1920s Idealistic Diplomacy, Cabinet Meetings, and Budget Bills

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Victor is the Martin A. Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
This is our Saturday edition and we have Victor talking about, what were you going to talk about this middle cycle? I think I'm going to talk about, i hadn't really thought seriously about the order but uh after we finished the great depression and i want to talk about legislation in the 20s uh international treaties the kellogg-breon pact uh the washington arms limitation agreement and the rap Apollo Treaty that tried to deal with the either anticipated the Great Depression, but mostly tried to deal with the fallout of World War II and then later the Depression. Some of them, like the Washington Arms Treaty, went on into the 30s with sequela.
So we'll talk about international efforts to ward off another World War I and depression. All right.
And before that, we'll look at some more news. Obviously, there's been lots of changes in the tariff war for Donald Trump.
And he also had a cabinet meeting that was made available to the press. So we were all able to watch his cabinet meeting.
So we'll talk about it. I watched the whole thing.
We'll talk about those two things first. Stay with us and we'll be right back from these messages.
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And I... So, Victor, there's been a couple of things.
Donald Trump, since we talked last, put a stay of 90 days on most tariffs, but not China. And I think that's the thing.
I think he still has, for negotiating purposes, that's still de facto 10% on everybody. And that's going to be negotiated, collected at the end if they can't reach an agreement.
Sort of Damocles. So everybody went crazy.
The stock market had historic losses, 10%, 12%, and then it had the largest gain on Wednesday, April 9th, since 2008, 17 years. Yeah.
And today, as I'm speaking, I don't know what it is, but it has gone gyrated as people are trying to figure out what the trade situation is. Everybody, if you look at the left-wing media, it says Donald Trump pivots, Donald Trump folds, Donald Trump collapses, concedes.
If you look at the conservative media, Donald Trump pivots or Donald Trump's art of the deal. Somewhere in between, I suppose, is what he was doing.
But Donald Trump doesn't sit down and he writes out steps one to 10 because he's not going to be shackled by that. He says, I'm going to notify all these trade cheaters that are running up helping a trillion dollars

in trade deficits, especially China,

which is responsible for 40% of it, 35 to 40%.

And we'll see how it goes.

We'll look at the market.

We'll see this.

And then he did that.

And he thought that because they all shrieked to high heaven and they all threatened him with reciprocal tariffs, the market might hold off a little bit and see what he was going to do. But the market went crazy at that news.
And then he tried to get the message out during that on Monday, tried to get the message out. And, you know, the worst day was Friday, but he tried to get the message out during that on Monday, tried to get the message out.

And, you know, the worst day was Friday, but he tried to get the message out that he was negotiating. Seventy of these countries wanted to cut a deal.
And they were under threat of a 10% tariff, but they were negotiating. And the market, everybody went crazy.
And then step three is he said they don't have anything in common with China. There were people crazy said they're going to have a new block, China, Japan.
Remember we talked about it. I said that's not going to happen.
So where we are right now is he's got 70 countries that know they have been raising inordinate tariffs. Privately, they know the jig is up.
It's just a question of how much can they give up. And he's going to select, I imagine, I'm just pontificating here, but I think he'll pick two or three big ones.
Germany, France, EU in total, Japan, South Korea. and he will say to them, let's cut a deal.

It won't be what he wants completely, but it will reduce their deficits, our deficits with them sizably.

At that point, I think the plan is the other states will fall in line and they'll all look at China and they'll say,

as Panama is today, we didn't want to deal with Panama, but we looked at Joe Biden and he was

decrepit. And we remember the Obama years and then we looked up what they did to you and we didn't

think you were going to be around. So the Americans were going to be asleep at the wheel.
So we cut a

deal with China. But if you want your Panama come Canal back in its old mode, pro-American mode, then you've got to kick them out for us.
We can't do it. So get BlackRock down here to seal the deal on the entry and exit ports and send in a big warship so the Chinese understand you're serious and we'll be your partner.
And he's saying that. That's what the Europeans are saying.
German, if you look at German jobs and manufacturing, they've gone down about 20% because of China. Everybody says, well, it's just paranoid about China.
No, it's the whole world because when you look at their four or five trillion trillion investment, they're creating products for which they don't really have a domestic market for. It's all predicated on dumping it cheaper than domestic production in Europe, in Japan, in Korea.
And what Trump is now trying to do is saying if we all stick together, we're about 70% of the trade, not them. We're much bigger than they are.
And as far as we are, we only have 11% of our economies based on exports. So but China is very, very vulnerable.
So what he's trying to do is cut deals with all these countries, mitigate the damage, just like he did with NATO. He said, you know what, someday they're going to invade you guys or you can't trust the Russians.
They laughed at him. I mean, literally laughed at him at that meeting when he said, don't trust the Russians on natural gas.
And then they didn't listen to him. And then finally he said, I might get out of NATO.
I might do this. And then when he left office, 20, almost, I think it was 18 out of the 32 had agreed.
And now it's all but eight, nine, eight or nine. Same order of the deal.
So they'll cut a deal. And then he's going to try to redirect all this to China.
And China is not acting very rational. I mean, their Secretary of State put up a film of Mao Zedong, Korean War Vintage, when he was – they had sent Chinese troops across the Yala River that overran the Americans in November, December of 1950.
And then Eisenhower, you of running. Truman was president.
And then I came in in early 53, and within six months they had a ceasefire. But in that process of negotiating that ceasefire, Mao Zedong said, we don't listen to Eisenhower.
We do what we want. We're Chinese.
And they thought that was going to gain them worldwide respect. In other words, they're saying we're going to put on a mass murder who killed more people than anybody in the world, including Hitler and Stalin combined.
And he's going to threaten everybody on this tape. And you're all going to think that's great.
And you're going to be afraid of it. No, everybody's going to despise you for doing

