Trump Goes to California and Hegseth's Confirmation

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host.
You are here to listen to Victor, who's the man with the wisdom. He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhanson.com.
Later in the show, I will tell you why I believe you should be subscribing. Victor, I feel the last time you and I spoke was a week ago, and I feel like a year has happened in these last seven days.
So much dramatic Donald Trumpism has gone around the world. You and the great Sammy Wink have discussed much of this, but there's still so much to get your take on, Victor.
Actually, I think we should begin the show today by talking about a vote in the Senate for Pete Hegseth's confirmation and how, of all people,

Mitch McConnell voted against that. We have that.
We have Donald Trump in California,

the Musk salute, the removal of security details for Fauci, Pompeo, Bolton, and some more talk

about pardons. And we'll get to all of this, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. We are recording, by the way, on Saturday the 25th, and this particular episode will be up on Tuesday the 28th.
Folks, we know a lot happens in three days. A lot happens in one day in America now.
But we always catch up with Victor's take on what has transpired. So, Victor, let's commence today with Mitch McConnell, now just a plain old senator from Kentucky, no longer a member of the leadership.
But damn, he seems like a man filled with spite. He voted against Pete Hegseth's confirmation to the Senate.

Pete was confirmed when the vice president cast a tie-breaking vote. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, two other Republicans who voted against him.
Victor, you have some important thoughts to share on this. Yes.
There were three Republicans, Murkowski from Alaska, Collins from Maine, and Mitch McConnell from Kentucky. They all voted against Pete Exeth, and they're all sort of in a different category.
Take Lisa Murkowski first. She would not be representing, there's a Republican, as you know, Senator in Alaska.
She's the other quote unquote Republican. She's not really a Republican.
She's only there because she engineered through her allies this rank voting that is unlike almost any other place. And it's designed to elect people with more minority support by playing off other candidates, which sometimes in collusion they run to the benefit of the person who is going to be advantageously favored by this rank voting.
And number two is she's got to make the argument that she has a consistent record, a prescient principled record about rejecting nominees for high cabinet posts. So let's just go back in the time machine four years ago.
She voted for Pete Buttigieg, and she had heard in the entire primary debates of 2020, what all of the things he said, all of the things he said going into speculation that he would be the transportation secretary about racist cloverleafs and all of this DEI, and she voted for him. She also voted as, and by the way, Susan Collins did too.
Deb Highland was the interior secretary. All we heard from Biden was that she was the first Native American woman, first woman, but we didn't hear about what she had been promoting her whole life and what she tried to do to reify that advocacy once she was the Interior Secretary.
So what was it? She wanted to cancel all pipelines. She wanted to ban all fracking on federal lands.
She wanted to ban all new federal leases for oil production. She got a lot of that through.
And that was to the detriment of the people of Alaska and to everybody. Because this was at a time, once she was in, that prices spiked.
Here in California, I remember distinctly filling up for $5.80 a gallon, but $21.22. And that was only broke when Joe Biden decided to dump 2 million barrels a day on the domestic market by pumping out of the strategic reserve.
And by the way, everybody, Joe Biden took a reserve that was 80 percent. I don't know what it was, 650 barrels, 650 million barrels.
And he took it down by 40 percent at a time when we had, we mean the American people, had been benefited because Trump had filled it up with cheap oil. So then Joe Biden took it down, and now Trump's going to have to spend a lot, multi-billion dollars to fill it back up.
He did that to win the midterms and say that gas had gone down. So you tell me the logic, Deb Haaland, why is it okay to re-pump oil out of the ground, but it's not to pump it out the first time? Then we go to Collins.
And so she voted for Buttigieg, she voted for Holland, and then if we go to the Secretary of Defense, she's saying Pete Hegseth, who was a decorated veteran who saw service at Guantanamo and Iraq and Afghanistan. She says she voted for Lloyd Austin, as did the other two.
Lloyd Austin went AWOL for about seven days. He didn't even tell anybody where he was.
If you're a private and you have an emergency, let's say, appendix or prostate problem, and you just stay home and go to your doctor and take care of it, you're going to be court-martial. You really are.
And so, I understand he was ill, but he has to set an example. He was the person in charge as DOD secretary of the worst military humiliation in American history at Kabul.
Never have we left so quickly in such chaos, not even in 75 from the Saigon embassy roof. We left 50 to 60 billion dollars.
We turned over billions of dollars of infrastructure to terrorists, the Taliban. We left a billion dollar embassy, a remodeled $300 million priceless Bagram air base.
We did all of that. He was the general that was there, and he did not tell Joe Biden, don't do it.
He went along with it. He can say what he wants afterwards, but he didn't make a principled effort to stop that.
So, and they, Collins and Murkowski voted as well for Austin. So I don't understand how they're saying that Pete Hexeth is unqualified as a conservative, but Lloyd Austin was a great Secretary of Defense, or that their judgment about him was confirmed when he served, or Pete Buttigieg was a great transportation, or they were shocked that he thought he was, but he wasn't, or Deb Haaland.
I could go on with other cabinets. So then we come to Mitch McConnell.
He's a little different. He voted, I don't remember, but I don't think that he voted to confirm Deb Haaland, but I may be mistaken.
So why did he vote? And you could take it two ways, Jack. You could say once Collins and Murkowski were informally known to be opposed to Pete Hegseth, he, I don't know what would be, he circulated among the senators and wanted to know if Tillis was going to vote against it.
When Tillis said no, he was, at the last moment, he was going to vote for Hexeth, then I think Mitch might have thought, huh, I can make a principled vote in opposition to Trump, but I won't be blamed because I know it'll be tied in J.D. Vance.
That's the charitable. The uncharitable is that he wanted to stop Pete Hexeth and embarrass Donald Trump for past slights, insults, going back almost a decade.
And that goes back to the, remember when Trump blamed Mitch

for the collapse of the effort

to repeal Obamacare,

that Mitch had assured Trump

that they had the votes

and then they basically carried McCain in

and McCain just,

who had campaigned for re-election

on repealing Obamacare,

it turned out that he hated Trump

more than he disliked Obamacare and voted to extend it. So it was very disappointing to see that happen.
But Pete was confirmed, and the question is what will he do? I think he'll do three things very quickly. He will look at recruitment, and he will stop the farce that when the military is short 30, 40, 50,000 soldiers, then the next year they say, well, you know what? We were looking at our military needs and we really didn't need 30 or 40.
And guess what? We met our recruitment. But when you look at the actual numbers, they're shrinking.
And I think he will stop the DEI that It turns off white males who, as I keep saying, have a record of dying at twice their numbers in the demographic. But if you go in ad after ad after ad, not about people jumping out of a helicopter of all different races, of all, you know, men and women.
And you say all you can be. If you get rid of that and just stress, I'm the first woman, I'm the first gay, I'm the first trans, and all of that, this is a pregnant flight suit, then you're going to turn off people because they feel they will not be promoted or retained or evaluated in a merocratic fashion.
And then I think he's going to look at the procurement. And I think he's going to learn lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East that while it's valuable to have $5 million tanks and $14 billion carriers and $150 million F-22s in a conventional fight against a superpower like China, you could get a much bigger bang for the buck.
And that would be by buying not, you know, five, six, $10 million drones, but thousands of cheap things and put them on drone platforms at sea and very lightly manned and just swarm the zone. And I think he's going to do that.
I think he's going to tell Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed,

