Call Me Daddy: Trump Takes on the World

1h 12m

Join Victor Davis Hanson and host Sami Winc in this Friday news roundup as they look at the tragic storm in Texas, the Democratic Party losing on immigration and ICE, Trump's approach to foreign affairs, the political messaging of the new Superman movie, and more.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Listen and follow along

Transcript

Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business.

Like that, let's put it online and see what happens stage.

And the site is live.

That we opened a store and need a fast checkout stage.

Thanks.

You're all set.

That count it up and ship it around the globe stage.

This one's going to Thailand.

And that, wait, did we just hit a million orders stage?

Whatever your stage, businesses that grow grow with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com/slash listen.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our Friday news roundup, and there is lots of news this week.

Trump has been making news every week, all the time, anytime, as everybody knows.

He did have a cabinet meeting, but we do want to look at Zoran Mondami first, and then also the storm in Texas that took more than 100 lives.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back after these messages.

Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

Data brokers make a profit off your data.

Your data is a commodity.

Anyone on the web can buy your private details.

This can lead to identity theft, phishing attempts, and harassment.

But now you can protect your privacy with Delete Me.

Have you ever been a victim of identity theft, harassment, doxing?

If you haven't, you probably know someone who has.

Delete me can help.

Delete me is a subscription service that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers.

Delete me isn't just a one-time service.

Delete me is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the internet.

Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners.

Today, get 20% off your delete me plan by texting victor to 64000 the only way to get 20% off is to text Victor to 64000 that's a Victor264000 message and data rates they apply this is unconstitutional have you heard some biased journalist maybe on a podcast or a YouTube show say this probably

do you just take their word for it which begs another question, have you ever taken the time to read and understand for yourself the meaning of the United States Constitution?

Most haven't.

That's why I'm excited that Hillsdale College is offering a brand new free online course called The Federalist.

This terrific course explains how the United States Constitution established a government strong enough to secure the rights of citizens and safe enough to wield that power.

And today, it's our responsibility to pay attention, to be vigilant, as our founders might say, in order to preserve and protect Republican self-government.

Hillsdale's online course, The Federalist, includes 10 lectures, each about 30 minutes long.

You can take the course at your own pace.

There's no cost to sign up.

They're remarkably well-produced and engaging, and a must for anyone like me who's never really delved into the Federalist papers.

Enroll here at no cost.

Go right now to hillsdale.edu/slash VDH to enroll.

Again, there's no cost and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll for free.

Hillsdale.edu slash VDH.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find find him at his website, victorhanson.com.

Please come join us there.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and it does have all of Victor's works there.

It is his official website, and there are links to his books as well.

So please come join us.

So, Victor, I know that there's been a lot of news out on Zoron Mondami.

The things I picked up on this week that I thought were new was that he visited a mosque after the Iman in the mosque said that Israel should be annihilated.

And then he has also threatened that he would arrest Netanyahu if Netanyahu came to New York City.

The thing to keep in mind about him is he is a leftist communist.

And I use that term very carefully because he did say in Marxist terminology that he wants to seize the means of production.

I don't know what that means, Tesla dealerships, Trump towers.

So that's not hyperbole.

But the problem with him is he is a child of privilege.

As we pointed out before, when he said he wanted to go after richer, wider neighborhoods, he's also not that bright.

He's glib, but not that bright.

Because everybody knows when you look at statistical analyses of

per family capital income, Indian Americans, i.e.

him, the mom Danis, are the richest of all.

But now that he's in the spotlight, everything he's posted, so he talked about an ISIS member who was unfairly treated by the United States.

He said

he apparently filled out applications where he said he was African American.

He was trying to game the system just because he's an Indian American who happened to be born in Uganda.

He thought that would work.

It didn't work.

He didn't have great SAT scores.

We're told he was a genius.

In addition to that,

he didn't make it, but he trafficked in a video making fun of Hanukkah had all of these Indian actors and they were it was like a minstrel show can you imagine if anybody did that about Ramadan they would be he would be outraged and now we learned that he's got a he had a

he also trafficked in photos where people were flipping the bird at the Columbus statue so if you think about it in the last two weeks he has managed to offend three ethnic groups that are prominent in New York.

Blacks by trying to piggyback onto affirmative action when he wasn't qualified.

Jews by making fun of their most solemn religious festivity.

And Italian Americans make about 8% to 10% by basically saying F Columbus.

And he's not done yet because he has a whole record.

And he's supported people who were anti-American terrorists.

So the question again is Curtis Silwa and

washed up Cuomo, are they going to stay in the race and divide the conservative vote?

If you look at the primary totals of Cuomo, Silwa, and Eric Adams, there's enough to beat him by 10 points.

I don't like Eric Adams.

I think he was a racist.

He said when he was a policeman that only he could go after the crackers.

He was hard left.

And then when he found out his city was being bankrupt by the Biden immigration policies and the transference of illegal immigration people to New York.

Then he flipped.

And when he flip against the left, then suddenly they brought out of the wilderness indictments.

Probably

was culpable of getting Turkish government money, but it wouldn't have ever happened had he not crossed them.

But he's the only chance that they have to stop this Marxist.

A lot of you on the conservative side, you feel like this is good because they get what they deserve.

It's only going to discredit the democratic label.

That's partly true, but New York is an iconic city and it's an all-American city and you don't want it going down the tubes from this faker.

So we'll see what happens.

But each day we learn more about Mr.

Imam Dhani and it's not good.

He's one of these people like Barack Obama.

His father got everything from the government.

He came over here and he was a leftist

from Kenya.

And the same thing with Obama, you know, apology to her, all that.

And then we get Kamala Harris.

Her father came from Jamaica.

He was a a Marxist professor, got everything, affirmative action.

And then Kamala is leftist and very critical.

And then we have the I don't even need to get into the Ilan Omar family.

All the scholarships and special deference that she got.

And I could expand that list, but what you're seeing with Mom Dami is a pattern where people from, let's be candid, third world hell holes, they want to get out.

And the U.S.

government and its DEI or its magnanimity offers them ways out.

They come over here.

They enjoy all of the benefits of being a non-white minority in America, whether it's a Jamaican economics professor, Mr.

Harris, or whether it is Mom Dami's parents, filmmaker, and his father is a left-wing Middle East studies professor at Columbia or Obama's father from Africa.

And then their children, the second generation, tend to be very critical and hard left of America.

But America is the antithesis of where they came from.

So you would think that they would appreciate, said, oh my gosh,

I got special preference.

I didn't even grow up in America.

My kids, and they don't.

And

it's telling people about human nature that so many people look at

magnanimity as weakness to be exploited and not to be respected and returned in kind.

Yeah, that would take a little bit too much elevated thought, Victor, for those people that you just mentioned.

So let's move on to the big tragedy this week: the storm in Texas that flooded the Guadalupe River.

More than a hundred people died.

The river rose twenty-six feet in three-quarters of an hour in the dead of night.

And so a lot of kids in a camp lost their lives and other people as well.

And I was wondering your thoughts on the news on this real tragedy here.

