CONRAD BLACK: Why the Left So Despises Donald Trump.

The Democrats are almost leaderless. The Clinton faction is discounted by the election result, the appalling fraud of the Steele Dossier, and many unsavory financial questions; President Obama remains somewhat popular but is a rather withdrawn figure. In these circumstances, the frolicsome Democratic Left has made the running, and as usually happens, the more strenuous factions of the party out of the White House have the most energy, which in these times means that the Democrats have made a seismic shift to the left.

This has been magnified by the fact that the further to the economic and foreign-policy left one is, the more repulsive Donald Trump appears. The far-left faction of the Democrats, led by congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, have with this big, very white, rigorously politically incorrect billionaire, what they believe, tactically and by uncontainable impulse, is the target of their political dreams.

Mr. Trump is the personification of every policy they hate and every human trait they despise; to them, he is a monster of ignorance, greed, bombast, bellicosity, and racist bigotry. They are like World War II movie submarine captains seeing a thousand feet ahead of their periscopes a giant enemy oil tanker, inching through still waters.

Their hate is real, but their impression of the target is a chimerical mirage.

The Two Minute Hate was always ginned up, and the Left is now in its third year of never-ending two-minute hate cycles.