Northrop, look, you're very valuable, but we're going to have to stop this where our generals revolve out of the Pentagon and then they go to work for you. and then they call up their former subordinates and advise them that their particular high-ticket

item is better than their competitors. So we're going to still deal with you, but we're going to put some kind of sunset law that when you leave the military, you cannot be a defense contractor or lobbyist.
And he was asked that directly, and he didn't answer it because he just cut off Elizabeth Warren. I think she she had a point but he cut her off brilliantly and he said I'm not a general so are you going to go out and rotate he said I'm not a general but I don't think he will when he leaves anyway we'll see and I think he's going to favor these startup companies with Anderil and these Anderil and all these other ones that we see in Southern California that are saying we can do far more hypersonic, laser, drones, AI, all of this stuff.
Just give us a chance. So I'm very happy that he got confirmed.
One final footnote. There was not one single Democrat that voted for Hegseth.
And there will not be one single Democrat that votes for Patel. And there will not be one single Democrat that votes for Pam Bondi, I think.
Maybe one or two. When you go back and look at the voting records for the Biden nominees, they were all like Marco Rubio.
I mean, pretty much some Republicans voted overwhelmingly with the exception of Deb Haaland. That was a little close, but there were still a lot of Republicans that voted for her.
So it should remind us, as we see in the House wars, that the Democrats have an ironclad rule. And that is whatever your ideology is, if you can be a Marxist in the squad, you can be so-called vestigial blue dog Democrat, you can be anything.
But if you don't vote the way their leadership tells you to vote and you don't have ironclad solidarity, then they're going to punish you. They're going to punish you by not appropriating federal funds to your district or your state.
They're going to punish you by raising the prospect of primarying you with a candidate. They're going to cut the vote blue fund for you and drain off your campaign resource.
They're going to do anything. And they have put the fear of God into all of these people, and they vote lock, stock, and barrel.
I'm not suggesting the Republicans use those terms, but until they get that type of discipline, they're going to need a much bigger margin than they have now. Yeah, well, hopefully the Democrats won't have any nominees for several decades.
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Victor, you love gold. I know you do.
I love liquid gold too, as Donald Trump said. Liquid gold, liquid gold.
You love golden raisins too. Yes, I love the sulfur golden raisins.
Yeah. Hey, two things.
One about Pete. You know, I know Pete a little.
I think it would be fair to call him a friend. I am very fond of him.
I had him on a National Review cruise once. I don't know if you were on that one or not, Victor.
But we had a thing three mornings at 730 and it was called the Burke to Buckley program. It was very scholarly.
I was on it. I was on it.
I think he was living. Was he living in Florida then? No, I think he came.
I forget where he came from. He brought his dad with him, who's a great guy.
I love the guy. But he was there every one of these sessions.
He was really a scholarly guy. So I think that's important to note.
And that leads me to hope he would, amongst the things that he would be taking on is a reform of the curriculum

of our military academies. I think he would be surprisingly positioned to do that because he does care deeply about these matters.
So, that was great. I was at one time, I mean, I was the Simon visiting professor at Pepperdine.
I was a visiting professor in the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine. I was a Nimitz professor visiting at UC Berkeley.
I taught a year as a Schifrin professor at U.S. Naval Academy.
And I'm the Butzke professor at Hillsdale. I know that these are center right, but I have never, never, and I've spoken at maybe over 200 universities in the last 45 years.
I have never been in a more left-wing environment than the U.S. Naval Academy of 2002 and 2003 really was.
And if it wasn't for two or three really great friends I met, I just encountered a hatred there of the Bush administration, George W. Bush.
And me in particular, I was really shocked about it. And I didn't, you know, I tried to be collegial, but I just couldn't believe some of the faculty presentations, and some of them by military.
And I'm not saying that was all true. There was maybe eight or ten really good people.
But there's a problem when you have a set up like the Naval Academy that emulates a private university. And then they rotate people in from the military that have PhDs that want to teach there.
And then you hire 60% or 70% of the faculty out of the civilian pool. So what you do is you get this tenured civilian group of leftists, because all professors are leftists.
And then you get military people that want to stay there as professors and be tenured by civilian leftists. So then that modulates what they say and act like because the civilians do not want a hardcore conservative military person teaching.
And the irony was that most of the students were very conservative. So they had this kind of coded, I don't know, anger resistance at the faculty.
I don't know if it's changed in 22 years, but I was just shocked when I went there. I was shocked.
And I probably, I mean, the professorship gave some funds so you could invite people in that particular chair. Not a lot of money, but you wanted to get...
So, I really... The last two people had not invited very many people.
So, I took it very seriously. And I called up a lot of people to speak and do it for the government in the sense of don't get the regular honorarium.
And at that time, I tried to be ecumenical. So I had Max Boot.
He had a master's degree. You know, he wrote about whatever one thinks about the new Max Boot.
At that particular time, he was an up-and-coming historian. He'd written a book on irregular warfare.
Most of his scholars, I don't like the new Reagan book, but there are many books he wrote that are very good. And he came and he was the editor of the Wall Street Journal page.
Remember that? At a very young age. And I had all these people say, he can't come.
He doesn't have a PhD. He's too conservative.
And then I had Don Kagan. Don Kagan said, you know what? I'll come for almost nothing.
He came down. Oh, Don Kagan is here.
Well, he had just written this great book, The Causes of War, you know. So I thought that they would welcome that I had revived this lecture program that had been inert under the prior, and they didn't, the faculty.
So it was very hard to bring the people. I had people.
I just left there. And then I think I told you there was a very wonderful person there who had been a graduate.
He was in the reserves. He went to Iraq.
He was an Arab linguist. He was offshore training people how to interrogate.
And he came onshore, I think, into one of the hot spots. I don't want to give any information that might reveal his identity.
And he was tragically killed. Kind of a fluke incident going.
And I, this professor came up and basically said, you're responsible for killing him because you supported the Iraq war. And I said, I'd like to give some,.
We don't want your money. So I left very angry about it.
Yeah. And then I remember the late Don Rumsfeld called me and said, I hear you're at the Naval Camp.
We've got a big problem there, and I'm going to reform it. I said, I don't think you're going to reform it.
You're not going to reform it. It's just not going to happen.
You're going to have to go back to the Air Force West Point. And I said, you've got to understand that for an academic coming into history or English and the idea that you live near Washington, D.C., but not in Washington in beautiful Annapolis, and you have the prestige of saying you're a professor at the United States Military Academy, and third, you know that it doesn't work like West Point or the Air Force Academy.
In other words, you can get tenure and a lifetime appointment, and the majority of faculty will be like-minded leftists like you, and the people who will gravitate to the military will be sort of independent thinkers in the military and brave, intellectuals, not your blood and guts patent type. That's not going to change.
And he said, I can change it. I said, no, you can't.
You cannot change that. And I remember he called me up later and he said, I looked into this.
This can't go on. Someday after we're all gone, he said, it can't go on.
And I don't know if they've made changes. Not yet.
Well, I hope Petey Pete looks into it. I think he looks into that.
I really do. One other thing about Murkowski, it's not funny, but she and her dad.

