Victor Davis Hanson Helps Make Sense of a Confusing World

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Joining us for the entire hour is the legend, someone that I listen to every week. I try to read almost everything he publishes, is Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Victor, great to see you. Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you for having me. So, Victor, you have had some phenomenal commentary lately on President Trump's tariff policy and how we should think about this through national security and the reindustrialization of America terms.
Please explain to our audience what your take is on President Trump's tariff announcement. Well, it's very incumbent upon him and his team to talk in terms of symmetry and parity and to emphasize that his wish would be a tariff-free world.
But unfortunately, that's been only half true, that the United States is the only country in the world with such low tariffs

and has essentially a free market. And that was fine during the post-war era when we were

rebuilding Europe and deterring the communist world. But 80 years later, the United States is

facing $37 trillion in debt, $2-3 billion in interest per year, a $1.7 trillion budget deficit, and almost over most years, over a billion dollars, excuse me, a trillion dollars in trade deficits. So what we're asking for is not asymmetry, but just parity.
And that would mean we're not, I don't even think Donald Trump his team have said, we need parity right now. Just to take one example, they would say to Mexico, you were part of a free trade North American continent.
What happened? You're running 50, and then 80, and then 100, then 150. And now you're running $177 billion annual trade deficit.
You're a conduit for the communist Chinese to get around tariff policies, which are asymmetrical in their favor. And this is in addition to you have $63 billion coming to your country in remittances, most of whom are from whom people are here illegally, and they're subsidized by our own welfare system.

And then there's some $20 to $30 billion in excess that's estimated to come from smuggling and the cartel's fentanyl trade, which was killed. That's not the behavior of a good neighbor, and we're just asking for parity.
And I think he could apply that logic and tone, vocabulary, diction to all of these Europe, China, maybe not China because we expect it from them, but Europe, Canada, Mexico, and not let them get away with the idea that we're waging a unilateral trade war when we're just asking for parity and reciprocity. so help me understand the history of tariffs the only history that most people can remember is oh

tariffs caused the Great Depression, Smoot-Hawley tariff. But it's actually far more deep and complex and interesting than that.
Our government was largely funded on tariffs, as per Abraham Lincoln supported and Alexander Hamilton. What is the history of tariffs when it comes to our country? And let's go much deeper than the superficial analysis that, oh, it caused the Great Depression.
Well, to put it another way, we didn't have an income tax. It was envisioned in 1913, but ratified 1916.
So then that begs the question, where did the federal government get their money? They had no other source of revenue other than tariffs, essentially. And that was, it wasn't just the idea of protecting domestic industries, but it was also a revenue generating mechanism for the federal government.
And one of the reasons, to be frank, why people did not want an income tax is because they felt that government

by needs would be small and manageable. The federal government would be if it relied on tariff income rather than everybody paying a percentage of their wages.
That was never envisioned by the founders. But tariffs were pretty much part and parcel of the American project until about 1916.
And then all of a sudden, we substituted them with this vast new influx of the IRS and income tax revenue. And then people said, well, they're kind of obsolete now.
But they were designed both to fund the federal government, but fund a small federal government, and also to protect vulnerable industries. But remember what the opposition is saying, Charlie, the free but not fair opposition.
They're saying, well, we believe that free trade must be maintained at all costs, without exception. And when you say it hurts Americans,

Americans lose jobs in American industries or offshore or outsourced, they say, no, no, it doesn't matter because the subsidies of our foreign governments are not sustainable if they're dumping product here below the cost of production. And we found that not to be true.
China's been fine doing it for almost a half century.

