Trump's Tariffs and the Great Depression

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different in the middle segment.
And today, Victor is going to be talking about the Great Depression.

And I think that kind of works well with the top news stories, which are over Donald Trump's Liberation Day speech.

And then, of course, the topic of that, which are tariffs.

And we'll get to that after these messages.

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welcome back to the victor davis hansen show victor Martin and 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. Please come join him at his website, The Blade of Perseus.
The web address is victorhanson.com, and we'd love to see everybody there. There's lots of things to read, and I think that you will enjoy the website, especially if you like Victor's work.
So, Victor, Donald Trump, we had our Friday news roundup when we had, Donald Trump was just giving his speech, so we haven't had a time to talk about the Liberation Day speech, which seemed to be centered around tariffs and the process of the United States giving what Donald Trump called kind reciprocity for tariffs that are applied. Generous reciprocity.
Yes. And we've had some reaction in the meantime to those that liberation day speech which is the dow or the stock markets have seemed to have responded by dropping a little bit 1600 points today on thursday which we're doing it europe and china have sent out the signal that they are going to retaliate possibly so this looks like it's going to turn into a very big part of Donald Trump's administration.
I was wondering your thoughts on this. I have some questions about this.
Number one, if tariffs are so bad, then why isn't the economy of China, Vietnam, India, and Europe crashing? Because they have tariffs up to 200, 300 in some aspects like Canada, but 20, 30 percent. So why aren't they saying, why aren't they having a discussion in China or Europe?

This is bad.

This is like the Smoot-Hartley Act.

We can't do this.

Classical libertarian economics say tariffs are terrible, Europe.

Why aren't they having that internal discussion?

But they're not.

Apparently, they think tariffs are very good.

It's only our tariffs that are bad.

That's the first thing.

The second is they keep saying Great Depression, Great Depression, Great Depression.

Depression is a first thing.

The second is they keep saying Great Depression, Great Depression, Great Depression, Depression, Depression, Depression. You're going to cause a depression.
Well, we're going to talk about the Great Depression. But my former colleague, deceased, but a brilliant man, Milton Friedman, pointed out in print and in lectures, I must have heard him say this four or five times in person, that tariffs did not, they were a minor factor in the Great Depression.
Most of it was monetary policy, too few dollars. There wasn't enough money, and people were hoarding money, etc.
But his other point was, it was wild speculation Wall Street. So my point is the more Wall Street lectures us about depressions and tariffs cause depression, I want to say to them, no, you did.
You caused depressions because you had wild stock swings. Does anybody believe some of these stocks that are being offered to the public are actually worth that? If you look at the actual earnings of companies and you look at their stock valuation, they're way off.

So they are just headed toward a reconciliation, a reckoning.

It's not the tariffs that are going to cause it.

And it didn't cause it in the Great Depression.

The other thing is what I don't understand.

Maybe you can answer the question, Sammy, is simply this. Why is the world not angry at the people who started the tariffs and have asymmetrical, but they're angry at the target that is finally replying? I do have an answer for that.
The United States is the strongest country in the world and expected to be paternal to the rest of the nations. Okay, so we're going to be a patsy for long because we think it's 1947 forever, and we're right after World War II, flush with cash, and we're the colossus of stride in the entire world and that's in perpetuity? No.
The other thing is that I don't understand, is the word tariff even appropriate? So give me, I'll give you an example. If Europe has a 10%, 8% tariff on cars and we say we're going to do the same thing, is it a tariff, or is it just, are we just doing what you do? What I'm getting at is tariffs classically, as defined, and we're going back to the Smoot-Hartley Act, they were 40 and 50%, and they were unilaterally on the United States to protect industry in 1930 after the stock market crash.
But these aren't unilateral, preemptive, provocative tariffs. They are a reaction, and they're reciprocal.
So I don't even know what they're saying. It's like we're on autopilot.
We just say, we don't believe in tariffs, but all we're going to do is whatever tariffs you have, it's going to mirror image you. So it's your tariff.
So Canada, if you have a 258% tariff on American butter, it's autopilot. We'll do the same to you.
And if you don't, we won't. But we're going to be completely on autopilot, reactive.
And that's pretty much what we are doing. I don't even think tariff is the right word for it.
And the other thing is, they keep talking about the Hartley Act in 1930. But if you look at those tariffs, like I just said, they were astronomical.

They weren't 10%. They weren't even 25%.

They were 40% and 50%.

And this is a whole different world right now.

I'm more worried about the stock market being overvalued.

And a whole generation of young people between the two coasts that are not getting married, they're not having children, they can't buy a home, they have not had a rise in real wages. From 2015, excuse me, from 2005 to 2017 until Trump came in, there was no rise in middle wage adjusted for inflation.
What good does it do to dump all this stuff, free trade stuff, from China and Vietnam, for example, and Mexico in the United States and say it keeps consumer prices down if wages haven't risen commiserately? So we don't get any break by cheaper prices if the wages are flat. And I don't mean California artificially raising the minimum wage and driving everybody out.
I'm talking about free market economics. And wages have not gone up.
And they haven't gone up because people are outsourcing and offshoring. So there are cultural, economic, and social

considerations. There's a reason why we're losing not just the cartel's machinations, but there's

a reason why a person takes a drug. There's a reason why the suicide rate is at record levels.

There's a reason why males of the working classes between 18 and 30 are completely a lost generation. And it's because they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm going to build a plant.
I'm going to build a natural gas generator. I'm going to build it, and I'm going to get an adequate wage, and I can buy a house.
That's been gone. So this is a class thing.
It really is. Donald Trump, Mirabil Dicto, I can't believe he did it as a classical Republican.
He's not classical Republican. But what Donald Trump did was he said, this Republican is going to side on the, this Republican is going to choose the side of the working man.
It's not going to choose Wall Street. Wall Street hates Donald Trump.
Have you ever seen anybody in this audience that's watching or listening? Has anybody ever in their wildest imagination think that Democrats would be on the floor of the Congress blasting Donald Trump and worried that Wall Street's going to be hurt and not talking one word about the working classes that are all for this because they think finally somebody's listening? And the final thing is, has it had any effects? Donald Trump says $4 trillion in foreign investment. The figures I've seen are commitments.
They're not actualizations yet, but $3.1 trillion. If that comes in, $3.1 trillion, there'll be millions of jobs that come in here for people to avoid these tariffs.

