The Last Line of Defense: Victor's conversation with Senator Eric Schmitt

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Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm alone today.

Sammy and Jack are allowing me to do one of our interviews, which we do about every week or so.

And I'm with the senator from Missouri, Eric Schmidt.

He was elected in 2022.

Yep.

Is that correct?

And he's got a new book, The Last Defense,

The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.

And we're going to talk about the book and also

his election and Missouri in general before we get to the book.

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Senator, is Missouri now solidly a red state after Claire McCoskill lost?

It is.

Yeah, it's for the first time actually in our state's history that every

both U.S.

senators, the governor, all the statewide office holders are Republicans.

It's a super majority in both the House and the Senate in Missouri.

So it's been pretty dramatic.

It's taken place over the last, I'd say, 20 years.

As Missouri, as you know, Victor, was sort of this ultimate bellwether state in the 20th century.

Yeah, Harry Truman state.

Harry Truman and voted for the winner in every election in the 20th century, except one time with Adelaide Stevenson.

So you kind of, Missouri's always been this place and still is, but it certainly leans a little more right, where it's got urban, suburban, ex-urban, rural.

If your message works well in Missouri, it typically works well across the country.

It's why a lot of presidential candidates over the years have spent a lot of time in Missouri.

But yeah, it's definitely shifted to the right.

And actually, I think because of this long populist streak that Missouri's always had, President Trump has really supercharged that.

He has tapped into it in a way.

And if you think of Missouri's history, it was sort of

a real stronghold for Andrew Jackson.

Yeah, it was.

It was always kind of skeptical of a federal government telling us what to do with our lives a thousand miles away.

That's in the DNA.

Even when Democrats would represent Missouri, that's always been the DNA of our state, the show state.

So, yeah, but it is solidly red now, that's for sure.

Yeah, and it has, it's kind of followed or parallel with Iowa.

I remember Iowa used to be solidly blue.

It's the same phenomenon, I guess.

Ohio,

Indiana, all those states are kind of.

Is the enclave of

blue Missouri and St.

Louis and Kansas, just the two cities?

Yeah, it's really interesting.

You used to have

rural Missouri represented by a lot of Democrats when you had Democrats who are pro-life, pro-gun, pro-union Democrats.

They just don't exist anymore in our state.

So you really kind of have these progressive coasts in St.

Louis City and in Kansas City where the mayors in the past have often competed to sort of who can be, you know, more progressive and that kind of thing.

And it's obviously led to a lot of challenges

along the way.

But yeah, that is pretty much it.

2016 was really the last vestige, the last gasp of a Democrat Party that had a gubernatorial candidate or somebody like that that could appeal to rural Missouri.

And then, of course, Clara McCaskill lost in 2018.

And then,

you know, I just think now in many ways, it's sort of a primary state, but that's, that's brand new.

That is like a very recent phenomenon in Missouri.

She had kind of a transmogrification.

She used to at least feign the idea that she was an old-style Democrat.

And then when she lost, she got onto NMS NBC and bought into the Russian collusion.

And,

you know, she, I, you know, you've been around this stuff long enough, you kind of have, you see things for what they are.

But I always thought she's a big phony, honestly.

Um, she would kind of do this daughter of rural Missouri thing and then badmouth rural Missouri

and say, you know, would she go down to the boot heel, which is that part of Missouri in the southeast corner that,

you know, kind of shapes, helps shape the map of Missouri.

She would, you know, not, you know, she would, she would tell people in St.

Louis that area doesn't matter.

And I think in this modern age of media, all that stuff caught up to her.

She could get away with it for a while, but that conjob sort of caught up to her.

And she is, you know, who she really is now on MSNBC, just spouting off hysteria daily.

It's crazy.

Are you confident in of the 2026 midterms?

I know the Senate is a little bit more confident than the House that the Trump counterrevolution will continue unimpeded.

I am.

I can't, it's harder for me to speak to sort of what the House map looks like.

I think the Senate map is pretty, is pretty favorable for us.

You know, Georgia, I can't believe actually there will be two Democrat senators from Georgia.

So hopefully there's a pickup opportunity there.

But I think that by and large, the states where the Democrats are really trying to play,

we should be able to hold.

I wouldn't be surprised if we at least hold serve on the number that we have, 53 in the House is different.

But you've got, of course, this redistricting.

And actually in Missouri, there's going to be an effort, I think, to move from the 6-2 map to a 7-1 map.

And then you've got, of course, what's happening in Texas.

The Democrats have gerrymandered their states.

They've squeezed all the juice there is to squeeze in places like California and our neighbor to the east, Illinois.

And so I think that that might provide some opportunities.

But I will say,

as somebody who is very much aligned with President Trump and Vice President Vance,

we have, I'm excited.

This is a Republican Party.

I'm very comfortable in.

I grew up in a blue-collar area.

My dad, you know, works seven days a week in the midnight shift.

So this is the party I always dreamed would be the Republican Party.

So it's a broader coalition now, but there are more lower propensity voters in our coalition now.

Right.

So in fact, presidential years are better for us.

I think now that didn't used to be the case for Republicans, but it is now.

So we just got to make sure that we turn people out and there's a, you know, people understand there's a reason to get out the polls like they did in 2024.

Yeah, I was reading the data on the 2024 election and usually the Democrats claim that they have all of the silent voters that they have to get out because if they always say to us, if everybody could vote, mandatory, we would win by a landslide.

But it was the opposite in 2024 that there was a large

the polls of registered voters who did vote and the people who were just polled that were registered but didn't vote, the Republicans would have picked up, they would have won 51%, Trump would.

There was that many people that were for Trump.

That's a big shift that it suggests that the Trump counterrevolution or whatever you want to call it's going on has a lot more support than people can detect.

It seems that way.

Yeah, no, I think that's right.

And so that's the challenge for us in this, like I said, this new coalition is to make sure people get out to vote in the midterms.

But I think it's also reflective of the fact that the Republican Party now is the party of working class

and people who've really felt like they were left behind of this kind of globalization and this kind of catering to elites and seeing what that did to their communities, seeing what it did to their schools.

And it's also interesting, you look at those 2024.

numbers.

