Another terrific review, this time from Pamela Geller, of my new book Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster.
“A 45-Gun Salvo in the Battle for America’s Past — and Present,” by Pamela Geller, American Thinker, October 1, 2020:
“The past is not dead. It is not even past,” William Faulkner once said, and leftists today have learned this well. They know the truth of George Orwell’s declaration in 1984 that “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Controlling the present, and the future, is what the left’s war on our history is all about, from the tearing-down of statues to the 1619 Project. The leftist political and media elites are determined to destroy our freedoms and impose an authoritarian state upon us. In service of that goal, they’re working hard to make us ashamed of being American, and hence unwilling to defend our nation or our heritage. But now an important new book is fighting back.
In Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, Robert Spencer gives us a strong defense of the greatness, and goodness, of America, through an evaluation of each of the 45 presidential administrations based on the simple criteria of Were Americans safer and more prosperous at the end of this administration than they were at its beginning?
It’s a simple and common-sense standard, but one that has been lost amid the prevailing bipartisan commitment to a utopian and messianic internationalism that has had the not-so-paradoxical effect of weakening, rather than strengthening, America’s position in the world. Under both Republican and Democrat Presidents, we have been so busy saving the world that we have scarcely noticed that our jobs are flowing out of the country as well as our troops, while our infrastructure is crumbling and our standard of living is progressively declining.
We have scarcely noticed, that is, until the presidency of Donald Trump. Spencer here makes a compelling case for Trump, even after just three years in office, being ranked with the greatest of Presidents, in large part because he has put the welfare of America and Americans first. In his appraisals of all forty-five, Spencer is consistent in ranking high those whose policies aided America politically, militarily (although he shares President Trump’s distaste for today’s endless wars), and economically. Hence Barack Obama ranks at the bottom, for a presidency that was essentially the obverse of the Trump administration: internationalist, socialist, and drifting toward authoritarianism, while Trump has been all about aiding American enterprise and strengthening America’s freedom….
Read the rest here.