Because he's just saying, if you come in the United States and you want to help us, you can keep the profits. You just have to have the jobs here.
If you're Mercedes Benz and you get a 3% to 8% profit on your sales, fine. But the cost and the services and the labor is going to be here.
You're going to pay for things here. And so it's going to be a boon to the interior of America.
And the Democrats, because they have no other alternative agenda, they are taking the side of the uber rich, even while they blast oligarchs and aristocrats and plutocrats. No, you're on the side of plutocrats and aristocrats.
You guys were the party of globalization under Bill Clinton that started it all off. You were the people who thought globalization was neat because you could wean the billionaire class over to your site, which was about 70% of them are on their site.
So they are speaking in their interest. They're not speaking for the people of Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin, the working people.
So then just a few more things about the tariffs that are being applied to countries. Donald Trump has chosen not to apply those tariffs to Russia, Cuba, China, and North Korea, or Belarus, not China, Belarus and North Korea.
And I was wondering, and Russia, yes., yes. Well, ostensibly we don't.
I'm not saying that we don't have leakage through third parties, but we have trade sanctions on those countries. So there's no point in.
I mean, we're not trading with them because they're under the Biden administration. Once they invaded, we leveled trade sanctions against.
And Trump has said that he would even go beyond that and put sanctions on anybody who does trade with Russia, i.e. buys their oil.
Then they would have sanctions put upon them by us. So it would be redundant.
In North Korea, we don't let things from North Korea come in. And, of course, the left says this is Putin's puppet.
He's not putting things on Russia. He's putting things on Great Britain because Russia is already sanctioned.
And Trump, to get them back into the negotiations, he's going to sanction them even harder. He's doing things that nobody on the left ever thought.
If the Joe Biden ever say, I mean, Joe Biden almost from if you read the secret history of the Ukraine war, as it appears in the New York Times, Joe Biden was authorizing types of strikes where he was getting messaging from the Russian military, not to do that, because they were going to go to DEFCON, their version of DEFCON 1. He just ignored it.
Or whoever was running the country, he wasn't. But my point is that I didn't hear any Democrat in Senate said, we're going to sanction any country that buys Russian oil or gas.
Partly because the Europeans were blasting us, were not giving enough money, why they were secretly buying Russian natural gas and oil. And they didn't want to be sanctioned.
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And we'd like to thank Field of Greens for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. So Victor, I was wondering if you thought that there would be special impact on farmers or the how is this going to impact farmers? Are they for or against these tariffs? I would say most of them are probably against them because it's in the media.
But if you look at the entire economic plan that people are proposing about the extension of the tax cuts, there are elements within that package of immediate depreciation for the purchase of tractors and things that will be, in the long run, favorable to them. But right now, if you have a, I don't know, if you have a Massey Ferguson that's assembled in Canada,

or you've got a Kubota tractor and you need parts and they come in here, they're going to be more expensive.

I don't know how much people are talking about, but in the case of a house, it might be $10,000 more to pay the extra price on bolts and nuts and nails until domestic production either increases or those companies decide to put those factories here.

Thank you. extra price on bolts and nuts and nails until domestic production either increases or those companies decide to put those factories here.
That can be done very quickly because there's so much unused manufacturing places in the Rust Belt. You could have a Japanese company going to Michigan or Wisconsin or any of those places.
They'll probably go into Tennessee or the South because of the unions. But they can find all of these abandoned places, fix them up, or build new ones.
They could do it immediately. Within a year, they could do it if they wanted to.
But the thing about it is, I have 40 acres of almonds, and it produces, I don't know, in an excellent year, almost three tons. We're talking about 120 tons.
It's not very much, but we have 1.1 million. Maybe it was 1.5.
I think it's down to 1.2 million acres of almonds. And tariffs did not make the almond price collapse.
Overproduction did. And so what happens is if you have almonds or walnuts or pistachios or raisins and they go down to the port of L.A., the Koreans, the Indians, the Chinese just go along with clipboards and they look at all of the cargo ships.
They look at the cargoes, the big crates, you know, and they count them and they think, what is the shelf life of a pistachio? How long has it been sitting here? Oh, in about six months, we'll offer them 75 cents on the dollar. That's what they're doing because of overproduction.
And they have tariffs, too. Anything that competes with their agriculture, they have tariffs.
And one final thing, this idea, that post-war idea is so ossified that we take the hit and we allow these countries to create these production assembly manufacturing centers. and then we take American capital out of the United States and develop them over there in these centers, and then they send it back here cheap.
And this process then is going to make these countries like Vietnam more affluent or China more affluent. Now I'm parroting George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton. And in that affluence, they naturally appreciate the beauties of Western-style free market capitalism and, more importantly, democracy.
And I have seen zero proof of that. The more we gave concessions to China, the more they rigged their markets and dumped product here below the cost of production.
They manipulated the money markets. They stole copyrights.
They stole patents. They ran up deliberate surpluses.
They didn't believe in capitalism, free market economics. They believed in Napoleonic mercantilism.
And did they ever liberalize? Oh, Tiananmen Square was because, I remember this, Tiananmen Square, that was because of the new affluent growing awareness. No.
It just made the Chinese, all globalization did to the Chinese is make its military almost the equal of ours. And Vietnam is still run by communists.
I haven't seen any of that. I think Mexico, all of a sudden, they've got a $177 billion surplus and there's no cartels, there's no corrupt judges.
No. There's no proven demonstrable connection between greater affluence and a tent and based on mercantilism and then a automatic or predestined transition to democracy.

That's what we were told.

You guys out there in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, we're going to have to put you up on the altar of globalismism and you can just go to 7-Eleven and be a clerk or work on the internet and sales or something because your jobs were overpriced you were getting too much so we outsourced and now everything is more efficient because capital always goes to the more sufficient thing but the people who say that are never the victims of their own ideology.

It's always somebody else in the Midwest or the San Joaquin Valley. And I saw that as a farmer.
I saw raisins go $1,420 to 440 in 12 months. And I was a smart blank blank A.S.
kid with a relevant Ph.D. in classical languages, farming on a massive Ferguson.
And everybody around me, my Mexican-American friends would say, Victor, did you get a Ph.D.? Are you a better pruner than I am? I can prune 200 vines. I don't think you can do that.
What did they teach you over there at Stamford? That's what they would say to me. And I'd say, you got a point.
And they said, who is the fool, you or me? And I said, I am. But the point is, I went up, I think I mentioned that I went up to the Rays and Administrative Committee, and we had this economist come out, and he was going to lecture us all about how wonderful it is that the free market was going to.
And I said, Greece and Turkey are now in the EU, and they're dumping product below. They're getting about, you're a baker, and you want to pay $1,400 for American ton of raisins, or you want to pay $800.
But they had actually, the real costs were triple R's because of their regulated economies. But the EU was subsidizing it, so they were dumped here.
And I said, they have no defense. We're paying for their NATO budget big time in the 80s.
And I said, we just bombed Libya, Gaddafi. And you know what? All of these people that are dumping, these EU countries that are dumping product here through subsidies below the cost of production to ruin our industry, they wouldn't let American planes fly over Europe from England.
They had to go around the European, they were siding with Gaddafi while we were protecting them from Russia. So we're paying their defense, they're subsidizing product.
And this guy says to me, as I said earlier, and I've, you know, it's so weird. I heard it on the radio and driving today and on television.
I try to listen to all these different stations. They get these free market people.
Now they're Democrats, but usually they're Republicans. And they always say that it's going to hurt the consumer because you're going to get cheaper prices.
And we're going to get lackadaisical domestic suppliers because they think that they can just raise prices. They're not going to be competitive.
And, you know, we talk about China and Vietnam and Europe, but you know, they're not, this is not sustainable for their countries to have protectionism because they're not, they're not facing market realities. The Buffett's the winds, the tornadoes of the market.
We are. So we're flexible.
How'd that work out the last 50 years? Go tell that somebody who was a boiler maker or steel worker and tell them that he was lazy or that he's better off at seven bucks an hour or 10 bucks an hour. I'm so sick of that.
It's a class thing. And I have this unique or unfortunate experience of being in the Bay Area and on the Stanford campus listening to this and then coming back to southwestern Fresno County and seeing the reality of stark poverty and no jobs that pay well, except for government, state of California.
$57 billion in debt.

