Where Powell Stands, Beating Mamdani, and the Fallout from Butler

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Deus Hanson Show.

We're at the studio at this time where we've kind of moved our studio to another place.

So it might be some maybe some background noise from time to time, but don't pay attention to that.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show and we're here to talk about the news from this week.

So this is the Friday news roundup and on deck we have Trump's dealings with NATO and Putin and the Secret Service report on Butler and then also attacks on ICE in both Texas and California.

So stay with us and we'll be right back with the show.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So lots of news this week.

Victor, for those of you who are new, Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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So Victor Trump's had some very serious dealings this week.

He seems a little frustrated, as I would be, and I think all of our audience too, with what's going on in the war in Ukraine, a little bit, but he's made some progress, at least with Europe.

So that's been a good thing.

And he is sending NATO arms for perhaps helping Ukraine.

And he's also sending defensive weapons, is my understanding, to the Ukraine itself.

And then the last thing for the news of the week, and then your commentary on it, is that Mark Root,

the

General Secretary of the EU, or sorry, NATO, has visited the United States and he's a very, very good Trump supporter, I think.

So, anyways, it's some good news and some frustrations.

What are your thoughts?

He's the best NATO general secretary they've had in a long, long time.

And he was Prime Minister of the Netherlands for a long time.

He was the one that the left got outraged about when he said daddy at the NATO summit.

Donald Trump is trying to thread the needle.

Everybody should remember that.

He's got on the one hand the MAGA base that says we are not neo-isolationists, we're Jacksonians, but we do not want to get involved in Ukraine.

We didn't want to get involved in Iran.

This is the base of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon.

On the other hand, There is the traditional Republican base that redefines deterrence in a different way, and that's you have to, from time to time, to intervene or to be active to ensure that our enemies and our rivals don't take advantage of our appearing passive.

So what Donald Trump is trying to thread the needle in the case of Ukraine, he came into office saying he could solve it in one day.

He can't solve it.

Nobody could solve the Ukraine-Russian war in one day.

But he, as we had that famous intervention with J.D.

Vance and Donald Trump that set Zelensky straight.

What you're you're a, you know, you're a beggar, basically.

You're here asking for us, so don't tell us what we have to do.

That was salutary.

And now that relationship has been restored.

Donald Trump, in a weird, ironic way, has set the stage where he, I think he'll be much more successful as a mediator in Ukraine for a couple of reasons.

He has bent over backwards to

be conciliary to

conciliatory with Vladimir Putin.

No one can say he didn't exhaust all avenues.

There was a famous anecdote circulating in the last 72 hours that he said, I just had a good call with Vladimir to Melania, our first lady, and she said, every time you have a call, he bombs some civilian center.

And Donald Trump said, you know, you're right.

Maybe he's playing me.

I don't know what.

I think Trump is trying to warn Putin that he's going to get tough.

And indeed, he said

when Mr.

Root came to Washington that he was doing something that no other president had done, and that's a secondary boycott.

Secondary boycotts here in the United States are illegal in most cases under labor and trade acts.

In other words, secondary boycott says you don't boycott Russian goods, you boycott anybody who buys and trades with Russia.

That could be

catastrophic for Russia.

It could also disrupt world trade.

What he's saying is, if you are China and you're buying Russian oil, if you're India and you're buying Russian natural gas, and indeed European countries are doing it, then we're not going to trade with you.

But he gave 50 days.

It was kind of ironic because the Europeans said, why did you give 50 days?

Why not do it now?

Well, if he did it now, some of you, Germany in particular, might be secondary boycotted because you have been still trading in various

silent ways with Vladimir Putin.

The other thing he did was he tried to square the circle and said, We're going to give a lot of aid, Patriots,

missile defense to Ukraine, but this time you guys are going to pitch in and help pay for it.

We're not going to be the only ones that deplete our munitions and then not get paid.

I don't think that went over very well with the left, but it was consistent with the MAGA agenda.

So basically, where are we with Ukraine and Russia?

We're just the $64,000 question.

Vladimir Putin, we don't know exactly, but he's lost dead, wounded, missing, somewhere between one and one and a half million Russians.

And he has to tell the Russian oligarchs, the Russian military, he's got to tell them that that was worth it.

the greatest loss of Russian soldiers since World War II.

It was worth it because,

and here's what he has so far.

He can say, I got them out of NATO.

They're not going the idea, they weren't in NATO, but they're never going to be in NATO.

I had to do that.

Number two, he's saying,

I know we had the Donbass, I know we had Crimea, but now the West has institutionalized that they belong back with Russia.

And now he's depending on this huge 600-mile front, he's somewhere between 40 and 80 miles beyond the demarcation point of the war of 2022.

So the question is,

how much territory that he occupies, in addition to what he had at the beginning of the war, can he go back and tell the Russians, we're done, peace.

And they're going to say, well,

it was

serious losses, Vladimir, but at least you got the following.

And apparently,

an assurance that they won't gain entrance into NATO and they will not have to worry about giving back the Donbass was not enough.

We don't know what that magical line is of advancement westward that Putin thinks will satisfy his, you know, he's a dictator and you know how dictators function.

They're here one day and they're gone the next because they have no political legitimacy.

So we don't know what that what he has to have, but apparently he thinks it's more than he has now.

The other thing that is the second factor is it doesn't matter what he thinks he has to have if he feels he's going to lose what he has.

And by that I mean if Vladimir Putin had not invaded Ukraine, three things would have happened.

NATO would have never had 30 members meeting the 2% GDP.

It looks like all but Spain will do that very quickly.

Maybe Spain and Canada won't for a while.

Two, NATO would have never promised to shoot for 5% GDP.

Number three,

NATO would have never had Finland with the most effective artillery in NATO.