Well, there's the truth.

Yeah.

And then there's the media constructs.

Not just, I could say the left-wing or Democrat.

It's not.

It's the media, too.

So the truth is that the National Weather Service

and NOAA

gave alerts.

24, 36 hours, if you look at their maps and you read their alerts, flash flood warning, dangerous conditions.

I don't know why people who had these camps on the river did not evacuate, because I think they thought that when they had flash floods in the past, the river went up 10 or 12 feet.

Nobody had ever seen this in 100 years.

And when you see those time-elapse photographs where you see a bridge that's several, I mean,

way, way above the river, and then within four or five hours, there's water coming over it.

And so there was no if you weren't going to evacuate, then you weren't going to save a lot of people.

And I think people just thought, you know, I I'm here out in Central California, we get NOAA alerts all the time about spring storms, lightning dangerous.

They'll say possible tornado conditions.

It's very rare here, so they don't they don't take it seriously.

But

that's the reality.

If it was preventable, it was only the people who run the camps might have taken more seriously the clear weather alerts.

But for the left, it was a Rom, Emmanuel,

never let a great crisis go to waste.

So immediately they jumped in

and they had three themes on social media.

One theme was, you deny global warming.

This is what you get, you Texans.

Well, that's kind of weird because Texas has one of the largest solar and wind grids in the country, and they've really paid for it.

And Austin's probably one of the most liberal cities in the United States.

But the point I'm making is there's no evidence that this was global warming.

It was, if you look at 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you had an incident in 1987, but nothing like this.

So it's a once-in-a-century phenomenon.

And that happens.

The second thing the left did immediately was this was nemesis.

You got what you deserve.

You're cutting everything, and we're kind of happy this happened.

I'm not exaggerating.

You had a pediatrician that went on social media and said, basically, they get what they deserve.

The third one was because a lot of these people were very conservative that were killed tragically and they were Christian, you knew that somebody in the left had to do, they have two cards they play, the global warming card and the race card.

So we had this minor appointed Democrat, Sade

Perkins, excuse me, in Texas.

And she gets on there and says, basically, that's good.

You never let blacks go to your camps and you were segregated.

That was demonstrably untrue.

And you kind of got died, and you want us to feel sorry for you, white people, and we don't.

So, this is important because

it's a reflection where the Democratic Party and the left are going.

Because you have to superimpose what we just saw and what I just said onto a series of events.

So, you had the Obrego-Garcia romantic treatment of this spousal

thug, gang member, trafficker, and the attempts to redefine him as a victim.

Then you had these constant attacks on ICE.

And just this last 10 days, there were two violent attacks.

One would-be assassin had armor, and he was in his car, and they stopped him.

Then we had 10, 10.

10 Antifa-like would-be assassins that shot one of the officers in the neck.

And

what's interesting about them is they had their pictures.

They fit the perfect profile of white kind of Antifa extremists, spoiled brats.

They were all in black.

They had arms.

They were communicating with radio to coordinate this.

And they had body armor.

And

if you want to, this happened when I was in high school and in college with the weathermen and the symboles liberal.

If you want to stop it, then you have to do what Voltaire said.

Every once in a while, the British hang an admiral to encourage the others.

And I don't mean they're going to be hanged, but what I do think is they should charge all of them with conspiracy to commit murder, even the people who were not actually shooting.

And then the next question is,

who is funding these people?

Where do they get the money to buy expensive arms, AR-15s, body armor?

Who coordinates them?

Where do they train?

And

if you take middle-class, class upper middle class kids and we had this with the simberlees liberation army and you put them in jail that kind of stops it because then because these kids for all their revolutionary talk they are part of the establishment and they're the kids that grew up and their mom said you've got to go to stanford you've got to go to harvard and so that that's another then you had the mainstream democrats feeding this seditious

that's the word the democrats use but it's more out to themselves.

You had Hikeum Jeffrey posing with a bat.

Hikeum, you're opposing the big, beautiful bill, and you spoke eight hours, but why would you take a symbol of violence like you're going to club these people?

And this happened at the same time that members of your Democratic Congressional Caucus met with town hall people and grassroots.

And we don't know if it's true or not because it was on off the record anonymous, but your own Democratic people said, These people are kind of crazy.

They're asking us to be shot and take a bullet.

We don't know if that's true or not because the Democratic Party is very, I mean, it's not like Jasmine Crockett and AOC are moderates, but they're trying to claim now, well, we're only like this because we have this lunatic hardcore base.

So what is, just to finish, what sums all this up?

The obvious exegesis is they have no power.

We had a district judge, and we have been told for the first five months that Donald Trump has executive orders, and that's why district judges are going after them to stop them.

But if there was congressionally approved legislation constitutionally correct, then they couldn't do anything.

Well, we had the big, beautiful bill pass.

And what had happened?

The Planned Parenthood people went to an Obama-appointed DEI judge and tried to get an injunction to stop it.

Well,

this isn't an executive order.

So it shows you that these people are renegades and there's people talking about impeaching that judge for trying.

I mean, that's unheard of, that you go in there and you wait to a congressionally approved major bill and then you immediately nullify it nationwide when you have this limited jurisdiction right after the Supreme Court has said you can't do that.

And then so they don't have power.

They don't have the House.

They don't have the Senate.

They don't have the White House.

But there's another thing that's going on that's showing how crazy they are.

Well, actually, two.

One is Donald Trump had, I think,

acknowledged by many people the best 20 days of any president in modern history.

So he did that incursion, 25-minute incursion to Iran.

He neutered the Iranian nuclear facilities.

There was no wider war.

Now he's negotiating.

He's not pro-Putin.

He's hard on Putin.

He's trying to leverage Putin by arming, giving arms to the Ukrainians against the wishes of his base.

He's looking at Gaza, and there's about 500 to 700,000 Gazans who want to follow a group of sheiks and cut a deal and make their own enclave independent in Gaza, analogous to something

and the West Bank, what we see of the 2 million Arabs who are living inside Israel.

So he's doing that.

He passed the big, beautiful budget bill.

The economic news came out.

Unexpected tariff, high income, good job growth, unexpected.

We have to use the word unexpectedly because the media always says this isn't true.

Wall Street hit record highs,

was not supposed to happen.

Inflation low.

And

in addition to all of that,

basically zero illegal entries.

Nobody would have believed that, that he could go from 10 to 12,000 a day to none, maybe 50, and they're not making it through.

And this is coupled with something we also don't talk about.

When we came in, we were told by our military grandees, oh, we're short 45,000 troops.

It's not those commercials with pregnant flight suits.

It's not the trans commercials.

It's not the DEI hiring.

It's not Mark Milley and Lloyd Awesome talking about white rage, white privilege, none of that.

It's because suddenly people got fat.

Suddenly they got tattoos.

Suddenly they went into gang members.

Suddenly there's very low unemployment.

So we just can't compete.

And with the ones we get, we can't.

No, no, no.

As soon as Donald Trump came in, they canceled all of those politically correct things.

They started renaming ships to people who really served the military and were heroic, not Harvey Melk.