But it's still, you know, printing money. I can't print money.
Borrowing money for everything, Medicaid, everything. Victor, before we go to a break and then to your middle segment on the Great Depression, the last question I had was, did you notice I was skimming over the tariffs to be applied in all the countries and their tariffs? And it seemed to me that the countries that had the highest tariffs against the United States, and you kind of touched on this, were Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam.
And somebody could argue, well, they're communist states, of course, but then Taiwan as well, which is not. And it's all these Asian states.
And is there any, there are some that were not Asian, but it's predominantly with the highest ones, those Asian states. And I know that they would make an infant industry.
They're not all communists. But Taiwan's not communist.
Thailand, Taiwan. But their attitude was, their attitude, what was their model? Their model was China, and their attitude was this.
Well, if China is a belligerent to the United States, an arrival, and the United States doesn't trust it, and China gets away with 10, 20, 30% tariffs on certain things, then why wouldn't our friends or neutrals like us get the same break? See, that's what people don't understand. Once you start to do it and you work at a disadvantage, and some of the people that you're working at a disadvantage of are your hostiles or belligerents or enemy or opposition, then your friends say, well, why would you treat your enemy better than us? So we're going to do it, too.
So they got on. And then the second thing was when we started to have frostier relations, some people started to relocate to Southeast Asia for cheaper wages.
And they thought, wow, this is really good. We've got a lot of money coming in.
Maybe we'll put barriers because we're kind of insulated now. First of all, the United States doesn't believe in retaliatory tariffs.
And number two, we've got all this foreign investment coming in. So we can afford to be a little bit of protectionist of our, you know, small-scale industries, agriculture, because they're not going to retaliate against this.
And we've got all this infusion for relocation from china and assembly same thing with mexico so it's i just don't understand the logic this is why i'm so confused the world is angry at the people who say no mas and and all you have and carolyn levitt's been very good at that i don't know if the press secretary. I really like her.
She just kept saying reciprocity, reciprocity, reciprocity. With her little chart, she puts them up.
And why are you mad at us? We're just doing what you do. And, you know, even the only country that I have I'm ambiguous about somewhat is Australia.
I did last night Sky News of Australia. I love Australia.
The Pew polls show that of all countries in the world, we have the fondest, most favorable feelings, reverence for Australia. Okay.
They run a $16 billion deficit with us. And so why did we have a tariff on them? Because one of their biggest industries, of course, is beef.
And in 2003, there was a case of mad cow disease from a Canadian imported cow. And so they went, and I don't blame them, they went ballistic, so they said no more beef.
But then Donald Trump said, if you look at the Chinese, and if you look at the Europeans, and if you look at everybody, they go into little weird things like, oh, you can't have a chicken in a cage this size, or this environmental can't leave this much carbon footprint. you can't have, you might have a swine flu or a bird flu outbreak and they find little things like that.
You think that 345 million Americans that eat meat all the time are going to get mad cow disease? No. But Australia used that.
And so for the next 22 years, they haven't allowed our beef to go in at all. So Trump said the other day, I like Australia, but they're using an archaic calcified idea as an excuse to keep out competition from American beef.
And I just, I live eight miles from the Harris Beef Corporation, which is the largest beef corporation west of the Mississippi in terms of actual tonnage of beef produced. It's right here on McCall Avenue, not very far from my house.
John Harris sold it about four years ago to a local company. But if you talk to the people who ran it, I won't mention their names, they're wonderful people.
And John Harris is probably, he's known as a cattle baron, agribusiness person, but he's known foremost as a man of integrity. He's just a sui generis.
He's a different type of person. He's always had a high moral code.

And we mentioned Carol Harris that recently deceased.

She did too. Very generous people.
The idea that they were producing beef there that might have mad, that is insane. That is one of the most up-to-date, clean, automated.
and he's even got they even had PhDs

in animal science to see

that the way that the animals were dispatched was humane. You know, I think they even had an animal psychologist that come in and make sure that the animals weren't too apprehensive as they were led to their next life.
But my point of it is, so Australia would say that you can't have any American beef, no Harris beef. That's insane.
And so that's why there's all these things that Trump is saying, I got four years, I'm going to be reciprocal. It's madness.
And think one last thing. Everybody take a deep breath.
He could have been like Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan did a lot of good things.
But he didn't cut the budget. He didn't try to balance the budget.
And he didn't try to shock the world into treating us the way that we treat them. George W.
Bush came in. He did a lot of good things.
Deregulate a lot. but the deficits went up, just like they did during Trump's first term, partly or mostly due to COVID.
And we got into optional ground wars, which I supported in Iraq after 9-11 and Afghanistan. So my point is this, this is the first, and George H.W hw bush he kept talking about capital gains tax

capital gains tax capital gains tax but not offshore in our off source this is the first republican that said we've all been playing musical chairs and this music's going to go off and when it goes off there's no seat for the united states with 37 trillion in debt and a 1.1 trillion or somewhere between $900 billion versus $1.5 trillion that undulates in trade deficits. So he's the first person who said, I am going to common sense-wise or comprehensively take a look at everything that is plaguing the United States.
The border, no more cheap labor under the Bushes and Reagan. I looked at them as I've debated.
My friend Alan Simpson, he was one of my close friends, I debated him on the Simpson-Mazzoli button in front of a group. I really loved him.
He was a wonderful person, but I think that Bill was wrong. But he's the first person so there's going to be no illegal immigration.
We're going to follow the law. He's the first person that said we just want to be treated the way they treat us on trade.
He's the first person that said the federal government's three million employees. It's out of control.
And we can't run these deficits. None of the other Republicans did it.
And yet you pick up the Wall Street Journal, you think he'd be public enemy number one. I don't understand it at all.
I don't understand why people are saying, yes, he tweets too much, or he says this or that. I can understand that.
But why don't they see what he's trying to do? And why don't they compare what he's trying to do with past presidents? Why isn't the Wall Street Journal like the Democrats? Why don't they just say, this is the Wall Street Journal's alternate plan? We believe either they have to do one of two things. We don't think trade deficits are a problem at all.
We don't mind at all. It's what we said.
It lowers consumer prices. It makes us more efficient.
And just say that. Or we don't think budget deficits are that bad.

You can always borrow.

You don't need to cut like this and this

because they're always criticizing his cuts and stuff.

Or why don't they say,

we can manage $3 billion.

Or the defense budget,

it's the same as the annual interest payout.

That's no big problem.

But they don't.

All they do is attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.

We'll come up with a constructive alternative.

Or if you can't, say the status quo was fine.

It was all Trump's imagination.

Trade was great.

Deficits were no problem.

Interest borrowing, no problem.

The border was fine.

We got a lot of cheap labor, great demographics.

Just say that. But they don't.

That's what

drives me nuts.

There's going to be one last thing.

There's going to be, is it 12

Democratic representatives as we

speak are going to visit the border to

inspect the status of immigration.

What are they going to do?

Where were they?

Vinnie Thompson, remember him? The chairman of the January 6th committee? Before that known as an election denialist who tried to overthrow the 2004 election by trying not to certify, I think along with 30 other House members, because they said, does this sound familiar? The voting machines were crooked and and George W. Bush didn't really win Ohio.
It really, John Kerry, and John Kerry, if he won Ohio, he'd be the president, so we're not going to certify it. We're going to delay.
And then they put him, the head of the January 6th committee, and he's going down to the border. He didn't set foot there, did he? Not for four years.
I guess his attitude is the border's wonderful when it's wide open and there's 12 million illegal aliens and there's 500,000 felons, so I don't have to visit it. But if Donald Trump is president and there's nobody coming across and there's no more illegal aliens, then there's something wrong.
I've got to go find out and attack him. There might be something unsafe there, Victor.
He's saying there's too many people not working. I went there and they're just diving around waving at each other.
They're not getting killed or shot at or trying to deport people with who knows what. You know what I mean? And I think that Donald Trump has got a massive project trying to clean up the border problem that the Democrats left him.