Remember her dad? Yes, I do. He was a senator, and then he was governor, and he lost his primary to Sarah Palin in 2006.
And then Lisa Murkowski lost her primary to Miller, I forget his first name, in 2010. And then she orchestrated a write-in campaign, mostly through the Eskimo tribes.
However, I'm sorry, Native American. I'm not sure how you say it anymore.
But then she won again in 2016, 2022. And as you mentioned, she had the, what do you call it, the second third place the rank voting yeah yeah that came a lot of the rank voting believe it or not came out of the hoover institution we had scholars who really pushed that and i i never understood why that was i think that she is a clearly a woman with tremendous resentment of conservative republicans for what they did to her family.
Remember her dad had the land, the bridge to nowhere? Her dad had the land on the other side of the bridge to nowhere. I don't know.
It was the same thing with Mitt Romney. When he ran twice, he made his hajj to Trump Tower.
Remember that? In 2008 and 12 to get Donald Trump as a private citizens endorsement. And then he waged this really bitter campaign against Donald Trump.
Even though he wasn't a contestant in 2016, people went to Romney and said, you're the senior Republican of the party, given you were our nominee in the last election. You have to use all your intellectual talent and courage and independence to blast this man.
And so he went on up. Remember that campaign in 2016 where he said, Trump University, Trump steaks, Trump whiskey, it's all fake.
Everything he taught, he just went crazy. And Donald Trump, to pay him back, I think it was a mistake, but Donald Trump, to pay him back, said, I don't carry grudges.
That's largely true. He's transactional.
So then he said, Secretary of State, I hear Romney wants it. Remember when Romney went all the way up there? And he actually went through the, he was never going to appoint Mitt Romney, but Mitt Romney made it clear to the world that he, A, really wanted something from the man that he had insulted and tried to destroy, and number two, didn't catch on what was going on.
And once that happened, then he ran for Senate in Utah and Trump, again, is transactional. He thought, you know what? I need that vote.
So he endorsed Romney. And then Romney turned out to be the leading never Trumper in the Republican, almost always voted against Trump.
Well, that scene making him way to... I think they were eating dinner together.
I almost picture Trump having food in front of him and Romney not, but at the Secretary of State beg-a-thon. It was kind of cruel.
Anyway, hey, Victor, let's move on and talk – get your thoughts on – because we have a lot to get to on California and pardons and other things, but maybe quickly, this controversy about Elon Musk and the Nazi salute, which is one of the few things that leftists seem to be grasping onto and trying to make into a major scandal. I note that Benjamin Netanyahu came out with strong praise for Elon Musk.
Do you have any thoughts about this weirdo controversy? Yeah, I mean, Elon obviously went something. He was excited at a crowd, so it went like this, like, touch, and he goes like this.
And they said he paused too long here. But that died very quickly because everybody started showing these things from Elizabeth Warren, from Barack Obama, from Hillary Clinton, even AOC.
AOC. Yeah.
So then he tweeted something because they kept at him. and he tweeted something about pronouns, you know, and he used all of the worst Nazis sort of like, oh, you think I'm boring, like goring, or should I say him or he, him, ler, and he did this word game, and then they went back to the anti-defamation league and Jewish organizations and said you were wrong to support him and say it wasn't a salute.
Now he's making fun of the Holocaust. He wasn't.
He was making fun of the Holocaust in a way, if that's true, the way the left then trivializes Hitler and say you're Hitler, you're Hitler, you're Nazi. Or General Hayden said, oh, Donald Trump is setting up Auschwitz cages.
So then they went after him. I think the subtext is they see him as an asset, the left does, and they have that asset.
And then they look at, in the left's wing mind, remember everybody that what they do is exempt. They often project things that they do that are unlawful or unethical onto the left because they feel that they're exempt.
So it's perfectly okay for Mark Zuckerberg to infuse $419 million into the 2020 to absorb the work of the registrars or for George Soros to put in $60 billion. But you better not be Elon Musk, $60 million.
You cannot be Elon Musk and spend $300 million in swing states. So they detest him for that.
So now what they're doing is they're trying. I went through the Daily Beast, all of the left-wing sites, the Drudge Report, which, by the way, is one of the hardest left ones there is now.
People can speculate why, but I think it's personal pick at the Trump family. But nevertheless, when you go through them, then now they're playing up that Sam Altman, the guy with the AI, you know, he and Musk are arguing.
And there's a story that Susie Wiles says Elon's trying to get an office in the Oval Office. And then they're, you know, Steve Bannon says he hates him.
So what they're trying to do is tear Elon from Trump and say he's a liability, you know, when he's an ego. And that's a lot about going after Elon.
And then the Europeans are going after him because he endorsed the alternative for Germany party, etc. And you're left with just the reality is a very talented, wealthy, controversial guy.
And they're very angry because they feel that they have a monopoly. And they're going to go after the same way very soon.
They're going to go out. They did Peter Till, but they'll go after Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Google people, Cook at Apple, if they don't toe the line.
Right. I don't know where they get their power.
It's social and cultural that these titans, they finally said to themselves, you know, I don't mind paying taxes and I don't mind, you know, ESG, DI, whatever. But when they go into the market and they tell us that these seven companies are going to have AI and nobody else, or you can't do

this and we're going to regulate you, or they don't support us when the Europeans are taxing

the crap out of us.

Now, that's too much.

And then when we have to hire these people out of these elite universities that they

train, and recent, I think Sammy and I talked about that, that his CEO or his partner said

to him, one of his, not his partner, but one of his chief advisors said, I've come to the conclusion that people we hire from these places, they want to destroy us. And they do.
And so, we'll see. But they're going to go after, everybody should just assume that they're going to go after Elon and they're going to try to tell everybody that he hates Trump and Trump hates him.
And the other tech lords are in the fight and it's a mess. I don't think it's quite true, though.
Well, speaking of messes. What do you do to the richest man in the world? I don't know.
He can always escape to Mars. Maybe literally literally be able to victor speaking of messes uh the uh the fires in california and the the devastation there uh donald trump visited yesterday we are recording on the 25th saturday the 25th but trump went to california after he went to north carolina and he had and he had a meeting with Gavin Newsom and a meeting and slash confrontation with Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, and we'll get your take, Victor, on the relevance of these things when we come back from these important messages.
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I just want to state before we get into fires and Newsom, ask Trump that Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus, victorhanson.com. Please check it out.
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Victor, there's so much to ask you about. So, Trump goes to California, and the man who had a special session, created a special session of the California legislature to stick it to Trump, meets him at the airport, Gavin Newsom.
Let's take any thoughts you have on that before we move to his meeting with Karen Bass. Any commentary on that, Victor? Well, Trump has all the cards because the Olympics is coming and Trump rightfully took credit for it when he was president.

He engineered that.

And they know that Los Angeles has got to do this, but he also knows that there's a lot of agendas.