And the Swedes, frontline states right on the border with Russia, who have a very sophisticated aircraft industry, the Gripen-Saab airplane is very good.

So they got two valuable NATO members into the alliance.

and they got a $400 to $500

billion increase in weaponry and munitions and military readiness, and they're going to have double that if they go to 5%.

And then for

Vladimir Putin's insistence to keep going has changed Donald Trump's attitude.

Now he can say legitimately to the MAGA, I exhausted every single avenue.

And if we pull out like you want me to, this is going to be Afghanistan August 2021.

And it will destroy the Republican Party because we will be tagged not with losing an Islamic country, a backward Islamic country like Afghanistan.

To be frank, we had no other policy interest in it other than humanitarianism and to prevent al-Qaeda from coming back and partnering with the Taliban.

But Ukraine is a little different.

It's on the doorstep of Europe, and it's an adversary, a direct adversary of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

So

he can't let Ukraine be completely swallowed or even largely swallowed.

And so that was a big change, and he understands that now.

And he's now said that, as I said earlier, he's willing to give Ukraine more munitions.

He's willing to have a secondary boycott of Putin.

And we are getting in very, very dangerous territory.

I outlined this in the end of everything, my recent book.

It comes out in paperback this September.

And in the epilogue, I said,

these are the threats that are existential in the world.

Pakistan, India, Turkey, threatening Israel or Greece, but also Putin, the Russian media, and the Russian military threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons, of which our military and political and diplomatic corps have said that's nothing.

They don't mean it.

They do mean it.

They could do it.

So if we'll see what happens, but for now,

the net effect domestically is: I think Donald Trump has neutralized the MAGA base because he's tried to negotiate with Putin.

He did everything he could, and I think they understand if he pulls out, it's going to be a disaster, not just for Republicans, but for MAGA too, politically.

And then I think he can legitimately say to NATO, I didn't disrupt NATO, I saved NATO, and I'm now partnering with him.

That's why the Europeans are relieved, because for all their talk about

maintaining the 2% promise and going up to 5%, they're not capable.

They are not capable.

In theory, they should.

They have a huge GDP that's 15 times larger than Russia.

They have altogether 500 million people in the EU versus 145 in Russia, but they're socialist, and their fertility rate is crashing, and they're not up to it without the assurance that the United States is going to back them up.

But for now, we're in a new phase where Donald Trump is getting tough with Vladimir Putin.

And if you think it's not going to work,

I would remind you again that in the last four different presidencies, Bush, Obama, Biden, there was only one four-year period in which Vladimir Putin did not leave his border.

He did not go into Ossatia and Georgia as he did under George Bush.

He did not go into Donbass and Crimea as he did under Barack Obama.

He did not try to decapitate Kiev like he did during the Biden administration.

And there was a reason for that.

Final thought, Medeved, who's sort of the bad cop in Russia, he was that

Russian president for a while, and then he was considered a moderate, and now he's a lunatic to regain his feet as a hawk.

He said when he was asked what Trump said, he said, Trump is going to have a secondary secondary boycott.

He's giving us only 50 days to shape up.

He's going to all, he goes, we don't care.

Russia doesn't care.

We'll see how Russia doesn't care.

Secondary boycott.

The other thing is, finally, I keep saying that, but finally, this economic program is very ambitious.

And the trade,

the trade war, the tariffs, interest,

all these things are in flux.

And we don't know what the consequences will be of a secondary boycott, and we don't know what Vladimir Putin thinks the consequences will be.

It may be he thinks I have enough damage anyway.

I don't care.

And if they have a secondary boycott of India, of China, of Middle East countries that sell, you know, that deal with me in oil, et cetera, or buy oil, whatever, this will hurt the United States if they start boycotting third parties.

So we'll see.

It's a mess that Donald Trump inherited, Joe Biden.

Well, you almost shot down my thing that I was happy about or excited, and that was that the Europeans appear to be willing to join if Donald Trump is selling them arms and also if they're upping the amount that they're willing to put into NATO.

So I was excited about that, but I think that maybe there'll be a surprise.

There are 500 million people and

this new commitment to being a little bit more of a strong force.

I'm hoping.

I'm hoping.

Yes.

If your hopes were to be reified, the argument would be something like this.

There was a time when Russia was an existential threat from 1946 to 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 92-93.

In that period, Germany had a huge army of 500,000 people.

And they were armed to the teeth, as was NATO, because they didn't know at any one time when Russia was going to try to go,

as I think some of the European communists, they're going to end up in the Thames River.

That's what their idea was.

So they thought they were going to be overrun by the Red Army.

When that vanished, NATO then had no reason to be, if you look at the original charter, keep Russia out, Germany down,

the United States in.

Russia was no longer a threat, we thought.

It was no longer communist.

Germany, you don't have to keep it down.

It was going to disarm.

The United States was sort of kind of.

And then there was NATO turned into an expeditionary force.

By that I mean it used NATO troops outside the European continent contrary to the charter.

It was supposed to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to protect Europe.

It was using troops to remove Milosevic in the Balkans with the air campaign.

It sent troops to Afghanistan, NATO did.

And

the Europeans

never were on board.

They thought,

the war is over, it's a perpetual peace, we're going to have our socialist contract, we're going to have green energy, we're going to have open borders, we're going to live in Lalawa.

But now we're back to the Cold War in the sense that they have a Russian army right on their borders.

The only difference is

in the past Cold War, you had the Warsaw Pact, Hungary, Poland,

the old Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, all part of the Russian juggernaut.

Now these are frontline states and they are arming to the teeth.

So he would have to go through Eastern Europe to get to Western Europe.

So I think if Europe will arm, 30 nations will promise to meet, they still have six or seven that are saying they're going to do it.