And he's got a massive project doing these tariffs. They are going to be somewhat of a long term, much longer term.
He didn't have to do this. He could have just sat back and said, I'm Donald Trump.
And he could tweak things at the edges. He could have, like he did the first term, he could have done some good things, good GDP, low inflation, deregulated, cut taxes, tried to jawbone the cultural revolution.
Instead, he said, woke, ESG, DEI, uh-uh, I'm going to have a counter-revolution, cultural, social, economic, political, military, diplomatic. And that's what he's doing.
And I think only a businessman and a businessman's attitude of, we've got a problem, let's get it fixed. This is how we do it.
That's the only way to get done. If you had a swamp creature in there, they would be doing what you just suggested, sitting back, letting things ride.
Well, their wife would have come to them or their spouse or whatever and said, you know, I went to a cocktail party in Georgetown and I just can't take it. What they're saying.
Or one of the senders would call up and say, you know, my wife works for CBS. She's going ballistic.
Or somebody else would say, my husband, he's working for PBS. You can't do this.
And then they would be susceptible to that. But as I wrote in the case for Trump, I'm writing this sequel that Trump come back or whatever we call it.
It's almost I'm getting close to a rough draft, but he is like Sophocles Ajax or Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. He's the outsider, the tragic hero.
And everybody said, we're in the status. We can't deal with the debt.
We can't deal with trade. We can't deal with the border.
We had Joe Biden. Oh, who's that weirdo riding in from the Grand Tetons? Oh, it's Shane.
Oh, he was a gunslinger. Yeah, but we don't care if he's a gunslinger.
He's faster than the cattle baron. So, Shane, do your thing.
And then when he does his thing and we're safe, they said, oh my God, he has a gun. I don't approve of that.
Remember that great line when he says, there's no living with a killing and there's no place for me here and I've got to leave. And the point was, it's just like John Wayne at the end of that searchers when he walks out, famous John Ford scene where he opens the door and there's light coming out.
It's dark and everybody's celebrating that Natalie Wood came back and everybody's happy. And you think they're going to crown him with flowers or an olive wreath or something? No, they don't want him.
He kind of does that John Wayne. Well, you know, I'm done and I'm going home.
And he's got

that kind of Confederate double-breasted thing. And it's like, thank you.
And we loved you for doing that. And I don't think we want you to stay for dinner.
Not the mechanisms you used. You were a little bit too violent for my taste.
I don't, you know, it's kind of like Curtis LeMay. He's going to take the B-29s down to 7,000 feet

He's going to drop napalm. He's going to come in on the jet stream 400 miles an hour.
He's going to target the industrial centers of all the major Japanese cities. He's going to shorten the war by two years and no invasion of Japan probably?

He's going to mine all the harbors?

Oh my gosh, if he could do that, we wouldn't have to invade Japan.

And that was why we didn't invade Japan, by the way.

It wasn't just the atomic bomb.

Japanese said that after the war, that the B-29s did far more damage than the atomic bomb.

So then after it's over, peace.

Oh my God, we invented napalm at Harvard University.

And that Curtis LeMay guy did it.

Thank you. piece oh my god we invented napalm at harvard university and that curtis lamay guy did it he dropped napalm he didn't he dropped 11 million leaflets that wasn't enough that was and then we started trashing him and he pops up and dr strangelove you know as a as a composite character of these nefarious, odious generals.
And then we make fun of him. And then he dies.
And it's like, but when you're in an existential war and you don't know how to use the B-29 and it's a bigger loss than the Manhattan Project, $2 billion down the drain. And General Hansel was a nice guy, a really nice guy,

and he's flying at 30,000 feet, and they're missing the target, and the engines are burning out, then I think you need Shane. You need Shane or John Wayne.
And that's what we do. Same thing with George Patton.

Oh my God, he slapped a soldier.

Yeah, he slapped a soldier

after he took, he slapped a soldier after he saved North Africa and he won the Sicilian campaign. And then they put him back in.
Oh, we need him. Where is he? Well, we isolate him for a year because he slapped two soldiers.
Well, bring him back. We were stuck at D-Day.
We can't get out of the Bokkash. He's on the way to the Rhine.
And then after the war, it's, oh my gosh, he said that one day we might have to fight the Russians. Oh my gosh.
He said that we fought to liberate Eastern Europe in 1941 from the Nazis, and now it's controlled by the people just as bad. Those are our allies, our friends, the Ruskies.
I know what we'll do. Will we leave him of command? And then we'll say he's a nut.
And that's what they did. Same thing with General Sherman.
Sad tales, Victor. It is.
That's the tragic hero. That was the brilliance of the seven plays of Sophocles.
Read them. Philictides, Ajax, Antigone.
It's brilliant person that is comes out of nowhere to be the moral and the moral problem solver and then as the problems get solved the people who are the beneficiaries think wow that was amazing but now we don't need them and now i hate myself for every calling calling in such extremist and that's how it works well victor we have to go to a break and then come back to talk a little bit about the Great Depression. So stay with us, everyone, and we'll be right back for the Great Depression.
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You can do it all yourself on Wix. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
So Victor, you can find Victor at X. His handle is at VD Hanson and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup.
And we've started video production of these podcast, which can be found on YouTube, Rumble, and Spotify. So whatever your outlet is, come join us there.
So Victor, the Great Depression, perfect week for it since Donald Trump rolled out all his tariffs. So I'm looking forward to your assessment of the insignificance of the Great Depression to our history.
So go ahead. It's still debated.
The Great Depression was that period, everybody, from Black Tuesday, the collapse of the American stock market in 1929, all the way through 1939, where you finally had a steady increase in GDP and lower unemployment. It really didn't happen, though, until 1941.
And you should remember that we had about 18% unemployment with the second mini-depression of 1938 and 1939. So the question is, why did this booming economy in the post-World War I era, the Roaring Twenties, that we call it, why did it suddenly collapse?

It's very interesting that it's relevant now because we're talking about tariffs,

and there was a huge tariff, the Smoot-Hartley Act of 1930.

But we noticed something.

The stock market collapsed in 1929, not 1930, and that didn't get really going to 1931. As I said earlier to Sammy, Milton Friedman never thought, as most economists don't think, that the tariffs were the main contribution.
So what caused this panic? One of the problems was that the stock market was not regulated, and there was this boom, and the actual productive capacity and profits in real dollars of companies that were highly valued and through speculation, they were not earning the types of returns that justified the market.