I mean, every demographic, every county really got redder.

It did.

So even in places that are Democrat areas,

they've shifted more to the right.

And that is something very significant.

It used to be, you know, when I was in college, you'd talk about realigning elections every 30 years or so.

I think that's happening much quicker now.

And President Trump has been the accelerant, which is a good thing.

Yeah, you mentioned middle class.

And I was looking at a lot of the data.

Trump did not, I mean, he had kind of maxed out on the so-called white vote, 61 and then 59, I think.

He got about 58%.

That was steady over three elections.

But what was fascinating was Hispanic males went up to 54%,

black males somewhere between 23 and 25.

He picked up another 10 or 15 percent from Asians.

So you get the impression that whether by intent or it's just a natural phenomenon that Class is starting to replace race.

In other words, maybe a black truck driver or a white electrician or Hispanic

roofer have more in common, at least politically or electorally, than they do with their elites of each party that represent them in academia or the media.

That's really new, I think.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And it's really, I refer to it as a multi-ethnic working class party.

Yeah, so that's what it is.

You know, and you've got people who...

And honestly, the Democrats sort of bet on this

demographics is destiny kind of thing.

But you really, as you mentioned,

the Hispanic voters who tend to even be more conservative sometimes than their white counterparts in the suburbs who might vote Republican.

No, they are.

You voted, you know, a lot more Republican this go around.

So I think all those things sort of bode well for us in the long term as far as like just structurally.

I think that the key now is to make sure we continue to deliver and making sure that we don't, you know, stray away from that.

And I think just some of the things that we mentioned, Missouri is this bell weather and what happened.

And I think culturally, you know,

you think about what Pat Buchanan was talking about 30 years ago, too, right?

Culturally, that's where they lost the voters, the Democrats did.

It's why the relatively conservative guy from a rural county in Missouri whose father or maybe he himself maybe identified as a Democrat 30, 40 years ago, they don't anymore because they can't believe that this woke ideology took hold.

They can't believe that you'd have struggle sessions in the military.

They can't believe, you know, you'd be paying for Guatemalan sex changes through USAID.

They can't believe that you'd have

this

trans hysteria stuff that's sort of swept through the Democrat Party and men can play in women's sports.

So all those sort of things factor in, but the economic issues, I think, are always front and center.

And I think Republicans and through President Trump specifically, when he walked on that or came down that elevator, I should say, a decade ago, that Overton window.

really shifted.

And you look at immigration as sort of the classic example now.

You've got big majorities that support the mass deportation effort that 10 years ago, if you would have polled it, I don't know if it would have been the same, but I think the Democrats, when they got into office with Joe Biden, just opened the floodgates and people.

I don't think they under.

I live in a community that's about 95% Mexican-American, and they had no idea.

They were flying people into the Fresno airport 2-4 in the morning, you know, 600-700 every night.

And then the Democrats thought that was demography is destiny or the new Democratic majority, as they said.

But where do they go?

They go into dialysis centers, they go into schools of Hispanic communities, and then they have to spend all this money on bilingual education, or there's gang members that pick on their kids because they don't speak Spanish.

And the Democrats were just oblivious to all that.

And

it really boomeranged.

And then it was also the way they talked to them.

It was almost, you don't know what's good for you, but open borders and 10,000 people a day illegally is good for you.

You don't know that transgendered biological

men are good for you in women's sports.

You don't know.

And even though you have never, even though you've never referred to a relative of yours as Latinx, we're going to tell you that that's the right term.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, and they did it in such a way that was insulting.

We're with Senator Eric Schmidt, and he's got a new book, The Last Line of Defense.

And we're going to talk to him about that specifically in a minute when we come back from our sponsor.

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And we now return you to the current episode.

And we're back with Senator Eric Schmidt.

Senator, this is a really timely book because in one sense, you guys in the Republican Party control the House, you control the Senate, you control the White House, you control, I guess, six to three, on many cases, the Supreme Court.

And yet I was taken aback that of these 750 district judges, maybe 400 of them are left-wing, but your book is talking how the left has used the courts and how you as an attorney general and others tried to stop it.

And that expertise, how do you stop

these cherry-picking

district judges?

Is the whole idea that they're going to be eventually overturned, but each one in succession can run out the clock on the Trump administration?

Yeah, so I think a couple of reasons why I wrote the book.

One was

having lived through this, you know, we're on the other side of this fever dream now for those four years.

Before I was a senator, I was the attorney general of Missouri.

We really led the charge in a lot of these big fights to kind of hold the dam, right?

Hold the line,

hence the title of the book, Last Line of Defense.

And so whether that meant we filed the lawsuit on the vaccine mandate case, took that to the Supreme Court and we won.

We had the student loan debt forgiveness case.

That was Missouri, took it to the Supreme Court and we won.

I filed that Missouri versus Biden censorship case that exposed this vast censorship enterprise that the Biden regime entered into with big tech.

And we were able to expose that.

And so, even in those dark days when President Trump and his allies were out of power, it kind of fell to a relatively unknown group of people to fight those fights.

We did it.

We wanted.

I wanted to share those lessons about what we did and what it means for the fights ahead.

So, to answer your question, I think that's exactly right.

I was saying very early on, because of just the sheer number of, you know, Joe Biden appointed, you know, 200-plus plus district court judges.

And by the time he got to that end, you know, the end of his time, they were really radical.

I mean, you couldn't even argue they were qualified.

These were leftist law professors that got lifetime appointments on the federal bench.

And so you're going to have, especially at the district court, some decisions here or there that are insane and ridiculous.

We've seen it.

Even with Judge Boseberg, who is somehow got assigned these cases, even though he wasn't the emergency assignment judge that night and got it at two in the morning when he was on vacation,

We can work through that because as they're moving forward now, if you've noticed, Victor, at the appellate level and at the Supreme Court, they're getting struck down.

President Trump, by and large, is winning on these questions, important questions about personnel and policy.

It's principally on deportations.

I mean, there was a massive effort to stop those deportations.

There was a win or two here for the other side.

But now the Supreme Court has basically greenlit the deportations.

They've also, on these universal nationwide injunctions, importantly, in the last month, the Supreme Court said, yeah, you don't get to do that.