And once this beautiful, this most beautiful, the crown jewel, really, of Los Angeles area, the Malibu Palisades area,

when you combine the hillsides, the sun, the ocean, just, you know, I teach at Pepperdine sometimes. It's just beautiful, just stunning.
And they know it's going to be rebuilt, but they have these engineering ideas. Why did these people inherit a quarter acre lot and a Spanish style villa? This isn't fair.
Maybe now they don't have money to build it or they didn't have insurance. So the city should come in and re-engineer low income housing affordable.
And you know what I'm talking about, European, you know, outside in the suburbs. Every time you go to Milan or Naples or, you know, Marseille, you see these big high rises, kind of like where you guys live outside on Long Island.
And then you supposedly tie them in with light veil and they have green spaces. And this is what they want to do.
And Trump, of course, doesn't. So he comes in there and he says, we're going to put some, you know, he turns to Rick Grinnell, either you or someone you trust, Rick, and Rick is a L.A.
resident, is going to run this, and there's going to be, and then you have Daryl Isis explain there's going to be strings on this. And then Trump, kind of like a maestro, he's orchestrating all these people, and they all have this different agendas, and then this leftist Brad Sherman goes in and says, I don't agree with you this, I don't agree with you that it's like me saying Jack I'd like you to be co-host but I don't agree with you on abortion, I don't agree with you on foreign policy, I don't agree but and that's what he did with no power and I'm thinking are you insane why are you doing this and then so finally Trump was very diplomatic and then he turned and he said, you know, if you think about it, we have a storm coming in.
The fire is out in Palisades. There are looters going in there.
It's restricted. A lot of people off the record know that they have safes or they have gold or they have precious jewels.
And it's their property and they can't go in. So Trump just turns to Karen Bass in front of the world and says, why are they waiting? She goes, well, they'll be in a week.
Why wait a week? What harm can they do? They can go in there and the fire was of intensity, and there's not a lot of, you know, half walls or upstairs. It's just powder.
So they can go in there and hire their own people and get in and clean it up. Let all of these brilliant people who made all this money or they're moving, they have their own idiosyncratic ways of cleaning this up.
Just unleash them, and they will rebuild. And then she thought, maybe, okay, sort of, kind of.
And then there's Gavin Newsom. He wasn't invited, but he met him at the airport.
So out here in California, everybody, Gavin has been blanketing the state and saying, that's a lie about Trump. All the reservoirs everywhere are

full. And what he's saying is, at this time of the year, we don't fill them all the way because

we anticipate a big melt. So I, when I let the water out all year long out of the Sacramento

tributaries, and to a lesser extent when the San Joaquin dumps into the delta and they meet, it doesn't matter in the winter because I need the reservoir. But when, you know, when the melt's gone, I still do it in the summer, but let's not talk about that.
But he's lying because we are in a drought right now, and we're probably not going to get an anticipated snowpack. And when you look at these reservoirs, there's most of them, not the far north ones, but the big ones, Folsom, 60%, San Luis, 70%.
They're not full. They could be full right now if you let these tributaries, that the snow was melting that occurred in November or December, if you could let them not go out to the ocean, you could fill them.
And then if you get a big snow melt, you could let some out, or you could just cram it down the aqueduct or the Mendota Canal. But he's lying about that.
These reservoirs are not full. And you know why you know that? The California Aqueduct, the state project, the state water project that's joined with the Mendota Bypass, Hern-Madona Canal, that's a Central Valley project.
But they have kind of merged. And the point that Trump was making, as a federal partner, I will insist that the water that comes out of the reservoir system and the river system, the Sacramento American climate, all of that will be pumped into the aqueduct.
But right now, these people that are farming millions of two or three million acres along this aqueduct goes 100 miles, longer than 100 miles, those farmers are getting 10% of their contracted water. And who's taking it? Well, over the years, they've given some to San Jose, they've given to Santa Barbara, they've given it to San Luis Obispo, they pump it over.
But the point is, they could get most of it if he wouldn't let it out to the ocean. If he'd fill the aqueduct, there would still be plenty for LA, but he won't do that.
So what he does is, he says, basically he says, well, he lies in so many different ways. He says, well, the reservoirs are full because they're traditionally at 70% in a traditional year in preparation for the huge snowmelt.
There's not going to be a huge snowmelt, probably. There's no reason to keep them that down.
The water that would fill them up in case we have a drought and we are in a drought is not there because you're letting it out. The farmers are not going to get their water that's contracted.
And they want that because out in the west side that the water table runs from 500 to 1500 feet. And if they don't have that water, they have to shut down.
If they shut down, then you get the scrub and the tumbleweeds of my youth. I'd go out to the west side.
My grandfather would always say, if you guys go out there, be careful of valley fever because it's just a dust bowl. That's that fungal infection that's deadly if you don't have immunity to it.
It didn't grow up out here. And then there's just tumbleweeds, coyotes, etc.
The soil was rich, but there was no water. Well, they want that to go back.
They don't want it farmed. When you fly over, it looks like a green garden.
All the way down to the Harris Ranch, all the way up to Los Banos and above, all the way up to Stock, Tracy and up there. So then my point is, then it goes to Los Angeles and then he says, well, they're all full.
If you actually look at the Pyramid Lake, they're about 90%. There's no reason why they're not full.

They're not full because he's not putting enough water in the system.

Would that have made a difference?

Probably not because you had a confederacy of dunces that were operating the water.

And what do I mean by that?

There was enough water to fill the 117 million gallon reservoir at the top of Palisades. It was completely empty because of a tear, a five-foot tear in the plastic cover.
And that was to prevent evaporation and contamination. But it would have, you could have, she should have just said, you know what, fill that thing because we're in fire season right now and you work on the cover and when the cover is done, put it over there.
But just keep filling that thing up. She didn't do that.
She didn't look at the fire hydrants that had been inoperative or stolen or didn't have the pressure. Then she said something like, Quione said something like the head of Water and Power, oh my God, we went through three million gallons of reserve water to augment the system.
And why were they augmenting the system, Ms. Keonez? Because accordingly to Gavin Newsom's, all the reservoirs were full.
So if they were full, you were pressurizing the system in Palisades from different sources. Why did you need 3 million reserve gallons? Because you don't have enough water to keep the system pressurized at its fullest because you don't you have limitations on how much water you can take out of those reservoirs because you're not sure the governor is going to release enough water into the aqueduct and pump it over the grapevine into them or you won't have enough from the owens valley or colorado sources so if she just filled that thing there that thing, they would have had a fighting chance

to stop a lot of the damage.

The whole thing, and so Trump got into that mess.

And, you know, he had all of these people

and many of them were people

from the legislature that hated him.

I mean, the Speaker of the Assembly

called a special session

and then the press

conference to show what they were going to do started attacking Trump. And when Gavin Newsom

says, I have nothing, I need Trump's help, I'm trying to be a part, no, you're not. You just

authorized 20 to 30, 40 million dollars when you have a multi-billion dollar deficit, and you

a lot of that money for the sole purpose of blocking Trump, his executive orders, and then

you turn around and say you want to partner with him and everything he's wrong about you've never diverted water from the California Water Project. That was what you ran on.
That's what you did. You took money from the California bond to build three mega reservoirs and you blew up four small ones.
You blew them up and you use money from the bond to build reservoirs to destroy them. I know you're going to say, well, Vector, that was only 2% of the total water.
Yeah, yeah. But it was iconic that you take money that voters wanted to build reservoirs for insurance that would have given you five to six million, million acre feet, million.
And you took that money to blow up four historic dams on the climate group. So I don't know how he survived that mess.
He'd been on a 19-hour day. But when he turned to Karen Bass and says, why not a week? Week's a long time.
He was soft-spoken. And Melania is with him all the time now, Jack.
She's a partner again. Boy, she just sits there smiling at him and sort of like saying, go on, Don.
Go do it. There's some weird way a force multiplier.
Yes, she is. Because she's so superbly dressed and so beautiful, and she just sits there.
And then I just saw her face. I was looking at the face of all the Trump people when you have that boo day or whatever her name is at the National Cathedral when she was going on that harangue against the Trump family.

