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Ali, Antaeus, Anna Freud, and Sun-Tzu: Lessons for Leftists

By Roger E. Bissell

February 7, 2025

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Introduction

The 2024 presidential election results have been met with varying responses: jubilation or anger, fear or reassurance, despair or happiness. But whether people are pleased or not by the results, the reaction common to almost everyone is bewilderment: how and why did Donald Trump win?

My colleagues at The Savvy Street, Walter Donway and Roger Bissell, have provided thorough and insightful analyses of the 2024 presidential election results that explain exactly how and why Trump won. The second of these, by Roger Bissell, follows.

— Donna F. Paris, Editor

 

As Donald J. Trump’s second (but non-consecutive) presidential administration quickly takes shape, waves of strong emotion—shock and awe, anger and bewilderment, cautious optimism and wary concern, satisfaction and relief, jubilation and enjoyment—are sweeping over the electorate and the American public in general. “Your mileage may vary,” as they say, but hardly anyone in America is indifferent to what has been happening, and the emotional roller coaster rolls on.

Less than three months after the decisive victory by Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, over the weak and unfocused Democrats’ ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, President Trump has pushed out a non-stop cascade of Executive Orders and other actions that undo various kinds of damage perpetrated by his predecessor, Joe Biden, as well as by previous administrations. “Promises made, promises kept,” has been the oft-heard mantra since his inauguration on January 20, 2025.

As Trump supporters pinch themselves in happy disbelief that they not only kept the House of Representatives but also took the Senate and the White House, Democrats are scratching their heads in puzzlement as to what went wrong. How did all their hopes and plans for another four years of Leftist hegemony crash and burn? Who or what was to blame? Finger-pointing has been the order of the day among Democrats and the liberal media, and almost no one has escaped scrutiny and becoming the target of frantic efforts to “pin the tail on the donkey.”

Democrats are scratching their heads in puzzlement as to what went wrong.

The Dems, however, are nothing if not stubborn. (Stubbornness is sometimes conflated with insanity, which is facetiously defined as doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for different results.) They cling to their shopworn, hyper-inflated caricatures and smears of Trump, instead of looking squarely at who he is and why he has succeeded so unexpectedly and convincingly in winning reelection. Worse, they speak of “soul-searching” but refuse to look in the mirror and identify exactly what they have been doing that is so counter-productive.

In short, the Left has failed to take to heart one of the most time-honored maxims of battle. Older than the Christian admonition to “love thy neighbor as thyself” is the saying by Chinese general and military strategist Sun-Tzu. Writing in The Art of War, sometime about 400–320 BC, he said in part, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” With this in mind, as I will argue, we can now understand the source of the fear and loathing currently enveloping Democrats as they try to recover from once again losing to the “Orange Hitler.”

 

A Lesson from Ancient Myth

One way that Democrats fail to “get” who Trump is can helpfully be understood by recalling the ancient Greek myth of Heracles and the giant Antaeus.

Heracles was the son of Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, and the mortal woman Alcmene, and Antaeus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the Earth goddess Gaia. On his way to the garden of the Hesperides to atone for a past killing, Heracles met up with Antaeus, and they had a battle—a wrestling match, actually, in which the standard Greek pattern was to win by throwing one’s opponent to the ground enough times that they couldn’t get back up and keep fighting.

Heracles was quite proficient at the throwing part, but he didn’t realize that Antaeus drew his strength from Mother Earth (Gaia), and that every time Heracles threw him down, Antaeus only became stronger. Finally, Heracles caught on and managed to defeat Antaeus by holding him off the ground and crushing him to death with a bear hug. (Apparently Heracles’s body was not a good conductor of Mother Earth’s energies, and thus the only wrestling match Antaeus ever lost was his last.)

Dems and their media shills…do not realize that with every hysterical attack and every political and legal maneuver against Trump, they are feeding the beast, rather than slaying him.

Although Heracles managed to win the day by figuring out where his enemy’s strength came from, today’s Dems and their media shills are still mentally out to sea. They do not realize that with every hysterical attack and every political and legal maneuver against Trump, they are feeding the beast, rather than slaying him. The two things Trump most feeds on during adversity are attention and sympathy, and the net result of nine years of a continuous barrage of unhinged commentaries and lawfare has been the return of the Dems’ worst nightmare.

Fake collusion accusations, two impeachment attempts (with another being planned), distortions of Trump’s comments and policies to make him sound racist or fascist, weaponization of the federal and state justice systems to try to keep Trump off the ballot or to imprison him or seize his wealth, dismissing the importance and even the reality of two assassination attempts—all of this and more gave Trump’s ambitions the fuel needed to turn the American electorate in his favor and to administer a resounding “no mas” to the Dems on November 5, 2024.