We've seen this abuse.

You don't get to do that anymore.

That's going to kind of slow down the train wreck that the Democrats want to cause to derail President Trump's agenda.

So I just think, you know, this last line of defense book is sort of a field manual for what it was like to go up against this leftist lawfare machine and win.

And I would also say, What we need more than anything in this fight in the courts is courage.

You know, in addition to those lawsuits I mentioned, you know, taking on the censorship enterprise, I got to see the whole landscape.

I got to see the corruption, not just at the highest levels of government, but the local superintendents that were forcing masking on kids.

I sued 60-plus school districts in Missouri to say, you don't have any authority to force the masking or these ridiculous quarantine policies.

And we were victorious there too.

So I think when you're in that arena, when there's a lot of heat around you, we really need people of courage who are going to stand up and fight back on all fronts.

One of the subtexts I got from your book is that

maybe not explicitly, I think that was one of your themes is that we assume that because the law school faculties are left-wing and law students, especially in this generation, are left-wing and blue-chip law firms are left-wing, that they have a lock hold on the use of the judiciary.

kind of an anti-democratic way to countervene popular opinion.

But you're saying that that's not necessarily true if you understand the system that Republicans,

maybe they don't want to adopt those tactics that they use to stymie, you know, they rather prefer legislative, but they can stop the judicial stuff, that they can create an expertise of their own, even though

they're not traditionally known as the lawyers party.

Yeah, we look, we're not.

We're outnumbered

even today.

And certainly when I was in law school in the late 90s, there were still, professors were still talking about the living Constitution, which is total nonsense.

but you had I think you had this continuum now you had people like Antonin Scalia and now Clarence Thomas who've wrote an elegant prose about originalism and the law means what it is and the constitution is fixed it can't possibly mean just something that the judge made up that day because if it means that it means nothing at all and so you do have a generation of people now who've come in and include me in this who were inspired by those folks who even though we're in the minority can fight on that playing field and win And we're not winning by trying to alter the will of the people.

We're saying common sense should rule.

The Constitution should rule.

Take vaccine mandates.

For example, there's no way that OSHA, which was created to make sure forklifts beep when they back up, should be able to force the COVID shot on 100 million people.

And we took that strategy and ultimately we were vindicated.

There's no way that one person, the president of the United States, without statutory authority can wipe away a half a trillion dollars worth of student loan debt.

And Missouri, because we had standing, because we had this little-known loan servicing agency called Mohila, we brought that case and we were able to win.

If Missouri doesn't bring that lawsuit, I think this is an important point.

The big question in that case, Victor, was who has standing?

Because just general taxpayer standing wasn't going to work.

But we identified, even though the bureaucrats in Mohila probably didn't want me to bring that lawsuit, I didn't care.

That was my job and to represent the interests of the people of Missouri.

And so I just think it's understanding that system and knowing that the left has been fighting in that arena for a very long time.

And if we really want to save this country, and if we really want to keep the policies that President Trump has put in place that we believe in, we got to be willing to fight in court too.

And again, this last line of defense book is that playbook for not just the war stories and the history that took place the last four years that people sometimes might forget, but how we go do that into the future.

Do you see it as a constant

last line of defense on these district court rulings, or do you think that the more that they file them and the more

they get rejected or

stayed or overturned by circuit court and the Supreme Court, that eventually you start building up a body or a corpus of precedence, and then they say they can be rejected much more quickly and it will start to fade out, or do you think they're going to double down?

It's a great question.

I think

it's a great question.

I think actually what's happened is because of the abuse that we saw early on with these radical activist judges and the nationwide injunctions, it forced the Supreme Court's hand.

The Supreme Court said, look, we can't be getting these emergency appeals from injunctions from nationwide injunctions every other day on something that one district court judge decides for the whole country.

That was never what this was intended.

And what the Supreme Court said was, hey, you have a case in controversy for the parties that are involved.

You get to rule on that, but you don't get to say that some terrorist

immigrant classification in four states away, that this will somehow affect the ability to deport MS-13 members in Arizona.

Like you don't get to do that.

And so that, I think, was a very significant, probably underrated decision because that was the, think of that as the assembly line of the lawfare that the Democrats wanted to have en masse against President Trump's agenda.

And the Supreme Court has already said you can't do that.

They've also rejected, I think, a lot of these arguments that somehow the commander-in-chief or the chief executive of the country doesn't have control over the executive branch.

Of course, he does.

It's the only person elected by the entire country.

And all those agencies effectively,

you know, roll out from the authority that the president himself has, this sort of core Article II powers.

And so I think the more that, you know, we were able to establish, I think, some important precedents on a lot of cases.

I think now those are playing out as we roll into this new administration.

I will also say, I think the Trump administration in the 47 term versus the 45 term are very prepared for this.

There is a benefit for this historic comeback of a non-consecutive term in that he's got a great team.

There are no more like establishment-like figures, I don't think, impeding progress.

And they thought very deeply about these executive orders and their agenda.

And I think that that kind of preparation and thoughtfulness now is withstanding a lot of judicial scrutiny.

I know that, you know, it was kind of fascinating.

I looked at some of the Supreme Court rulings.

Conservatives have been very critical of John Roberts, especially because of the

Obamacare.

But actually, when you looked at it, he kind of organized, he was pretty good on all of these.

He stepped up.

Yeah.

And

I think, Victor, the reason why, if you could paint Roberts with a single brush, which is always a little dangerous, he's really kind of an incrementalist.

You know, Clarence Thomas is of a different school.

Certainly Scalia was a different school.

But Roberts wants to move a little bit slower, right?

But again, I think when you force his hand on things that really threaten the judiciary, like the nationwide injunction issue, you know, he's in line because he sees the dangers of those excesses.

So yeah, I think that on the ones that have mattered the most so far, they've been, you know, whether it's 5-4 or 6-3.

And, you know, and it also just goes to show, I mean, take Justice Jackson, for example, who's really been honestly criticized by Justice Sotomayor for the naivete in a lot of her decisions.

They're not based on anything other than her personal feelings.

I mean, she gave a speech saying, I love being a judge because

I get to, you know, let people know effectively what my feelings are on issues.