And people started to see that. Now, what were the structural things that were happening? In the 1920s, horses, I think my grandfather told me that he stopped using horses in the early 20s on this ranch.
But his point was half of his 135 acres was devoted to pasture to feed the so-called human tractors. Once he got, I think his first tractor was a Fordson, I think they called it.
And he went to heaven when they made the model 9, 8. It was called a 9N.
It didn't have overhead valves, but it did have a PTO shot. My point is that once that happened, he bought all of his land in production.
And that happened all over the United States. And it happened in industry too, with electrification.
So when you started to get mass electrification in the 20s, at the end of World War I, you started to get enormous increases in assembly line production and you started to get enormous increases in food production because you almost got a 40% increase in heritable land because they were not, it wasn't being used to create the power to cultivate. That was now replaced by the internal combustion engine.
So you were creating a lot of product. At the same time, there was this Ponzi scheme where the Versailles Treaty said that Germans had to pay reparations.
The Weimar government was under pressure, so it was almost the equivalent of about a half a trillion dollars today. And they were supposed to be paid in gold, or at least marks that were backed by sufficient gold reserve.
And they quickly started to inflate the currencies to pay back France and Britain, but primarily France. So the German economy then suffered hyperinflation, started to tank.
The allies who had borrowed billions of dollars from us in 1914, 1915, 1916 were not able to pay us back. So what we did, partly rectified and exacerbated under the Dawes plan, we started loaning massive billions of dollars of outflows to Germany so Germany could pay France and Britain so they could pay us back our reparations.
And what we were doing is we were putting investment into the German economy that wasn't creating goods and services or new factories or new jobs. And we were doing the same thing.
They were paying Britain reparations, and they were not really using that to rectify the losses they had or convert their factories into productive piece. They were paying us.
So this money was coming in, and the stock market was going crazy. And they looked at increased, I mean, wouldn't you want to have a booming stock market and start speculating when all of a sudden there's billions of dollars coming in on borrowed money from the French and the British to pay us what they had borrowed at the early years? And then all of a sudden you look at agriculture and manufacturing and they're producing all this goods and services.
And once the stock market started to collapse and big time, and then people's banks started to fail, people started to hoard money. I mean, one out of every five banks failed.
And so they took money out of circulation. And then people, at the moment they had this enormous productive increase in the 20s, there was no purchasing power because everybody was freaked out.
They started taking their money out of the bank. The stocks were wiped out because of the dramatic thing.
The British couldn't pay us back. The French couldn't pay us back.
And it was a monetary problem. And we were on the gold standard.
And the gold standard's fine if you're in prosperity. But when you have no money, you need to increase the supply of money.
And that was contrary to classical economics. Keynes was right for a brief period that you needed to increase the money.
And that was contrary to classical economics. Keynes was right for a brief period that you needed to increase the money supply because there was billions of U.S.
dollars that were in people's socks under their mattress. They were just terrified to spend it because they didn't know if they'd have a job and they didn't want to put it in the stock market and they didn't trust the bank so what do you do you take it out of circulation and you pile not that they hadn't that much money and then the debts were called in the more the debts were called in the more you put you reload you took people 25 percent unemployment it was just a circular at some and then in 1933 after the third year of this, getting into the fourth, we get the New Deal.

And what did the New Deal do?

It started to regulate the economy.

And it's the National Recovery Act, which was declared unconstitutional.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act.

They started to make work.

Some of it was good, but it wasn't market-based.

The government is not as wise as the market. And they started restricting profit-making and controlling the economy.
At this time, by 1935 and 1906, we had some increases in GDP. But when you look at the other countries, and this is the irony about it, the totalitarian, fascist, horrific countries like Japan, like Germany, like Italy were command economies.

And one of the things that, and remember, they had the word socialism, national socialism. Italian fascism was a socialist concept.
Same thing with the Japanese militarists. So what they started to do were massive public works program, trains, train stations, public buildings in Germany and Italy, autobonds.
And then Japan started building huge port facilities and they started to rearm and they started to expand their market economies by printing by expanding their monetary base. and for, I mean, it had to be paid back, but for that period, it was stimulus.
We didn't do that. And that cycle of too much production, too little money in circulation, 25%, it just kept going and going.
And no matter what Roosevelt did, he made it worse because he kept trying to control the natural yin and yang of the market, which would have adjusted. And so by 1938, we had about 17% unemployment, 18%.
I think in some states it was up to 20%. And then he said something quite unique.
He said, we're going to have Dr. War War and not Dr.
New Deal get us out of this. So then we went up, suddenly printed money up to 123%, 130%, bigger than now, 140% of GDP.
So a country that could not afford an army the size of Portugal in four years was equipping people, 12.2 million people in uniform. And when they went overseas, people could not believe it.
The Australians or the British would say, oh my gosh, those Americans have the most beautiful uniform. They have chocolate bars.
They have Lucky Strikes. They have camel cigarettes.
They have condoms. They have everything.
And we don't have anything. So it was a massive, and then everybody said when the war was over, the music would cut out and we'd be back in the Depression.
It didn't happen because we kept expanding production and we changed over from war production and then the Cold War and we stayed in them.

But it was preventable had the Federal Reserve loosened up on the money supply. I don't know if it would have been wise to suddenly get off the gold standard.
We did it eventually, but to get to start to nurse our ourselves off it and allow money not to be all money connected with the amount of gold we had. I know it's an inflationary process we have today.
But the main problem was coming out of World War I with these payments that were just circulating between the defeated Germans and Austrians, the reparations that were not going to them, they were being paid off in funny money, and then our desire. I think Coolidge said they hired the money, didn't they? Meaning France, especially France, but also Britain, especially Britain, and also had to pay us back.
But nobody was using that money to invest, is what I'm saying. And that fueled the stock market price.
And then the stock market looked at things, and they looked at, oh my gosh, look at cotton now. We went from a half a bale an acre to three barrels with machinery and nitrogen fertilizers, and oh my gosh, everything.
and they looked at the arable and these farmers were buying machinery and they were taking huge debt i know my grandfather said to me i never borrowed a dime in my life but i had no choice if i could get it to nine in tractors you know for eight hundred dollars each and go to the bank and it, then I could get double my production. But if the price of raisins went from World War I, $175 to $32, and they used it fine, and the government went in and bought it from them, and they laced it with brandy and sold it for cattle feed.
And then the government came in and controlled it.

You couldn't take your raisins and sell them yourself.

The government owned it, commodities.

And those were these allotments.

You couldn't plant this much of cotton or this much of wheat.

They had allotments on everything.

So it strangled the free market as a reaction.

So the strangulation of the free market and the constriction of the money supply and then the methods to address that made it worse. And then the international scene.
And it was tragic because one of the results of the Great Depression, besides the ruined lives and people died and starvation and horrible things happened, was the rise of Italy, Japan and Germany. And they said to us, the democracies, we solved the Great Depression before you did.
And we did public works and we borrowed and we rearmed. And so in the salons of New York, Mussolini was a cult hero.
All these very wealthy New Yorkers said, wow, the douche, douche, he's got the trains run on time. He's got sophisticated telecommunication stations.
He's got air service between cities in Italy. And they looked at Germany and they said, there's not a freeway in the United States like the Autobahn.
So they started to not look at what those fascist countries were really like. They just saw that they had somehow survived the depression greater than, and that made us unaware of what they were like and what our rendezvous would be like.
And they got ahead of us, way ahead of us, especially Japan. Well, your discussion has raised one observation and then one question, which might be too big for right now.
But it looks like the United States has expected to take an imbalance in their economic relationship with other nations in the world. From post-World War I, we tend to just always put it as post-World War II, the U.S.
becomes the big economic power, therefore it had to take the hit when it came to trade imbalances, for example. But it seems to me that from the discussion of the Great Depression in the United States or what you said earlier, the United States has really done that even post-World War I.
They did. They stepped in with a Dawes plan, and they said to the Germans, stop printing money to pay the Allies because the Allies can't pay us.
So we will loan you money and then you should invest that money in productive and create real wealth and pay the Allies and they can pay us. It didn't quite work out that way.
But we were trying to intervene and solve these problems. And finally, we said, we're so wealthy now with the roaring 20s, and we're so sick of World War I.
And by 1933 and four, the mood in America was, hey, we got 117,000 of our kids killed over there. We sent 2 million people over there, and they're at it it again.
Hitler, Mussolini, now the Japanese, we're sick of them. And that delayed our rearmament.
And that was tragic. And the second one is a question.
So when you said that government is not as wise as the free market, you sound like a Milton Friedman free market advocate. Yet, in our earlier segment, we talked about tariffs and you're defending Donald Trump's tariffs.
So make sense of that for me. Well, the fallacy with all due respect is yours.
Apparently, you have to remember the adjectives I used. I said wise, not ethical, or nice.
There's an iron law out there. It has nothing to do with us.
It's kind of like the political science theory of the iron law of oligarchy. No matter what kind of democracy you create or constitution, there's going to be a select group of people who are