By the way, could I have a footnote?

Canada, for all their rhetoric,

there was a recent poll that 80% of Canadians don't like the United States and they hate Donald Trump.

If that's true, ask yourself, Canadians, why did it take a disruptor?

You think he's crude?

You think he's obnoxious?

You could have prevented that.

All you had to do was keep your 2014 promises and have invested 2%,

2%.

And all you had to do was have a moderate surplus.

You didn't have to have $63 billion surplus.

And you wouldn't have had a Donald Trump screaming at you.

But you couldn't do that.

And you broke your word to NATO.

And that was something that in this period of Russian aggression was unforgivable, especially given your military history and World War II when you had the fourth largest Navy in the world.

You had your own beach at D-Day.

Canadians were very heroic at the Dieppe catastrophe raid, and yet they asked for a lot of the things that happened.

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So, Victor, let's turn to the Secret Service report on Butler.

I'm not sure that there was a whole lot new, but these were the things that I noticed that they brought out as problematic with the Secret Service.

And that is that they denied requests for additional resources.

They had a threat on

Donald Trump's life 10 days before that Butler speech.

And they had an effective, I think everybody heard about this, sharing with the local.

And then the last thing was pretty shocking.

I think we heard about it at the time, that Crooks had been let in through the gates with a range finder on him.

That is so weird.

They put people on leave.

They've disciplined people.

They've taken people out of the field that were partly responsible.

The head of the Secret Service, who was a...

whom was appointed by Joe Biden was fired.

So what happened?

People were yelling for about a minute and a half.

They could see the shooter on the roof.

Nobody did anything.

He came through security.

There was no reason to have a range finder.

So what explains it?

I don't know what explains it.

I don't think it was a conspiracy among Secret Service people to have Donald Trump killed.

But I do think this.

I think there was a nonchalance among the Secret Service.

I think under the Obama administrations and the Biden administrations, they had been using non-meritocratic criteria for hiring people, not just DEI, but ideological criteria.

They were trying to get a woke left-wing Secret Service, and they felt that that was going to be conducive to their democratic succession of presidents.

When Donald Trump came back in, against all expectation, the greatest fall and rise story in history, really, of the American presidency, people in the hierarchy of the Secret Service, like a James Comey, like an Andrew McCabe of the FBI, like a Robert Mueller, like a Christopher Wray, just let down.

They just said, you know what?

We got to go to Butler and watch Trump.

Trump this.

We got to listen to his talk, the rallies, the MAGA people.

So they slow walked their job.

Their heart was not in it.

Their prime directive was not taking a bullet for Donald J.

Trump.

And they were lax.

And they had been lax all summer.

And hopefully they've cleaned house on all of these people.

I hope they've done the same thing with the FBI.

So

these bureaucracies,

because of the method of ideological and DEI as well, bias in hiring and promotion and tenure, you're getting a left-wing C you had a left-wing CIA, a left-wing

FBI, and a left-wing Sec Secret Service.

And the result of that is, in the case of the Secret Service, they weren't weren't worried enough about protecting Donald Trump, just a fact.

And hopefully, that's not the case any longer.

Yeah, that's hope.

Well, how about, and I know that in your state of California,

a lot of action on the ICE front is taking place, of course, and lots of protests against it.

And I was wondering your thoughts on the recent pot raid in California.

I think everybody's shocked about this.

So again, I keep beating this

dead horse, but the Democratic premise, the left-wing premise is

under Joe Biden, it was a moral thing, it was a moral project to deliberately undermine federal law and in Confederate fashion nullify it.

Let in 10 to 12 million people illegally and let them reside illegally.

That was moral.

When he unexpectedly, in the mind of the left, lost, they were going to let in another 12 million.

They temporarily clamped down just to get re-elected, then they were going to let in another 12 million.

This was part of the demographic project of the left.

And then Donald Trump was elected.

Then they redefined it and said, oh, the new morality is to break the law again and try to oppose those who were enforcing the law.

Think about that.

If we break the law, we're moral.

If you enforce a law, you're amoral.

That's how they're directed.

So then ICE has been getting...

I mean, ICE couldn't function unless people are calling them up.

And I don't mean the traditional white MAGA person.

I'm talking about Hispanic people.

I'm talking about black people who say, we're being overrun by illegal aliens.

This is going on.

That's going on.

They call ICE.

There are members in the bureaucratic architecture of ICE who are not on board with the Trump agenda, they call people up and tip them off with dangerous consequences.

That's the background.

So they get calls.

There is the largest plot farm in Ventura County, right near Los Angeles, not 50 miles, 60 miles away.

And they are hiring 350 to 400 people to harvest, and they're illegal.

And there's children out there that are 14 and 15 years old.

In California, you cannot work at any age under 16.

If you're 16, you have to be out, and it has to be on non-school hours.

If you are raising cannabis and marijuana and you're having young people come in contact with this potentially dangerous product,

you have to be 21.

So some people tipped off ICE and said there are people below the age of 21, they may be as young as 14, and they're violating labor laws.

And they are all, for the most part, illegal.

And ICE went out there to arrest them, and they were met very quickly by protesters.

And it was the same old, same old script.

They were waving a Mexican flag of the country that none of the people want to go back to.

And they were not waving the flag of the United States where all the people in question wanted to stay.

You figure that out, logic.

I can't.

And it was tragic because they started to forcibly try to get into the fields and prevent ICE agents from detaining illegal aliens.

They were trying to find the children that were being illegally exploited by working.

Farah, the owner, had been a Democratic donor.

He had violated children's law.

He put up a protest on X and said, I haven't.

He quickly took that down.

He knows that they apprehended people below the age of eligibility to work in marijuana and very young.

There were reports that of the 360s, they found some people with convictions or warrants for either one, kidnapping, assault, rape.