I won't get into that.

And

they started to appeal to that.

They basically said to the white working class, rural class, and Mexican and black rural class.

But mostly the people who were responsible responsible are the targeted demographic that the Biden administration went out after when they said they were going to investigate them.

The multi-generational combat people, the people that die at double their numbers in the demographic, and they want to go and camp.

They said, you're not culpable.

You're not a racist, and you're going to be judged on your expertise and military efficacy, not your gender, your sex, your sexual orientation, your race.

And lo and behold,

it's just like illegal immigration.

We need comprehensive immigration.

No, you need a new president.

Oh, we can't recruit people.

We just have to get used to the new demographic.

No, no, no, you need a new military leadership.

And so you put all that together.

I could go on.

And that is driving the left crazy that he is very, very successful.

Finally,

out of breath.

He's not doing what he did the first term.

He addressed symptoms.

He said, we're going to try to build a wall because of illegal immigration.

This time we're going to try to find a university that doesn't disclose like Stanford Chinese companies.

This time they got in the wilderness years between 2021 and 2025,

Trump and his advisors sat down and they said, Why are these people so crazy?

What caused the transgender nuttiness?

Why did we we've got to address the symptoms.

Not the excuse me, not the symptoms, the causes of the symptoms.

It's the universities.

They are training an elite, and they're getting away with murder.

They're not honoring the Bill of Rights.

They're not honoring First Amendment rights, free speech.

They are violating the 2023 Supreme Court ruling on racial prejudice and bias.

They are gouging us on grants.

They're charging 55% overhead.

On and on.

They're having all of these foreign students from illiberal regimes are not even giving back.

Let's hold them to account.

Let's look at the foundations.

Let's look at endowment income at the universities.

And then let's look at PBS and NPR, these megaphones that are propagandistic.

And then, if we have illegal immigration, let's just not build a wall.

Let's just look at Mexico.

Let's just look at Mexico and say, Ms.

Scheinbaum, do you want to have $63 billion in remittances, or do you want me to tax it?

Do you want a $171 billion in surplus?

Or do you want to go have me tariff you?

Do you want to have the cartels killing us and getting 20 billion?

Or do you want me to declare them a terrorist organization and anybody that has anything to do with them in the banking system?

And so he's looking at the causes, and that is terrified the left.

Because that's how they hold power, not through popular acclaim, but because they control the media and education and foundations,

Wall Street, etc.

Yes, and Donald Trump is doing it all with his velvet glove as

has become his way, and I admire it.

So, let's welcome back a sponsor of this show, Open Phone.

If you're running a business and you know that every time you miss a call, you're leaving money on the table.

When every customer conversation matters, you need a phone system that keeps up and helps you stay connected 24-7.

That's why you need Open Phone.

OpenPhone is the number one business phone system that streamlines the scales

and scales scales your customer communication it works through an app on your phone or computer so no more carrying two phones or using a landline with open phone your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox that way any team mate can pick up right where the last person left off keeping response times faster than ever plus say goodbye to voicemail their ai agent can be set up in a minute to handle calls after hours, answer questions, and capture leads.

So you never need to miss a customer.

So, whether you're a one-person operation drowning in calls and texts, or have a large team that needs better collaboration tools, Open Phone is a no-brainer.

See why over 60,000 businesses trust Open Phone.

Open Phone is offering my listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com/slash slash Victor.

That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash Victor.

And if you have existing numbers with another service, Open Phone will port them over at no extra charge.

Open phone, no missed calls, no missed customers.

And thank you, Open Phone, for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So Victor, the one last thing I wanted to just note about all of this democratic

warring with ICE is

they always fill us with the rhetoric of Hitler and tyranny, and they're really the ones that look like the brown shirts of the Nazi Party when these things are taking place, that they have their Antifa, and the Nazis had the brown shirts.

So they are the real...

They have two problems.

And number one is when you ask people, do you support illegal immigration?

It polls no.

And would you support deportation?

Even with the legacy media propaganda, they do support it.

That's number one.

Number two, they have a problem with the law.

They're basically telling Americans that it is moral to break the law and let in 12 million people, but it is amoral to enforce the law and tell the people who came in illegally to go back and try it again if they would self-deport.

If they don't want us, if they want to continue to reside illegally, they're not going to get a second chance and they will be deported.

So they understand that reality, but they also know that, as I said earlier, they don't have any institutional power

and Donald Trump is addressing why they had any influence at all.

They have no political power and now he's addressing their institutional power and they are paranoid.

And so one of the things they're doing is they're trying to concoct an idea that we're going to forget about the 100,000 criminals he's already deported and the drastic drop in crime that ensued.

We're just going to fabricate an idea that ICE is going after young children that were here illegally.

But the problem they have is they can't tell you, well, what do you do about somebody who came in illegally and defiantly broke the law, cut in ahead of people who were here waiting to come in here legally, and they're now residing illegally, often with fraudulent ID.

They're breaking the law.

So you either believe in the law or you don't.

Well, they don't believe in the law.

So their idea of the law is whatever is convenient to us at any given moment.

So if it's to wage law affair against Donald Trump, that's lawful.

If it's to raid Mar-a-Lago, that's lawful.

If it's to say that Donald Trump took classified documents and we're going to go into Molania's underwear drawer, but you don't do that to Joe Biden's house.

You don't raid his house.

So it's asymmetrical.

They don't believe in the Constitution.

They do not believe in the rule of law.

They believe in critical legal critical race theory.

That the law is a malleable construct.

That it's against the law to steal sneakers only because white, Christian, heterosexual, wealthy white people don't do it.

So then they make laws to hurt poor people.

So poor people then can redefine those laws and just do it.

And then a critical legal, critical race theory prosecutor should understand that.

He should let them go.

And that's called distribution and equity.

That's what they believe in.

And they do it, of course, from their enclaves.

They believe in the law when it comes to illegal aliens swarming into Martha's Vineyard.

Or they believe in the law when Brad Pitt or somebody's house like that is broken into in the Malibu or the most tony areas of Beverly Hill.

You mentioned Karen Bass.

So she went and confronted ICE and said, get out of here.

Karen, two things.

You are utterly disgraced.

You were in Uganda and you let your city burn.

You were on a junket.

You had no business going over there at the height of the fire season.

Your administration in cahoots with Gavin Newsom did not allow people to clean the hillsides.

You allowed the fodder.

You appointed a crazy water and power person who

let drain or let stay empty a critical reservoir.

You appointed a DEI fire chief that was more interested in people's appearance, sex, or race than she was making sure the hydrants were there for her fire crews.

Your deputy mayor is now in jail because he phoned in a bomb threat in an anti-Semitic fashion.

That's your record.

It's a mess.

So you know that.

So what are you doing now?

You think if I confront ICE and tell him to get out of my city, the one million undocumented or illegal aliens in my city will be happy and I'll be popular.

No, it's not going to work.

It's too late for you.

You're a seditionist, and that's very funny.

You and others gave us lectures about January 6th.

This is true sedition.

This is George Wallace Tar excellence.