that. As I said last time, I just want to know what China's cards are.
What are their cards that they're playing? And this is what this, the big winner in all this is Scott Bessant. Yeah, about China, furthermore, is everybody looks at their 6% GDP and they look at taking over with Belt and Road, but they're very vulnerable.
It's all predicated on nobody's going to react to them in concert. Their attitude is if Europe, if Japan, if South Korea, if Australia, if the UK, if the United States tries to push back, then we'll go to the other countries and help turn them against them.
But if everybody sticks together and Trump is trying to be amicable with our trade partners that haven't really stuck together with us because they've had asymmetrical tariffs. But they've got 300,000 students here.
They want every one of them. Every single weapon system, whether an airplane or a tank or a rocket or a missile, is copied from us.
And where did that technology come from? It came from either forcing companies that are doing business in China to turn over their expertise or stealing it under the guise of green card holders and students. Everybody knows that.
So I'd ask our audience this. Just imagine something right now.
When this is all over and we have a same tariff that China does, we put one on them what they do. And that will cut their surplus probably 150, 200 billion.
And we just tell them, you know what? We don't really need your students anymore. We've got all kinds of students that want to come here.
We've got students from Europe. They're underrepresented.
We've got people from India. We've got people from Japan.
Why don't we have 100,000 Japanese students? Why don't we have 50,000 Germans? You know what I mean? We don't need your students. All they do is pay extra premiums, and they're here as a force of the universities to make money, a force multiplier.
So we don't need them. And we don't want you to buy any more farmland.
And you know what? I think, I don't know where you're

going to get your technology, but you're not going to get it from us anymore. Go get it from Vietnam.
That would be a much more stable world. So that's what he's aiming at.
And Chi's going to wake up one morning and say, you know what? We're trapped because if we go into Taiwan, everybody's going to put trade junctions on us. And right now

they're planning to decouple. So the United States and Europe are suddenly got wise to us,

and they're going to start building their own pharmaceutical protective equipment for COVID

type epidemics. They're going to get their own parts.
They're not going to need us anymore.

And if they don't need us anymore, then we're going to be in big trouble. So I think he's going to get a lot of support.
Right now, I don't understand American capitalists. I really don't.
I mean, they're all up there as if they're so smart, so moral. Donald Trump is doing this.
Why don't you just get out of China? Whoever said that was a smart thing to do? Why do you go over to China and give them our expertise and open a company when you know that in a matter of years, they're going to copy the layout of the plant, they're going to copy the operation, they're going to copy the managerial architecture, and they're going to copy your product and your technology. And then they're going to tell you after you've outlived your utility, see you, wouldn't want to be you.
And then you're going to go, well, I'll sue you in a Chinese court. Good luck with that.
Just get the blank out of that country. And that would be the best thing you can do.

It is a sinister Maoist Stalinist country. And it bodes no, we should have learned that with COVID.
And we will learn that with Taiwan. We already learned it with Tibet and the Uyghurs.
Just get out of that country. Do not expose your country's technology to theft.
And if you need it, it's not like Mark Zuckerberg or Bezos or all these people who are multi. Look what they did to Uber.
Uber went over there. We're going to bring Uber to China.
We're going to have 1.4 billion. And they looked at how it worked and they saw how all the ads were.
And they said, line up, Chinese entrepreneurs. Who wants to get Uber? Well, we in the government will give you all the money.
Just go make Chinese, call it Uder or something. Just like it.
And then we will pass laws to make sure that you're favored. And we control and we will bankrupt Uber.
And that's what happened. They left.
So hopefully American companies will come back to and build in America and produce in America. That's what I'm hoping for.
We'll see how it pans out. I think they'll get 10 million jobs if they get $5 trillion.
Yeah. They will.
Victor, go ahead. There's one other aspect to this.
Donald Trump is pretty smart. This war on DEI and the universities that are wasting all this federal money, how much GDP, half a point has been wasted on all of these tens of thousands at high school, community college, four-year college, state colleges, public, DEI commissars, and all these bogus, worthless gender studies, peace studies, black studies, Asian studies, environmental studies.
What we need right now, we need trade schools, and we really need people who can weld, people can fabricate, people who can assemble, people who are electricians, people who are plumbers, skilled, high-paid.

That's what the economy needs right now. So if any good comes out of the DEI, the anti-woke, it's to tell these universities, half the people in the United States go to your university and all they do is take six years on average to get a degree and 50% never graduate.
And those that graduate are stuck with 150 plus thousand in debt. And you guys have run up 1.7 trillion in student debt, a quarter of which are non-performing on the interest.
Just get rid of it all. We just want you, don't take half the country and didn't work on K-12 to get people educated and then let half the country, 70%, go to a trade school.
And I learned more farming in 10 years as far as how to do practical things and be productive. Maybe then I did an eight in academia.
As my dad said, when I came home from Stanford, he said, did you go to your graduation? I said, no, I didn't. Well, did you graduate? I said, yeah.
And what do you do? I said, you know, I passed my Greek composition. So what is that? Oh, I can write in Greek.
My other brother said, oh, it's like a dog that's on two legs. It's impressive.
But what use is it that can dance? And then my dad said, okay, we're going to build a little raisin dehydrator. Can you go down there and help this guy wire it? I said, wire it? I don't know anything.
Don't you know anything about Romex? Where have you been doing all these years? I said, I'll learn. That's what I did.
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So, Victor, the next topic is the cabinet meeting of Donald Trump. And I know you have lots of reflections on that.
So, go ahead. I don't think any president's ever had the entire cabinet there live without a script.
And some of you are going to say on the left, well, it was scripted. It was obsequious.
They all, yes, but it was not scripted. I mean, people knew what they were going to say, but in a cabinet meeting that's live with reporters in the room, we know what Biden would think of that.
They even had footprints for him stuck on the ground where to walk and little stickies everywhere, turn left, turn right, stop, pause. And even when he read his script, you remember it said pause, stop, and he would read, I think we really got to reduce inflation, pause, stop.
So my point is that anything can happen in those meetings. And I was thinking when I was watching it, they have a great cabinet.
Marco Rubio, this Scott Besson has become kind of a folk hero. He's really articulate.
He's really loyal to Trump. He knows Wall Street.
But I couldn't imagine the first Trump cabinet like that. Can you imagine Trump sitting there and there's Rick Tillerson, who's called Trump a moron or an idiot? And then there's Mattis next to him and my good friend, HR, who had some disagreements.
But let's not get HR into that. We should put John Bolton there instead.
And you put all that array, Bill Barr or Jeff Sessions, I just don't see it happening to you. But these guys were like a symphony.
They were all on the same page. And they're getting stuff done that's just amazing.
You know, one of the things that your audience might call obsequious

what they kept saying but i think was true was they kept saying it was by your directive donald trump so they want everybody to see that they're all on the same page and they're taking directive from trump yeah that was the point that was part of the point they know that isn't it?