And yet you had people protesting.

And one of them,

I was in this California State University system for 21 years.

It's the largest university in the world, over 30,000 faculty members.

You had a CSU faculty member out there protesting, and he took a tear gas canister and he threw it back at ICE to injure them.

That's a felony.

And of course the CSU union, the California State Union, supported him.

They said, oh, you shouldn't have arrested them.

You were manhandling them.

And that's the same old, same old.

In other words, we're back to the idea that it is a moral thing to try to help illegal aliens many of them violent not your at the expense of your own citizens and to endanger the life of people that are trying to enforce the law it's right out of the south carolina 1860 to 61 playbook of nullification that's who they are and karen baston weighed in and said oh i'm so worried we have all of our illegals in los angeles and some of them don't want to go out because they're illegal and they're breaking the law, and they might have to go back home.

So, I'm going to give them $200.

I don't know how much I'm going to give them, $200.

I don't know if that meant a week, I don't know if that a day, but what she was basically saying is: Los Angeles taxpayers, the city is broke, it's overrun by homeless people.

We have not built the palisades.

We will not build the palisades, we will not issue permits in a timely fashion.

We have 300,000 people leaving this state a year, and yet I want to give illegal aliens money so they can evade

people who are trying to enforce federal immigration law.

All these people were silent when 12 million people swarmed the border.

Criminals, rapists, murderers, people, you name it, no health backgrounds, no criminal.

They didn't care.

And suddenly they care about them now.

They don't care about them.

They care only about them as useful political weapons against Donald Trump.

And they're on the wrong side of public opinion.

They think the more chaos they can inflict, the more mayhem it's going to be, just like 2020.

And all of their collective brains have says, remember 2020, George Floyd?

We rioted for the end of May, June, July, August, September.

We had Kamala Harris say, it's not going to stop.

It's wonderful.

We're going to go all the way to the election.

We had 14,000 people arrested.

Almost none of them, 97% were let go.

There were no ramifications.

We beat up 1,500 police officers.

We burned a police precinct.

We burned down a federal courthouse.

We attacked the St.

John's Church in Washington, D.C.

We tried to torch it.

There were 35 people killed.

We created sanctuary city zone

right in the middle of Washington, Seattle, and we got away with it.

And you know what the result was?

The military sided with us.

Generals said, we don't believe in sending out, Donald Trump can't send out the military.

Governors, Tim Waltz said, you know what, my wife wants to open the window so she can see that sweet smell of burning come in.

My daughter is on X tipping off every, that's the climate.

And they think, you know what?

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election because we created an impossible situation for Donald Trump.

If he brought out sufficient force, he nationalized the state guards or he brought out the Marines in the fashion of George H.W.

Bush with the Rodney King riots, then we would call him Hitler.

And

it was police state.

If he didn't, and for the most part he didn't, then we said, ah, it's chaos in the street.

That's their strategy.

They want to replay 2020 because it worked.

And we'll see if it works again.

They think they can cut, cut, cut, cut Trump every day ice.

And then somebody's going to have a CNN story about Herlinda Gomez, who was in her home, and she all of a sudden her son was yanked yanked out because he had an arrest warrant or something.

And that's a simple, that's what they want to do.

Cut, bleed, cut, bleed, and then drive down Donald Trump so that he cannot fulfill his agenda and he will lose the midterms and he will be impeached.

That is the agenda behind all of these protests.

So it's very important that ICE has no margin of error.

They have to follow the book.

They've got to deport people.

They've got to have good optics.

They have to have good spokespeople.

And they've got to reiterate we are here for the American people, especially the middle classes and poor people who are swarmed in their social services by illegal aliens, who live in communities where violent illegal aliens have been preying on them.

And

we're not here to satisfy the elite by coastal corridors.

We're not here for Martha's Vineyard people.

We don't really care what Malibu people we could care less what a CSU professor says so we can perform in SART and get arrested and try to hurt people.

That's not who we're here for.

We're here for the middle classes and the poor,

our people, our citizens.

Okay, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.

I have a few more questions on that.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Dad?

How do you make a happy egg?

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Happy crack.

Happy flip.

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Happy hen.

Happy egg.

Happy sizzle.

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So, Victor, I was looking at Texas.

You remember they had the ambush of the ICE agents there, and

they were looking for these guys they were trying to capture.

And they have one guy left, a Mr.

Song, who was trained as a Marine, I believe, by the United States military.

And so, he had, you know, the point was, was that he had ammunition and weapons skills.

But I was wondering, because you know, you look at these people that they're pulling in from these attacks on ICE, and they seem many of them seem like they may have been foreign nationals, even if they've become American citizens.

And I don't know to what extent, and maybe

I'm wrong about this, but to what extent America or the United States and this ICE stuff is becoming a mecca for anarchists from around the world to come in.

And

I do know that as I'm speaking, and

I'm not in the studio, as everybody can see,

but they arrested five Iranian nationals near the Canadian border.

And you tell me why Iranian nationals are coming into the United States.

And the profile of Chinese nationals who come in illegally is pretty consistent.

It is single male between the ages of 20 and 30.

Now, why would that happen?

And so the obvious assumption is there are a lot, thanks to Joe Biden and the left, who is protesting the enforcement of the law and is advocating it not be enforced, under their rule or their tenure, they let in people, male, young,

from illiberal regimes, not from Mexico, not from

Guatemala, not from Nicaragua.

I'm talking about communist China and Iran that are here to do us no good.

In the case of the ten suspects who are being charged with conspiracy to commit murder or to,

I guess, assault and injure or kill ICE officers, those pictures were a rogue's gallery of what the left is today.

They were all young.

I think two or three of them were trans.