You're going as a state's writer right up to a federal official, and you're saying that you have no jurisdiction in my city.

Karen, you should read the Constitution.

He does have jurisdiction in your city because the laws of federal laws trump state laws.

George Wallace cannot tell black people to keep out of the University of Alabama just because it's the Alabama National Guard.

JFK nationalized it.

Abraham Lincoln went to war because Confederate governors, mayors were claiming that post offices, armories, federal bases belong to the jurisdiction of the state or the city.

And the federal government said that's insurrection.

That's what you're doing.

That's what she's doing.

And it's not going to work.

It's all a roost because she and Newsome cannot govern California.

They can't.

It's a mess.

And so they think they're going to gent up all this hate of ICE.

She's going to, there's going to be, I hate to say this, but there are going to be ICE people killed unless people speak out and start to tell Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass

and others that we hold you directly responsible for your rhetoric.

And we're not going to allow people to shoot at an ICE patrol person or enforcement.

If they try to do it, we're going to file felony, conspiracy to commit murder charges.

And they're going to be in jail if we can convict them for 50 or 60 years.

And we don't really care if they live in the suburbs or their parents or professionals.

We're going to make an example out of them to save lives.

And I think that's what's going to happen.

Well, I hope so.

Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Trump and his cabinet meeting.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Why drop a fortune on basics when you don't have to?

Quince has the good stuff, high-quality fabrics, classic fits, and lightweight layers for warm weather, all at prices that make sense.

Everything I've ordered from Quince has been nothing but solid.

Quince has closet staples staples you'll want to reach for over and over again, like cashmere and cotton sweaters from just $50, breathable flow-knit polos, and comfortable, lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dress-up dinners.

The best part?

Everything with Quince is half the cost of similar brands.

By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markup.

And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes.

My favorite piece this summer is a linen blazer, which is perfect for any day in the office or even recording podcasts.

It's beautiful and comfortable and a classic fit and the best thing is it's affordable price.

You just can't beat Quince.

Keep it classic and cool with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's Quince, Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Victor to get free shipping and 365-day returns.

Quince.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance.

As a business owner, you take on a lot of roles.

Marketer, bookkeeper, CEO.

But when it comes to small business insurance, Progressive has you covered.

They offer discounts on commercial auto insurance, customizable coverages that can grow with your business, and reliable protection for whatever comes your way.

Count on Progressive to handle your insurance while you do, well, everything else.

Quote today in as little as seven minutes at progressivecommercial.com.

Progressive casualty insurance company coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers.

Discounts and coverage, selections not available in all states or situations.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on X.

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

So please come join us there if those are your choice social media.

Well, Trump had a meeting, a cabinet meeting, and in fact, he went over a lot of the victories of his administration that you have just recounted for us.

But there was one other thing that he said in it that surprised his defense minister, or sorry, Secretary of Defense Pete Hag Seth, and that was that the Ukraine needs defensive weapons, and Donald Trump's willing to give them to them.

I was wondering your thoughts on that.

I wrote an article in the New Criterion about six months ago at the beginning of the Trump, and I said, these are MAGA agonistis, these are contradictions, these are

problems within the MAGA movement.

One of the points I made is,

in terms of foreign policy, MAGA is Jacksonian.

No better friend, no worse enemy.

Don't tread on me.

And from time to time, to maintain deterrence, you're going to have to use force.

Kill Baghdadi, kill Soleimani, get rid of the Wagner group attack on an insulation Americans in Syria, deal with the Houthis.

But the MAGA people say,

no, that's, we don't even have, our border is wide open, and you're spending too much money overseas, the defense budget's too big, why don't we spend and be Fortress America?

Well,

an Iranian missile will soon be able to hit Fortress America.

So

what happened was Donald Trump came in with a MAGA movement and he said,

I'm kind of tired of Ukraine.

Zelensky is a fraud.

The Democrats pressured Israel.

They said no collateral damage.

Got to have a coalition government.

You've got to get a ceasefire.

They suspended weapons deliveries.

And

they said to Ukraine, you can suspend habeas corpus.

You can suspend political parties.

You can suspend elections.

No ceasefire.

Don't have a ceasefire.

Win.

Don't be proportionate like Netanyahu.

We want you to be disproportionate.

And I guess they hated Putin, or they thought he was more existential threat than they did the people on October 7th.

So Trump came in with that anger at that, and he had the mega-base.

But the problem was, when he yelled at Zelensky, there is an existential truth.

The immediate causation of the war was Vladimir Putin for the third time in four presidents who's left his borders.

He went into Ossatia under Bush.

He went under Honor Obama, Donbass, and Crime.

He tried to take Kiev under Biden.

And Trump said, well, he didn't try to do it on me because he knew what I would do.

Yes, that's true, but you didn't inherit a quiet

Putin.

You had inherited a country with no deterrence left.

So you had to restore deterrence.

And by pressuring Zelensky to make peace, you forgot for a second that it was Putin.

Maybe he had reason.

The MAGA people said, well, we promised that we wouldn't extend NATO to the Russian border.

Or, you know, we did all it doesn't matter for the immediate proximate cause was he crossed the border again, tried to take Kiev.

Okay.

So Trump is learning now as he talks to Putin.

Basically, he said, Vladimir, stop it, stop it, stop it.

We'll have a thing.

We won't put them in NATO.

And we promise that

we'll make an economic corridor between you and Ukraine.

Everybody can profit with rare earth

mining and everything.

And you can probably, we'll give you the Donbass in Crimea that you stole in 2014.

What do you want?

And Putin said, basically, I want it all because you don't understand, Mr.

Trump.

I'm riding a tiger.

And when you're a dictator, you can't get off the tiger.

You've got to keep riding him.

And I got to explain to the Russian people: I killed a million and a half or wounded a million and a half Russians for what?

To go 30 miles more than I already had?

That's not enough for me.

If I have peace right now, all the Russian bloggers and all these people are going to start attacking.

They're going to get rid of me.

So I'm not going to do it.

So then Trump went to his advisors and said, uh-oh,

we've got to violate a MAGA canon again right after the Iranian war, that we have to do something that we didn't want to do.

We have to side with Zelensky for a while and give him arms.

Because if we don't give him arms, we have no leverage against Putin.

Because Putin is counting on me not to give them arms and to yell at Zelensky again in the Oval Office.

So I don't have any credibility.

So to get credibility, I've got to threaten Putin by giving arms to Ukraine.

That's where we are.

It's a lose-lose situation.

It's not Trump's war.

He inherited it from a weak, demented president.

And he's going to have to

create a credible deterrence with Ukraine.

And I think he's going to try to give them patriot missiles, but he's got a good point.

We're so depleted because we have not rearmed ourselves, and we had to give a lot to Israel, and our means of production is sluggish of patriot missile production.

So

I don't anticipate that he will be Trump will be very successful with his peace efforts in the Ukraine and Russia, while he will be successful in the Middle East and his work with the state.

There's only one way to stop Putin,

and that is to triangulate.

And that's what Henry Kissinger did in the Cold War.