They've got,

there was a subtext to that.

Who wasn't there?

I know they were senior advisors, but they did not have Peter Navarro there. Because Peter Navarro has been going on television and freelancing.
And when the markets were gyrating radically and he was on television, especially with Laura Ingraham, what kind of surprise, like, what are you saying? and he was on television especially with laura ingham what kind of surprised like what are you saying because he was saying things like we're not going to cut a deal they cheat well yeah they do they they manipulate their currencies they have excise taxes they have phony health concerns but the markets going crazy, and all they want to hear is

that you're going to cut a deal and have reciprocal tariffs, and you've just said that's not enough,

so this is going to go on forever, and the bond market is in debt.

So that was, he wasn't there, is what I'm saying.

And he plays a valuable role, but Basant is a much smoother operator. And then I can get under my other rant of the Wall Street Journal.
Wait, before you go, I wanted to talk about Basant because he has hired on two senior advisors that were those whistleblowers, Shapely and Ziegler. Yeah.
So that's been a wonderful story. Those whistleblowers are Hunter.
Those who will last shall be first, and the first shall be last. And the alpha shall be the omega, and the omega should be the alpha.
And so they were discredited unfairly. They were trashed.
All of their obsequious advisors tried to railroad them. All they wanted to do was investigate.
And the only reason they were, one guy was working on pornographic income that wasn't reported. And somehow he found reference to these pictures.
And then he started investigating the laptop. And he found out that Hunter hadn't even filed a 1040.
And it was by accident.

And then the Biden people went over.

I love this because on the left-wing media, they're always,

Trump is trying to use the government to weaponize law.

Whatever he does, he's never going to catch up with what they did. They did every single agency, IRS, CIA, FBI, DOJ, DOD, they weaponized everything.
So I thought that was kind of funny. Yeah, that was a wonderful story.
But that was thematic, though, of all of Trump's appointments. HHS during COVID said that Bob Kennedy, Bobby, was a nut.
He's running it. Jay Bacharia was persona non grata.
Fauci the other day said, well, I just disagreed with him. I didn't try to destroy him.
Then he has those emails that say, how do we neutralize him and stuff? Now he runs HHS. Cash Patel was targeted.
He runs FBI. Tulsi Gabbard was put on a no-fly list.
She's director of national. And that's not by accident.
He thinks the people who would be the most zealous to cut and reform had been victimized by the agencies in which they're now running things. Since you mentioned Cash Patel, another thing, he recently hired on, and this was

actually, I was going to talk about it later. He recently hired on a new, oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah,

Steve Jensen, who had in fact been, I think, a lead, if not, you know, the lead in the

investigation of January 6th. Parents who were at school board meetings, angry, Catholic schools, etc.
So why do you think Cash put him ahead of the field operations in D.C.? Because here's Cash. Okay, I'm Cash.
I'm now the FBI director. And I've got thousands of employees.
Let's just say hundreds in the Washington office. And I know that most of those SOBs have no ideology, the most, not all, because they just do whatever Comey or McCabe or Christopher Wray wanted.
And some of them did bad things. Some of them did quasi bad things.
Some people kept quiet when the FBI was not telling people the authentic laptop. It was not Russian disinformation.
Or when the FBI under James Baker was freelancing with Twitter to suppress the news, that kind of stuff. So he knows the really bad guys, and he's getting rid of them.
But then he sees people who, what's the word? We're opportunistic. and he doesn't, what do you do with them? They're very skilled.
If you fire all of them at the beginning, I mean, maybe he's got a plan to ease them out when he gets other people, but he's got to have gradations. It's sort of like when you go in, De Gaulle goes in and they say, you've got Vichy French people working for him.
Well, yeah, there was not very many people in England with me when we left. And then the Machis are either commies or we don't know anything about them.
So I have to use some of them, right? They also say that about Trotsky, that he didn't get rid of the high command of the Russian army when he took it over as the Red Army. So long did eventually.
Yeah, eventually they got it, but not at first. But who do you use? And so you can't, I think everybody, you just can't go, and then given civil service and things, these are political pointies, many of them, but you can't just fire that person and say you work.
And they're doing a lot of it. Right now, their problem is not getting rid of Biden people who broke the law.
They're doing a great job on that. But there's people in this gray area that you may want to use.
Or there could be an alternate explanation. Cash calls him in and says,

I've never worked for the FBI.

And most of the guys that knows

how this corrupt organization worked, I fired.

But you, you know where every corpse is buried.

So I'll tell you what I'll do.

You stick around and I'll give you your title and everything,

but you better start telling me where the keys are

that unlock this sordid mess. I think that's very possible.
And Cash is very smart, after all. He's a very smart guy.
I've known him a long time. Do not ever underestimate his intelligence.
Yeah. All right.
So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk about diplomacy in the 1920s and the treaties made by the United States. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. So in our moments in U.S.
history that were very significant, We have now the 1920s. The United States is doing

very well after World War I, and they're also very involved in the international diplomacy and trying to negotiate treaties rather than going to war with other people. I think that was the general reason behind it.

So go ahead, Victor.

There were two driving forces.

One was... than going to war with other people.
I think that was the general reason behind it.

So go ahead, Victor.

There were two driving forces.

One was, we're not going to repeat the arms race.

They felt, I think wrongly so, that World War I was an accident caused by automatic

mobilization with a further catalyst of the dreadnought race and the arms race before the war, when it really was German aggression. That was the cause of the war.
But nevertheless, they felt in this Wilsonian League of Nations, League of Nations is now operating under the auspices or after the result of the Versailles Treaty. They had all of this idealism.
We're never going to kill 17 million people again.

It was very enviable.

So we're going to make a series of pacts.