There's all these lip readers who say that J.D. turned.
Everybody turned around and said, can you believe that? And Tiffany was the angriest. Tiffany Trump.
What a blank show that was. Hey, Victor.
She left her six bedroom, five bathroom home worth two million in one of the tonious neighborhoods of Washington to talk about that Donald Trump is not sensitive to poor people. He's sensitive to poor people, but they're not your poor people who are illegally here.
There are people who are black in the inner city, and there are people who are Hispanic in the Rio grande valley or the san joaquin valley that are impacted and don't live in two million dollar states like you do and protected from the consequences of your own cheap ideology yeah anyone who sees that and sees if they take the time to see what is happening with the anglicans over in england will say there's no I don't follow it all that closely but I'm not surprised this religion will be extinct in a few years I don't think they believe that Jesus took a whip and chased out the money lenders I think they think that I think she says to the people that Jesus said to the money lenders and the Pharisee type people, I think we need to network on this. You get your people, I'll get mine.
We'll have a discussion and we'll brainstorm and we'll have concessions in the spirit of my Sermon on the Mount. And then you get something and I get something, but we just tone it down.
We don't resort to whips and things. I wonder how they would rewrite the Sermon on the Mount.
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By the way, Victor, I want to get your thoughts on Trump's quid pro quo for aid to California. But I noticed you watch old movies and people don't say Los Angeles.
They say Los Angeles. It seemed to be like that was a traditional way to pronounce the city's name.
Anyway, I just bring that up because I thought I heard you say it similarly recently. Okay.
When I mispronounce words, people sometimes think that I've got an agenda that I'm influenced by my vast knowledge of foreign languages.

No, no, no. And it's not true.
It's usually just... No, it's part of your Norm Crosby stand-up routine, I think.
All right, Victor. Donald Trump said the price for helping California is for the state to adopt voter ID laws, which, by the way, is a very popular position with the population, not necessarily the Assembly and the legislature of California.

Do you think that's good?

They'll never do it.

They will never do it because they don't want to disenfranchise millions of people who are here illegally and are voting and have been long residents. They just don't want to do it.
They'll never do it. They will never do that.
They will only do it if things get very worse. And there is a charismatic Republican leader, and he can galvanize all of the anger about the $150 billion boondoggle Fresno, I mean Merced to Bakersfield high-speed rail, or what they're doing with water, or these fires are now endemic, and they're going to keep going.
That's the sad thing about it. There's still millions of acres of uncleared brush chaparral around Los Angeles.
We haven't had a big storm. They may have a little rain today.
We don't know. But the winds will kick up still.
The San Andes are not quite over. They're still, especially if it's hot during the day, it's very cold.
When you get these cold nights and you get these warm days in Los Angeles, these winds go up in the canyons. It's just terrible.
And they haven't changed. And what does somebody mean by that? I would say, do you still have 100 vehicles that are not running because of air pollution updates? I bet you do.
Has anybody filled up that reservoir in Pacific Palisades just to show people, are all the hydrants working now? I don't think so. Do you have a new fire chief and a new assistant fire chief? I don't think so.
Is the deputy mayor fired because he allegedly phoned in a bomb threat? I don't think so. So if the conditions haven't changed

and the people who caused the problem haven't changed and there's not a radical, are there

right now thousands of fire people combing the hills around Los Angeles to cut down the brush

and to strangle, kill, murder, bomb, cut down the poor little milk vetch plant that they love

I'm not saying that one-party states can't work. Texas works.
But this party, it doesn't work. You've got a bunch of socialists that are very wealthy and materialistic, and they feel that they have enough money and zip codes and influence.
When you go through, if you just take, I take, if you want to know what's wrong with California, just go, start in La Jolla, one of the most beautiful places in the world, San Diego, La Jolla. Drive up and go up to Newport, one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Keep going along the coast to Ventura, Oxnard, and then go to Montecito, one of the most beautiful places in the world. And then just take a little hike up in those beautiful places like San Luis Obispo.
Then keep going up to Monterey and Santa Cruz and then on the way to the Bay Area. And you'll see more money there than anywhere in the world.
Some of the most beautiful homes and 90% of those people vote hard left. They really do.

And then you jog over to the Inland Empire, San Bernardino, or you go up from, say, Bakersfield, go up to the 99, you know, pull over into a counter, I don't know, in Delano, and then come by and go into West Selma where I live. and then you can make a little detour into Madera and you go up to the 99

all the way to some, and you'll see some of the poorest people in the world living. And these communities are heavily reliant on entitlements.
And those communities make so much money and they have such beautiful homes that they're willing to pay it. And the people in between that don't have that kind of capital and can't afford the tax and don't take government services to the same degree, they've left.
They've left. And that's California.
And I don't know how you change it except the people along the coast, the 30 million of the 40 million residents have to make a change of mindset. And I just don't see it.
I say that because I've been 22 years at the Hoover Institution, driving back and forth every week, and I see these kids generation after generation, some of the wealthiest people in the world, and especially from California, and they're hard left when they're there. My favorite was parking on campus during George Floyd that, I think it was May of 2020, and the thing was shut down, but there was a young kid in flip-flops, and he pulled in with a BMW convertible in

May or June. It was during the summer.
And he had flip-flops, and he had a BLM sticker on his $120,000 BMW convertible. I thought, there it is.
That's it. Yep.
Well, I'd like to mention one other thing, Victor. get your thoughts on it and then we're going to

head to the

last Well, I'd like to mention one other thing, Victor, get your thoughts on it, and then we're going to head to the last chapter of the show, and we're going to talk about pardons. But pardons is part of this.
It has to do with Karen Bass. We brought this up before that in her previous life as a hardcore communist, maybe she's a softcore communist now.
But she went to Cuba regularly. She was an organizer for this Venseramos Brigade.
That was big in California. Well, they taught a variety of future looming terrorists.
And those terrorists with names like Tim Blunk, Susan Rosenberg, Linda Sue Evans, these are the people who engaged in a number of terrorist activities in the U.S., including bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1983.
So here we had an actual attack on the Capitol by people connect the dots to this Karen Bass. And then also thinking of pardons, all these people, well, not pardons, they had their long conviction, because they were engaged in a variety of terrorist activities, bombing other federal facilities, armed robbery of the Brinks truck in New York.
But they were arrested, convicted, some of them 50-year jail terms. Guess who ended their sentences? Was Bill Clinton in one of his last acts as president.
He let all these SOBs out of jail. So we have pardons.
We have capital, true attacks on the capital of the United States, And somehow or other, Karen Bass's fingerprints. That's a good point because I was looking at the pardons.
Joe Biden, if you count clemencies, reductions, and pardons, has pardoned about 8,000. and when you do the 2,000 of Barack Obama, you get 10,000.
So of the last four presidents, George W. Bush only did 200.
And now Trump has got about 1,600, but 1,500 of them were just this one pardon. He did about 200 in his first two.
So what I'm getting at is of the last four presidents, the two conservative presidents that had 12 years of governance pardoned or offered clemency to 20% of what the eight years, the same period, eight years of Obama and four years of Biden. In other words, they did almost five times as many pardons and clemencies.

