Their legacy is that lying under oath now is not a sin, much less illegal.

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness that Trump’s

style has become a sort of “don’t-tread-on-me” combativeness. In truth, Trump at home and abroad is mostly retaliatory. His theory seems to be that no slight should go unanswered. When Trump retorts in kind or trumps the original attack, he believes he adds yet another brick to his wall of deterrence—and exposes the sometimes dormant and disguised irrational hatred of the Left.

…Liberals, who now warn of Trump’s “war on the press” long ago excused Eric Holder’s monitoring of the Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen. And they had no problem with John Brennan lying under oath when he claimed the Obama CIA had not monitored the computers of Senate staffers (he would lie brazenly again under oath about drone collateral damage and his role in seeding the Steele dossier).

Likewise, they snoozed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress in his denial of government surveillance of U.S. citizens. Both were seen at the time to be useful liars. Their partisanship and exemption from any consequences for past lying under oath led to lucrative cable news gigs—proof, as it were, of their innate Trump hatred. Their legacy is that lying under oath now is not a sin, much less illegal.

…Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice flat out lied in her denial about her involvement in unmasking. The Obama FBI and Justice Department officials deliberately misled FISA courts, on the premise that spying on American citizens even with flimsy or fabricated evidence was OK—if it at least neutered the Trump candidacy and presidency. Had they just told justices something like, “We present, as justification for these warrants of surveillance, opposition research compiled on candidate Donald Trump, and paid for by Hillary Clinton during the present campaign,” they likely would never have been able to spy on American citizens.

…Any notions of conflict of interest are gone. The Obama Justice Department, FBI, and CIA destroyed that concept entirely. When Loretta Lynch met Bill Clinton on the tarmac in the course of investigations about his wife’s likely illegal behavior or the Justice Department and FBI gave immunity to Clinton’s top aides after making false statements, all credibility was shot.

Justice Department official Bruce Ohr communicated with a political campaign’s opposition research team that had hired his own wife. The deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe oversaw the Hillary Clinton email investigation shortly after his wife had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Clinton-related political action committees. Rod Rosenstein was knee-deep in the Uranium One investigation, the Clinton email investigation, the FISA warrant applications, and the Trump-collusion mythologies. He should have been recused long ago. If Rosenstein was not recused, there is now no such thing as an idea of recusal at all.

Liberals do not care much whether Bill Clinton received a $500,000 honorarium in Moscow or that Russian interests gave millions to the Clinton foundation shortly before Hillary Clinton urged the government to approve the sale to them of 20 percent of U.S. uranium.

…It used to be a progressive truism that “words matter”—as in the warning not to give voice to violent things because they may happen just because you said them. Actually, words today no longer matter at all. If they did, Madonna, Johnny Depp, Kathy Griffin, Robert De Niro, or Peter Fonda would all be socially ostracized for their threats of bodily violence to the president of the United States or his family. God forbid that such eliminationism rhetoric will spill over to the next Democratic presidency. But if it should, the Left has now lost all moral authority to condemn it.

By the same token, there is no longer any accepted limitation on presidential hate speech. No one will have a problem with calling any president a Nazi, the new Hitler, an abject traitor, treasonous, or his conduct tantamount to the mass death of Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or the Holocaust. Those who compare Trump to the worst monsters of history regularly appear on cable news and enjoy vast Twitter and social media audiences.

There is no longer any sense of public and private first families. If Barron Trump can be smeared and ridiculed in print and cartoons, if the president can be accused of incest with his daughter by mainstream reporters, if the first lady can be demonized as everything from an illegal alien to a former call girl, no first family is off limits. The next time a Democratic president takes office, any call for “restraint” or “have you no decency” to recreate the bubble that once protected the Obama family would be laughed at—and understandably so.

From now on, the accusation that a president is a traitor, a colluder, a lackey, a pimp, a whatever of the Russians, or a dupe of the Chinese, or of who knows what else, will be an accepted way to help stall an opposition administration, to smear it as unpatriotic, to use any low means necessary to achieve a supposed high end of destroying it.

Just watch soon what the Left has birthed.

Read more here.