Then they said, well, it lowers consumer prices because you're bringing in cheap stuff that domestic people have to adjust to. That may or may not be true.
But if the other side is being subsidized and your own producers are not being subsidized, then it's a way to put people into bankruptcy. And I can attest for that as somebody who farmed during the Reagan period when EU agricultural produce was subsidized and dumped in this country.
And we were told that that was good for us because it would make us more efficient. And that's the third fallacy.
They say, well, if you allow foreign stuff to come in without a tariff, even though it's being produced at below the cost of production, then you're going to have to compete with it and that will make you lean and mean. But there's only a certain point where you can compete when you're losing money.
So it's a deliberate policy that, and I'm speaking as a conservative, but a lot of the libertarians believe that even the most abusive tariff, asymmetrical tariffs are in the interest of the target almost as if, you know, get with it or get over it. And it's destroyed the interior of the United States.
Yes, it has. And I want to really hone in on a couple of things you mentioned there.
The first of which is how the libertarian free trade absolutism took over so much of our trade policy and so much of the prevailing dogma of Washington, D.C. When did that start, and why did it largely go unchallenged or unchecked from the American right for nearly 30 or 40 years, despite the obvious consequences of deindustrialization, factory closings, and the fact that we couldn't make anything? Walk us through kind of how that hyper libertarian view grew.
There had been a view in the 1960s and 70s and 80s as we remember in 1945, there was no China as an industrial power. Russia was destroyed.
Europe was completely leveled to speak. and Japan was destroyed.
So we were providing about 85% of the washers, the dryers, even the vehicles, the planes. And that started to end as we subsidized the rebirth of these once powerhouses by letting them send their products in here without a tariff, either in the case of our allies that we owed it to them and they would get back on their feet and they wouldn't turn communist, or in the case of places like China, they would be liberal.
The more affluent they got, affluence was the twin supposedly of consensual government, which didn't turn out to be true. So we were losing the Rust Belt in the 70s.
And then what happened was, I think part of it was during the Reagan administration and the George H.W. and the Bill Clinton, there was this idea that finance was more important than assembly, global finance.
And while the trade was destroying manufacturing and assembly in the middle classes, then the service classes, and I'm talking about insurance and law and media and academia and all sorts of investment, we were pretty good at. And now we had under globalization, not a 300 million person market at the time, but 6 billion.
And so these areas, anybody who could have a product that was globalized, and that was mostly in these areas, made out like bandits. And they sold it to the middle class by saying, well, you have 401ks.
That's right. So maybe you're not making what you want, but you've got all this investment now because and the high tech as well, you know, we're selling a billion Apple computers or iPhones and this is all good for you.
But the problem was if you had muscular labor that could be outsourced or offshore, and it was, then it was. So they said, well, we're going to provide people with high-tech communication devices, social media services, financial services, law services, academia, all that stuff.
But the muscles of the United States will be over with, and that's kind of passé.

So even in the case of agriculture, millions of acres were being farmed in Latin America

and Asia, and industries were offshore and outsourced, and the idea was that the middle

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Welcome back. Victor Davis Hanson with us.
Sorry to cut you off. Please continue.
I love this idea that you were getting into, that it became almost, I like the word passe, but it was just not acceptable or desirable to work with one's hands. that upper middle class society no one wanted the children no one in suburban society wanted

their kids to go work construction the idea was you're going to go work on a laptop you're going

to go work construction. The idea was you're going to go work on a laptop, you're going to go work as an accountant or an engineer.
Upper middle class dogma became that if you had to sweat to make a living, to be a plumber, a welder, electrician, there's something wrong with you, go get a four-year degree. Please continue on that, Victor.
Well, it was the idea that we were going to be the brain of the world and the world would be the body and the body was inferior and that we were going to make so much money that it would trickle down to everybody in their 401ks and everything. And you saw that the vocabulary adjusted.
Joe Biden said that people had to learn to code if they were minors or something. Hillary said something the same thing in West Virginia.
We had this kind of thinly veiled class disparagement vocabulary, irredeemables, you know, clingers, chumps, dregs, etc. So there was a kind of a demonization as if they were the losers of globalization.
And there was a geographical element to it. It was in the interior of the United States, the Red Star.
And then the two blue coasts were going to be were all Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, federal government, big banks, corporate headquarters, Silicon Valley. These were going to be leading the United States and we were going to kind of be the tail or the drag, you know, farming, mining, getting your hands dirty, extraction, production, assembly, manufacturing.
It wasn't really necessary. And then of course, we started to notice things, Charlie, that we were producing one warship a year and the China was a month and they were producing over 200.
And we, during COVID, we looked for our pharmaceuticals, masks, all these things we thought were mundane and trivial. And suddenly these countries were saying, well, we don't know if we're going to ship it to you this week or not.
And so we realized that our grandfathers were not stupid, that they wanted to be self-sufficient in the stuff of civilization, food, energy, housing, materials, ships, military equipment. And so I think we're kind of, we're questioning in that, that we thought we were so wealthy that the financial sectors and the globalization was going to carry us.
and now suddenly we're $37 trillion in debt.

And people are saying... We're so wealthy that the financial sectors and the globalization was going to carry us.
And now suddenly we're $37 trillion in debt.

And people are saying, well, maybe our grandfathers were not that bad off because they were producing the stuff that civilization and life needs.

So I couldn't agree with that more.