We don't have time to go into the Dawes plan, but that was how to give money to Germany

so Germany wouldn't print any more fake money to pay back France and England

what they owed them under reparations of the Versailles Treaty. So then those two could pay us what they welched on.
And they finally, that was one thing. The Treaty of Rapallo, I was in the hotel at Rapallo where they, that idea was, we're going to get rid of all the troublesome places that caused World War I.
It was over borders, borders. Most wars are, by the way, with contiguous states, over borders.
But I once wrote an article about that in History of Greek Warfare, what caused Greek warfare, battles, Argos and Sparta. It was always borderland.
It was always worthless, too. But it was very important as objects of prestige, national will.
But anyway, the Rhineland, for example, take one example. The Rhineland shall remain demilitarized.
That's the area west of the Rhine River that traditionally after Napoleon went to Germany. How are you going to enforce that? So everybody was excited they We're going to go look all the borders.
Of course, Germany, when Hitler came in in 1933, when he got power, 34, 35, he just went in and put the German army and violated the Apollo Treaty. Nobody cared.
A couple of other ones were the Washington Arms Limitation Act in the late 20s, and then they had successors in the 30s. And they thought, we're going to get a supernatural body and stop.
The most expensive weapons are always ships. And the Jackie Fisher and the dreadnought race that had led, felt, helped bankrupt the countries that France and Britain and Germany,

they were trying to outbuild each other with battleships, the new battleships.

So they said, we're going to have a five to five to three ratio.

That is, whatever tonnage, I think it was something like 400,000 collective shipping tons,

the British and Americans get to have the same, but Japanese get to have three. The ratio, five, five, three.
And France and Germany, you know, Germany was out of it. And France kind of finagled around, later came in.
And Japanese got really angry. But Yamamoto, who was now ascending in the ranks of naval, told Nagumo and others, just be quiet.
We're not able to build 555. We'll do that later.
But what we need to do, all we can get close to them with our capacity, steel and shipbuilding, is three. So actually, they've done us a great favor.
They've said five for Britain ratio, five for the United States, and only three for poor Japan. But we couldn't even get near three until another four or five years.
But we can play the noble victim that was screwed over, if I can use that term. Yeah.
Do you think the United States and Britain knew they couldn't get there? No. United States was, they were very haughty.
They just said, you know what, you're not a superpower. And Japan said, oh, please, we were very good in World War I.
And then they looked at their industrial capacity and they thought, you know what, we have to steal the rubber of Malaysia. We've got to steal the oil of the Dutch East Indies.
We've got to steal the breadbasket in Southeast Asia. And we can do that in a few years but we'll build three and that'll get us close then they start violating it very quickly and it was really a weird thing that it was for battle the first iteration was battleships and cruisers so we had these big beautiful cruisers they're going to be like 35 000 tons the biggest they were going to be like the HMS hood.
And then you couldn't build them because they were 35,000. So they were almost half done.
So then the United States put a little exception. We can put them as carriers because nobody really knew what carriers, whether they're going to be good or not.
But they did say they're going to be 27,000. So they put a little clause in there.
If you've already built it when the treaty went through, so the result was they took these two huge hulls that were half done, and they had a very sophisticated electric motor, not steam-driven. The steam drew your fuel oil, heated the water, they created the steam, and then that was used for pistons and to run the propellers.
But they figured out you could use that steam to spin electric generators and then get electric motors to turn the propellers. And then you could modulate the speed much better and control it.
And so they created these two battle cruisers, and they renamed them the Lexington and the Saratoga. And they became the largest aircraft carriers in the world.
And they were never really replicated. When the war broke out, we only had, I think, three other, the Wasp and the Hornet, the Yorktown and Enterprise Four.
And they were all 22,000. These were monsters, 35.
And they were very, they were kind of awkward, but they were very powerful. They had 80-inch guns.
One was sunk. The Lexington was sunk at Coral Sea, 1942 in May.
But the Saratoga lasted the entire war. And then they were replaced.
That was an effort. But the most famous, very quickly, of these, I don't want to say naive.
When I was a college student, I took one, History of International Diplomacy. And it was actually taught by a very brilliant guy, Carl Lamb, who was a professor at Santa Cruz.
And he went to the Naval Academy. And I didn't realize there had been a whole scholarship how wonderful the Kellogg-Briand Act is.
Still exists. Remember the Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, and his French foreign minister, Mr.
Briand, got people together. It was mostly Japan, the United States, France, and England.
And they said war is not an acceptable, very short little clauses, not an acceptable means of adjudicating conflict. That's like saying to your neighbor, I just moved in.
And the property line is a little vague about the tree you have, its limbs come over. But whatever we do, I promise you that we will not get in an argument over this.
And then the neighbor goes, okay, but what if you do get in an argument? There's nobody to stop you, right? So there was nobody to enforce that the League of Nations, you know, can't do anything. So they renounced war, and it was a joke.
And then the Japanese in 1933 went into Manchuria. And then in 1935, the Italians went into Ethiopia.
And then they were off to the races with Spain, Spanish Civil War, and everybody was fueling that.. So Hitler went into the Rhineland.

So these were all naive efforts.

But if you go into some of the text, I'll say this was a very, very sophisticated utopian maybe, but war was less common afterwards. No, it was less common afterwards, you people, in the late 40s and 50s, not because of the fumes of the stupid Kellogg-Briand Act,

because of nuclear weapons and the fear that could escalate into Armageddon.

So the renouncing of war was in the Kellogg-Briand Act.

Okay.

So they all signed on, or at least the big powers signed on, to a renunciation of resorting to war.

Yes. And then Italy broke it, and then Germany broke it.
Russia, nobody wanted it in. Well, Russia was in the League of Nations to invade Finland in November of 1939, but they were always a rogue power after the revolution, the Bolsheviks.
So anyway, we've started with the Russo-Japanese War. We've gone through the income tax.
We've gone through World War I. We've gone through the Depression.
We had a lot of others. I think this is our 10th or 8th or 9th, 10th.
So next time we're reaching the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Man? How come they went fascist and Britain, France, and the United States did not?

I didn't realize you were done, so I want to ask you a question. Go ahead.
Don't you think that they realize that an international agreements made and the avoidance of war really doesn't work very well because of the 19th century congresses.

They had tons of congresses to solve war in Spain, to solve war in Italy. I know they all came after the Congress of Vienna, which solved the Napoleonic thing to some extent.

