VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump vs. Obama: The Great Experiment:

Whatever Donald J. Trump’s political past and vociferous present, his first year of governance is most certainly as hard conservative as Barack Obama’s eight years were hard progressive. We are watching a rare experiment in political governance play out, as we go, in back-to-back fashion, from one pole to its opposite.
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From January 2009 to January 2016 (especially when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress until January 2011), Barack Obama implemented the most progressive agenda since Franklin Roosevelt, to whom his supporters logically compared their new president. . . .

In other words, free-market economics, deterrent foreign policies, and conservative cultural reform that are championed in the abstract in think tanks, on radio and television by conservative pundits, and in magazines and journals by conservative intellectuals are currently being put to work concretely in the real world, a rare occurrence. Or they’re being implemented as least as much as possible with a president and a Congress of the same party behind them and within a set tenure.

If the economy grows, if the world is calmer and the U.S. stronger, if average Americans acquire more income and more jobs, and if the culture encourages greater stability and virtue, then the conservative experiment will have worked. If all that does not happen, we cannot blame it on the bad Trump messenger, the incompetent Republican Senate, the biased or the squabbling conservative House.

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