I mean, talk about a departure from what judges are supposed to be doing, doing, but that's where she's at, and it's a pretty radical view.

What do you,

in the next three years,

what do you think the biggest challenge for the Trump administration?

I know that it's kind of amazing.

I should be candid.

Every time I read the news section as opposed to the opinion journalism section of the Wall Street Journal, whatever they have said, I always think that the opposite's going to happen because about the tariffs, the trade war, closing the border, you're not going to get the military recruits back.

Everything he solved so far, they had said was going to be a disaster.

But

what do you think are going to be the big controversial issues in the immediate future that this administration is going to have to look at?

I was looking at the tariff revenue is going to be up.

There's going to be some revenue from

self-deporting one, people haven't talked about, but self-deporting one million illegal aliens is going to really help a lot of state budgets and local budgets.

But what do you see as the big challenges in the next year or two?

Well, I think,

you know, in the first seven months, it's been, it's been pretty remarkable.

I mean, they're effectively hitting 1,000.

You had the key appointments of the cabinet, which in my view were, I spent a lot of time on the campaign trail with President Trump and a lot of the figures have relationships with that are in the cabinet now.

It's basically a team of disruptors, which is really, really unique.

I mean, you talk about this a lot.

Like, just generally speaking, even prior Republican presidents kind of go to the same pool of applicants.

And

they're well received in the cocktail parties of Washington, D.C., but they're not really reflective of the people that I represent.

They're not really reflective of the people who listen to your show who don't feel like this thing has worked out particularly well for them.

They think it's a little bit too clubby.

And it's about what the elites write in their white papers as opposed to what people are feeling when they're swinging the hammer at home, right?

So I think putting that team of disruptors together was huge and we got that done.

I think the one big beautiful bill, you know, to get that across the finish line, even though you only needed 51 votes, was an important feat.

And President Trump, I think because of his comeback, because of his popularity, because of his

connection with America,

gave everybody strength to go do it.

Right.

And it got done.

And so you have, again,

we front-loaded the money for not only ICE agents, border

detention facilities and deportations.

That's all front-loaded and the wall, by the way.

So what that means is that Democrats, as they negotiate on like, let's say, a 60-vote threshold for appropriations bills, they can't hold that stuff hostage anymore because it's already out the door.

right that's a big deal um same on military spending um same on the tax cuts that went that went through that are gonna for the average families you know five to ten thousand dollars a year those are gonna continue so you look at all the successes and then i actually had the honor to handle the rescissions package,

which was a very important statement for us to make, which was we're going to defund NPR

and PBS.

That's a billion dollars.

And another $8 billion on those crazy USAID projects that were so stupid that have been kind of baked into the kind of considerate the Washington consensus way of doing foreign policy.

And so that was another big win.

So you got these wins, you got the momentum.

But what you're, you know, to get to your question is what becomes the biggest part of that?

I think we've got to stay resolute on this meeting mass migration with mass deportations.

The press is going to be looking for anything.

I mean, they can't help themselves.

They, they, you know, they fell all over themselves on an MS-13 gang member in, you know, in El Salvador.

Um, they're going to look for any kind of story to try to soften public support for it, which is sky high.

I think that has to continue.

I would also say that what we're seeing,

it's hard to put in context.

You sort of think of when the Cold War ended.

We had been living prior to that with this unified belief, and rightfully so, that we ought to be very focused on defeating Soviet communism, right?

That united even the Republicans and Democrats to some degree.

And in that time, NATO and that defense shield and these terrible trade deals that were enacted were all meant to kind of let Europe get back on its feet, Japan get back up on its feet so that they could kind of, you know, be strong against this threat.

Well, when the Cold War ended, we never really adjusted those policies.

We never really renegotiated the trade deals.

We never said to Europe on their own defense, you need to step up in a much more meaningful way.

That's what's happening right now.

And so I feel like that's the ascending view.

I consider myself an American like realist with foreign policy.

That's very different than sort of a neoliberal view, a neoconservative view on it.

So that's the ascending point of view, I think.

And you have to have a president that believes that.

And so you got a vice president and a president, J.D.

Vance and Donald Trump.

That's their view of the world.

And I think we're going to have to continue to win the argument with people because that, especially in Washington, as you know, that is not.

That is not the majority view.

But because of what President Trump has done in securing these peace deals and that being the North Star, he's bringing a lot more people with him.

And so I think that's the long-term challenge is how do we maintain this trajectory, not just for the three years, but moving forward, that this really core kind of america first ideology remains and that it's that it um is is lasting and enduring it's very hard to do even ronald reagan the reagan revolution was it

it was about a three-year first term and then it sort of you know it got stalled and then george h w bush was a very good guy but he was a thousand points of light read my lips no new taxes and it kind of went into rhinoism, you know, at the end of his,

and they never really got that back.

So it's very hard to perpetuate a counter-revolution against the progressive project over 12 years, maybe, or 16 years.

And I'll tell you, yeah, and I'll also say, so this is my third year in the Senate.

My first two years, one of the things that I was struck by was

just how different the conversations were in Washington at our lunches versus what they are at home.

And

the biggest example of that was on the continuing obsession by

Democrats and some Republicans.

And then, of course, Joe Biden on this never-ending blank check to Ukraine.

You know, it was, it was, it dominated so much, Richard.

It just dominated so much of the discussion.

And I told somebody one time, I literally have not had a single person in Missouri come to me and say, you know what, Eric, the most important thing I want you to do right now is I want you to vote for another $60 billion for Ukraine.

It just,

it just was not a topic, but it dominated.

And I think it's not to say that there aren't important foreign policy questions that should be front and center, but it was just weird.

And I think now it's so different.

The conversations that we're having about the policies we're pursuing are things that actually do matter to people at home.

And it's like, this is like making sure that they're not getting hit with the biggest tax increase in American history, making sure that we have a secure border.

One of the things I think it's kind of wild that we don't even ever talk about now is border crossings.

Like that problem was solved in a month.

I know it.

And we were told, you know, you need new borders.

Immigration reform was the only answer.

Right.

And you just needed a president who actually wanted to enforce the law.

