Book Review: Victor Davis Hanson’s ‘The Counterrevolution’ Draws a Sharp Partisan Split — “Indispensable Guide” or “Trumpite Hagiography”

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By TRH Book Desk

The classicist-historian’s account of Trump’s comeback has earned praise from the president himself and a roster of conservative commentators — and one of the harshest capsule reviews Kirkus has published this year.

New Delhi, October 3, 2026 — Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, frames what he calls the “Trump Decade” (2015-2025) through the lens of ancient history and tragedy. The book is structured in two parts: “The Fall,” tracing Trump’s path from the “Rock Bottom” of his post-2020 political exile through a “MAGA Rebooted” resurgence against what Hanson terms “The Jacobin Democrats” and “The Armies of Anti-Trumpers,” and “The Rise,” which opens with a Nietzsche epigraph — “What does not kill me makes me stronger” — before covering the 2024 campaign, Trump’s foreign policy approach (what Hanson calls “Jacksonian deterrence”), and a closing chapter asking whether the MAGA movement can survive “without Trump.”

The book concludes in January 2026, with an afterword extending coverage through April 2026.

The Washington Times summarized the book’s culminating argument as resting on “the continued mass appeal of the movement’s issues, its resonance with the working middle classes, its subjugation of racial tribalism to common class concerns,” and what Hanson frames as the movement’s success in distancing itself from “the demagogic and racialist alt-right.”

The Washington Times was broadly admiring of the book’s narrative sweep, describing it as chronicling “with engaging detail” what it called “the near-demise of Mr. Trump’s first-term MAGA efforts to return America to its founding principles,” and crediting Hanson with capturing both Trump’s political comeback and the MAGA movement’s durability.

PJ Media was similarly positive in tone, noting that despite the book’s grand classical framing, “Hanson does not emote; nor does he lavishly praise Trump the way an enthusiastic rally-goer would” — a characterization that pushes back against the idea that the book is pure cheerleading, even as it credits Hanson with making the sympathetic case for Trump’s second-term agenda as a direct, deliberate response to “the tactical errors and overreaches of Trump’s opponents” during his years out of office.

A Pointedly Critical Reading

Kirkus Reviews took a considerably harsher view, opening its capsule assessment with the blunt label “Trumpite hagiography” and calling the book “a paean to all things Trump.”

The review quoted Hanson’s own framing of Trump’s political survival as “the greatest political comeback in modern presidential history” before pushing back on the book’s classical pretensions directly: Kirkus noted Hanson “signals” his credentials as a classicist “by suggesting Trump is ‘a classically tragic figure’” while pointedly observing that “he doesn’t add that classically tragic figures are always so through their own hubris and arrogance, never by accident.”

The review was similarly unimpressed by Hanson’s frequent use of Latin — citing his deployment of phrases including primus inter pares and damnatio memoriae — and argued that, after extensive classical framing, Hanson “belatedly allows that the MAGA base is made up of white men without college degrees,” before reciting what the review called “an all-too-familiar litany of talking points and grievances.”

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A Book Entering the World With Its Praise Already Attached

Few recent political books have arrived with a blurb roster quite as prominent as this one. The book’s marketing copy, carried across retailer listings including Hachette’s own publisher page and Bookshop.org, opens with an endorsement from President Trump himself: “Victor Davis Hanson explains it all, and better than ever before. Get his historically important book now.”

Ben Shapiro called Hanson “the indispensable analyst of the American spirit,” Fox News host Sean Hannity labelled it “A Must Read,” and former Representative Devin Nunes called it “your indispensable guide” to understanding Trump’s political trajectory.

Conservative outlets Commentary, American Thinker, and The New Criterion each contributed blurbs praising the book’s analytical depth and historical framing, with The New Criterion specifically crediting it as “an authoritative chronicle” of Trump’s political resurrection and its effect on “the character of the Democrats.”

As with most books carrying this volume of pre-publication praise, it’s worth noting these are solicited endorsements rather than independent reviews.