So, yes, in this reading of ancient myth and current events, Donald Trump is the equivalent of the giant Antaeus,1 while the Left has failed to take up the mantle of the demigod Heracles. And that failure was due, in large part, to their simple, but dogged refusal to understand with whom they were dealing—to “know thy enemy,” as Sun-Tzu told us. As a result, power-seeking bullies that they were, they kept battering him right up to the bitter end (or the sweet conclusion, for some). They just couldn’t help themselves.

 

A Lesson from Modern Sports

Transitioning now from wrestling to boxing, we can see that the Left has missed a golden opportunity to learn another lesson, this time about how important it also is, in the immortal Delphic maxim, to “Know thyself.” Here, the Dems’ problem is a double failure. As Sun-Tzu put it, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” That is precisely what happened in the 2024 presidential campaign. The Dems continued to misunderstand Trump, and for the first time since 2016, and in the most important way, they also failed to look themselves in the mirror.

Longtime strategist, James Carville—the advisor to Bill Clinton’s successful White House bid in 1992—continues his focus on economic issues as the priority for the Democrats going forward. He acknowledged that the issue of border security got out of hand because President Biden “listened to the idiot left and didn’t enforce the border,” and that criminal immigrants “got to be sent back wherever they came from.” However, he added, what Dems need to focus on for the 2026 midterm elections is “what people need, including higher wages and cheaper schooling.”

The Democrats have punched themselves out…At this point, a gentle breeze would knock them over.

Well and good: “It’s the economy, stupid” is still a high priority for Democrats and Republicans alike, and it should not be neglected. But where Carville went completely off the rails was in suggesting a parallel between Donald Trump and the boxer George Foreman. He advised the Democrats to adopt Muhammed Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy of boxing’s most famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight (1974) and to “let [Trump] punch himself out. Then, after a while, we can come in and launch our own moves.” In other words, let Trump deluge us with Executive Orders (EOs) until he exhausts himself and then move in for the kill.

Sorry, Mr. Carville, but this is 180 degrees wrong, and you need to step away from the mirror. (Or look in the mirror more accurately and honestly.) If anyone has watched Trump’s recent EO signing events during the past week, they have seen him multi-tasking, holding impromptu, unscripted press conferences while signing the EOs completely coherently and with good humor. Truly, the man can not only walk and chew gum at the same time but also juggle bowling pins while riding a unicycle. Where does he get his energy? (See above.)

Meanwhile, not President Trump but the Democrats have punched themselves out. For eight long years, they have been bludgeoning him, and like Rocky Balboa,2 he has, in effect, mocked them, “You ain’t so bad, you ain’t so bad, you ain’t nothin’. C’mon, champ, hit me in the face! My mom hits harder than that.” Their once fearsome efforts have now devolved to false accusations that ICE is invading Chicago elementary schools and that Trump has cut off people’s Medicaid and that Elon Musk is a Neo-Nazi. At this point, a gentle breeze would knock them over.

 

A Lesson from Freudian Psychology

To drive this last point home, it is good to draw briefly upon the work of Anna Freud (1895–1982), the daughter of the famous neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The baby of the family, Anna was also a prodigious intellectual theorist, carrying forward her father’s work in important areas such as child psychology. Most important here is her 1936 monograph, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, in which she discussed the very important phenomenon of psychological projection.

Projection (for short) is variously defined, but most simply it is “the mental process by which people attribute to others what is in their own minds.” It functions as a defense when a person’s or group’s feelings and other internal states are felt to be unworthy, painful, or otherwise unacceptable, and it is a main factor behind paranoid states, including the belief that someone else has evil and dangerous intentions. From there, it is a short step to alleging that that person has already acted out such intentions or soon will.

The list of ways in which the Left has projected its own motives and behaviors onto Donald Trump and his supporters is far too long to catalog here, but “collusion” is one of the most infamously and persistently used ones. Another is that he disrespects the military or is antisemitic, when nothing could be further from the truth, and it is the Left that frequently exhibits such attitudes and behavior.

Yet another is their quadrennial smear claim that he will refuse to accept that a presidential election result was legitimate. Hillary Clinton actually claimed this in 2016 and has continued to do so from time to time since then (hypocritically citing “Russian collusion,” among other things), and more recently some of Harris’s liberal supporters even claimed election fraud. A November 16, 2024, NBC News story details how Leftist online groups abounded with conspiracy theories that the presidential vote was “miscounted, hacked and stolen.”