When Russia was threatening

to gain military superiority under Nixon, he said to Nixon, go to China and then split the two apart and make a cardinal rule.

Russia is no friendlier to China than it is to us.

China is no friendlier to Russia than it is to us.

There's a lot of disputed territory in Russia that has been annexed over the years from China.

Russia has 144 million people and a much bigger territory than China.

China's got 1.4 billion,

ten times more.

And yes, it's got less territory.

And it has claims on some of them.

So when you talk to Qi,

you're trying to divorce him from Putin.

You tell Putin,

Qi's got designs on your territory, and he's got a bigger army than you, and you're tied down.

You should be friendly with us and make a deal with us, because whatever you say about the United States, we don't want your territory.

We're not interested in trying to hurt you.

And then he should tell Chi,

you know, be careful, but Putin's tied down.

He has no means to

and

we don't support your idea of aggression against Russia, but we understand it.

And then we tell Putin, you better be careful about China.

And that's what Kissinger did.

It was kind of double dealing, triangulate.

But the point was he nullified the Russian overwhelming threat in the cold war that way well victor let's welcome back another sponsor of our show free prints i would like to take a moment for free prints i know you've got a gazillion photos sitting on your phone right now don't leave them there get them printed for free and delivered straight to your door with free prints with more than 1 million five star reviews free prints is the world's favorite way to get premium quality photo prints, no subscriptions, no commitments, just a thousand free prints a year.

Go to freeprints.com or download the Free Prints app directly from Google Play or the App Store.

I think they mean the Apple App Store.

So thank you, Free Prince, for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

And I hope everybody takes advantage of your service.

So Victor, it seemed like there was one more thing on that Trump Trump meeting.

Oh, no, not one more thing on the meeting, but one Netanyahu, the second thing that Trump did this week was to meet with Netanyahu, and they seemed to be good friends.

I think everybody and myself as well are very happy about the relationship between Israel and the United States right now, and that

meeting seemed to exude that.

But he also said that he has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Netanyahu did.

That was a payback because Trump supported him, never cut off his supplies, gave him the

I think I don't know if he gave him the green light during the actual negotiations,

but that's what the Iranian president, when he had that interview with Tucker, I saw part of it.

It was something else.

I mean, that guy just acted as if he was

I don't know why anybody doesn't like Iran.

We love the United.

We've never done it.

We haven't ever committed one one act of terrorism.

I thought, you know, how about the Marine barracks?

How about the Iraq war?

How about

trying to kill diplomats in Washington?

How about blowing up the embassy?

Those were all your surrogates that did that.

But anyway,

it was the idea that Trump was allowing Netanyahu to do what he had to do, and then he helped out in the 11th hour to get rid of the nuclear facility when I wasn't sure the Israelis had the wherewithal to do it.

And then Trump also attacked the left in Israel and said, Why are you trying to destroy Netanyahu through these bogus?

I've gone through this myself, lawfare.

Stop it.

And then Netanyahu appreciated that and said, We should nominate you for the.

But the problem is, do you really think the left, left, left, left-wing Norwegians would ever listen to the head of Israel?

If he's nominated something, they would say, That person's never going to get it.

We live in a very sick world, an upside-down, Alice-through-the-looking-glass world, where Barack Obama does nothing and he gets a Nobel Prize.

And Donald Trump, whether it's the Abrahams Accord or trying to stop the Iranian war after the end of the nuclear threat, or the Pakistan, India, or the Rwanda war, or Ukraine, he's trying to create peace, and he'll never get the Nobel Prize.

The more that he creates peace, the more they hate him.

And again, it's that tragic hero.

The more Shane comes down out of the mountains and he starts to give deterrence to the Sodbusters, and the more he kills

the three people, the cattle barons, he has to say to Joey, tell your mother there's no more guns in the valley.

I'm gone.

Or that one guy during that dance scene in Shane, I mentioned that with Jack the other day.

I don't know how you know, Wilson.

And I felt like getting out of my chair and slapping the TV screen.

You idiot.

He's saving all you people that can't save yourself.

And you're criticizing the methodology only because you're safe now because he's here.

And isn't it strange that they give a Nobel Prize to somebody for not doing anything,

American President Obama for not doing anything?

As though the Europeans are saying, if you Americans would just stay out of everything, it would be better.

But we all know it wouldn't be better.

No, we know what's going on right now in European capitals.

They're all saying, oh my God, crazy Donald Trump.

He eliminated, at least for five to ten years the threat of ballistic nuclear tip missiles.

And the Iranians would always gang up on us and bully us and not listening because we're unarmed.

And we were always kind of hoping the United States would help us.

And Obama and Biden, everybody was too scared to do it.

And this guy comes in that we despise and he, in one shot, puts them back 10 years.

And then he makes us...

go up to 5% and he's going to rearm the United States and we're better.

But we can't say that because because we're supposed to hate him.

He's orange.

He's got comb over hair.

He's got a Queen's accent.

He's crude.

He's bombastic.

He's right-wing.

Gosh, what are we going to do?

That's their attitude.

That's moral cowardice at all.

I really like the NATO head.

He didn't care.

He was a former, I think, what, 14 years he was the head of state of the Netherlands.

Was it Netherlands?

I think so.

And he basically said,

they had a New York

left-wing journalist that interviewed him and said, are you kind of embarrassed that you called him daddy and that you're obsequious?

He said, no, we're in better shape than we've ever been.

We're going to be rearmed.

NATO is going to be, we have strike plans the moment Putin goes into Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Korda.

They would pay a terrible price.

Then the reporter

said something like, well, you don't think Trump would come to your we've already discussed it.

Yes, he is.

And we're going to have the wherewithal and between Trump and us.

And

we could swat, you know, very confident.

I couldn't believe it.

So, what they're saying, I mean,

how low do you get when the American journalists want to attack their own country and their own president because the Europeans are starting to respect the idea that at last the United States is rearming and forcing them to rearm against their will, which they knew they had to do?

And yet

it's like that news conference you mentioned about the, it's not a news conference, the televised cabinet meeting and they asked a question about Epstein

yes and Donald Trump just tore the reporter apart as that's an inappropriate question when there's so much more going on and so much tragedy in Texas I was watching that I think that's the sixth cabinet there's once a month Biden in four years only had nine so he's going to pass him in September but

there's a famous he wasn't a very good writer but there was a classical Greek writer of the Roman period Athenaeus and he had something called the Dipno Sophisticae, and it was called Table Talk, Witticisms Around the Table.

And he just recorded what everybody said.

And if you read it, it's fascinating.

You know, how many varieties of figs are there?

Or why do Romans have togas?

Or what, you know, they just talk about.

And when you listen to that cabinet meeting, each cabinet member kind of praises Trump, but Trump goes, how about energy?

And then all of a sudden he goes, goes, It's just horrible.

Wind and solar, and you can't recycle, and they're toxic.

And then somebody else comes out with a whole different topic, and it's just a pokery.

It's and it confuses the media because they're like,

wow, Biden never even had this, and we've never had a televised, let it all hang out.