more talented or more money or whatever, and they're going to rise and run the thing. Okay, I don't know if you believe that or not.
But there's kind of an iron law. The hidden hand is what they use.
And you can't pick, there's millions of variables that make a business succeed or failure. So when Pete Buttigieg thinks he's going to spend $10 billion to make charging stations, he thinks he's smarter than all of these local people who build charging stations.
They know the traffic patterns, the type of charging station. He thinks he can just mandate that.
Well, he didn't bill any.

We just blew that $10 billion.

But because he didn't just say,

here is a grant for the state of California to disperse,

and it's going to be competitive building,

and we're going to monitor it and see which particular contractor can build so many stations in such a time for such a cost. It was overly controlled.
And even that is not efficient. So what I'm saying is there is a hidden hand, and it's very efficient.
Don't get me wrong. It's very efficient for the whole world to have something, a guy in Vietnam produce something we want, and somebody will produce something they want.
But the problem is that efficiency is not necessarily it's not necessarily equated to fairness. I'm not a socialist.
I'm just saying that I'll take an example. We have the seventh highest per capita income in the world, but we've got massive numbers of people that can't buy homes because that per capita reflects the total wealth of the country divided by the number of people in it.
But it's not a good indicator of the general welfare of everybody. It's a good indicator of how dynamic the U.S.
economy is, as is GDP.

But when you have vast numbers of the people of the population who can't do certain things in a sophisticated society, like get married at an earlier age, have children, buy a home, not take drugs, not commit crime, all that. Not that you can, that's part of human nature, but you can mitigate that by having affordable housing.
And I'll give you an example of what, in 1971, I graduated from this town. And I mentioned this before, but almost everybody in my class did not go to a four-year college.
They were electricians. They were insurance salesmen.
They were assemblers. They were manufacturers.
There was about 10 of those plants in this little tiny town. If I went down the main drag of Reedley, California, there were packing house after packing house after.
They're all shut down now. And everybody was working there.
And these people were buying homes for $18,000, $20,000, FHA homes. And they were getting married.
When I came back from graduate school at 25, everybody called me the old man. And you're not married? You're not married and you're 25 years old? And I thought, well, I got a PhD.
Id i don't have any money what would i do you know i can't but so that was a very healthy thing in that country and that reflects things about the country on crime on safety on tradition on values it was a very public spirited time i can tell you that And I would make some prognosis. If I was walking in San Francisco, I don't know, in 1955, and I lost my wallet, I would have a much better chance of somebody turning into police than I would today.
I'm sorry, I would. If I was in Salma, California, and I was driving in a parking lot, there would be very little chance that somebody would intentionally try to hit my car and then file a fraudulent insurance claim.
Because there was a shame culture. It was a close-knit.
People were roughly pretty prosperous. I'm not saying they were as – I mean, they didn't have cheap Chinese things and the Internet and all that.
I'm not talking about technology, but it was very different. it was the idea that we're building homes and we're going to build you know in 2014 we voted in california seven five it was kind of an ossified idea an old-fashioned idea to build dams and make water and like our grandparents did we built we authorized 7.5 billion dollars to make three big reservoirs and gavin news didn't even do it.
Nobody would have ever got away with that in the 50s or 60s. Instead, he took the money, he took a quarter billion dollars of the money and blew up dams.
For what? Well, that was this new postmodern. But what I'm getting at is you have to have a moral economy and an efficient capitalist economy.

And they're not antithetical.

You can channel it.

If you restrict it too much like Europe does, you get socialism and inefficiency.

So there's 500 million people in the EU, and they produce about $20 trillion of goods and services per year.

That's their GDP.

There's 340 million in the United States. We produce about $30 trillion of goods and services per year.
That's their GDP. There's 340 million in the United States.
We produce about 30 trillion, 33% more than the EU. And we have 60% of the population.
And that's because we're far more efficient, far more efficient. But we might do a little bit more of ensuring that people haven't up that we can encourage home builders to build homes we don't have to be socialists like they are but if we just said we're not going to regulate the thing that's really destroyed this country is this bi-coastal elite who is very very wealthy through globalization when they had their seven billion person markets if you were a lawyer a media person an academic an investor a financial analyst you name it a high-tech person you got a whole new seven billion people buying your products and then you but the muscular people we just wrote them off they were losers.
And you can't do that. I'm not trying to romanticize the middle class.
I grew up with the middle classes. I think if you look at a map of California, Tulare County, Kings County, and Southwest Fresno County, and I live at the intersection of all three, is the poorest area in California and about where Appalachia is.
I think this community has about a $16,000 per capita income. So I'm not trying to, but I can tell you that the morality of the people that I see here, in many ways, it's superior to the people that I see who are very affluent in Silicon Valley.
And so you have to try to invest in the working classes, always, the majority. So the government should play a role, but a necessarily smaller role for particular, somewhat moral issues.
It can be a deregulatory war. It can be an incentive capitalist role.
It can say to this, if Gavin Newsom said this, any developer who creates 1,000 homes, 2,500 square feet per year, I will waive the requirement that he has to have a solar panel and this and this. Not things that involve the structure.

And I will promise you, you can get a permit in a year and a half.

That's it.

Or if you could give incentives, or I will not charge.

If you build a new, for the first 10 years, you will have a 50% reduction in your property tax.