I think there's going to be a couple of,

I don't know how to say it, but controversies within the MAGA Republican movement.

I can think of one.

So almost everybody I meet in the Mexican-American community here thinks that the 10 to 12 million people who came illegally should be brought back.

I think they would also agree, the Trump 55 percent, let's say, of males who voted for him, they would also agree if you're able-bodied and you're in that prior pool, which I think is about 20 million before Biden's 12 million.

That's the figures.

I think we have about 30 million.

But that other 20 million, if you're able-bodied and you're on social services, I think people think they should be deported.

If you have a criminal record, even a DUI, you should be deported.

If you've only been here, let's let's say a year before the Biden, you should be deported.

But then you get into what everybody has asked me this question, and it goes something like this.

Well, I screwed up.

I didn't get legality.

I broke the law.

I've been here nine years.

I've been a roofer for nine years.

I'm working 60 hours a week.

I've never been on welfare.

I have no criminal record.

And I think, by the way, that pool is smaller than the Democrats say it is.

I don't think there's a lot of people who who have never been on social services.

They've never had, and I think I should have to pay a fine.

And I don't want citizenship.

I don't want to just say that I deserve it, but I would like to see if I could pay a fine and get a green card.

Do you think there's going to be support for that at all?

I don't.

I mean, I think there'll be some, but I just think that the Overton window has shifted on this, as I said earlier.

And I think that, you know, you listen to people and

look, I think the frustration people have is that the people that I I grew up around who, you know, they worked in factories or the cops or

they worked, you know, hard for a living.

They got hit by this double whammy of globalism, which was

their jobs were shipped overseas.

Okay.

And then as they're shifting, like this is a big shift, as they're moving.

At that point, then people were brought here illegally to undercut their wages for the next job.

Yeah.

And so they just haven't seen the prosperity that,

you know, others have seen.

And there's just not an appetite, I don't think, for that that kind of condoning the illegal activity.

Because you listen to people, there is a need right now.

There is a need out there for like 500,000 electricians, right?

And we have to get to a place where we stop accepting this idea that Americans won't do it.

So no,

we still have this stubborn 62% labor participation rate.

And I don't know how

you...

you get it up to 70%.

And I think,

yeah, and I think, I agree.

And I think that some of the advanced manufacturing that we're just on the leading edge for is going to be a great opportunity.

So, in some ways, that advancement and AI and all that is going to lead, you know, the argument we've heard from Chamber of Commerce folks for a long time was, well, we need to be able to bring in cheap labor for jobs that won't get done.

Well, you're actually not going to have as much of a need for that moving forward if you're going to need fewer people to do it.

So, the factory jobs aren't going to look like they looked like in 1960, but they're going to look like something very different that I think can empower American workers.

You can see that's our tokens.

Yeah, I'm looking out the window right now.

I have a 40-acre almond orchard, and when I was a kid, we all had mallets and we hit the almonds, and then we had these heavy canvases, and then they would fall in the canvases, and then we would drag it to the next tree.

And after about six trees, it was so heavy, then we dumped them into gunny sacks.

And then we came by with a trailer.

And one person now,

three days ago, he came with this very sophisticated machine I have about 7,000 trees and he just each one had a computerized you know he could tell by the and it shook it and he did the whole 40 acres in one day and then he came back

two days ago and he took went with a blower and he blew all the almonds on the ground into a neat row in the middle and now he's coming back and he's scooping them all up and one man

and all the things they said that could never be mechanized you can't mechanize picking grapes and putting them on the ground and drying them into raisins.

That's mechanized.

You cannot mechanize strawberries.

How would you, and they're starting to do things to mechanize.

So it actually, I agree with you, there's going to be a radical shift.

I think one of the answers

But this is going to be a political question I think the Trump administration is going to have to face because if they're successful, and I think they will be with the self-deportations,

I think it's very feasible in five, four years they can get almost all of the Biden people back.

And I think they can get all of the people with criminal records that were here before the Biden people, and there's a lot of them.

And all the people who are just aimlessly on so.

But that other group that I talked to, I don't know what you call them, they're going to have to get a strategy or an exegesis to the public because

I look at the polls.

Yeah.

And

you're up to 60, 70 percent deport the Biden people.

And then it starts when you get down to somebody that the left mentions all the time.

And there are people like that.

I just talked to a guy yesterday in the supermarket.

And he's been here 12 years.

He's worked every day, seven days a week.

He pays taxes.

His kids are all legal.

And he wanted to know.

He said, well, why don't you try to help me get citizenship?

Why don't you talk on TV about it?

And I said, have you ever no, I've never been arrested.

Are you on welfare?

No, I've never been on welfare.

I said, Didn't you think you broke the law?

Why did you come illegally?

Well, I was 17 and I had, I was down in Michel Khan, so I came up.

I want to pay a fine and I want to get a green card.

And I said, Well, do you think you should go back and come back again?

And he said, Well, you know, if I could go back and stay for a month and then apply for a green card, I'd come back.

So,

what I'm getting at is not so much the morality or the legality.

I'm just talking now just of the pure politics for the.

Yeah, no, I get to.

And I don't know how that, that, that's something the left is waiting for.

Right.

Well, I think also, Victor, it's, it's true.

We talked earlier about

Hispanic voters

trending more Republican.

And I think part of that, too, is there is a great deal of sort of resentment of those who have come here legally.

Like even the example of the guy at the grocery store, like there are people who actually waited in line and it took them years to do it who don't like the fact.

No, they don't.

But there is a subset when a guy's here and his three kids are citizens and he hasn't been back to Mexico in 20 years and he's been all and you've got to do something with him.

Either you've got to deport him or you I don't think you want to give him a pathway to citizenship or reward that.

But is there an avenue where where he pays a fine and either has to go back to Mexico, but he gets back, he gets some preference to come back and get a green card or something?

Because

what I'm worried about is on the Republican side,

when I go in

to the store,

I had to get a CT scan the other day, and I talk to people, and I said 90% of the people I talk to are Hispanic.

I meet people who speak perfect English.

They haven't spoken Spanish in 15 years, and it's the weirdest thing in the world.

They come up to me and they said,

I'm illegal.

I said, You can't be illegal.