We know statistically, as we've said on this

podcast, if you look at scientific literature that documented gender dysphoria, published, you can find it very easily online.

Prior to the trans quote-unquote civil rights movement of, say, post-2010 or 15,

it was about 001%.

It was very rare for a person to have gender.

Now, all of a sudden, undergraduates at some campuses say 30% of us want to transition.

Now, that's a cultural fad.

That's hula hoops or swallowing goldfish or cramming people into a telephone booth of the 1950s and 60s.

So if you have 10 people and two or three are trans,

you've got a leftist rogues gallery.

And the people, the pictures of them and the descriptions of them, it's usually the same thing.

Middle class, upper middle class.

and various complaints against the United States.

And here's the common thread.

Nothing is going to happen to us because the ideologically, we are the Sarnevs, we are Luigi Mangioni, we are people who attack Jews and get $63,000 scholarships at Harvard.

Nothing happens to us.

So you may think you're going to do something, but nothing.

And they're defiant.

All this is going to continue until we get federal prosecutors

who go to grand juries and they ask for the maximum sentences.

And when they start to indict,

prosecute, successively convict upper-middle-class kids or foreign nationals that are trying to kill people or cause mayhem, and they say, you're going to go to federal prison for 10 years,

then that will, as I said before, and the French word,

French phrase, encourage Voltaire,

encourage the others.

Remember what Voltaire said in Candide?

From time to time, the British have a very odd custom.

They think it's necessary to hang an admiral, encourage lead, to encourage the others.

There was reference to Admiral Bing, who was pretty much innocent.

He came late to a particular sea battle.

I think it was off the coast of Denmark, and they hung him.

They hanged him, I should say.

And I mean, they finally reversed the sentence, I think, 100 years later, 200, his family did.

But the point was it gave the message to all of the other admirals that you can be a very nice admiral, but if you come late or you don't show aggressive behavior to protect the fleet, you're going to be hanged.

And I'm not saying we're going to hang anybody, but I'm saying that if you take a middle-class, upper-middle-class kid who tries to kill somebody and you treat him like you do any other person, a poor white kid, a poor Mexican kid, a poor black kid.

You treat him the same, no difference between his status, his education, or his income, or his parents' zip code.

It will stop.

It will stop very quickly.

The news will get out.

Do not point a gun at an ICE officer.

Do not, if you take this CSU professor, and he really did pick up a canister of tear gas, and he really did throw it at an ICE officer with the intent to harm him, and he gets charged and he is tried and he's convicted and he spends five years in prison.

I guarantee you there will be none of my former colleagues out there with tips from employees in the federal government.

Go out there, point a gun at ICE, throw a canister at them, block their cars, punch holes in their tire.

They won't do it.

Because they're not known as especially brave or courageous lot.

I can tell you, I taught 21 years with them.

They're not the kind of people I see on farms.

They're not farmers, they're not farm workers, they're academics.

And these kids are students, our former students.

And imagine that our children are being taught by that guy.

That's the sad thing.

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Victor, I was, while you were talking about the Illegal Marine Site and how Trump should represent himself, did you see that Tom Holman took on a detractor in one of his speeches to an audience that obviously supported him because they were booing the guy that was criticizing him?

I was wondering if you had seen that, or maybe you've been in community.

I admire Tom Holman.

People caricature him because he has this gruff look, that his

syntax and diction and vocabulary are middle class or working class.

And more importantly, he doesn't equivocate.

When things get very controversial, when they are going into areas where it's very dangerous, they're getting doxxed.

A lot of presidents, I can think I won't mention Republicans, but I can imagine if we had a different type of Republican president, he'd get on the phone and say, Tom, Tom,

you've got to stop this.

That's killing us.

Don't do this.

Please, please.

And

they wouldn't get anywhere with Tom Holman.

Trump is encouraging, but

he's a very courageous guy, and people are doxing him.

They're threatening his life.

And

he's exactly the opposite of

Alejandro Mayorkas, who in cowardly fashion caused this entire problem, probably on the prompt of the same people who were using the auto-pen to give pardons away.

We don't know who they are, all of them.

We just know that they thought this would be cute to let in 12 million people in four years and change the demographics of swing states, perhaps, and they didn't care about the welfare of people.

These are the people who came in, flew in at night at the Fresno Air Terminal.

I saw them for two or three years, illegally, no passport, no permission, flying in from southern Mexico.

I talked to people that when I came in late at an airplane, they couldn't tell me why all these people were flying in from Mexico.

They had no idea whether they had a passport.

They had no idea whether there was any customs.

They just know that they all had an app, and they had pushed buttons in Mexico, and the next thing they were in the Central Valley.

That's the type of lawlessness that Biden and Mayorkas created.

And then again, I get so angry because people like Tom Holman and all these brave ICE agents have to rectify.

Remember, everybody,

we're not starting at zero.

If they're effective, if they're effective, if they spend another $30 billion and finish the wall,

if they spend $50, $80 billion more, if they're effective, if no one gets killed and they deport 10 million people, I don't know if they can,

we're back to square one.

We're not any ahead.

We still have 20 million illegal aliens.

We're going to have to have creative solutions to deal with them.

But we're just back where Donald Trump left office in 2021.

This was a created disaster by

Joe Biden.

It was not laxity.

It was not incompetence.

This was a clear mission.

to open the border, destroy it, import the poorest people from around the world, and change the demography and say to all of us, we need more government to give these poor people parity.

We need more welfare.

We need more housing help.

We need more food.

We need more education.

It's going to come at the expense not of us in Malibu or Beverly Hills or Cambridge or Madison.

It's going to come at the expense of poor people.

And we don't care about them, but we're going to change the demography and we're going to try to ram that border.