Anything like that, you can work with the market to incentivize it. But they're doing the opposite.
They're de-incentivizing the market. They're saying if you build a house, you better take a camera guy and pay him $20,000 to film every aspect of your building because under our judicial system, some guy is going to sue you and say you missed three studs and then we're going to hold you liable.
You know what I'm saying? And so we're so overregulated. And California is a huge state.
If you look at the population per square mile, it's not compared to other countries. It's huge.
I mean, it's about the size and total area of Japan. And we don't have 130 million people.
We have 41 million. It's shrinking.
So we have a lot of space. We could really create more dams and reservoirs and fix our freeways and get more, better airports and housing and we don't have to build you know european style high rises with a little green grass circle around it and everybody gets on the high speed rail to work we can give people you know six or five or six homes per acre give them a backyard and stuff and the government's role is to play the role of making that an easier process to the extent and but not taking over as the capitalists or the builder.
You have to have regulations or otherwise. There's a housing tract that was built in the late 50s or at least in this town.
And if you go look at those houses, and I know people who've lived there, so I've been in them, they have like one quarter inch glass still. There were no regulations.
And there's slums. We called it Splinter Village when I was in high school.
Splinter Village. It was kind of fake Frank Lloyd Wright style, and they all collapse.
So you have to have regulations, but you have to be reasonable. And the problem is that our regulations are boutique regulations.
They come out of the mind of very affluent people on the coast who have everything they need. They're very wealthy, and they think, I'd like to live to 100 years.
I want beautiful air. I don't want any.
I want to look out at California as perfectly scenic and pristine. I have to, because they have that laxity to do that.
And then they start charging electricity rates and gas rates and taxes that nobody could afford except them. And that's what's destroying the Democratic Party, that it's the party of the professional class and the billionaire class.
And they want this idealistic, top-down vision. The vision of what Tom Sowell called the vision of the anointed.
And it has nothing to do with getting up in the morning in Fowler, California, and saying, can I fill my gas tank at 470? I just got back from Michigan when I got this flu a month ago. Gas was 305.
We have more gas in California, natural gas and oil than Michigan does. I just went by, it was 470.
There's no reason for that. There's no reason that a guy named Joe Gomez, who's a lineman for the power company, should have to pay 40 cents per kilowatt.
It's just ridiculous. Well, Victor, let's take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party.
Speaking of California. Yeah, speaking of California.
I know you went into it, but we'll talk. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
So, Victor, I know that you wanted to say a little bit about Gavin Newsom, who's been in the news in an effort to look like he's moving to the center so that he could potentially run for a presidential race. And also just the Democrats, are they offering any viable agenda? so go ahead i mean he said he said he was going to have what were the edgiest podcast around he was going to engage people confront people so we've had let's see we've had michael savage savage nation have charlie hurt We've had Bill Ma, Savage Nation.
We've had Charlie Hurt. We've had Bill Maher.
And we had another conservative, too. And it's been going on about 60 days.
Has he had any new initiative that says we're going to build a reservoir with a 7.5? No. As he said, we're not going to blow up those

two dams in Northern California after I did four already? No. As he said, I have a plan to

raise the $8 billion that I gave to Medi-Cal. As he canceled the reparations commission that he

created, 4% of the population of California is African AmericanAmerican. It was a free state.
It never had a slave in its mind. 27% of the population were not born here.
And he's creating a reparations when he's $76 billion started the fiscal year in debt. No, as he said, oh my gosh, California has one of the lowest home ownership rates.
It's 55%. The average nationwide is 62.
I've got to start getting initiative to incentivize developers billing. No.
As he said, oh my gosh, I've blown 20 billion on high-speed rail and the 99 doesn't have six lanes, three

in each direction, nor does the I-5 and the Federal Highway, nor does 101. And people

are being killed. And per miles driven, the 101 and the 99 are among the most dangerous

places in the United States to drive. I better fix them.
I better get six lanes before I

build one more inch of high-speed rail boondoggle. Stonehenge.
No. He hasn't done anything.
We passed this repeal of the $950 theft. He hasn't even enforced it.
They don't enforce it. You can go to San Francisco and walk through and shoplift.
They're not going to do anything to you. There's not a new team that's going to indict you, convict you, and put you in jail for grand theft.
He hasn't done anything because he just looked around and he said this. This is what he's doing.
Okay, 29% Democratic rating, 27% NBC's, CNN says 29, then NBC said 27. Now it's 23%.
So then he got, I better talk tough. We have a toxic brand.
That's what he said, remember? So then he thought, okay, but I created all this mess. But I'll just reinvent myself, but I won't ever reinvent myself and go back and do things to correct the disasters that I caused.

But how are we doing this?

Is the party following the lead of Fetterman?

No.

Oh, it's called street art.

AOC and Bernie Sanders, she does her little jiggle lig and then Bernie gets that awful accent and starts. You know what I mean? And then we look at, oh, we can say S.H.I.T.
if we're senators. We're going to stop this S.H.
We're going to do this to Trump. And then we can have the kickback.
Or we can get Al Green. I can take my cane.
You're not going to do that, Donald Trump, and get escorted out. And then we can have Cory Booker.
25 hours. I hate Donald Trump.
I despise Donald Trump. He's a monster.
No, he's a dictator. No, he's a...
For 25... The only thing that was impressive about that, he didn't urinate or defecate.
I don't know how he did it for 25... He must have taken some type of constipatory drug or something.
I don't know how he did it. Or not drink water.
Maybe he didn't get a kidney stone. I don't know.
But he that was a complete waste of time. There was no, it was just a buffoon.
So then Gavin looks around and says, well, Cory's, these people all have their theater art. We've got the House of Representatives inspecting the border to see if any illegal alien is being clubbed or whipped.

So we can say Donald Trump is put, where are those cages that Obama built?

And they say, well, they're empty now.

Well, show me a cage.

I've got to say that Donald Trump is worse than Auschwitz, like Michael Hayden tweeted, remember?

So that's what they're doing, and Gavin feels left out. So now I'm going to have a hard-hitting Joe Rogan type of podcast.
No, you're not. And then he's going to do this.
Have you watched him? It's really weird, his mannerism. He kind of goes like this.
You know, like this? Yeah, he has a lot of mannerism. He has a lot of hand movements and movement in the mountains of greece buying a rug for my mother you know what i mean a handmade rug up in andritzina or maybe a rock of a and the guy would do this point it out like this very figuratively with their hands and so dramatic it tries to it.
The difference was they were genuine and he's artificial. So it's a joke.
And Donald Trump is like, he's like the proverbial D9 cat. I mean, he just, there's all these obstacles.
He's going boom, boom, boom, boom. And they throw mud at him.
They throw stuff at him, and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then he adds insult to injury when he doesn't say like this, which I would do and I'd fail because I don't have his political skills.
But I'd say, I didn't ask to do this, but if I don't do it, who's going to do it? In other words, you know, the tragic sense. He says, it's Liberation Day.
It's a day that'll be the most famous day in American history. We're liberating.
You're going to love it. It's going to be a little tough, but it's like a showman.
And then their heads even explode what's left of them. And the D9 just go, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And he doesn't care. He thinks, well, I'm only here one term.
how do i get back at those people for all the things they did to me they you know fanny willows and i know what i'll do this week i'll say i'm going to invade panama oh my god he's a 19th century teddy well that didn't last long maybe i'll say that i'll make canada the first 51st state oh my. How about invading Greenland? I got a better idea.
I'm going to run for a third term and violate the concept. He's not going to do any of that.
But he wants to make them go insane. And that's what they're doing.
And you know what? I wouldn't do that. And if I was president right now, the Democrats would probably have a 40%.

He's president, and he's got them down to 23.

Because he understands their mentality and what makes them go nuts.

And when they go nuts, they show who they are, and they're absolutely blank, blank crazy.

And they have no agenda.

They have nothing to offer that the American people want.

They're like the Wall Street Journal one.

They're like the libertarian.

I just want to hear what they want to say.

I mean, I was surprised by Rand Paul.

I know you're going the Wall Street Journal one. They're like the libertarian.