And what President Trump is trying to course correct it, I suppose I'm going to ask you a speculative question. Can we become a body, not just a brain economy? Is it possible? It is because you see that it's not just a bunch of people mindlessly on an assembly line putting widgets together.
It requires the most sophisticated robotics, artificial intelligence, and those are areas that we excel in. So when you start to see these people building these huge power plants, mostly by natural gas and AI plants, that technology can be married with assembly.
So even though we have a fossilized 1.6 fertility rate, you can get an American and marry him with machines in assembly, in manufacturing. Even in things like housing now, where you see entire walls made in factories, you know, the studs and everything, and then brought to the site and they're pre-assembled.
And so we're very innovative and it's time that we could do both very well. And it's kind of interesting what Trump is doing.
He's kind of emulating very quickly the war production board. You know, we were the 17th largest army in the world.
At the end of 1945, we had 12 million people, almost the size of the Soviet Union's army. And we had the largest navy in the world.
but it was the largest Navy in the sense of greater than all the navies put together. We built 140 aircraft carriers of various classifications.
And what I'm getting at is what Roosevelt did, the socialists, he said, I'm not going to be a socialist anymore during the war. You, Henry Ford, you, Henry Kaiser, you, William Knudsen, you go out and make bombers and liberty ships and make a profit.
But you've got to have the United States interest. And I think that's what Trump's doing with Andreessen and David Sachs and even to a degree Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
I will protect you when the Europeans go after you or the Chinese cheat on you. But I want you to invest here.

And I want your abilities to be in service of America.

And I want your rockets and your Facebook and your investments and anything you make create jobs here first.

And it's kind of an appeal to a national patriotic element. I think a lot of the billionaire entrepreneurs are starting to react to it.

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Shouldn't you be looking into doing that too? Victor, do you want to comment on a second, for a second, on Hillsdale College? I know we both share an admiration of them. You're a visiting lecturer there, are you not? Yeah, I've been there for 21 years in the fall, and I'm going to give the graduation speech in May, May 10th.
So I'm looking forward to it. It's a wonderful place.
First day I got there, I noticed two things that nobody locked their bike up, and there wasn't one book in the bookstore that had a dash studies, no environmental studies, gender studies, race studies. It was all regular courses of the old style, math, science, literature, history, philosophy.
And if I remember correctly, I could be wrong, but I'm drawing from memory of one of your lectures or articles that you might have been at Hillsdale or in Michigan riding your bike or something. And you saw Trump flags in 2016 and you saw some indicator.
Is that am I am correctly? Yeah. I, I came back and wrote a

column and said, I think he's going to win. That's right.
I remember this. I saw them everywhere.
And I saw a guy painting the side of his barn. I got off and I thought somebody was vandalizing it.
I didn't see the Trump, just part of the T I ran over there and he was very nice. He just said, I can do whatever I want to my blank, blank barn.
And I said, well, what are you doing? and I'm curious.

He said, I'm painting the word Trump.

So that was, that was, I thought he had a chance. I really did.
And I wrote that because I saw, and here where I live in the San Joaquin Valley, a lot of Hispanic males, especially, even as early as 2016, I was just stunned that so many of them in building, construction, agriculture, were going to vote Trump for a variety of reasons. That's a good segue to something you mentioned previously.
You're different than most intellectuals, philosophers and historians and professors. You work with your hands.
You are a farmer. It's not just some hobby.
It's not something you do for social media. You don't run a TikTok account where you do it for likes.
You enjoy being in contact with the earth. You have been your entire life.
There is a fair amount of angst and anxiety in the farmer community right now about these tariffs. I know you touched on this previously.
I was at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma a couple days ago, and a couple farmers came up, and they were all Trump guys wearing Trump gear, and they were very worried. They said that these tariffs very well might raise the price of equipment coming in, that they might not be able to export their goods.
Please, as a farmer, give us your take on Trump's tariff announcement. How should we think about this? Well, I think the way to look at it is long term and short term.
Almost every country that we export with, we're running a deficit with. I mean, in terms of now as a farmer and say almonds with India, and they have tariffs and they're very tough people.
So if they retaliate, the easiest thing they're going to do is say, we're not going to allow almonds in without a 40%. And they already have tariffs, but not that high.
But long-term, if you were able to achieve parity, and we took a short-term hit, and you were able to tell India and China and the Europeans, we're not going to let in this, this, this, unless you let our soybeans or our almonds or our cheese in at the same rate that we let yours in. It would be kind of fantastic.
It really would. And then I don't know to the degree which he is going to retaliate by putting tariffs on imported foodstuffs.
The United States is not the largest producer of export food in volume, but it is in value. That's pretty amazing when you think we only have 335 million, 40 million, and China's got 1.4 billion.
But so what I'm getting at is half of everything we produce, we sell abroad and it's very pricey. It's things like high volume pistachios that are worth a lot of money or walnuts or processed cheese, things like that.
It's not just grain, which is essential, corn or sorghum, but we have a lot of really specialty crops that the world likes. And people are paranoid about that, especially because you can live without almonds and you can live without pistachios.
So if they think that they're going to hurt a particular sector of the American, and that's what they do, when they negotiate with Trump, they look at particular red state or areas that are his supporters, and they want to target that type of commodity for these small towns and rural areas.

