In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Why they hate Trump,” David Gelernter, a professor at Yale, offered insights that I found instructive in assessing both Donald Trump and his vociferous adversaries.

Gelernter notes, “Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared. The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says ‘Empty.’ The Left is beaten.”

But of course, they are far from beaten… I think the 2018 midterm “Blue Wave” has been overstated, though certainly not to the extent of Hillary Clinton’s presumed victory in 2016, I don’t expect a “Republican Waves” as we saw in 2010 and 2014.

All Americans are MUCH better off today than they were two years ago, but that notwithstanding, Republicans will suffer losses in the House. And here is why: This election is a referendum on Democrat voter IQ and the Demo/MSM chokehold on their opinion — not the considerable Trump record. The result of that chokehold and Demo voter delusion is, as Gelernter notes, one political theme: “We hate Trump.” All the Left has to offer is fear, anger, hate, and division.

Based on the Trump administration’s extraordinary domestic and foreign policy record, if American voters were not so malleable – if their opinions were not so easily shaped by Democrat Party protagonists and their Leftmedia propagandists – we would see Republican gains in both the Senate and House.

Indeed, Gelernter observes, “What the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America.” They fear him because, “He has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American — except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.”

Gelernter writes, “Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is. Not the average male American, or the average white American. We know for sure that, come 2020, intellectuals will be dumbfounded at the number of women and blacks who will vote for Mr. Trump. He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones.”

He asks this of the Left-elite: “This all leads to an important question — one that will be dismissed indignantly today, but not by historians in the long run: Is it possible to hate Donald Trump but not the average American?” The leftist protagonists who now dominate the Socialist Democrat Party, clearly believe as did Clinton, that grassroots Americans all fall into what Clinton called that “basket of deplorables.”

Gelernter concludes, “The president deserves our respect because Americans deserve it—not such fancy-pants extras as network commentators, socialist high-school teachers and eminent professors, but the basic human stuff that has made America great, and is making us greater all the time.”

I should note here that Trump did not create the seething hate on the Left – he revealed it. It is important to understand that hate is often the manifestation of fear, and Trump revealed the fear that most Democrat leaders, and particularly almost all wealthy white liberal elitists, harbor toward those “deplorable” grassroots Americans.

At their core, Beltway Democrats, their Leftmedia publicists and ideological protagonists, and their wealthy elitist benefactors hate grassroots Americans and the Liberty we embrace, because they fear us.