I just want to hear what they want to say. I mean, I was surprised by Rand Paul.
I know he's a libertarian, but he voted against Trump on the tariffs. So I would just like him, and then I would like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to say, look, this is the, to be fair to Rand Paul, he's good on the budget.
But let's just say Nancy and Hakeem Jeffries and all of them just say, contract for America, debt, 37. Here is how we reduce the debt to 30 over the next decade, then 20, and then 2050, we're balanced.
Here's how we get the deficit from 1.7 down. Besides, and we already have almost 40% in some states like California, it's over 50%.
So the idea you're going to raise taxes to 60 or 70 is not going to be a solution. So then this is where Social Security is not funded.
This is our plan. This is our plan to close the border.
This is our plan to deal with the 500,000 criminals. They don't do it.
You know why? This is because their solutions pull 20%. Because they're ideologue revolutionaries.
They're Jacobins, French revolutionaries. And they say, you know what? If I say that I'm delighted that we let in 12 million new constituents, yeah, we have a few bad apples.
There are always a few bad, just a half a million. There's going to be some people killed, raped, maimed for life, but that's, you know, you make an omelet, you break an egg.
That's their attitude. And you know what? Afghanistan, that was humiliation, but it's over.
50 billion, 60 billion, million, who cares? It's Taliban. They're terrorists anyway.
They needed a new rifle, a new helicopter. That's their attitude.
They don't care. And they can't say that.
Fracking, I don't want fracking. I don't want fossil fuels.
Well, the Americans do. Well, I can't say anything.
I can't say that I'd like to make mandatory EVs. That's what they did.
They had all these rules until Elon. Elon's kind of a sacrificial tragic hero.
Tesla's on the altar of fossil fuels. By trying to destroy the brand of Tesla, they're empowering the fossil fuel kind of nice.
Maybe Ram 1500 truck's going to say, oh my God, we got rid of that beautiful Hemi V8 just when it was getting 19 or 20 in it. Let's bring it back because they destroyed Elon and nobody wants to test us.
So we're all going to buy Hemis or maybe Tahoe and Suburbans will come back with a V8. I think you're dreaming, Victor.
I think that the idea is we'll get rid of Tesla and they'll go to the EVs that Ford and... They have about 8% of the market.
Nobody wants those things. They're no good.
Yeah, they're... Tesla is a work of genius.
That's the funny thing. The best thing he ever said was he said something to the the effect that, they asked him how he did it, and he said something to the effect.
And I did it with Asperger's, too. I'm the first guy to do with Asperger's.
Because he is a little communicatively distant. Everything he touches, I don't know how he does it.
When you talk, I mean, his personal life is a mess. He's got all these children.
He's got these girlfriends, wives. But, and he tweets some crazy thing.
But there is a authentic American, he's kind of like Henry Ford was kind of weird, you know, and so was Henry Kaiser and so was Alexander Graham Bell. Edison was really weird.
And I think he's just, he's an authentic Renaissance genius. And he knows how, not only as an engineer, he has the idea, but he knows how to get the top people.
When they did Brett Baer's interview and he had those doge people, remember it was Big Balls, is that his name? B-A-L-S. I thought it was going to be be a bunch of little nerds and then i looked at those guys and they were like 45 50 and they were head of this company head out and they were they reminded me of a half a courtroom lawyer half sophisticated professor half engineer they were brilliant and they weren't chainsaw we're gonna cut they were sober judicious methodical and they gave a brilliant tutorial on what they're doing i wish they could be that could be published that's the best thing elon ever did yeah it seemed like a room full of mathematician mathematical geniuses they're like no problem i mean i don't people say well why would you have any empathy for the witch man in the world? But I do.
And I see him talking, and he seems to be wilder when he talks about what they're doing to Tesla. It's kind of like they're destroying.
I used to be, I provided they all love me. They're destroying this product, this brand that they all want.
It's the best car of any EV in the world. It has no emissions.
You can argue about the power generation and where it comes from but why are they doing this well they hate you elon why do they hate you because you're trying to balance the budget and cutting and you endorse satan lucifer the prince of darkness donald trump they're going to hate you for the rest of your life no matter what you. Well, why would they do that? It's so bizarre.
They're terrorists. Nobody's arresting them.
No, they're in on it. When AOC says this is take, when Jasmine Crockett says we're going to take Elon down, she means it.
And then that filters out to the talking points and the eight to five demonstration hours. Somebody is paying them a lot of money in some cases, a lot, talking points.
But the Democratic Party and the left is behind it all. They're the orchestrators.
Just like during the 2020 riots, you always get a fact checker. Have you noticed that? Kamala Harris can say, and these riots are not going to stop, nor should they stop.
They're going to keep going. They're going to keep going.
They're going to go all the way into Election Day. She didn't say riots, but demonstration.
And they shouldn't stop. And then you see all the fire in the background destruction.
Then all of the facts, Polifact, you know, and all of these fact checkers say she, context was lacking. She didn't mean that she was calling for peaceful protein.
And then you have Donald Trump. I want everybody to go to the Capitol and assemble, assemble, assemble patriotically and peaceful.
This is a code name for rioting. That's what the fact checkers did.

So it's crazy.

It's just the way it is.

All right, Victor Rohr at the end of the show.

So I wanted to read a comment from Ashley Craft, who is responding on your website to your article,

What Trump Needs to Do.

And I have a feeling, based on what she says,

she's responding to the suggestion that he have a compassion

Thank you. to your article, What Trump Needs to Do, and I have a feeling, based on what she says, she's responding to the suggestion that he have a compassionate voice.
And she says, thank you for your wise comments. President Trump has shown this side of himself before.
As I remember the disastrous debate with Biden last summer that ended that campaign, It wasn't just that Biden's condition was out there for all to see, but many times President Trump looked at him with sympathy, and it worked really well. That being said, one of Trump's greatest assets, in my opinion, is his steady authenticity.
If and when he authentically feels like expressing that tragic tone, he will. I like that.
I don't know if I would say it was quite sympathy. If you're Biden and you say the following, and then Trump goes like this, did anybody, I don't know what to say.
I can't, does anybody know what he said? I guess that's sympathetic. The most sympathetic thing, I keep going now, I know your listeners are going to get sick, but he said when that couple came up, you're not ordinary.
No, no, you're not ordinary. And then when the wife, the spouse of the person who said that said, you took a bullet for us.

Thank you.

And he said, I guess I did. Yeah, I did.
So there's, I'm writing this book, and one of the things I'm not doing is going to interview him or go, I just want to look at, you know, dispassionately and read everything I can and watch everything, every video. But I've been learning that he's much more complex than his enemies make it out.
You know what I mean? Yeah. And he's very affable.
And anyway, the story's not written. We'll see what's going to happen.
He's got four years. He's got to get through the midterms.
Or they're going to impeach him and subpoena everybody. Everybody's going to have to get.
That's going to make the Wisconsin race look like child's play, the midterm. And the low propensity voters that have joined the Republicans, they're going to have to get out and vote.
And vote and vote. They've got to get out.
because it's going to be, I don't even want to go through it. It's going to be.
It's going to be very important for the country. They're going to change all of the tabulatory, too, about Donald Trump.
The classical definition of a recession is 1.5 negative growth for two quarters. When Joe Biden had that, remember that?

And they said, that's not a recession.

That was an archaic system of classification.

The reason I'm saying that, I just saw that on a left-wing site said, once we get to 1.5, two consecutive quarters, he's doomed us.

It'll be a full-fledged recession.

And I thought, no, it won't. You told us it didn't exist anymore.
That was what by. So the language will change.
And we've got a lot to look forward to. But at least someone finally in God's year 2025 said, what can't go on won't go on.
And we were headed to the third tier of civilization if we were lucky in debt and disunity and no borders. And now we have a chance.
Well, thank you, Victor, for all your wisdom today. And thanks to our reader, Ashley Craft, for her comment.
And thanks to you, our audience, for choosing to join us this weekend. Thank you, everybody, for watching.
Much appreciated. And viewing, too.
Yeah. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off.
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