Kind of, it's, we feel like we're being used because it's scripted, but it's crazy.

It's spontaneous.

Trump can say anything to anybody, anytime, anywhere.

And

there's no blinders, there's no filters, and we're right in the middle of it.

Then you have some conservative, for the first time, you have conservative

journalists, and they kind of have a t-ball attitude.

Hey, President Trump, what are you going to do about this?

And they put a ball up there so Trump can whack it.

And then you look at the faces of the Democratic or left-wing journalists.

What?

You're not supposed to be a journalist.

You're conservative.

You know, the British played that famous song when they lost at Yorktown, the world upside down.

That's what happened.

The world is upside down.

It's the Battle of Yorktown.

Trump seems to have done it in a very good way for most of us voters, so I'm not complaining about the upside-down world of the left.

And just think if he's right about the tariffs.

That was another news this week that all of the experts who said the tariffs were going to strike inflation, according to Jerome Powell, apparently the Japanese and the Germans and the Chinese and the Indonesians and the Vietnamese and the Canadians and the Mexicans, all of them were making a lot of money, and they all want to be in the largest consumer market in the world.

And if you just say to them, so we know what you're doing, and you're making a big profit, so we're going to take 10, 15, 20% of it.

And they're like,

we're not going to do that.

And then you say, okay, don't do it.

But then Scott Desant, who's really a good guy, he calls them up and says, hey, remember now, when you have a big surplus, you're vulnerable.

And when we have nothing left to lose, because we have a deficit.

So, just if you don't want it, play with us, buy, wouldn't want to be you, see you.

So, the point I'm making is that now they're all saying,

Well, Trump got revenue with these 10, 15, 20 percent tariffs, and the prices didn't go up.

Well, yeah,

because they were making a huge price margin profit.

So, they got together and said, which is more important?

Making 5 to 10 percent

on our sales to the United States instead of making 20%

or not having sales at all in the United States?

And they chose to have a reduced margin and pay the tariff.

And then

Chairman Powell,

the head of the Fed, keeps talking about tariffs are going to raise inflation.

He keeps doing it and doing it and doing it.

So Donald Trump said he's too late, Powell, Jerome Powell.

Everybody said Trump is picking on him.

He was picking on him.

He didn't fire him, which would have been kind of

untoward.

He's gonna I think he he has to step down and march.

But basically, if you think of all the ec economic indicators and you compare his lowering of interest rates under

Joe Biden, you get the impression that we're paying three billion dollars a day in interest.

And all Donald Trump is saying, if you were to lower it by a third,

we would save one billion dollars.

That's third of a trillion dollars in my budget.

And that would really help us to

balance the books.

Why don't you do that?

Because all the economic indicators, and you get the impression Powell is thinking, yeah, but you've made fun of me, and I'm a left-wing person.

I may be a rhino-Republican, but I don't like you.

And I'm going to have all this high-flutin language and economic jargon, and I'm going to keep the interest high, and you're going to hate that.

And I'm going to enjoy the fact you hate me and hate that because I got another nine months here.

I'm going to torment you.

And he's really tormenting millions of Americans that want to buy a house or a car with paying artificially high interest rates.

And you are not going to catch Jerome Powell making Donald Trump's administration a success.

That's one of the downsides of Trump.

screaming and yelling at people.

There's a lot of good side because chaos disrupts and gives avenues of new

change.

But a lot of people nurse their wounds and they get so angry that they become self-destructive and nihilistic, like Powell.

He's not going to go down as a great Fed.

20 years from now, when somebody writes the periodic book of the Federal Reserve, they're going to look at this period and they're going to say, this guy did not lower interest rates when every economic indicator shows the economy was robust

and

there was no danger of inflation.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and talk a little bit about the word that's been floating around DC recently.

And stay with us to find out, and we'll be right back.

Hi, I'm Kristen Bell.

And if you know my husband, Axe, then you also know he loves shopping for a car.

Selling a car?

Not so much.

We're really doing this, huh?

Thankfully, Carvana makes it easy.

Answer a few questions, put in your van or license, and done.

We sold ours in minutes this morning, and they'll come pick it up and pay us this afternoon.

Bye-bye, Trucky.

Of course, we kept the favorite.

Hello, other trucky.

Sell your car with Carvana today.

Terms and conditions apply.

Hi, I'm William Googe, a Vuri collaborating professional ultra runner from the UK.

I love to tackle endurance runs around the world, including a 55-day, 3,064-mile run across the US.

So, I know a thing or two about performance wear.

My go-to daily short is the core short from Viewery.

It's perfect for my daily run in the gym, strength training, or even when I'm taking a day off, relaxing, doing some stretching, and recovering the best way I can.

Check them out by visiting viewery.com/slash William.

That's vuori.com slash William, where new customers can receive 20% off their first order, plus enjoy free shipping in the US on orders over $75 and free returns.

Excluding supply, visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor's podcasts are now on video on YouTube, Rumble, and Spotify.

So join us on any of those platforms if that's where you get your video content.

So, Victor, the word floating around DC has been amnesty: that Donald Trump is planning on some sort of amnesty for the workers of agriculture, hospitality, etc.

And I think he's a little bit opposed to that right now, but

there's a lot of pressure on him to give amnesty to those people who have been here for some time and have been working and participating in the economy.

I think that's the key to the point.

Amnesty is a weird word.

It's a Greek word.

In Greek, you put an alpha, we call it alpha privative, and it cancels out whatever the root is.

The root comes from the Greek verb mennefsko to memory, to memory, to remember.

Pneuma, anything you see with m in

is usually something to do with memory.

So amnesty means you just don't, you just forget it.

I forget what happened.

So the problem is that

I don't want to give my amnesty, but he's not talking about citizenship.

He's talking about allowing people under certain conditions to apply for a green card.

The key is the certain conditions and the numbers.

Those are the two things that will rile everybody.

Everybody's got to remember that the 12 million who came under Biden was in addition, not to three or four or five like the left told us, but 20 million illegal aliens.

There are about 30

to 35 million illegal aliens and they make up part of 55 million who were not born in the United States.

The other 20 million apparently are either citizens now or green card holders.

So what are we talking about?

We're talking about people in key industries that

Trump has been told by Agma Business that you can't find Americans to do the work.

And that's not just

driving a tractor or picking blueberries.

It's also meat packing, it's also making beds, it's also cooking, etc.

Okay.

So how is he going to square that circle of telling his mega supporters that he's giving amnesty?

Well, he's going to have to be very, very careful.

If he's going to do this, he's going to have to say the following.

Of the 35 million, I'm only talking about four or five million people that can get a green card that are not going to be subject to deportation.

And who are those?

They have to have been here four or five years.

They have to be crime-free, no DUIs even.

They have to be off public assistance.

They have to be gainfully, as I said, employed, and they have to pay a fine.

And then they get a green card, and then they can do what they want.

They can reapply every year for it, or they can try to go to the citizenship route.

Under the 1986 Simpson-Missouli Act, only a third chose to get citizenship.

I think I said in the dying citizens, that means citizenship and residency are almost the same now.