But surely they would have realized that they just really couldn't

come to agreements on people. No, they were guided by two principles.
Number one, they had never seen a war like World War I. Never.
And they called it the Great War. As I said earlier, the word First World War in the anglo-speaking world and what ours with the Roman numeral, we call it World War I.
That word was very rare in 1939. I mean, it was still in currency in 1939, 1940.
That word, Great War, disappeared in 1941 with two events. The Soviet invasion, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941, and Pearl Harbor.
At that point, it was a whole world war. And they said, oh, my God, the World War I is nothing compared to this.
This is the whole world. So they started calling, I should say, Great War is nothing.
So they said, no more Great War, World War I. Now we'll call this World War II.
So my point is they were captives of the Great War. They had never seen anything like it.
And they said, we can't have this happen again. It will ruin Europe.
So they were intent on finding a solution. And they looked at what had caused World War I.
And they used the word merchants of death, that all these people were making profits. They thought the United States could have helped if we'd been involved.
So they were trying to get us in the League of Nations. This is why they had Kellogg, American Secretary of State.
I think he'd been a senator from Montana. They wanted America in because they thought that when it came in in World War I in 1917 in April, it won the war within a year and a half.
And it had been there at the beginning. Germany, if there had been 300,000 or 400,000 American troops, Germany would not have invaded Belgium.
That's what they thought. The other thing is they looked at the Congress of Vienna, and they said from the Battle of Waterloo's aftermath to World War I, with minor exceptions, which were on the periphery like the Crimean War, there was general peace in Europe.
And they were able to craft a century-long, Kissinger wrote about that.

And so they looked back and said, we can do the same thing that they did.

Well, the world was very different in 1928 than it was in 1815.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back to talk about a few more news stories this week. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. You can catch Victor on X.
His handle is at VD Hanson and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. And I should mention that there is a Victor Davis Hanson fan club on Facebook as well that is not affiliated with us, so we don't have any, but they do dredge up all sorts of interesting things that Victor has done in the past.
They're different, too, than these not-to-be-named people who I said this. I wrote you a note, Sammy.
Did you see that note I sent you to post on our website? No, but I will look for it as soon as possible. You should have something that says this is not unauthorized.
Because what I do sometimes, I do longer interviews. Well, in this guy's case, they were always longer than he agreed upon.
And then they just sliced them into one minute, you know, vignettes. And then they put lavish videos.
In this case, he was using AI. And then people write me and say, I didn't know you had a daily interview series.
I don't. And it's not just him.
So, in other words, if you do 80 minutes, and you should never do 80 minutes, but I did. I wanted to help the fellow because he was starting.
I thought he was still on the ascendance. But if you do all those one minute and then they lavish them with videos and AI and all that, and they make them into three minutes, then you can do 80 of them.
And that's what's happened. You've got all these things that appear.
And then people write me and say, you just did another little series? You've got a new video? And I say, no, that was done six months ago. And I have no idea who's doing it.
Well, it's worse than you think, Victor,

because there are people I've seen some of these short videos

that they have somehow recorded probably on their phone or something

a video of you talking

and then they take that recording off of their phone and use it to...

I know and they get this

and I must get five to six emails a day, and this is not even to the website, and they'll say things like, did you know this person's having you swat wasp? Weren't you stung by a bee? Did you know this person, every week you come out with a minute and a half, I thought you were doing this only for the Daily Signal, which is authorized. Yeah.
And so it's a wide open frontier, a wild west. It sure is.
And it would take me years just to monitor it all. Yeah.
And I don't have the resources to, you know, get lawyers and all that. We tried to do this at the website, and we still are obviously working.
The website is a living thing for everybody who is listening. We have a vast array of loyal listeners, because when I said sinus the other day, all of a sudden, all these wonderful people said, have you tried homopathic? Have you tried salt sprays? Have you done this? And they were all great ideas.
I'm trying them right now. One person said, are you trying to stop mucus or something? Mucus stop, enzyme.
Because I have this chronic sinus fix. Yeah.
Dogacillin was dogacillin. I was speaking, I think I told you that, at a local event.
And one of the persons said, why are you taking someone? It's not intended for dogs, but that's dog medicine. I felt like a dog when I was on it.
I thought it was going to die. And I still have joint and muscle pain from it.
And apparently it's a well-known safe drug. But for me, it just was worse than the sinus infection.
Well, also I wanted to remind everybody that you can find Victor on Speaking of Where the Legitimate.

He has a YouTube channel that is, you can get the Victor Davis Hanson podcast is what it's called. And you'll see all of these podcasts there, as well as on Rumble.
So Victor is legitimately on that. And I should mention, too, that we're a subsidiary of Just the News, which is run by John Solomon, who is one of the best investigative reporters in DC.
So we like to promote his work as well. So, Victor, let's go ahead and move on to, I was going to talk a little bit about the end of DEI.
It seems to be failing, but there were stories that came out that either illustrate it or don't, kind of. Carolyn Levitt has announced that the press secretary of Donald Trump, that she is not going to be responding to emails that have pronouns.
And Anderson Cooper got checked by one of his audience members who was asking a question of his guest, and he called her she, and she said, no, I'm they, them. So poor old left-wing Anderson Cooper.
They did that with Bernie Sanders, too. Did you see him? I saw that.
He didn't baffle, like, what is this? So your thoughts on that? Is DEI ending? Well, I mean,lyn said she wasn't going to take inquiries some pronoun multipliers it was unfair to her because they said she's just exercising censorship or something but as a person in the university when you get those administrative your administrative superiors from stan Stanford and they all have, I don't know even when they have they, they, I don't even know what they are. They're trying to enforce a code and telling you that this is the way we're going to do it from now on.
But anybody who has been one footprint outside a university knows that these people are lemmings. And so when I saw them, I just thought, this fad will last about a year and a half.
And then there won't be one of these people who will do it until the next fad. And so all of the DEI stuff that we've been reading about, I just look at it in economic terms.
We're in a race with the Chinese for survival. We have to get a fair trade.
We're a trillion dollars deficit, 37 trillion national debt, 2 trillion. I thought it was 1.7, but I looked, it's 2 trillion in the annual budget deficit.
So we have to be a lot more efficient. It can't be like California, high speed rail, blowing up dams, all that stuff.
We don't have a margin of error. And so why would we institute an entire Soviet commissar system that would check people's work and then modulate it or censor it based on ideology that had nothing to do with efficiency? So now we've got all these people that are all they do is they thought, well, I make $250,000.
I'm the dean of equity inclusion in the physics department or something, and I've got to find some racism. Oh, I'm going to call up that Nobel Prize winner.
You know what? I looked at your syllabus and I think you should be more inclusive. Then you take his time up and you slow him down so you can be justified and magnify that by millions of incidents.
And it's a drag on the economy and it's racist and it's contrary to all of the spirit and the letter of the civil rights laws. Somebody's going to write in, yes, but there was a district judge in Kansas that said it was perfectly okay under the 1965 civil rights.
No, it wasn't.

