My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum.  They ask if I don’t think his tweets and utterances are “beneath the dignity of the office.”  Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity.  There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.  Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?  And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – and through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end.  Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy.

Donald Trump continues to baffle. Contrary to popular supposition, the Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.)

Rather, it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.   Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show.

Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration.

In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama, the Nobama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. It is an accomplishment that he alone could have achieved.

Did Trump misspeak…use a slur to make a point…and thereby arouse all those dainty Liberals into a snit?

Not far from where I’m writing this in Manhattan, the kosher butcher shop is long gone; across the street, the church that once stood tall is now boarded up.

But next to it stands a mosque newly built and freshly painted. English in the neighborhood is a foreign tongue and nobody knows Frank Sinatra.

The boys don’t play stickball. The girls in their veils don’t play hopscotch and all the cabs are driven by men from Somalia and Afghanistan.

Strangers are not greeted warmly.

That’s a snapshot of what troubles President Trump…not the mosque, but the culture shift,

Call him chauvinistic…call him profane…he doesn’t care.  Our President is fighting for America’s soul – for America’s very existence.

I read as much of Michael Wolff’s "Fire and Fury" as my stomach lining could stand, and then I watched Donald Trump’s last rally of the 2016 presidential election. Groucho Marx’s old line came to mind — “Who are you going to believe; me, or your own eyes?”

He spoke in Michigan, a swing state where Hillary Clinton didn’t bother to campaign, and he hammered on the issues that decided the vote: more jobs, no Obamacare, Washington corruption. Trump was focused, confident, and ruthless.

“Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the Presidency of the United States…. We are finally going to close the history books on the Clintons, and their lies, schemes and corruption…. My contract with the American voter begins with a plan to end government corruption and to take our country back from the special interests…. We’re going to win today and we’re going to Washington D.C. to drain the swamp.”  

The crowd of 18,000 chanted “Drain the swamp!” back at him.

That’s the man who neither expected nor wanted to win, according to Wolff. There stood Donald Trump on the day before the election, declaring that he would win, in the middle of the state whose votes would make him win, talking about the issues on which he would win.

Most Millennials are too young to be intimately familiar with the Rocky films.  The original was released in 1976 and was a huge hit, making unknown actor Sylvester Stallone an instant superstar.

Rocky Balboa, a nobody fighter gets a chance at boxing stardom by fighting the world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed.  The fight is a P.R. stunt.  Creed needs an appeal-to-the-people fight, "a novelty."  He decides to give "a local underdog" fighter an opportunity.  "A snow-white underdog.  Very American!"

Donald Trump is the Rocky of our current political framework.  Once he announced, the late-night comics had a field day mocking the man and his candidacy.  Political elites assumed that the run was a publicity stunt.

There is a scene in Rocky in which a newswoman is interviewing Rocky at a meat locker, where Rocky's friend is employed and lets him train by hitting huge sides of beef.

Back at Apollo Creed's fancy office, no one is paying attention to the television newscast except one of Creed's trainers.  He alone sees something in Rocky – a talent and a determination no one else has yet observed.  No one listens to the trainer when he tells his boss, "This boy means business."  And to the Left’s dismay, so did Donald Trump.

In those ubiquitous YouTube videos riffing on that famous scene from “Downfall,” Hitler flies off the handle when he learns that all is lost, so by now there’s a cottage industry of adapting that scene to the every perceived political “downfall.”

I happened to obtain a transcript of another delusional leader, Nancy Pelosi, after she had a similar reaction upon learning that the Republican tax bill was passed into law.

THE SCENE. Nancy Pelosi is seated at a desk in a crowded windowless room. Standing directly in front of Pelosi is House Democrat Whip Steny Hoyer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The rest of the group consists of deeply concerned Senators and Representatives.

Schumer places a large poster on her desk. It’s a list of the GOP tax bill highlights.