But my point is, out of the 35 million illegals, I don't think you'd have more than four or five million.

And I'm always surprised when I go into my local town and I meet somebody that I thought I knew or I was acquainted with or comes up to talk to me.

And they are on the following.

They're working.

They speak perfect English.

They're very conservative.

And they've been here a long time and they're illegal.

I'm serious.

I've met a lot of people like that.

And they made a bad mistake, and they're perpetuating that mistake.

And if they had an avenue to get a green card, I think it would be worth it because it's not going to be a lot of people, but it would.

There's another thing why it would be valuable.

It would really make the left look stupid because they're saying they want to deport everybody.

But if you said to the left,

well, if you're a good U.S.

resident and you don't commit crimes, you don't take money from the government when you're able-bodied and you're working and you're willing to pay a fine, then you have an avenue to a legal green card.

So in other words,

you're demanding that you not deport all the other people who don't qualify.

You mean you're on the side of people who are able-bodied and not working, on the side of people with criminal records, on the side that people don't want to pay a fine, on the sides of people who just crossed the border?

Is that what you're doing?

So that's what I think his team is doing.

But the MAGA base will say, no,

no green cards.

It's not amnesty.

That's the wrong word.

It's the chance to get a green card if you fulfill certain conditions.

And speaking of immigration, if we could turn to a little bit lighter subject, and that is movies.

There is a new Superman movie out, apparently.

And the director has claimed his movie has a political message about immigration because

Superman was an illegal immigrant, apparently.

What's the actor's name, Glenn?

Is that his last name?

Can't remember.

Scott Glenn?

Not Scott Glenn.

It's another guy, young guy.

But

he's saying that Superman was an alien.

I guess he's saying he was an interplanetary illegal alien because he came here without getting a passport or asking permission to come from Krypton, right?

So there's two things.

I can't figure out this because we know from the Snow White debacle and every other Disney movie, to take one example, any time you have the lead actors show who they really are, and they're all the same, that they hate the United States and they hate Trump even more than they hate the United States.

And this would be ridiculous because Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American Way.

I remember I used to watch George Reeves.

I'd come home from Selma Eric White School.

My twin brother and I would get off the bus before we did our farm chores with my grandparents.

We ran in at four o'clock to see Superman, and George Rees would stand there.

He killed himself later the after.

And there was wind blowing and his cape would blow, and it was really good.

But the point is, they're taking an all-American traditional hero, and they're making the actor attack America, or at least attack the current administration.

So you think,

now what's going on?

And it has to be one of two things.

They lost control of their merchandise, and it's going to be a big dud because who wants to go see an anti-American Superman?

It's like Snow White,

a PC Snow White.

So that thing was a dud.

And they know that.

So they lost control of the narrative.

Or

they knew from the very beginning, given the people that were working, it wasn't somebody in the front office let their ideology once again freelance and then the guys in the back room with the

the green shades and do all the numbers They said, what the?

Who are these people?

They're going to bankrupt us.

They always go PC and it destroys us.

So what do we do?

Well, at this point, we can't do much.

But maybe we can get the left-wing crowd to go to a movie.

So tell those guys, since they're left-wing anyway, and the right's on to it, and Middle America doesn't like it, and we're going to lose money.

Just tell them that now they're for illegal aliens.

And maybe we'll get a bunch of Antifa people and suburban Karens to come out.

That's really pathetic, but it doesn't make sense otherwise.

We want the hysteria.

We're getting free publicity.

Keep mouthing off.

You hate American, Superman.

It's like Captain America.

Any, as a general rule,

and maybe I can call it Victor's rule, any movie that is a superhero movie,

and any movie that the lead character is supposed to represent the American way or have the name America in him, or Captain America,

he's going to be left-wing.

And the director or producers are going to try to insert into the movie subtle repartee lines, dialogue that he's anti-American.

Because you have to look at the people,

the people who live down there in Los Angeles, and write the scripts.

It's like Google.

There's an article recently when you search all these Google trips.

We've talked about all the opposite comes up.

You know,

I mentioned insurrection, riot, 2020 and January 6th came up.

I had to have a surgical procedure follow-up this week, so I was in Menlo Park where it was, I had to go to a doctor, and I sat in a cafe and watched people walk by, and I was walking around from one doctor's office to the other, and I looked at those people, and I said, these are the people who write the Google

algorithms.

And they are.

They're all spaghetti arms, they're pink hair, they're young people, and they're all left-wing.

And that's who runs America's Google searches and Yahoo searches.

And it's the same thing with Screenwriter.

They're completely disconnected from the body politics.

And it's no wonder that Google runs the way it does, or movies are put out as they are.

So last topic for the week for our news roundup is that Gavin Newsom has backed down from placing caps on oil oil corporation profits.

And I was wondering if you had you know what I'm wondering?

Is this a political move?

I'm trying to get elected president, or is this him coming to terms with the reality that fossil fuels are an important source of energy for his state?

He's been along with the legislature the last six years.

Remember, as I said earlier, no one

person is more responsible for California's decline than Gavin Newsom because

maybe Jerry Brown, who was mayor of Oakland and had been governor

and was governor twice and mayor of Oakland, but Gavin Newsom was eight years a city council person,

eight years a lieutenant governor, eight years a mayor, and he will be eight years a governor.

So he'll have 32 years in the Bay Area, where is Bay Area, not LA, is now with Silicon Valley money and left-wing, but that's what runs California.

So

he's more responsible, and he has been overseeing all the regulations that we're going to get rid of refineries.

And he bullied them and bullied them and bullied them.

You got to have the California Air Resources Board does this, and you have to have this blend, and you have to do that.

And finally, they said, you know what?

We're going to go somewhere else.

You keep importing oil from the Saudis, and

you're going to have to

import gas from Nevada or, I don't know, Arizona, go ahead and Texas, I don't know.

But we're not going to do it anymore.

And that whole Richmond corridor for Northern California, they're going to leave.

And gas will go up to about $8 a gallon, and all the left-wing millionaires along the coastal corridor will be happy.

But he's going to panic because they're going to look at that when he wants to run for president.

And his Democratic primary rivals will bring it up.

What's the price of cow?

That's what Ron DeSantis did when he beat him in that debate.

What's the price of gas?

How many people have left California versus Florida?

What's your tax rate versus ours?

Here's how many people you have, and here's your budget, and here's how many people we have in our budget.

And he's done all of that.

And so, remember that line in Animal House where what was that guy's name?

I know everybody knows, Dean Wormerl or what?

Wormel?

Wormer?

Wormer?

Yeah, he says to the fatal

going through through life fat, lazy, and ugly, or is that what he says?

Fat, ugly, and lazy is no way to go through life.

I feel like somebody should say

being incoherent, incompetent, and I don't know what else, corrupt is no way to go through being a governor, Gavin, because everything you've done from high-speed rail to the tax rate at 13.3

to gasoline tax that you're now increasing, it's going to be the high it is the highest in the nation, to 48 cents a kilowatt to Stonehenge high-speed rail.