That's just a district judge. And most people realize that as the Supreme Court has recently ruled, that is contrary to civil rights affirmative action, they got rid of it.
And that's just, what DEI is.

And when you add DEI

and you add the new Green Deal

and you add ESG, the, I guess you'd call it the break or the limitations on investment that they use for the stock market. It has to be used for environmental purposes.
You know, so my point is that Trump is trying to get out of all that. So there's a lot of economic things that are going on right now that we're not getting.
We're not going to be long term. If you close the border and you get rid of 500,000 criminals and you get rid of 2 million people that have already been given their deportation orders, you cut down on the social welfare costs, the crime, the paperwork.
If at the same time you get rid of the Green New Deal and you tell a guy that's got a flatbed truck it's not that much different, or somebody who's got a natural gas generator, you can make these transformations slow rather than just get a commissar and order people. So he is getting rid of a lot of drags on the economy is what I'm trying to say.
And that's going to show up. It will show up eventually that we're not doing those things.
Because they're really called regulations,

aren't they? That's all they are, is DEI is a regulation. And I know somebody's going to say,

well, how long does it take? Well, it takes me three hours a year to do the DEI video.

And I fall asleep. I can't sleep.
It's just inane. It's just a complete waste of time.
It makes somebody a lot of money who makes the video. And those videos have figured out how to force you to pay attention.
No, you can't speed up and you can't miss them. And if you think, if you're listening, all of you, I know you've seen one or had to participate one.
A guy comes in and he pats a girl on the shoulder

stop question a george was just trying to show his affection it's perfectly all right alternative b the old boy network well look good he has a perfect right to show his affection to and attractive women. C, this is a problematic interaction.
Each side has a legitimate argument. D, this is always wrong, and people who witness this should go to your diversity, equity, and inclusion advisor.
And all you have to do is look for that phrase and not watch any of the video and you'll get 100% on all those questions.

But you can't because they won't let you speed it up.

Because they know you hate your gut.

They know that they're stupid and they're wasting your time and that you hate their guts.

And so they expect you to be completely nauseated by what they do. And even liberal, conservative doesn't matter because they're nags.
Yeah, exactly. And even if you're on their side, you're like, this is a boring video.
The video and you said, okay, why don't you be, if you're a DEI person or consultant and you're in the economics field, why don't you write a paper on economics about an intricacy of tariffs? Oh, you're a literature person. Could you, I don't know, give us a new insight on Don Quixote? No.
They can't do any of that. Because they're paying attention to videos that nobody would listen to, not even people on their side.
That's thepr has a captive i don't know what the status of npr and pbs is i do know we give them a half a billion dollars and then they claim it's only one percent and we've talked about that before but the money goes to the regional stations so they can buy these things that npr and and PBS motherships in Washington pedal. So then they can say, we're only getting money from our subordinate stations.
We don't get very much. It's only 1%.
But the subordinate stations that are paying your 90 or whatever, 40, 50% plus donations get their money from the government.

Well, Victor, let me go ahead and welcome back a sponsor, Wired to Fish Coffee. As you may know, I love Wired to Fish Coffee, not only for their delicious, smooth coffee, but more importantly, for their amazing commitment to give back.
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And thank you, Wired2Fish, for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So, Victor, there is a professor, not a professor, sorry, a Palestinian billionaire by the name of Bashar Mazri, who was part of the Dean's Council at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and he stepped down.

Was he an overseer board of something? He was a dean on the council. I know, but I mean that's a council.
Oh, okay. I doubt he was actually paid by Harvard.
Oh, no, probably not. He was an outside board of overseers type stuff.
Yeah. But that's bad enough.
Yeah, and he was being sued by about 200 people who were victims of the October 7th. Good.
And now he's stepped down from his position. So good news.
But I was wondering your thoughts on Palestinian billionaires. I remember the name of the guy.
Right. I'm trying to remember where I remembered it.
But it was right after Trump said that Gaza was going to be sort of like southern France, you know what I mean, on the beach.

His name came up. He was designing, he said, a utopian city that was going to be perfect.
And, of course, when I saw this article about him as an entrepreneur that was going to go and rebuild Gaza and make it non-denominational and democratic. I knew that was a complete lie because Hamas is there.
So he must have some concession to even be allowed to say that. And the next thing I thought, USAID, USAID, USAID.
And of course, USAID was giving him money, but he was a tunnel builder, right? He had the expertise to allow Hamas under the guise of rebuilding or whatever all these years. He was building these very well-crafted and constructed tunnels.
When you looked at those tunnels when the Israelis showed them, it didn't look like a bunch of guys with wheelbarrows. They had sophisticated tunneling machines.
They had rebar. They had vaulted ceilings.
They had all sorts of internet, heating, cooling, electrical cable. It was a whole underground city.
That's what he meant. I'm building a utopian killing city so I can design it to kill Jews.
That's basically what he did. And I don't know what is, but we're having a reckoning right now.
And where I work at Stanford, they've already given notices that they're going to pull some of the visas of students. But the way to look at all this is not that you go after all these people that are helping the so-called enemy, and I define radical Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas as an enemy.
But what's the purpose of what they're doing? I don't know his citizenship status. They say that he is a Palestinian-American, so he must have an American.
So then he has a perfect right to say what he wants, and he has a perfect right to be sued. But in the case of all the other people that are visiting here on green cards or temporary visas or student visas, the question is, what is the plus that they bring to this country when you see all of the demonstrations and all of the hatred and all of the disruption? I don't see any advantage to it.
So that's what Marco Rubio's position is. I'm not going to get into what they're saying.
I don't care. I just want to know, are they actual students who are studying something? And they don't seem to be.
They seem to be threatening Jews and going into classrooms and disrupting classes if they're taught by Israelis or Jews. And I have no problem with them.
I just don't think that we need that. So we don't want to have that extra problem overhead.
It's kind of like in a business. And you say, you know what, I have a guy come in every day, and he says he's going to clean the floors and wash the windows.
And all he does is he just sort of polishes the granite. I don't need the granite polish.
So I just don't, I just tell him, you know, it's nothing personal, but I don't need you. And that's what they do.
They do things that do not enhance the interest of the United States. And that's what a country should do when it issues a visa.
And this is, this is a multi, I mean, gosh, this is cultural, social, economic, political, military counter-revolution. He's addressing everything at once.
And all of it, you know, the higher education doesn't get it. The Columbia president that just said, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
We want that 400 million you cut. And yes, we won't have masks.

