “the fresh faces of The Squad and Zohran Mamdani along with the shock troops of antifa, BLM et al” — making the once-winning Clinton agenda seem, in Hanson’s word, surreal.
Scambray’s own commentary adds that electing Joe Biden and then running Kamala Harris in 2024 made the left believe it could dismantle the border, the penal system, and Americans’ buying power through $7 trillion in spending christened with Orwellian names like the Inflation Reduction Act. He invokes Larry Summers, who he says occasionally stumbles onto inconvenient truths, writing that Bidenomics caused the massive inflation that more than anything crippled Biden’s presidency and fueled the Trump recovery. Hanson reminds readers, per the essay, that America carries a $37 trillion debt with $3 billion a day in interest payments — and Scambray notes pointedly that spending continues at a destructive pace even under the Trump administration.
On minority voters, Scambray rejects the left’s “false consciousness” framing, arguing Trump appealed to the upward economic mobility of Black and Hispanic Americans and concluded that class has more voter appeal than ethnic solidarity — that e pluribus unum trumped tribal appeals like Black Lives Matter and Sí se puede. He cites Thomas Sowell’s work establishing that minority economic advancement is nothing new, and his own experience growing up in a mixed ethnic neighborhood.
The Nietzschean Trump
Quoting Napoleon’s warning that four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets, Scambray highlights Hanson’s treatment of the legacy media as armies of anti-Trumpers, the most vitriolic of the various anti-Trump entities, with younger reporters even less trained in traditional journalistic methods yet fully absorbed in woke zeal. Atop it all was the Russia Hoax — described here as a multiyear, multiagency frame-up. Meanwhile, Scambray writes that frothing opponents like Bill Kristol and the late-night court jesters have been vanquished, and Hanson calls NeverTrumpers clueless and increasingly irrelevant.
The endless attacks — lawfare, two impeachments, assassination attempts, the Mar-a-Lago search — gave rise, in Hanson’s phrase, to a “Nietzschean Trump.” His conclusion, as Scambray quotes it: much of Trump’s phoenixlike rebirth was due to his enemies’ pathological obsessions.
On foreign policy, Hanson describes “deterrent engagement” — which Scambray says could just as easily be called deterrent disengagement, since other nations are left to defend themselves rather than mooching off American taxpayers. Hanson has said that though Trump is blamed for ending the postwar order, all he did was bury its corpse. The policy is framed as a return to 19th-century balance-of-power geopolitics, buttressed by bilateral alliances and a strong military, in contrast to American power dissipating through bureaucratic organizations like NATO and the UN. Scambray credits Hanson with charting victories under this approach, including the Abraham Accords and a re-established Monroe Doctrine aimed at cleansing South America of ruinous influences.
Whether one accepts Hanson’s framework or finds it selective, the book Scambray describes makes a specific bet: that Trump’s presidency is best understood not as an aberration of American politics but as the product of a long apprenticeship in conflict — and of opponents whose fixation, in Hanson’s telling, did more to resurrect him than any strategy of his own.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/the-real-life-epic-of-donald-trump/