By contrast, Donald Trump has always hedged and said something to the effect that if the election were fair and honest, he would accept it. Obviously, though, he thought something went awry in the 2020 election, and ample evidence supports claims of election interference. A survey shows that one instance alone—the Hunter Biden laptop, falsely claimed by 51 US security officials to be “Russian disinformation”—definitely altered the 2020 election outcome, without which we’d now be talking about Donald Trump as the outgoing president and someone else as the new president. (Of course, the Washington Post disagrees, citing lawmakers calling it a “fishy poll.”)

The Left and their allies have been straining at a gnat and swallowing an elephant. Projecting much?

Obviously also, Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election occasioned a true fiasco, the riotous break-in of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. At his rally on the Ellipse, he urged his supporters to “fight” and march on the Capitol, but also to keep it “peaceful” and “patriotic.” Unfortunately, it was far from peaceful. Even more unfortunately, the 10,000 National Guard troops offered by President Trump were turned down (as bad optics) by D.C.’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Nonetheless, no one has been charged with “insurrection.”3

The cost of the damage done to the Capitol by the January 6 riot was about $3 million, and over nearly 1,300 of the rioters were convicted (out of over 1,500 charged with federal crimes). By comparison, the damage from arson, vandalism, and looting during the George Floyd riots between May 26 and June 6, 2020, was about 500 times greater (estimated at $1–2 billion), and at least 14,000 people had been arrested. One protester, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, was shot to death by an unidentified Capitol policeman, while apparently no protesters were killed during any of late May/early June 2020 riots. Nor were any police officers killed during any of these riots.

The human cost was thankfully quite low in each case, despite attempts by both sides to inflate the death toll. The number facing federal charges, however, was grossly disproportionate, with about 300 (as of late September 2020) for the George Floyd riots, just 20% of the number for the single-day riot on January 6. And as noted, the financial damage in the 11 days of rioting, even prorated, was enormous compared to that caused at the US Capitol. The point is that the Left and their allies have been straining at a gnat and swallowing an elephant. Projecting, maybe?

 

A Lesson from Ancient Military Strategy

Finally, we return once more to Sun-Tzu. Here’s the full quote from his The Art of War:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Trump and his team have spent four years knowing both the enemy and themselves, while the Democrats have lapsed into knowing neither…As a result, Trump is taking a wrecking ball to Washington, D.C…

Looking back to 2016 and 2020, we see that Trump simply did not know his enemy, not in the depth needed to realize what was awaiting him from both the Democrats and the media as well as from the entrenched bureaucracy and the Global Deep State. In 2016, he just did not realize how intent they were upon undermining his presidency, right from the beginning—even from before he was first inaugurated, with secret wiretaps being activated and fake Russian collusion hoaxes being prepared. But he learned, and he has had four years to prepare for his re-election and now his executive Blitzkrieg.4

By contrast, the Left seems to have their heads in the clouds (to put it nicely). They had a golden moment in 2020 with a new strategy of early voting and mail-in voting that the GOP was simply unwilling to adapt to. This all changed by 2024, of course, and the Trump campaign’s own get-out-the-vote efforts made all the difference. Trump and his team have spent four years knowing both the enemy and themselves, while the Democrats have lapsed into knowing neither. As a result, President Trump is taking a wrecking ball to Washington, D.C., and we get to watch the fun.

 

Notes:

1 I can’t resist pointing out that, prior to his 2015 entry into politics, Trump was long associated with the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment). In particular, he hosted WrestleMania IV at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for a rematch between his current supporter Hulk Hogan and…wait for it…Andre the Giant.

2 Rocky III, 1982.

3 Trump was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives on January 31, 2021, for “incitement of insurrection,” but he was acquitted by a vote of 57 guilty, 43 not guilty (10 short of the 67 needed to convict).

4 I deliberately use this term to tweak those who think Trump and his supporters or defenders are not-so-covert Nazis. The term “Blitzkrieg” was not coined by Hitler and his minions but was used widely in Europe and America by writers on military strategy and the looming possibility of a European War. See William J. Fanning, Jr., “The Origin of the Term ‘Blitzkrieg’: Another View,” The Journal of Military History, vol. 61, no. 2 (April 1997), pp. 283–302. Fanning says that the “Blitzkrieg” term “came into existence sometime between 1936 and 1938…to describe the ‘knockout blow’ strategy developed shortly after World War I” (302). The irony is that this concept of a military “knockout blow,” which sounds so brutal, “so just like the Nazis,” was a “short-war concept,” developed by “military experts in many countries” as a way “to overcome the horrors of attribution by finding a means of restoring speed and mobility to the battlefield” (302).

 

 

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