And then she goes to the faculty and just lies her head off and says, basically, don't listen to them. And now Cornell is looking at a huge amount of money that could be cut.
Is it a billion dollars? These are fantastic stums. Why are these private universities with these huge endowments, 15, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50 billion dollars, why do they get any federal money other than grants to individual scholars, mostly in science or health? But even then with their endowments, you'd think they could fund them.
40 years ago when we talked about these universities, we were talking like $1 billion endowment, $2 billion. Nothing like we see now.
So they have so much exposure. And again, it's not a question of anybody persecuting.
It's just Donald Trump saying, this was okay when Bill Clinton was president. We owed $5 trillion, and the national debt was 0.3% of GDP, but now it's six.
I mean, the annual budget deficit. The budget deficit is 6% of GDP.
It's 20 times greater than the budget deficit that he finally balanced. So we don't have the money to do it.
We're sorry. We'd like to help you, but we give you the money and you go out and hire a bunch of DEI people.
Then you tell us, but he's curing cancer in the biology department or genetics department or something. Yeah, but it's all fungible.
You just use those arguments to disguise the money you waste. And we're tired of it.
And I think they would get really lean and mean and better if they didn't have any federal. Because I've watched Hillsdale for 50 years.
And the fact that they don't take money, they're better funded than any other small, almost any other college. They're more efficient.
They watch the bottom line. And they don't rely on the government.
They're completely immune from government waffling or capriciousness. It's really good.
And they can't afford to have employees that aren't functioning, aren't producing for them, and so they probably keep a pretty lean system. They have no DGI, that's for sure.
I'm going to give the May 10th graduation address, and I was thinking I'm going to model it after three little events that happened to me. The first day I went there, I started teaching there in 2004.
I'd only visited once or twice. The first thing I did is I went to my apartment, I had requested a bicycle.
And I had this kind of older bike. And I rode it around.
And then I got the first day of class. So I left it.
I went home. I thought, oh, my God.
I came back 24 hours later. It was really crowded.
There it was, untouched, as if nobody even saw it. If that had been at Stanford, that wheels would have been off or had been gone.
And then I walked over just seconds after that to the bookstore. And I thought, this is going to be the same thing as a Stanford bookstore.
Leisure studies, environmental studies, Asian studies, no studies. I looked at the books that were being ordered, C.S.
Lewis books, Tolkien books, Shakespeare, could not believe it. Modern novel, Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald. Where are the studies? Racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, homophobic, homophobic, nothing.
And then I noticed the third thing the first day. I started walking campus Nobody knew who I was And people said, hi, how are you? And I thought, well, at Cal State A little bit of that But I had just gone to work at Stanford And everybody walked around like they were carrying the burdens of the world on their shoulders.
You know, they were grimacing. Abortion.
I'm 19 years old. And I've been a victim.
It's horrible what they've done to me. I'm here.
Somebody had to pay, I don't know, a quarter million dollars for me to come to this awful place where it's 70 degrees all year round and everybody caters my every whim. And I'm just mad because they don't understand what's going on in Defer.
They don't understand what's going on in, I don't know, Kenya. And it's horrible.
And they're so rude. And you see them and then you go to the hills.
Hi, how are you? What are you doing? I remember our first day I was there, a guy came up to me and said, hello, do I know you? I said, no, I'm a visitor. Well, can I help you show you the buildings? I said, well, I'm trying to go to this class.
Well, let me show you. And it was just so different.
And I go to Stanford and it's, gosh, everybody walks by by Crabby Appleton. And at Hillsdale, it's like everybody looks like Carolyn, the press secretary.
You know what I mean? I just love her when she goes on there. And I'm just like thinking, do you have any idea how you affect that crabby Appleton press corps or the left-wing people who are watching you? First of all, you're beautiful.
Second of all, you're always happy. Third of all, you've got a lot of confidence.
Fourth, you don't have to say any nuancing stuff on the one hand. On the other hand, now this is very complex.
You just say it and you're confident and you're sincere. And then when they hit you, it's like you have a little invisible force field between you and them and all their little barbs are like, oh, okay, yeah, no.
And she just drives them crazy. You know what I mean? I look at Jen Psaki.
She never says, I'm going to circle back on that. I'm going to Psaki back on that.
Her binder is in her head, Victor. No binder, nothing.
She's kind of like Kayla McElhinney, was kind of that way. But she's so young, she's 27.
I remember when I was 27. She's amazing, that's true.
She is, she's so confident. And it's a Manichean world about Trump versus the enemy.
And that's what is kind of unusual. And I know she has self-doubt.
I know she's got a young child. She's got a family.
But boy, she radiates confidence and happiness. And that's something these rare days.
Well, Victor, let's turn to the last topic, and that is the House passed a budget reconciliation bill, and I just want to mention two things that I found surprising in it. They raised the deficit ceiling by $5 trillion when we're trying to cut it, and they have a mandatory cut on spending of $1.5 trillion, which I think is great.
I just wonder,

boy, with Doge and what they're trying to do, it's going to be very difficult to cut that much. Because the budget is $7 trillion almost.
And when you look at optional areas to cut that are not mandated, Social Security, Medicare, unless you slash the defense budget. And Trump's not going to do that.
He's going to try to find savings so he can build sophisticated weapons, not just – but maybe they can cut a half of – if they can cut a half a trillion dollars, 500 billion, and they can get increased revenue, whether a little bit from tariffs, a little bit from his gold card, a little bit from deregulation, whatever. You know what I mean? And he cuts 700 billion.
That is an amazing accomplishment. I think the goal is to get to zero at the end of four years.
But when they raise the debt to $5 trillion, that doesn't mean they're going to go to $5 trillion, just so they have the option to go that high. But you've got to remember that we only had, in the last half century, no, yeah, last half century, we've only had four balanced budgets, 98, 99, 2000, 2001.
Those were brought about when Bill Clinton made a deal with Newt Genrich. And Newt Genrich said, if we can get half of these, half of the expenditures will be cuts.
and Clinton said okay i will make those cuts that you suggest but then you have to pass my tax increase and that's how they did it but again what they were doing is they inherited a 0.3 percent 0.3 percent deficit of the annual deficit was 0.3% of GDP.