I've seen you every week.

I said, You speak English better than I do.

He said, Oh, yeah, my kid's an engineer at Fresno State.

And I said, Well, how about your wife?

Well, she's illegal too.

We came up illegally.

I said, Well, why did you?

I said, When did you come up?

Oh, I came up in 1987.

So I said, you've been here working?

Yeah, my wife works for the state.

She's illegal.

So,

and they, I said, well, do you want people?

I've had this conversation I can memorize.

Do you want people to be deported?

Oh, yes, they have to be deported under Biden.

All of the people.

All the drunk drivers, all the people who leave the scene of the accident.

That's really a problem here.

Rural people hitting somebody who are illegal and leaving the scene of accident.

But then I said, so how many are you?

Oh, there's a few of us around, but we want to get a green card.

And then we could do what we want, whether we get citizenship.

I don't know.

I think the Republicans are going to have to find something, square that circle of not offending the base, because it will offend the base to give a solution, and then try to figure that out.

It feels so much farther down the line, though.

It is.

You know what I mean?

But hey, by the way, I have to ask you.

So I hear all these reports of trap.

What is the, is the congestion better in California?

Are these rumors true?

About what?

That because of a lot of the the self-deportations and all that, that the congestion and the traffic in Southern California is a lot better than it was six months ago?

Well, I drive 205 miles from,

I'm here in the center of Fresno County to Stanford.

And I would say

on the part that's in the San Joaquin Valley, it's better.

But to answer your question, the Fresno B is a McClatchy paper, so it's very left-wing, believe it or not.

And the conservatives, Sacramento, Modesto, and Fresno Bee, and there's not much left of them anymore.

They've been decimated.

They used to be huge conglomerates, and they're kind of like an online magazine that nobody reads.

But they've been running articles lamenting that the emergency rooms are too

sparse now.

There's not enough people.

So

when you go into an emergency room, instead of waiting six hours and not seeing anybody there who doesn't, who speaks English, I had a bee sting.

I didn't know I was allergic.

I suddenly got allergic.

They brought me in unconscious a few years ago, three years ago, and not one person in the local spoke English.

And there's about 50 people waiting.

And the B was running a story recently that said, this is terrible that

the emergency rooms are thinning out and you get access because that means that there's a lot of illegals in the community that haven't yet left and they don't have access, but they don't want to go into the emergency room.

But they never made the connection.

Well, maybe that's good for Mexican-American citizens who are poor and want to use it now.

They can find the other job.

Maybe the hospitals bought advertising and they wrote it because the hospitals make a lot of money on

the sector.

They do.

They do.

And

the biggest problem we have out here in rural central is

about half of all accidents, the driver leaves the scene of the accident.

Yeah.

And so, and they hit and they've killed, I mean, every day.

And I think in the last 20 years,

five people have run off the road at high speed, drunk, and taken out trees on my place.

And when they zoom in, they usually, depending on the age of the orchard, they'll take out 10 or 12 trees.

which actually you lose that production for three to five years.

And then they leave the car and

they run off.

They're usually not hurt.

And then their car car is there.

And one time I pulled it out with a tractor, chained it, and they wouldn't let me do it.

The Pyway Patrolman said, you can't.

And then they just leave.

And then they impound the car.

Then they mysteriously show up and get the car back.

And there's no compensation for anybody.

And that's a big problem because if you're bringing millions of people from Michokan or Oaxaca and they haven't driven very well and they have these high-powered American cars and they don't know the driver,

and you give them, you know, basically exemption, The people they're killing and hurting are mostly Mexican in this community, are Mexican-American citizens.

And that's one of the reasons why people were so angry, and that vote helped

Trump so much.

We're going to be right back with our last break.

I'm talking to Senator Eric Schmidt.

He's got a new book, The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.

You can buy it, Amazon bookstores on the 19th of August.

Yeah.

That's right.

we'll be right back.

Oh, hey.

Hey, thanks for meeting me here on such short notice.

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Bugged?

Wait, Jamie, what's going on?

Oh, it's just, you're my only lawyer friend, and I need your professional opinion.

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And we're back for our last session.

You mentioned Ukraine.

What do you see there?

Because one thing about Biden, He always said,

we're going to give money and aid as long as it takes, but they never told us what long was it.

Is it Trump is going to tell Putin, well, nobody has the military wherewithal to get back Crimea or the Donbass, and they're surely not going to be in NATO.

And you are about 80 to 100 miles east, excuse me, west of the old border, and we're going to negotiate that.

And is that what the critical point is, where the DMZ will be?

Yeah, I think

you mentioned where we were

even a year ago.

You had a wandering foreign policy.

There was no core American interest sort of articulated other than sort of nebulous things about defending democracy and all that.

And so I think where we're at now is, and by the way,

you know, no plan,

just more money.

And that is no way to run a railroad.

And I think

the European allies never took Biden seriously on any kind of like commitments on their own defense.

Or

if you really believe that Russia, a you know putin even though he can't get to kiev is about to roll through europe like hitler wouldn't you be doing a little bit more than you're doing right now and that message was never delivered so i think president trump is the only person literally on the planet who can bring about peace and i think that's um that's the goal that's his north star um this is the truth of the matter is if you're a realist you understand this is just a meat grinder um you know a million people or more have lost their lives and and thousands more every week by just sort of this kind of effective stalemate that exists.

But Russia, and look, this is sort of the Russian way.

Wars of attrition are kind of their thing.

And they've been doing that for a very, very long time.

So I think it's in all of their interests to get to a peace deal.

And again, I think Trump can kind of break through.

And you're probably, yeah, you're probably talking about what lands.

I mean, I don't think anybody really believes that Crimea is is going back, right?

That was in 2016.

And you had, of course, the two times Russia did move was when obama was president with crimea and then of course um when biden was president and so um trump has always been right about this that i don't think there would have been a move if he were you know been president in time that biden was so i think that's where this is all headed i think you look at the string of victories i mean just even things that you know the american public's probably not you know azerbaijan and armenia these sorts of like

struggles that have gone on for a very long time, even in Southeast Asia, he's brokering peace.

And I think that's going to be one of his great legacies.

And I think he's committed to trying this.