I was drove, we drove home today from Minlo Park on the 152 from Gilroy to Casa de Fruda hasn't changed in 60 years,

70 years.

I remember going three or four years old, four years old.

And that's your legacy.

And

the LA fire, the Aspen fire, the Paradise fire, all of that.

You took Paradise and you made it into purgatory.

That's what you did.

And

then you, every once in a while, went to a Napa wine tasting while people were trying to get a permit in L.A.

and you went to the

French laundry while you shut down everybody else.

And you can't help it living.

You're living in a $9 million house.

Your wife has government contracts.

You were a Nepo baby that got everything from the Getty family.

And now you're kind of a character.

He does that little neck thing.

What is that?

He goes back and forth with his neck.

It doesn't work anymore, Gavin.

The hair slicker and the vat, all that doesn't work.

Every once in a while, you put on your Abercrombie and fish work clothes, and you go out by that

nightmare train yard by the Port of L.A., remember, where they loot everything, and then he picks up his little gloves, or he goes to the Paradise Fire, and he digs a little ash and puts it in a bucket or something.

It doesn't work anymore.

He's just a total failure.

You destroyed the most successful, most beautiful state in the world.

And

the only reason it's even viable is because people, unlike you,

Pat Brown, whom was a Democrat, but he was a good governor, Ronald Reagan, George Dick Mason,

Pete Wilson, they built the state.

And you're living on their work and you're trying to destroy it, but they were so,

I don't know, so industrious and so imaginative that it's very hard to destroy in just your 32 years and as a public official to destroy.

But you're managing.

He's got a little bit more to go.

What will you come up with next?

Such a sad tale you weave, Victor, about that pathetic young man.

We want tales of heroes

on this podcast.

And I guess Donald Trump right now is our tale of a hero.

So, Victor, we're at the end of our show, and I have some comments from listeners of you and Jack on your latest podcast.

That would be the Tuesday podcast on July 8th.

And Lisa Ortiz, 4364, says, thank you both.

VDH, praise God.

You seem to be on a positive recovery.

Thank you, Jack.

I enjoy your input during the podcast.

We all don't like the same tea, and that's okay.

Don't change.

So

you're here for tea, meaning Jack said that he has detractors and I think she's saying she really likes what he does.

And so don't worry about his detractors.

I had a little post-op the other day.

It was kind of medieval where he went in and took a camera.

It was kind of, I've never seen anything like it.

You're watching it.

They give you a local anesthetic and then I've had an infection from the operator.

And they go in and

they have one little thing that shoots water, one little thing sucks it out, one little thing takes a picture.

And it feels like you have a caterpillar under your eye and a caterpillar crawling around above your wisdom teeth.

But the doctor is very good, and

there was a lot more extensive cutting than he had anticipated when he got in there, and a lot of it had some problems.

So, I hope that now I'm back on the road to recovery.

Yes, so some tales from Victor's Precious about Victor's Precious Bodily Fluid.

Yeah, not so precious.

Operation Number 10.

I don't want to do 11, plead me.

Yeah.

Another one is

Boo Lion LBS, so pounds, Boo Lion Pounds.

Hey, Jack, in a future podcast, can you finish the story of going for a drink on 35th and 3rd?

Yeah, I bet he can.

I bet he can.

And C.S.

or sorry, C.

Shelley 5658.

And this was a longer one where he was saying he really liked your guys' podcast, but I like this part of it.

He said, I'm a self-taught, I'm a self-taught kid.

I saved up to buy Oxford history books in my late 20s, and I'm in my late 20s now, only to be forced to temporarily fail my high school history exams in my socialist country, as I quoted Victor Davis Hansen as one of my sources.

Got a true PhD eventually and planning to teach on a temporary visa.

I adore America.

I adore order.

I've never known it and will leave when my gift of teaching expires.

Thank you for that.

I had a person write me about eight years ago, a scholar, I won't mention his name or affiliation, but he said, you know what's happening to you, Victor?

He was kind of friendly.

And he said, when you wrote a book like The Other Greeks, it has, I think I had like 5,000 citations

on the bottom of the page, footnotes at the back.

It was kind of crazy.

And the

references to cl a lot of them were very obscure and some of them, you know, from untranslated

scolia from

manuscripts.

But anyway, he said, people

use your citations and your research, but then they don't want to be associated with you given your

Trump feeds.

So they put a footnote.

and they'll say

they'll use in the body of the text they'll use an argument that you did And they don't want to be called plagiarists, so they'll footnote it.

And they'll say, see Victor Hansen,

and then they'll have a comma.

Who otherwise is completely wrong on the whole, or who otherwise is not.

And they always do that.

They take your research and your ideas, and then they footnote it.

And then, but when you look at the footnote, after they acknowledge they took it from you, they trash you as an idiot

or public enemy.

as only academics can do um and this last one is from socratic sandpiper i'm sympathetic to elon i i like this socratic sandpiper because i kind of sympathized with your sympathy here i'm sympathetic to elon's disappointment and anger he tried to move mountains in the administration and then trump turned around and pushed through the big beautiful bill which adds to the debt in significant ways instead of starting a new party Elon should take interviews and explain his position.

And that's a very rational thing.

I think I'm on record that the richest man in the world and the most powerful should let bygones be bygones.

And one of the things that Elon is a Renaissance genius, but

when he says something at X or Starlink or SpaceX.

or Tesla, that's gospel.

I want you to get a better booster.

I want you to expand Starlink into Africa.

They do it.

I want you, Doge, to cut.

No.

You can't do that in government.

And that's...

Trump's position is this.

We'll see who's right.

He's saying to Elon,

you didn't get your trillion dollars.

You got maybe 200 billion.

But I'm going to, you're not giving me credit because I got 10 trillion in foreign investment coming in, and I'm going to lower the interest rate one way or the other and save a billion dollars a day.

I'm going to get tariff revenue.

I'm going to start selling citizenship to rich foreigners.

I'm going to do everything in the I'm going to have the tax that's going to stimulate JDP.

So before you say that I blew up the, let me wait until next March

and we'll see.

And well, the only problem with that is that supply side does work,

but only if you have fiscal restraint.

Reagan

really grew the economy, grew by 7%

in 1984.

But the problem was he couldn't stop the spending, so he had big deficits.

Yeah.

Yes.

And you know, I was thinking just anecdotally, as I drive the 99, since I commute sometimes, I can really see a difference in the industrial area because you end up on the 99 right in a very industrial area of Fresno, and it really is changing.

I can see businesses starting to pick up and abandoned.

I drive through some very impoverished towns between Central California and where I work on the coast, near the coast, and on the west side.

I'm starting to see little towns where the old abandoned factories packing out.

You can start to see trucking companies come back, food companies come back.

And then I start to

I start to see the quality of some of the farming.

The places look better.

So I think there's, I don't know if it's psychological or it's foreign investment.

I don't know what it is.

It's looking good, Donald Trump.

That's all we have to say.

I even saw a statistic today.

Two million more Americans are working and one million less foreign nationals are working.

And that's something I cannot believe that.

All right.

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us for the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.

Thank you, you, everyone.