The farmer base overwhelmingly supported President Trump,

and I believe long-term they're going to have incredible prosperity.

They'll also get heavy machinery discounts.

I know that the president is looking at that in the upcoming tax bill.

Victor, you mentioned something a little while just previously.

You said that you were stunned by how many Hispanics and men were going in President Trump's direction. We are seeing a realignment of political parties.
I know you've written extensively about this, where no longer are we divided as much on race, but we are divided instead really on male, female, and on class. How should we think about the current political divides and how our political parties are realigning? Well, Trump got 26%, I think, of the black vote and about 55% of the Hispanic male, maybe 48 in general.
So there is a part of that was cultural. In other words, they like a strong leader.
Biden's mental and physical feebleness bothered them, of course. But they also on cultural issues, they don't like the idea of biological males, crime, open borders, especially here.
People didn't like. But there was also something about, I don't want to say macho, but there was the idea that you want a strong representative of the United States that embodies our confidence.
And so if somebody, they don't like optional military engagements in the Middle East or anywhere, but it's more of a Jacksonian, don't tread on me, but no better friend, no worse enemy. That type of foreign policy appeals a lot to males.
But class-wise, the idea of bringing jobs back in the United States and having, say, a worker and a half for every job, I mean, two jobs for every worker rather than two workers for every job is what they want because it makes them more valuable and prized and appreciated. So this idea when Trump says, I brought in $3 trillion worth of foreign investment in three years, most economists say for every $10 billion, some say $20, you get a million jobs.
So if what he says is correct, you could see 30 or 40, 50 million jobs in the next decade. And that appeals to people.
They'll say, you know what, I can be a machine operator and I'll have three or four offers rather than have to go beg and humiliate myself to work at minimum wage part time. And so it's kind of like a can do.
We want to get the country moving. We want to be preeminent in every field, military, food, oil, gas, everything.
And that appeals to, I think, men in a strange way. So as a historian, how would you judge President Trump's? We're almost at 100 days, his first 100 days versus Obama and that of the 20th century.
He has accomplished quite a lot, signed a ton of executive orders. How would you look at what President Trump has been able to do in such a short period of time? Well, he's a counter-revolutionary, so he's mapped out his counter-revolution.
And he's got, as you know, more lower district court injunctions in the first two months than any president, I mean, than Biden had in four years or any other president. So they are trying to do everything they can to stop him.
And we're right at the abyss. But if he should do just four or five things, achieve a peace in Ukraine, a peace in the Middle East, and make Iran inert in nuclear terms, get somewhat symmetry or parity in trade.
And if he can cut even a half a billion dollars, a half a trillion, and get on a trajectory within three years we're going to have a balanced budget, just those things alone would make him more successful than any president in the last half century, at least. No other Republican has ever tried that.
Reagan, George H.W., George W., they all said the same thing. You know, we're going to slow down the cultural revolution.
We're not going to stop it. We're going to slow the growth of government.
We're not going to cut it. We're going to look at deregulation and taxes, but we're going to not talk about trade.
So they knew that if they were to do, they wanted probably some of them to do what Trump did, but if they did do what Trump, they would meet a level of resistance that they thought would be incompatible, either socially or culturally. They just didn't want to handle that.
And they got a lot of resistance as it was. But I think something about Trump's temperament or background or attitude or outlook makes him invulnerable or oblivious or protected from social opprobrium.
He didn't care. It really is.
He's a political marvel. Victor, you wrote extensively for the last couple of years when Biden was president on the mass chaos on the southern border.
Can we just comment for a couple of minutes on how quickly President Trump has been able to seal the southern border? It is we have grown accustomed to crises go on for five, 10, 15 years. Think about it.
COVID and the lockdowns and the 2008 financial crisis and our national debt and Nixon had a war on drugs.