And people are so upset about the J-C. And the thing about the J-6 very quickly is, all I would say to Liz Cheney, Adam Kissinger, Adam Schiff, and by the way, Jack, just as a little sidelight, you see on the Internet all of these outraged expressions by Adam Schiff, Andrew Wiseman, the brains behind the Mueller investigation, the Machiavellian operator, and people like Chuck Schumer in 2021 when it came up that Donald Trump in his last two weeks

could give a preemptive pardon for the people that week that had just been arrested and pardoned himself. There was no idea.
There was no ever clear evidence that he was going to do that. In fact, he tweeted that he wouldn't.
But, of course, like Trump, he said, I could if I wanted to, but I won't. But they went nuts.
And those are being played now. And they say, anybody who accepts a preemptive pardon, de facto is guilty, because they would turn it down if they didn't.
And now they're all, this is wonderful. You have to have preemptive pardons.
And the thing about January 6th is, one, they stonewalled. They'll never tell us the true FBI role to Kash Patel as FBI director.
They said, we don't know. We can't tell.
And then they said 23 informants. Again, Matthew Rosenberg said, I was there.
They were everywhere. He said, liberal, little surprise, New York Times.
They would not release all of the videos for three years. I don't think we've still seen them.
There is missing encrypted files and evidence in the January 6th committee that they mysteriously disappeared shortly before the Republicans came into power after taking the House in 2022. Somebody destroyed evidence.
If there's nothing to hide, then Liz Cheney should have just said, Cassie Hutchinson, you go testify any way you want. But there's no need of me to have a stealthy phone call and make sure I walk through your testimony when your lawyer is not present.
And you know, if I'm Nancy Pelosi, the evidence is out there. Kevin McCarthy, we've never, why would I turn down your nominations? You know, three or four more Republicans, we've never done that in the history of the House.
Sure, it's your right, just as my right. When I was in the minority, you didn't turn down my nominations.
And then she didn't do that. She said, basically, I just want Liz and I want Adam because they voted to impeach Trump and they are going to be defunct and out of the house.
So I know that they're not going to vote in the way you would like. And then, of course, in addition to all that, they didn't have to lie.
If there was nothing wrong with the narrative, then just say that Brian Sicknick had a stroke. And then why fabricate that four people that were in law enforcement who later killed themselves for various reasons, they died, we're going to have a ceremony in the rotunda, all five were killed.
There was only one person killed. And if you really, really believe the narrative, then there was no reason not to just get the evidence out that Officer Byrd shot an unarmed woman, lethally shot her for the misdemeanor of going through a window.
A little diminutive veteran, Ashley Babbitt, was not an existential threat to anybody. She broke the law, but in the United States, when a law enforcement officer in any way is suggested that kills or did anything, I mean, Officer Chauvin didn't take a gun and shoot George Floyd, who was unarmed.
He tried to restrain him because he was resisting arrest. He was on fentanyl.
He just passed counterfeit currency. He was on drugs, fentanyl, and he had COVID, he had heart problems, etc.
But we had his picture in a nanosecond and his name and his address. So there was no reason to hide Bird or to tell us that he didn't.
He had a wonderful record when he had a checkered record. He left a loaded firearm in a bathroom in the Capitol.
So the point I'm making is... I think he shot a car in his neighborhood also.
Yes, he did. And then what else did he do? He tried to make sure that he got money from the victim's fund of January 6 law enforcement officers as if he was a victim.
So the point I'm making is all of those narratives were suppressed.

And if you really have nothing to hide, then you don't need a video to surface suddenly right now that Nancy Pelosi is in a car and said, oh, my God, I should have had more Capitol Police.

Why did they do all that?

And that's the problem.

And then you don't get your fact checkers and say, well, you can't talk about May, June, July, August, September, October, 2020, when 14,000 people were arrested because there were more arrested. Yes, there was more arrested.
And you know why there was more arrested? Because you guys killed 35 people, not none, 35. And you blew up $2 billion of damage and you blew up a precinct, police precinct, federal property and a courthouse and then you went in and tried to torch the St.
John's Episcopal Church. You tried to storm and that's why 14.
And you know what? The percentage of people arrested who were let go with nothing far exceeds the number of the 1,500 or so that were arrested on January 6th. The conviction rate, the jailing rate is many times higher.
Yet you go to those fact checkers and they just lie through their teeth. So there's no connection with these two things.
And, you know, this person was given 10 years for arson during the 2020. No one quite had that.
That is so frustrating. It really is.

Well, Victor, we have one or two more topics to bring up and we'll get into some of your

one of your favorite people, Anthony Fauci, and we'll do all that when we come back from these

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Again, we're recording on Saturday, the 25th.

And this particular episode is up on, to check my notes recording on Saturday the 25th and this particular episode is up on to check my notes Tuesday the 28th Victor one last thing on pardons if you don't mind I want to bring it a little close here to where I live in Connecticut I live in Milford Connecticut which is about 10 miles from Bridgeport so this is one of the more notorious pardonese of Joe Biden and let me just read this report from many of our local papers here about the Connecticut drug Kingpin, convicted in the deaths of an eight-year-old boy and his mother, was granted clemency by Biden. It's pissing off, excuse my French, even fellow Democrats.
Adrian Peeler, 48, of Bridgeport, served 25 years in state prison on conspiracy charges in the death of Karen Clark and her eight-year-old son, B.J. Brown, in January 1999.
The two had been slated to testify a month later against Peeler's brother, fellow gang, drug gang leader, Russell Peeler, who was on trial for killing Clark's boyfriend. Little BJ was in the car.
He saw what happened. He saw this drive-by shooting.
He was going to testify. And Adrian made sure the little boy was murdered and mom was murdered and he was convicted and went away.
I have to say this locally, what's one of the impacts of this crime irrespective of what biden did was okay wow if i'm in a drug-ridden community and if i see a crime happen and if i'm going to testify there's a good chance i may end up in a grave this is really a chilling impactful thing yeah and for biden to pardon him is like it's just staggering. And to do it at the end.
Just everybody who's listening, ask yourself, if Joe Biden had won the election, do you think he would have done this? You're going to say, well, he had nothing to lose, Victor. He wasn't going to go up for election.
No, he wouldn't have done it because he would have had zero public support going into a second term. And that would have been a midterm campaign issue that would have ruined his down ticket support in the Congress.
He only did it in the last days or hours even of his administration because he knew it had no public support. And he was an embittered old man.
And he hated he hated Donald Trump but more importantly he began to hate more his own party who deposed him and he had no circumspection he didn't say to himself you know I was going nowhere in 2020 I had bouts of dementia I had embarrassed myself on the debate stage and then these saved me, Jim Clyburn and the Black Caucus and the Obama people. And they allowed me to be president when I was not fit and they controlled the agenda, but they got rid of me.
So they created me and they got rid of me, but I had a four years, which I didn't deserve. You can't think like that.
And either can his wife. So he's a mean spirited person.
And all the dementia did was take away the veneer of control, took away his blinders. And we saw the old Joe Biden from Scranton, who he really was.
If you go back and look at his career, he was a mean, excuse the language, SOB. He always was.
He had racist tendencies. He was a plagiarist.
He was a pathological revaricator. No need to get into the lies that he defamed the person who was in the auto accident that killed his wife, who was not culpable at all.
He did every despicable thing. I go back to Tara Reid, all of that stuff.
And then, you know, every time I see Donald Trump hug somebody, I just say, if that was Joe Biden, that girl would be in big trouble right now.