It doesn't mean it's going to work.

But it also doesn't mean that

we're certainly never going to commit troops.

And I just don't think this endless funding stream from the American taxpayer is on the table anymore either.

So I think there's enough.

But I do think President Trump is doing everything he can right now to galvanize as much through economic sanctions and other things or threats of those to bring everybody to the table.

And that's what he should be doing.

Let me ask the last question.

We're with Senator Eric Schmidt, and we're talking about the last line of defense,

his new book on how the right and the conservatives,

conservatives can use the law to stymie the abuse of the law.

And absolutely.

And

I would say, too, I was so excited

when you had me on to talk about the book because

just the things that you talk about, you know,

we in the book, it's chronicled, we took the deposition of Anthony Fauci, and there's some really interesting stories there.

We took the definition or the deposition of Elvis Chan, who was the FBI guy in Cyber

who was pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story.

They knew it was real.

They were telling them it was going to be Russian hack and leak operation.

We took the deposition of somebody at CISA, which was this agency for cybersecurity that was basically

working to censor Americans with big tech companies.

So was the CDC.

I mean, there's some crazy stuff that went on in that time period.

And we were, you know, kind of on the front lines.

I just think your audience really is going to like this book.

I think so, too.

I was going to ask you about Anthony Fauci.

You know, everybody kind of poo-pooed the pardon, but if he hadn't have got a pardon, all those exchanges with...

Francis Collins about

gain of function and then Peter Dasick and routing the 600,000 around the law that said it was illegal.

Yeah, to the EcoHealth Alliance.

And we had Stephen Quay, a biologist on, and he was saying, Victor, Victor, Victor, the $600,000 wasn't the worst of it.

They were greenlighting doctors and their instrumentation and that expertise to be channeled into Wuhan as well.

But when you guys had him on,

I didn't realize

when you looked at what he was emailing, he had a lot of criminal exposure had he not been pardoned.

Well, we'll see.

By the way, we'll see.

I'm kind of leading the Senate investigation of this.

If those pardons hold up, because if he did not have knowledge of the specific pardons through Autopin, there's a very important legal question of whether or not those pardons are valid or not.

So we'll see.

But yeah, look, he's very, he's got a lot of exposure.

What's really interesting from that deposition that came to light, we spent a lot of time on.

And by the way, my solicitor general, John Sauer, when I was Missouri AG, he's now the solicitor general for the country.

So we've got people and the first four district court judges that President Trump put up or happened to be in Missouri and they all worked with me in the attorney general's office.

So we're kind of, we're run, we're uh we're flooding the zone.

What percentage do you think were auto-pinned pardons?

Do you anybody have a good question?

Well, sir, I well, I mean, there's already been some disclosures that at the end of the day, uh, when they got into the like massive number, yeah, that he was approving, whatever that means, classifications of pardons, right?

Like not an individual murderer, but a classification.

So if that's true, but I don't think that those are valid.

Can you tell by the auto pin?

Is there a document?

Well, actually, we have requested from the archives, and guess you'll never guess who the archivist for the United States is right now.

Marco Rubio is technically the archivist.

So we've asked Marco Rubio to release the sort of

the documents.

There should be authorizations for these auto pens.

So every time it was used, there should be some sort of paperwork or a receipt for it.

So that's what we've asked for.

We hope to get that in the next month to kind of dig a little bit deeper into the auto pen.

Did any, are you guys have any plans to depose Mark Milley about his phone call to his Chinese counterpart?

I mean, that isn't a wild.

You just sort of like, if you were to take the names out and you were to write a book about all the sinister stuff that was happening, and then, you know, Russia gave me could spend a whole nother episode on this, but you would think that was in some other country, not in America.

I would.

I'm writing this book on the comeback of Trump

chapter called Nietzsche and Trump, Everything They Tried to Do to Kill Him, Made Him Stronger.

Yeah.

Or destroy him.

But I went through all those.

I could not believe some of this stuff.

Well, we took Fauci's deposition.

He came in and, you know, one interesting anecdote that we noted in the last line of defense is that a court reporter about halfway through sneezed.

And he looked at her.

and asked her if she had an upper respiratory infection and requested she wear a mask.

And the court report, I mean, this is in November of 2022.

This is not like March of 2020.

So this guy,

and he sent his chief deputy early on in like March or April of 2020 to kind of look and see what the Chinese communists were doing.

And this guy, his chief deputy came back raving about the lockdowns.

And so immediately, Fauci was a big proponent of this and really undermined President Trump.

He emailed a friend of his who asked early on, hey, do I really, you know, should I wear a mask on an airplane?

And he said, no, of course not.

Masks are not effective.

And then, of course, he tells the country everybody needs to wear a mask, including five years and two

double masks for kids.

It was just totally insane.

But I think,

you know,

the level of

sensitivity this guy had, because, you know, he proclaimed to be the science.

The CDC was very protective of him.

And if there was criticism of him or there was criticism about

the vaccine in any way or masks, I mean, they were working with the biggest companies in the history of the world to shut you down.

I mean, RFK Jr.

was one of the first to be censored.

Jay Bacharia, they went after him.

By the way,

Dr.

Bhattacharya was one of the plaintiffs in Missouri versus Biden.

I forgot about that.

He was, yes.

He was.

And one of the great ironies that I, and this actually isn't in the book, but I was holding a hearing on censorship on the Judiciary Committee.

I was chairing the subcommittee to do it.

And I had to leave.

to go vote on Dr.

Bhattacharia's confirmation to be the director of NIH.

And there was a certain amount of historical symmetry to it.

That the people, me included, who were fighting against this censorship, Dr.

J.

Bhattacharya, who's a victim of the censorship, were now inside the castle, right?

Yeah.

Trying to reform it from within.

He really went, he's a colleague of mine through Hoover.

He went through hell at Stanford University.

They went after him and Scott Atlas.

Scott Atlas, another wonderful person, and they went after him.

Well, and think about, remember what their great sin was in the Great Barrington

Declaration.

What they said was, is that

natural immunity is actually still a thing.

And they almost lost their careers over it because it was crazy.

I know.

Last thing I'll say, one of the things I noticed when I was doing it, and you've mentioned a lot of the stuff about the law fair.