And that's what they did it's the worst thing that's ever happened i think in my lifetime what happened under biden the destruction of the southern border by intent it was an agenda and it worked they got what they wanted and now they're they have no shame that they're criticizing people who are trying to rectify their mistake

well you mentioned the um auto pen and the committee that's investigating what's happening with the auto pin did come out with i thought something new this week, I know that we were all, but that

orders were being given to an assistant of Joe Biden, Jeff Signs, and then he was telling the people with the auto pin to sign with the auto pin.

So

it was going through Jeff Signs, which is really very strange because I think Joe Biden is supposed to be the one that is.

Well, he did in some cases, didn't he?

There was no auto pin for Hunter.

I don't think there was any auto pin for his sister either.

In other words, Joe Biden, if he was completely senile, would not have been able to sign Hunter's pardon.

So what was going on,

this was the most pardons we've ever had in such a short period.

And apparently everybody had an agenda, and Joe Biden was non-composment.

He was only worried about one thing, signing his family and his friends to make sure that they wouldn't wouldn't be held responsible.

And so

the result of all this was

we had the,

I guess it's called the proverbial smoking gun.

We have a person's name and we have emails that says, you go through me and I am the one that will okay the use of the auto pin.

And I guess the only defense that you have is Joe Biden is coming out and said, I either authorized it or I used it myself.

He used it himself.

We have no evidence he ever did.

He did sign, again, his family people, he signed himself, but the hundreds of them were auto pins.

And the only thing is, well,

he must have written a wrong,

got the wrong impression.

I gave him permission.

I knew every Joe Biden said, I knew every one of these 1,500.

He didn't know any of them.

This is a larger question, I think everybody knows.

What do you do about these abuses that went on?

What do you do about James Comey lying 245 times saying he can't remember under oath?

What do you do about John Brennan lying that he didn't spy as CIA director on the Senate staffers, or lying to the Congress and the media about no collateral damage, or lying that he wasn't the instigator of giving the steel dossier CIA attention to forward to Barack Obama to monitor the Trump campaign.

What do you do with Adam Schiff, who apparently listed

his Maryland home as his chief residence when he was living in Los Angeles, or vice versa?

What do you do with these people?

And the answer is: well, you can't go after them because then you would do what they did to Donald Trump.

And if you don't, there's no deterrence.

So it's a tough call.

Donald Trump, when he was accused of being vengeful in the campaign, said, Success is my revenge.

But do you just let them get away with all the stuff they did just because they say we haven't done it?

Donald Trump is conducting law affair.

It's so frustrating for all our listeners.

I know it is, that you watch this for four years, why these people lied under oath, why Fannie Willis sent Nathan Wade into the White House, when Jack Smith that very day was appointed federal prosecutor, why Michael Coangelo left

the DOJ to go back in,

this time to Alvin Bragg after working for Letita James.

All this coordination, Mar-a-Lago raid, getting him off the...

What do you do?

How do you return?

Do you go down to their level and say, I don't want to do it, but they don't understand anything except tit-for-tat?

Or do you say, you know, I'm above that?

I play by the Marcus Queensbury rules.

Not in my name.

Don't dare do that.

That's the McCain-Romney formula.

Or do you go back to, I don't know,

Lee Outwater,

circa 19,

I don't know,

88, and do you campaign the way Lee Outwater did?

Willie Horton ad, Boston Harbor, Tank ad,

and get George H.W.

elected so George H.W.

Bush can say, ah, Lee Outwater work, but I'm never going to do that.

And then lose nobly and not win ugly.

I don't have the answer to it.

I really don't.

But it's very frustrating for people who destroyed the law and tried to overthrow the Constitution and weaponize the DOJ, the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon now to scream bloody murder.

when they're afraid that the Trump administration will do to them what they did to Donald Trump.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.

And we have two other topics.

Mom Donnie, there's lots of information coming out on him today.

And then also,

Jerome Powell is being pressured to resign from as chair of the Federal Reserve.

So stay with us and we'll be right back with those stories.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor on Mondami, there were new things.

One was that his father said suicide bombers needed to be recognized and their message needed to be recognized.

And then Mark Rubin ripped Zoran Mondami's policies as completely unfeasible.

He basically said, all these things he's telling you, he will not be able to get them through the legislature, grocery stores.

I think he's

increasing entitlement.

He will stock his

city administration, police, fire,

the regulars with leftists, and they will do a lot of damage.

And

never underestimate the power of the left.

He is a walking disaster in one sense.

He's offended every ethnic group in New York.

He said, I'm going to go after richer, whiter neighborhoods for extra tax attention, even though the most affluent ethnic group is Mom Donny.

He's an Indian American.

They make about $120,

$105,000 to $120,000.

I think so-called whites are eight, and he's not going to go after Indian American communities because they're rich.

I mean, he says he's going to go after the richer ones, therefore white.

No, if you're going to go after the richer communities, and a lot of the hotels are owned in the New York area by Indian Americans, then go after Indian Americans,

what he would call his own people.

So he's offended whites.

He's offended blacks.

We now know he faked an African American identity to get an edge in cynical fashion, which is an insult to the black community.

We know he insulted the Jewish community by trafficking in a video, it was horrible, of all these Indian Americans dressed up as traditional Jews and making fun of Hanukkah.

I mean, can you imagine if people dressed up as Arabs and then made fun of Islam, Ramadan, and that, and then you had a Republican, so-called white candidate traffic that on the internet, he'd be through.

So he went after blacks, he went after Jews, he went after whites, he went after Italian Americans, 10%.

He has a picture of himself flipping the bird to a statue of Christopher Columbus.

He says he's got a new plan.

You're 33 years old, Mr.

Mondani.

You don't even know what life was like in the United States in the 1960s and 70s in university towns.