Because he would say something or blow on her.

And no one says a word.

So, anyway, I would just like to talk about that very quickly as we end, Jack, about.

Well, I have to read one thing, though, before you do it. Go ahead.
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It sounds very, I'm going to go see it. Yeah.
Before you go see it, Victor, and before you start taking a two-by-four to the head of Anthony Fauci, although he's so small, maybe all you need is a toothpick, I do want to say that Peeler, who we were talking about before on the part, and like there has to be some parallel to Biden's madness and nastiness. It seems like there had to be some kind of like an earmark thing, like, oh, he's going to do this.
How did Peeler get on a list? And how did all these other SOBs get on this? Well, you know, Biden didn't know. From what Speaker Johnson said when he went to meet with him, he said, why did you shut down these liquid natural gas projects for export in Louisiana? Right.
And that was critical because we promised, you promised the Europeans you would supply them with a reliable, affordable source of energy. And Biden said, oh, I didn't do that.
Who said I did that? I don't know. I don't know if he was here to know.
And so you get the impression from Johnson that this was a normal occurrence when these people do, they think, what would be a really spectacular left wing performance art act? So when I leave office and I go apply to Google or I go to apply to the Saurus Foundation, I can say I was the architect

that shut down the LNG facilities for Biden. That's how they think.
So they're thinking, we're going to go out in the left-wing sphere and what do we do? Well, let's get, I'm a lawyer. I want to go to this law firm.
Oh, I want to go to the state government post in California. I want to be ahead of, you know, Apple's Interior DEI program.
So I'll just, let's go through all these names. Now, which people have been oppressed or discriminated or fit our DEI categories, and we don't really care what they did, and we can take credit for it.
So believe me, Jack, we don't know who did it, but it's that army of leftists that came into the Biden administration via the Obamas and via the recommendations and promotions of Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, and Bernie Sanders type. Those people are preparing these lists, and we'll never know their names, but they will not be shy in identifying themselves at the particular opportune moment when they think it helps their career.

And it will help their career in these leftist institutions. If you think that retiring generals revolve into the major defense contractors, and many of them do, The left-wing counterpart of that, they revolve into Silicon Valley, at least until recently, where they get, you know, James A.
Baker, the FBI lawyer who went from about a quarter million dollar salary at the FBI to seven million dollars a year as Jack Dorsey's chief counsel at Twitter,

where all the other 15 other retired FBI people were working. Take a breath, and now we're just finishing with your former fellow alumnus.
Is that right? Don't. Okay.
I don't understand. Donald Trump stopped

federal monies used to protect three people, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Anthony Fauci. Now, I have read, and people correct me, that Anthony Fauci's security detail was paid out of National Institute of Health funds and authorized by Joe Biden, and it would sunset or finish when Joe Biden went out of office.
So I think in that case, he simply did not renew this NIH program. It wasn't that he went out in the middle of it that had an unlimited tenure and said get rid of it.

But then the next question is

you're talking about

a person who had

secret service, supposedly

the best security detail almost had

his head blown off.

So I think Trump is saying to them

if they want to kill

you, it's not going to help you because it didn't help me. And I have the biggest legion of security in the world.
Number two, how long does this last? He asked that. They said, Mr.
President Trump, are you feeling any responsibility for anything? He's injured. No.
How long does it last? For life? and you know we all comparing great things to small

you injured. No, how long does it last? For life? And you know, we all, comparing great things to small, I have an angry reader call, and that I just kind of, every month or two, we go through the emails, and they are full of FU, and I have kind of an angry reader scale.
And they're threatening. I had a guy write and say, I know where you live.
I know your phone number. I know what you look like.
And I know you go to Washington. Next time you go to Washington, it's going to be your last trip.
And actually somebody, I printed that letter. And somebody online said, I'm a prosecutor, a federal prosecutor.
And I know from your email who that was because I put his email on there. And then I had a guy drive into my farm and I went out and I said, could I help you? And he said, I got a bone to pick with you.
I said, you know, this is a private residence. He said, I'm not leaving.
I said, fine, but you're on my property. And I looked over there and he had parked his car hidden in the orchard.
Why would he do that? So, I said, just go by, wouldn't want to see you, wouldn't want to be you. And then he just sat there in his car for four or five hours.
So, my point is, I think anybody that has a modicum of public exposure encounters thatounters that. I was at the Reagan Airport not too long ago.
I think I told you, Jack. And I got off the plane and I noticed out of the corner of my eye there was this young man who fit perfectly the Antifa profile.
Skinny, white, all black, stocking, a hoodie. And behind him was a large African-American

guy. So this guy, when I was walking, he, I saw that he kept walking and then he walked very fast

and hit me in the back of the head, really kind of hard. And then he jumped down the escalator,

almost like the movies where he's going. And the African-American guy had actually seen him

Thank you. I saw you when you got off the plane.
I was boarding and I got to get back. And I was not that far from the loading, you know, and I was still in security.
So we all encounter those things. John Bolton and then Trump made a very good point.
He said these these people made a lot of money. So Anthony Fauci, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jack, but he and his wife, I think, were the highest paid couple in the federal government.
I think they were each making somewhere between $400,000 and $450,000 a year. Unless they get drug royalties.
Yes. So he's a very wealthy person.
And he can afford $150,000 if he thinks that as a private citizen, after getting two years of government support, that he has offended people. And when I write stuff, I always think about, I always think when I get off this podcast, I say, did you, I always ask myself, were you unfair to anybody? Did you say a swear word that's going to offend children listening? Did you unfairly castigate? Did you have to, do you have to retract anything? I've written probably 4,000 columns in my life.
I've only had one retraction. So I, and I'm not a celebrity like Anthony Fauci, but he has the resources to protect himself.
Now we go to John Bolton. John Bolton is very wealthy.
I know for a fact that he had a PAC that earned $7 million a year. And I know a lot of people, I'm not going to mention their names, who have called me and said, I give this amount of money to John Bolton.
What do you think I should do? And I've always said, it's none of my business. If you want to donate to him, and they said, would you donate if you had money? I said, no.
And I wouldn't. I have nothing against John Bolton, but during the impeachment, John Bolton was writing a tell-all narrative.
And he understood that if he was to oppose and say Donald Trump needed to be impeached, he would get a big backlash. On the other hand, if he kind of winked and nod, and he did, and they had problems with classify, remember that back and forth about his memoirs? And then he made, it was a bestseller.
I know what that type of book will make. I do.
So he has a lot of funds. If he thinks he's in danger, then just hire somebody for $150,000 a year, and his speaking fees, pretty much, because I've spoken at avenues that have hired him, he can pay that in four or five speaking engagements for the entire year.
And I would imagine that he will be safer than Donald Trump will be at the level of the Secret Service. The one I have a problem with is Mike Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo, unlike Anthony Fauci and John Bolton, does not have those resources. He really doesn't.
I know him. I've known him.
He was one of Trump's most loyal people. He had a falling out, as I understand, for three reasons, Jack.
And I don't think these reasons constitute any defection on Mike Pompeo's part toward Donald Trump. But there was a time, you remember, right after January 6th, when they were floating names of possible, remember there was a flirtation, no announced candidacy, no campaigning, but there was a suggestion that Mike Pompeo was going to run against Donald Trump.
Do you remember that? Jack? Yes, yeah. He did throw his hat in the ring.
Yes, and the people in the Trump family said that's why he lost weight. You remember all that? So anyway, and then that was one, and the two, after the Mar-a-Lago raid, he said, and I'm doing this by memory, everybody, so please correct me.
But I will try to be fair to both sides. He characterized the SWAT raid into Mar-a-Lago in terms of, well, it's unusual, but there was some culpability.
If Donald Trump had better, what, communicated, it wouldn't have been necessary, something like that. And then a third time, he said something about the January 6th thing.
Okay. So I think what happened was the Trump people felt, A, if we come back into power, we're not going to have anybody.
It's not going to be directed at anybody. We're not going to have anybody from the first administration.
Maybe Rick Grenell or maybe Radcliffe, but pretty much we've got to have real strong MAGA people. And then there was some resentment about that, but the point is Iran has threatened to kill Bolton.
I shouldn't say has, at one point threatened to kill Trump, and more threats against Trump, but also Pompeo and Bolton for the death of Soleimani. I will say that the way that Trump will protect Trump and protect Bolton and protect Pompeo if Trump continues what he's doing vis-a-vis Iran.
And he has told them, if anybody is hurt by Iran, we're holding you directly responsible. Did that have an effect? Yes.
The Iranian president that was elected not too long ago gave an interview recently, and they asked him point blank, are you going to develop a bomb? Probably not. We don't want to.
Are you going to keep sending terrorists? This was a lie, but he said probably we want peace. Have you in the past or in the future or in the present planned to kill the American president or have it?

