The anti-Trump hysteria of the ruling class is impossible to overstate. It is a fever that has never broken since the day he announced his bid for the presidency. Out of this sickness has come a never-ending cycle of controversy around Trump, most of it premised on the ruling class’s view of him as inherently illegitimate. Hence, the ruling class has treated his every act of presidential power, no matter how prosaic, as “scandalous.” Much of the coverage has come down to the pout: How dare he control the executive branch!

Trump has also committed the unpardonable sin of growing more conservative in power. This has embittered the ruling class to no end. It has usually broken Republican presidents and brought them to heel. Not in Trump’s case. He has only grown more contemptuous of the Washington “consensus” against common sense. Had Trump reverted to Manhattanite liberalism, the ruling class would have cut him some slack. Instead, he committed such odious acts as showing up in person at the March for Life rally.

MSNBC runs a coronavirus death toll box at the bottom of the screen — a symbol of the ruling class’s holier-than-thou quest to try and defeat Trump on that issue. But one death toll box you will never see is the abortion one. The ruling class is responsible for sanctioning the deaths of millions of unborn children. Its disregard for those lives couldn’t be any more reckless and blatant. Yet it lectures Trump on “callousness” and “irresponsibility.”

The Democrats are the party of safety and prudence, they say, even as the party’s mayors preside over the most unsafe cities in America, even as the Democrats imprudently demand open borders for illegal immigrants.

The lectures on public health and safety are a little hard to take from libertines who refused to take any public-safety measures against the AIDS epidemic, on the grounds that lifestyle liberalism trumped public-health precautions. To this day, Democrats, including Joe Biden, want unsafe measures taken to accommodate risk-taking libertines. On Biden’s campaign website, he says that he will fight to make sure that LGBTQ rights take precedence over traditional public-safety measures:

Under the Obama-Biden Administration, the discriminatory lifetime ban on blood donation based on stigma was lifted. Biden will work with the Food and Drug Administration to ensure regulations are based on science, not fiction or stigma. As proposed by the Human Rights Campaign, Biden will invest in “new research to study risk behavior” and support “[consideration of] revising the donor questionnaires so that they focus on more refined and specific behavioral criteria, like recent sexual histories that include unprotected sex or significant numbers of sexual partners over the previous year.”

We’re told that the Democrats took the coronavirus seriously and Trump didn’t. But the ruling class, in keeping with its mania for open borders, poured scorn upon Trump for banning travel from China. Biden condemned that decision for months, only relenting after the prudence of Trump’s decision became undeniable.

It is Trump’s prudence, not his recklessness, that infuriates the ruling class. He has kept his promise to keep America out of stupid wars and delivered four years of peace to the country. Normally, this would meet with great praise. Instead, Trump is called “anti-military” by the very elitists who used to pride themselves on disdaining it. It is comical to see former peaceniks and nuclear freezers denouncing Trump for not prizing warmongers like John Bolton and for standing up to hawkish generals.

The ruling class, of course, doesn’t care about the military. It usually views it with suspicion. Look at its routine opposition to beefing it up. It is simply trying to turn a Trump strength into a weakness and adopt yet another holier-than-thou posture. Obama and Biden treated veterans scandalously and glorified traitors. Did the ruling class ever call them “anti-military”? No, they were extolled for those moves.

Compared to Biden on foreign policy matters, Trump is the picture of prudence. Biden, as former Defense Secretary Bob Gates puts it, has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

He voted against the good Gulf war and for the bad one, and was a bonehead throughout the Cold War. Had the conduct of the Cold War been left to him, it would still be going on. He supported the nuclear freeze movement and opposed Reagan’s arms build-up. He opposed a nuclear missile shield, opposed funding for the Contras, and accused anti-communists of alarmism.

In 2007, he was still whining about “Star Wars”:

In 2001, Bush’s new foreign affairs team were so intent on going ahead with Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense shield that they were willing to pull out of earlier arms control treaties to get there, inviting, in my view, another arms race. The missile defense system seemed to be the perfect metaphor for the neoisolationist policy. Let’s arm the heavens, they were saying, and protect the US, the rest of the world be damned. The [Bush] administration had said they were willing to walk away from the decades-old ABM Treaty in order to unilaterally develop and deploy the missile defense system, and now they were putting real money behind it. They were willing to put tens of billions of dollars into the Maginot line in the sky that could quite likely set off another arms race, while cutting funding for a program to help Russia destroy its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons before they got into the hands of terrorists.

Trump has shown that peace is maintained through strength. It is the softheaded pols like Biden who get America into wars. Tucker Carlson predicted on his show this week that Biden will entangle America in a pointless Syrian conflict.

Biden can’t even take credit for the one undeniable success of the Obama administration — the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. Biden was opposed to it.

Only the ruling class could portray Biden’s party — the party that couldn’t bring itself to condemn the rampaging mobs once at its convention — as a savior of “safety.” Under George McGovern, it was called the party of “abortion, amnesty, and acid.” It still is, and it has managed to get worse. For all of its talk about “health,” it is the party of heedless drug legalization and outré living. It is the party that sends Planned Parenthood into elementary schools to convert children to promiscuity. And for all of its talk about “science,” it is the party that refuses to look at sonograms, as it clings to the fiction that the child is not a life.

The hypocrisy of the ruling class is only exceeded by its dishonesty, as we will see over the next two months.

George Neumayr is the author of The Biden Deception.