Can I inform you it was, we're going to try something new called rent control.

We're going to have something new like take stores and have co-ops and serve the people with no profit.

Did you know that?

We're going to have something new and give you a free bus ride.

It's all been tried.

It's been tried since

basically

the Pythagoreans in this

550 BC in Sicily were trying socialism.

You should go read about it.

It might inform your ignorance, help.

And

that family, everything about it is distasteful.

What I mean by that is, here you have a family that was up the 1%

in Uganda.

They were a settler community.

I'm using his terms, not mine.

You have a non-indigenous community, the Indian Ugandan community, and they were the 1% affluent.

Then they got kicked out by the corrupt government, and they went to South Africa.

and they got kicked out of there and they came to the United States and his father then was given a plush endowed perch at Columbia.

And his mother was a filmmaker making millions of dollars and adored by the left.

And they played

that DEI card as Indian Americans.

It was an expansive definition under Obama.

It was no longer just black Americans and Hispanics as deserving affirmative action.

Under Obama, it was redefined as anybody not white was a victim.

So they played the victim card.

They were beneficiaries of American magnanimity, and they did not reciprocate.

They reciprocated with anti-Americanism and cheap advantage.

The whole family is suspect, I think.

And he's going to keep offending, and I think he's going to get elected for two reasons.

One,

tally up the primary votes.

If Mr.

Curtis Silwa would say, here's my percentage, here's Andrew Cuomo's percentage, here's Eric Adams, it's 51%.

He only got 40%.

But who is going to bow out?

If they could just take a poll and they say, let's go hire a private pollster if you want to save New York from communism, and may the best man win.

And we'll get, Mr.

Siwa, you pick a disinterested pollster, Eric Adams, you pick one, Cuomo pick one.

And whoever is the consensus candidate, the others will bow it and endorse.

And that will be our common front to stop communism.

And they're not going to do it.

And number two,

people read him wrong when they say,

Did you cheat and say you were African American?

Did you really say that you wanted to seize the means of production?

Did you really say there shouldn't be any billionaires, i.e., you might want to get rid of them?

Did you say all those things?

Did you flip the bird to a statue?

Did he say, oh, well,

no?

Yeah, I did.

Absolutely.

That's who I am.

And that means to his supporters that he is defiant.

And that small minority that will come out to vote, and there's about 8% of the voting population voted for him, of the greater New York, I guess it's 5 million voters, 8%.

And that's all he needs, because they will be the only ones that come out and they will say Mondami does not balk down.

He is defiant.

Now he's going to meet with all the billionaire leftists and say, you know what?

You guys have all this money and you can really help me if you just endorse me and I'll cut a deal with you.

It'll be a crony capitalism.

I really will.

That's how communism always works.

Look at Venezuela.

Just take a look at it.

Bolivia,

Cuba.

It's not socialism.

It's who gets to, look at the Soviet Union.

Who gets to have the DACA on the Black Sea?

It's all inside

crony capitalism, is what socialism is.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead.

And the last topic is just Jerome Powell.

It seems like it might be that he's had enough pressure to leave because we hear that the official process for appointing a new Fed chair has been implemented.

But I was thinking more importantly, maybe the question here is:

Donald Trump seems to be

getting his way in the sense that he's getting the government to be staffed with people that are on his side,

if we can put it that way.

And I was wondering how

there's got to be some point when it seems that

it's an administration of toadies to a tyrant or somebody who's at least got superpowers versus skilled administrators.

And so how do we do that?

well?

I think what you mean is out of the last seven, everybody's very critical of John Roberts.

But whatever your criticism, you have to look at the record, not the rhetoric.

They've had seven, I think it's 17 appeals from the

lunatic district court, the 400 liberal of the 750 judges in the district court that they cherry-pick Mark Elias and the Soros money people.

They go to the circuit court, they're upheld.

And when they get to the Supreme Court, the last 14, I think out of 17, have been reversed in favor of Donald Trump.

So, in the case of the courts, the Supreme Court is following the law.

Now, Jerome Powell, the complaint against him is this:

that when you look at the unemployment rate, when you look at the personal savings rate, when you look at the labor participation rate, and when you look at the inflation rate, and you compare what it is now with the same numbers under Joe Biden, and then you look at the interest rates, they're not rational.

The interest rate, the inflation rate was the lowest it had been in four years,

I think in April.

It creeped up a little bit from 2.34 to 2.67.

But what I'm getting at is by the logic that Jerome Powell has used with a Democratic president, he's a moderate, I guess you'd call him a Romney Republican,

he should lower interest rates.

And everybody says, why is Trump beating this drum?

Why does he just keep screaming?

And the reason he's doing that is he promised to work toward a balanced budget.

He's trying everything without cutting Medicare and Social Security and without cutting defense.

That's very hard to do.

So only $200 billion maybe in Doge cuts.

Maybe get rid of the Department of Energy can add it.

And then he's trying to think,

I'll tax endowments.

I will tax remittances.

The tariffs may give me an unheard of third of a billion dollars.

I will have a fast-track citizenship for millionaires.

He's trying to think of all of these things.

And then he looks at the interest rates.

And he thinks, if I could half this by one-third,

get down by a point and a half,

instead of paying $3 billion a day, I could pay $2 billion.

That would save me about a third of a trillion dollars.

If the tariffs made a trillion, a third of, I would get into nearly a budget that's looking at $1.9 trillion deficit, I might get it down to $1.2 trillion.

And that would be a radical thing because we have not not seen a reduction in the deficit from year to year in a long time.

And then that would give me the momentum to hit a balanced budget in maybe two budgets from now.

So he's saying to Powell, you talk like you're independent and I'm not supposed to affect you.

You say you're a man of principle, but by your own economic indicators for past presidents, you did not apply the same standards to adjudicate the interest rate as you're doing to me.