Never before my lifetime have I seen something go from crisis to non-issue in under 100 days. Yeah, I mean, they told us that you had to have comprehensive immigration reform, which was basically amnesty in their view.
And if you didn't, you couldn't close the border. And he understood that the border was open because they wanted the border open and they wanted 12 million people in here, both for cheap labor and for future political constituents and for larger federal programs, greater taxes, more redistribution.
And he just simply said, if you obey the law, and that means you fortify the border and you secure it and you turn people back and there's no catch and release and no refugee status once you're here, but you have to do it. You could stop it and create, more importantly, a psychological sense of deterrence.
And when he started to say things like, I have an executive order that if you come across the border illegally, you can't come back for 10 years. That was very brilliant because it told people, uh-oh, I'm here and these people are serious.
They might catch me and then I can't come back legally. So you're actually seeing a little bit of reverse immigration.
I think they really need to enhance that because it's something people had talked about in the past, but they thought no president would ever dare do it. Victor Davis Hanson, stay there.
Can you remind people it's victoranson.com, is that correct? Yes. I'm a paid subscriber.
Tell our audience very quickly, about 30 seconds about that. Well, I have a website, VictorHanson.com, for $5 a month.
You can get my usual stuff. It's two columns a week.
I do 11 videos of various statuses there. But I also have about 2,000 words only for subscribers and a video only for subscribers.
And it's fresh. I've done it for four years, haven't missed a week yet.
So every week, two long essays and a 10-minute video, in addition to all the other stuff at the website. Charlie Kirk here.
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That's byrna.com slash charlie. so Victor I have a difficult question

one that I have not heard you answer

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So, Victor, I have a difficult question, one that I have not heard you answer. What do you think that the Trump administration could be doing better right now? I think they can.
The messaging, I think, could be improved. I would get a little bit more tragic than raggedoccio.
In other words, I wouldn't have a chainsaw when I'm cutting. I would say something along the following.
I don't like laying people off. I don't like the idea of getting in arguments with Canada.
And I'm willing to hear things, but I didn't start this. I didn't open the border.
I didn't let in 12 million people. I didn't run up $37 trillion.
I didn't get us into $3 billion in interest a year. I don't like any of that, but I'm the one that's tasked with fixing all this.
And that sometimes is a rough thing to do because in this transition, there's going to be people are going to have to change their methods. They're going to lose jobs.
And I'm going to try to get as much federal investment as I can, $3 trillion worth. And for every person that we have to eliminate their job, we're going to try to get them something better in the private sector.
But I think a little bit more of that tone that we didn't ask for this, but if we don't do it, nobody else is going to do it. And they left it, they being the whole progressive agenda and project.
And we have to do this. And there's no, we ran out of time.
It was on our watch, our station, our time. This task fell to us.
We didn't ask for it, but we're going to complete it. That kind of attitude, I think, would be a little bit better, or at least explain in detail.
But if you just say, you know, we're going to invade Panama or we're going to take, you know, Canada should be our 50 for, I understand the art of the deal. but you've got to, we're going to invade Panama or we're going to take Canada should be our 50-50.
I understand the art of the deal, but we've got about a 10% independent, conservative, democratic constituency that we've got to reassure that things are going to get better. And we're doing this radical things because they were the radicals.
We weren't the radicals. We're the counter-revolutionaries.
They were the revolutionaries. We're bringing things back to the normal.
They were the ones that took it off the spectrum. That kind of explication very quickly, each time they have an important announcement, I think, would help.
The Russian-Ukrainian conflict, it's proving to be even more difficult than we could have imagined to bring this thing to peace. What is your expert analysis of where things stand? And do you think we're going to enter another summer of killing? I hope not.
It's worse than Stalingrad. I think everybody understands.
They don't want to admit they all understand the contours of a peace. They're not going to get the Donbass and Crimea back, Ukraine.
No president ever advocated it. They're not going to be in NATO.
But on the other hand, they've got the biggest army of any NATO country, and they're well armed to the teeth, and they've killed or wounded, tragically, a million Russians. And so Russia, the only point in contention is how far west does Putin think he can get? In other words, how far can you push him back east from his embarkation point? That's negotiable.
So if you give them guarantees that they can defend themselves, then I think we see the peace. All we're doing now is that every time we criticize Putin, Zelensky gets on his hind legs and says, I want to be back in NATO.
I want more money. And every time we criticize him, Putin says this, but that's normal.
That's the yin and yang of a peace negotiation. So the difficult part's been done.
We all know the contours of the peace. It's just convincing both of them.
They're both better off now than later. We don't need to have another 500000 people maimed or killed to do what we could do right now.
Victor Davis Hanson, check out VictorHanson.com and become a paid member.

Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Charlie.
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He is one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, if not the most

important public intellectual of our time. Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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