VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What was so different this time about Trump’s election?

In the weeks before the 2016 Trump Electoral College victory, Donald Trump was polling between 35 and 40 percent. He would average only about 41 percent approval over his tumultuous four-year tenure.

No one knows what lies ahead over the next four years. But for now, Trump already polls well higher than 50 percent approval.

His inauguration in a few weeks will probably not resemble Trump’s 2016 ceremony. In the 2016-17 transition, Democratic-affiliated interests ran commercials urging electors to become “faithless,” and thus illegally to reject their states’ popular votes and instead elect the loser, Hillary Clinton. Massive demonstrations met Trump on Inauguration Day.

In less than four months after assuming the presidency, special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate the hoax of Russian collusion. That wasted 22-month, $40 million investigation found no collusion but did derail the first two Trump years.

What followed the collusion ruse was a consistent effort to undermine the Trump presidency — two subsequent impeachments, the laptop “disinformation” hoax, the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown and news suppression of any mention of the Chinese lab origin of the virus or questioning the closing of schools.

In the Trump administration’s last summer of 2020, 120 days of riot, arson, looting, assault and murder followed, with the denouement of the Jan. 6 turmoil.

In contrast, the 2024-25 Trump transition has all but assumed the presidency. More than 100 foreign leaders have elbowed each other to be invited to Mar-a-Lago or to phone in their congratulations to the newly elected Trump.

Remember that in 2016 the left screamed “Logan Act” if a Trump transition appointee even talked with foreign officials.

So why is newly elected Trump a veritable cultural hero in 2024 in a fashion unimaginable eight years ago when the media had rendered him a near demon?

One, Trump is seen now as a welcome relief. A departing and unpopular President Joe Biden leaves with about a 36 percent approval rating. The prior Biden years are now seen as abnormal.

The left’s cultural revolution championed fringe policies never quite seen before: destroying the border, welcoming in 12 million illegal aliens, nihilist critical race and legal theories, institutionalizing a third sex and mandating woke/DEI quotas and indoctrination sessions.

Yet Biden had inherited from Trump a secure border, an economy rebounding after the COVID quarantines, 1.23 percent inflation, no wars abroad and cheap energy. Four years later, the outgoing Biden administration is widely unpopular. Almost every one of its policies polls below 50 percent.

In reaction, Trump promises not just to restore his first-term success, but to expand it.

Two, Trump personally remains transparent and energetic — eager to talk and meet anyone, anytime and just about anywhere. His energy offers a sharp contrast with the non-compos-mentis Biden. The change is welcomed by an electorate exhausted by the past four years of presidential stumbling, wandering, incoherence, mind-freezes and angry, “get-off-my-grass” aged fragility.

Three, Trump is grudgingly admired, now even by some of his enemies who once sought but failed to destroy him.

He endured two impeachments, five civil and criminal court indictments, incessant lawfare, 95 percent negative media coverage, attempts to remove him from states’ ballots and two assassination attempts. Yet all these unprecedented hostile efforts to end Trump may only have made him stronger — and more empathetic when seen as a target of increasingly fanatical enemies.

Four, Trump has expanded his MAGA base and permanently branded it as an ecumenical movement that welcomes shared class interests rather than the tired old tribal racial and ethnic chauvinism.

Trump also brought in disaffected Democrats, independents and minorities in a way the Democrats could not with the evaporating “Never Trump” dead enders. Trump’s veritable campaign menagerie of RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Dana White and Kid Rock made it impossible for the left to demonize MAGA Republicans as right-wing aristocrats or laissez-fair capitalists.

Fifth, the endorsements of the Biden-Harris legacy media, calcified Hollywood endorsers, blowhard university faculties and tech barons proved vastly overrated. It was trumped by more popular and dynamic Internet influencers, podcasters, bloggers and maverick entrepreneurs.

Sixth and finally, Trump himself proved more experienced and more measured and reflective than in 2016. His team, too, was more disciplined and street smart, led by savvy chief of staff Susan Wiles.

The past year has seen truly pivotal moments of Trump as an everyman — posing for a mugshot after being railroaded by a weaponized lawfare indictment, serving McDonald’s drive-up customers, riding in a garbage truck cab, raising his fist and yelling “fight, fight, fight” — and after nearly having his head blown off by a would-be assassin.

Add all of these once unimaginables up, and the people trusted more — and liked better — the Trump reboot than grouchy Biden or inane and inauthentic Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as their shared extremist agendas.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.