And you're doing this this to me because you're part of the bipartisan establishment that tries to impede me all the time because I'm a disruptive outside.

That's his argument.

Now, to finish this rant, he's going to be gone in March.

So the question is,

how much will we hemorrhage by these unexplained high interest rates when the economy does not look like it's going into hyperinflation and it does not look like it's going into

some kind of stock market crisis or anything.

And how much will he hurt by having to pay this extra interest per day versus how much will he be politically hurt to try to fire him, which he's not supposed to do.

He has a legal right to do it.

So they've come up with a gimmick.

I'll be honest.

And it's not the first time.

If you're angry that the left changed the name of bases and they went into the south and they said, there's not going to be any more Fort Hood or Fort Bragg, and you thought, well, we don't really agree that we should honor an incompetent segregationist like Braxton

Bragg or John Bill Hood, but it's tradition.

All these people, so then you get around it and you say, Give me a computer search of all the Medal of Honor winners, all the heroes in all of our wars, and give me a guy named Bragg or Hood or something.

And if you can come up with a Bragg, we'll just say it's Fort Bragg, but it doesn't honor Broxton Bragg.

It honors a World War II hero or something like that.

So now they're saying we've got to get rid of Powell, but we can't do it because he won't listen to logic and be fair with us on the interest because it looks like we're bullying.

Ah, they're building a new Federal Reserve headquarters.

And it is almost a billion dollars over budget.

And it's got rare imported marble, and it's it's a palace and he oversaw it and he didn't tell us how much it was spending.

Well,

true, true, but there's a subtext to that and that's the problem.

What do I mean is, just imagine everybody if

Powell lowered the interest rate three months ago by a point.

You know what I mean?

And then it came out, and then he said, well, you know, based on the criteria, I think I've been a little bit too conservative, and I was so worried about inflation or stock market or tariffs.

So, you know, I'm going to aim to, in the next nine months, to get down a point and a half.

And then it came out that he had a huge cost overrun.

His team did.

Would they fire him?

I don't think so.

I really don't.

I think they just say, you know what, you're sloppy and you cost us a lot of money, but we're not going to fire you because you're a reasonable Fed chair.

So

everybody can answer that moral dilemma.

I can't, but it just seems to me that

they have a legitimate reason to fire him by

cost overruns, but they would not apply that legitimate reason to him had he been more reasonable on the interest rate.

And other people in government who have had cost overruns, maybe even of that magnitude, are not fired.

And there's one last thing to remember.

A lot of you, and I think of the same thing.

What are they going to do?

It's Donald Trump's last term.

Is it going to lose him in the midterms?

The midterms will be one or lost on the economy.

So the lower the interest rate, the more pressure you put on Powell,

the more chances you have to stave off a big defeat and get impeached after the midterms.

But you've got to be very careful that you don't cause a big disruption because the idea is that Donald Trump is a lamed-duck lame-duck president, but his counter-revolution will not be finished by 2028.

It will require, if you're going to undo the damage on the border, on crime, on DEI,

on USAID, on the lack of deterrence, on 50,000 short military recruits, which we've done now, you're going to need another four years, and that will not be Donald Trump.

It'll either be somebody like Marco Rubio or J.D.

Vance, but you can't hand them over a basket case.

So he's got to think that he's got to be.

Trump has to think: I've got to get this down right.

I have no margin of error.

I can't make a mistake because I need J.D.

or Marco or somebody like them to finish my counter-revolution.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, at the end of the show, as we often do, I have a comment, and this one is from your website.

And that reminds me, actually, you can catch Victor on X.

His handle is is at BD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So please come join us there.

So, this is from your article on your website, The Frightening Dreamhouse of Zoran Mamdani, and it's from Jim J.

Hoffman.

Another stellar piece of literary genius, Victor.

Your fans expect nothing less.

Mondani is now the poster boy, epitomizing the old phrase of:

if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.

New York City is now a paragon of political ambiguity, and this guy should not be a surprise to anyone based on the insanity we have seen over the past four years.

Just another pseudo-intellectual, left-wing, radical limbing joining the ranks of the others you mentioned.

I'm just very thankful and blessed that I have been able to pass along the traditional values I was brought up with to my two kids.

Glad your surgery was a resounding success and you are on the road to recovery.

God bless America, POTUS, his family, the administration, our military, and especially our veterans.

So I liked that.

It was nice.

Very nice to you as well.

There's a lot of reasons, everybody out there, if you're listening and you're a New York resident, you can vote against Momdami because you don't like the way he is fixated on race.

You don't like the way he's cynically,

I guess the word would be, I don't like that word, I don't know if it's really a word, disrespects the black community.

He flips off the Italian, literally with a middle finger, the Italian community.

He makes fun of the Jewish community, has contempt for the white community.

The only community he hasn't insulted is his own Indian American community.

Or you can vote for him because you say he's a 33-year-old Ignoramus that never really held a job.

He's Bernie Sanders living in a forest incarnate who was pretty much

a leech and never really got a job.

That's a good reason.

Or you can say he's a two-bit Marxist that dabbles in Karl Marx, Das Kapitel, sees the means of production, and all that stuff.

That's a good reason to do it.

Or you can just say New York, as bad as Eric Adams was, the crime rate is really down.

And

property prices are back up and they're dealing with the homeless and they are way ahead of Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C.,

and San Francisco and he's going to ruin it all.

And there's so you can just pick one or all of them but there's no reason to vote for this guy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you very much, Victor, for all of your wisdom today.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of your week.

Thank you, and I'll be home, I hope, in familiar surroundings next time we see each other.

Yeah, very good.

Thanks to the audience for joining us, and this is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.

Thank you, everybody.