This annual deficit is 20 times larger in adjusted dollars, 20 times.

And that time they had a $5 trillion national debt, not $37 trillion with $3 billion.

$3 billion in interest a day. So it's almost impossible to do.
And that's why Trump is acting and the idea that it went up $7 trillion. If everybody would just take this phrase, modern monetary theory, put it in quotation and Google it, you will see it pop up from 21 to 24 in all different manifestations.
But there'll be one characteristic. It'll all be from left-wing venues, and it'll all be wonderful.
A new wave has been looking at money. It's a construct, because the government can print whatever it wants.
It can say whatever it is. So we can just say this and that, and that was infectious.
Well, Victor, I wanted to read one of our

readers' comments. This is at the website, and it's on the article you wrote, The Poverty of

Criticism of Trump's Agenda. And Jim Reynolds says, I never thought anybody in our lifetime

would seriously challenge our out-of-control spending. Everybody else has just kicked the

can down the street. Every one of them, and I think he's referring to Trump's the one who hasn't.
If you do the math, then you know that the lion's share of our budget is off limits, entitlements. We could double our taxes, cut the excuse me for this word, crap out of discretionary spending and still never touch the national debt.
I had never considered the tariff idea. Few others have either.
Do we have any other options than to get others to help us pay down the debt, meaning outsiders through tariffs. If we go under, so will all of them.
Trump is trying to keep our economy from driving off a cliff or into a brick wall. Choose your metaphor.
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Hello, reality.
And thank you, Jim Reynolds. Thank you.
But there are subtle ways it'll help. When you have the Fed raising interest rates, and now we're paying, what, 4.5 to almost 5% on government bonds, and we've got more and more bonds on the market, then that is $3 billion.
But when we were paying one and a half, if we were paying one and a half and two, we would only be paying a billion. We would save almost a third of a trillion dollars on the budget.
So we can do that. We can really try to get the economy going and inflation low, like this, it was 2.6 annualized.
That should send a message to the Fed that inflation is not a problem, even though the economy is growing because we had 100,000 new jobs. So Powell, he should lower it by a quarter point, half point immediately.
He did that for Biden during the campaign cycle. And that would save maybe a billion dollars a day.
And revenues until 1916 were really the only revenue that the country had before the income tax. And we still get about $300 billion with our low tariffs.
And if they were going to go up, if he can get a parity, we might get another $300 or $400 billion there. I don't know how much is gold card.
I don't believe that the number of people are going to pay $5 million to fast-track citizenship when they have a net worth of the required amount.

I think one of the cabinet people said it could be a trillion dollars. I don't think so.
But there will be a little bit of money there, and there will be a lot of money if he can deregulate and get rid of the Green New Deal stuff and keep the tax cuts and stimulate the economy, and it can grow. So that's what he's trying to do, but you've got to limit spending.
You've got to limit spending. And, you know, everybody should take a deep breath because Trump today was saying that they're building ships 200 times more than we are and the chinese fleet and number of ships i'm not quite in tonnage i think is larger than ours now an aircraft carrier i don't know how many more you want to build in the age age of hypersonic missiles and drones but let's just say you we have i think 11 of them and they're all nuclear.
They cost now the new ones, the Gerald Ford class, I think they're about $13 billion. But think for a minute.
We gave roughly $200 billion, depending on how you negotiate. They might say $ say 80, but when you get economic and USAID

and all the military stuff and the service, we had U.S. servicemen over there far more than we thought.
New York Times says that. Let's just say 150.
And you could have built 10

10

Gerald Ford aircraft carriers

For what we gave Ukraine

10

And if you look at what Elon Musk says he's cut, that's 10 aircraft carriers. Wouldn't everybody listening, wouldn't you act to have 10 Gerald Ford aircraft carriers? Or maybe you say 100 million for the most sophisticated F-22.
We don't make them anymore, but an F-35 is at least $50 million. So if you got two for $100 million, and then you could get $20 for every billion dollars.
So I would, you could, I mean, you could, for $100 billion, you could get 200 more of the most sophisticated planes in the world. So there's a lot to – we're just wasting money is what I'm trying to say.
And we're not – we're falling behind the Chinese. But there's no need to do that, especially when we cut off their technological pipeline of theft from us.
well since that letter was about how to cut the budget, and I forgot this story, Doge has found millions of unemployment going to fake claims of people that are not even born yet. So I'm going to ask you a question.
Why do you think that when that story came out, along with people who were 150 years old getting Social Security, what was the mentality of the left not to cover those stories or to downplay them? Because they were not in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, PBS, NPR. Because the left is large government, so they don't want this doge going around and showing all the inefficiencies and fraud.
Because they like inefficiencies. They don't care.
Because they don't care and they think that it's only, you know, millions. So no big deal.
It went to somebody. So somebody will say, well, he had four kids and we don't think that we give them enough welfare.
So if he, you know, he created a false identity and a non-existent person,

that's pretty good. And why would we want to report that when it would only get people angry

at the system and then help Donald Trump? So that's how we don't know these things.

They don't care as long as they think that it helps the administrative state,

the beast. I don't know what you call it, but they don't care about the waste or the fraud.
No, they don't. That's just crazy.
Well, Victor, this is the end of our show. So thank you for all of your wisdom today.
And thanks to our audience for choosing to join us here at the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Thank you, everybody, for both listening and viewing, and we'll see you next time.

We have David Mamet coming up.

I don't know if I've told you that.

You're going to interview him? Yeah, he's a good friend, and he wrote me a note, and I don't know if I've written him back yet, but we're going to have him on. Awesome.
Well, thanks again, and this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. Thank you, everyone.
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