No, no, no.

No, we're not going to do that.

So the point is that Donald Trump is creating deterrence and making it clear that if the Iranians send out what, as they purportedly did, a team to kill Donald Trump, but they try to touch one American.

And that will be as valuable as security detail.

That's my point.

Yeah.

So, bottom line, I would have said to myself, Bolton and Fauci, who don't like me and have written a lot of terrible things about me, and they have, both of them, have independent funds to at least get a security person, and the government can't afford to give lifelong, and in the case of Pompeo, I would have probably said, I'm going to extend, because he doesn't have those resources, and he had a higher profile as Secretary of State than did Bolton at National Security. And he had a longer tenure than John Bolton, and he was more intimately involved with the decision to kill Soleimani than was Bolton's brief tenure.
Therefore, he may have greater exposure, and he has less personal resources, and I would have extended it for a year just to see what happens. Yeah.
But they made a, the news is so biased and down that if you look, if you Google that issue, almost the first 20 Google searches will show up. Donald Trump yanks security.
When asked, he said, I don't feel I'm responsible. That was all it was.
No background, nothing. And I wish when he saw the Google people at the inauguration festivities, he should have walked over to them and said, you know what, you can really help this country.
Just don't use your algorithms to wire and warp the results of Google searches. Because every single Google search is wired to show the first 20 sites are left-wing propaganda bias.
And you just Google Cash Patel, who's coming up, I think, on Wednesday or Thursday for confirmation. Just Google it and see what comes up.
Anybody with a right mind who takes the Schiff counter memo or the Nunes original memo that Cash was very instrumental in writing and looks at the events since the issuance of those competing narratives knows that Adam Schiff was lying through his teeth. And the Nunes memo has stood the test of time.
And yet, if you go in and look at Google searches, it will say Cash Patel had a hand in the erroneous or biased or misleading Nunes memo. So, bottom line.
Who's more likely? I get kind of animated with this idea that Anthony Fauci or John Bolton is entitled to lifetime security when the president is doing all he can, unlike Joe Biden. Let me put it this way to end.
John Bolton was in more danger with the security deal with Joe Biden as president than he is with Donald Trump without it. Because Joe Biden gave no indication there would be any consequences because he was begging Iran to get back in the Iran deal and appeasing them.
Donald Trump has a different argument and they know that if anybody tried to make an attempt on anybody's life, he would probably go to an existential level in replying to that.

I know that because comparing, I'll just finish with this, Jack.

Do you remember when we expelled during the early Trump administration some, we had, excuse me, during the Obama administration, we had expelled some Russian oligarchs, but they were in the Russian embassy. And Putin replied by, and we put them under sanctions and said they couldn't go.

And then Putin replied by saying the following American former diplomats couldn't go back into the Soviet Union.

And we were going to consider them persona non grata. Okay.
So, a person, I won't mention the person. He was from the opposite political persuasion of mine.
And this speaks well of Mike Pompeo. And I'm relating a personal story, but I'll try to be as non-descriptive, so there's no individual.

Anyway, someone approached me from the Hoover Institution and said, there is this person who had a high diplomatic post and Vladimir Putin has targeted him that he can't go back into Russia and we feel that he might be endangered because of that. And I said, I don't think he is.
It's just a tit for tat. No, no.
And I said, why are you asking me? I'm just nobody. Well, you may or may not have contacts that we don't have.
I said, I don't. And they said, would you please try to contact the Secretary of State? So I made some phone calls and I talked to Mike Pompeo just for a second.
You know what his first reply was? Do not worry about it. We are way ahead of you people.
The Russian government will not touch one hair on any of these people. We do not care what the political persuasion is.
We do not care what administration they work for. Our diplomats will be sacrosanct, and we have communicated that to the Russians.
So he is safe to go whatever he wants. It's a Russian decision whether to let him in or not.
But if they allow him to go in the country and he wants to take the risk to go meet with Putin dissidents, we will still assume, still assume that he is safe. And if they touch him, they're going to be in big trouble.
That was Pompeo's attitude. So that's why I think he deserves some special consideration.
I really do. Because he was there for so long as Secretary of State.
And he made the primary decision that the Iranians really got angry about, so many. And he may be a target.
And he was a very honest guy, and he went in there with no money, and he didn't leave. He's not making a lot of money, to my knowledge.
And I've always found him a very principled person. And I understand why they had a falling out with the Trump administration.
But I don't see culpability on either side. I just think it was a disagreement.
And I think he has a role to play in future conservative administration. Yeah.
Well, that's a terrific note on which to end this episode, except that we have some of that end of episode business to attend to, which is one is to say that I write a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society. It's called Civil Thoughts, and I want to encourage you to sign up.
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Victor's getting 4.9 plus average from over 7,000 people who've done that. Thank you if you have.
Here's a comment that was filed the other day. It's titled Current Events Through the Lens of History.
I listen to this podcast regularly and appreciate BDH's succinct, articulate, and down-to-earth analysis so much. He affords an opportunity to look at current events through the lens of history, clear-sighted, intelligent, and very entertaining.
And this is from Honest Grace. And we thank you, Honest Grace.
And we thank everybody else who leaves these comments. And, Victor, you've been terrific.
Well, thank you. And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Thank you, everybody, for listening. We wouldn't be able to continue without your listening and adherence and loyalty.
I really appreciate it. So does Jack.
I do. Yes.
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