I didn't realize, I think Jim Jordan has it in his report, but I went back and looked.

So Trump, on November 15th of 2022, he announces he's going to run.

Three days later,

Joe Biden does three things.

He appoints on the same day

Jack Smith,

the same day Fannie Willis's paramour, Nathan Wade, is in the White House with the White House counsel that very day.

And the same day Michael Coangelo, number three in the DOJ, leaves that day to go work for Alvin Bragg, and he had rotated into the DOJ from working with Letita Jane.

That was all the same day.

Yes.

They had to coordinate that.

They had to be doing all of that, local, state, and federal.

And I don't know

that that's going to be, it's funny because all of those people have, almost all of them have criminal exposure.

Letita, do you see anything that's going to happen?

These are all, I guess, state and local.

No, I do.

I think, and there should be.

I think, you know, we could talk a little bit more.

I think there's actually an avenue for this Russia gate for their indictments, and it would probably center around a conspiracy because it's ongoing.

Because the biggest challenge you have, a lot of of this stuff is the statute of limitations.

But a conspiracy to defraud the United States of America that's ongoing, that doesn't run, the clock isn't over on that.

So I think that Brennan, Clapper, Comey have real, real risk here.

So if they haven't already hired lawyers, they probably should lawyer up.

But yeah, I've talked about this too.

I think.

What really is crazy about all this was they thought, and one of the reasons they pushed this January 6th thing and MAGA extremism so hard, they were really trying, and the censorship, they were really trying to bury the movement

and President Trump to marginalize him in a way that he couldn't come back.

When they realized that had failed, that he was coming back, and I was one of the early endorsers.

I may have been President Trump's first Senate endorsement, first or second.

I understood the connection this man had with the country and real people.

And I thought all along that there was a path for him to win.

And thank you.

I went back and looked at each one of them.

I went back and looked at the Mar-Lago raid, Bragg, James, eugene carroll uh

jack smith

the 25 states that tried to get him off the ballot yeah think about

every time that happened he went up at one point i don't know if the polls were right right after january 6th ron desantis was ahead of him in the polls

when that started and the way he was defiant and every time he was in new york he was going to these little markets and talking to people and he was just on he went up one to two points each time.

And within a year,

he was back.

You know, people just got outraged at what they were doing.

Yeah.

And

I start the book, Last Line of Fitness, by the line is in November of 2024, the fever broke.

And that is the best way I think to describe it.

This fever dream we had with wokeness and lawfare and all this.

The American people, thankfully, in their wisdom, sat in their own jury box and they saw all this play out and they rendered their own verdict and they said, we don't want our country to become some third world banana republic no that's

ushered in so i i think what it was is it was kind of like the emperor has no clothes they knew the emperor all dei and esg was all done with but it really took someone to say the emperor was naked and that was trump because i don't think i don't see a traditional a john i mean i'm not speaking ill of them but a john mccain type or a romney type or a ball i don't think they would have done it gone out on a limb and just said dei is over with.

Well, and I also think, yeah, and I also think one of the great gifts and legacies President Trump has given all of us, and I tried to articulate this in the book about the courage to stand up and fight.

Yeah, he did.

That is a new tenant of our party now.

And

I wouldn't say that that was always the case, but I know I got a lot of

resolve from that.

And

I found myself in situations when I was suing 64 school districts on on the peak day of Omicron for their mask mandates.

Not everybody agreed with that decision to do that.

But it was the right thing to do.

And I think by President Trump withstanding all of that and coming back victorious also provides a path, right?

Is that the way we're successful is people want to know.

I think the most important thing with leadership is people want to authenticate, they want to know you're authentically fighting for them.

And people can spot a phony.

I think they're,

they hadn't won.

Well, they'd lost seven out of the last eight popular votes at the national level.

And I think part of the problem was they want, it was kind of like they played by the Marcus of Queensbury rules.

And they thought winning nobly was better than losing, you know, like in a knife fight or a bruising fight.

You just don't do that if you're Republican.

And it would, you know, you get, it's kind of like, well, we got 46%.

We got close.

And we ran a really great, I'm Ritt Romney.

And they said all these horrible things about me.

You know, I took people over the cliff and I hazed somebody in high school.

I put a dog on my thing, but I did not reply to that.

And therefore I'm noble and I lost nobly and that's who we're going to be, a noble minority party.

And Trump came along and said, no, we're going to win and we're going to win.

We might have to win ugly in your interpretation, but we're going to win.

And that was something very important.

By the way, if you believe that all these things are on the line for a country, I think we have a moral obligation to fight that.

That's a very good point because he was basically telling somebody, you know, they call you deplorable, they call you dregs, but

I am your redemption, you know, and what he was saying is that if you're a national leader and you're worried about your comportment or whether people like you in Georgetown, then you're letting somebody down.

I said when I was running for the Senate, and I had, of course, my history as Attorney General is leading the charge on all these fights, I said, listen, I'm not interested in being invited to all the fancy cocktail parties in Washington.

That's not why I'm running.

I'm running because I think

the heart and soul of our country is at stake.

And I really believe that.

And I do too.

That fight doesn't end.

And I think even now, just because President Trump is in office and we've got control, the forces are still coming.

The forces are still coming.

And again, one of the reasons why I felt compelled to write the book was to say we have a playbook now in the Article III branch too.

Like, we're not going to limit this battlefield to just the elections.

We're not going to limit the battlefield to the administrative reform that needs to happen to dismantle the administrative state.

We got to fight on turf that has traditionally been considered Democrat turf if we really are serious about holding on to this Republic.

You can see that in action, the less traditional power they have,

and this time Donald Trump is saying, I'm not just going to go after the symptoms.

I'm going to go after the source of their power.

NPR, PBS, the universities, they're going to get very angry.

I mean, when they're hitting watermelons with mallets, these potty mouth videos,

Hikem Jeffries posing with a bat.

I think I call it fake authenticity.

Like they're faking the authenticity and people see through it.

And I actually don't think they've hit Victor.

I don't think they've hit rock bottom yet.

No, I don't think

they don't really get it yet.

They had some self-reflection for 60 days, but they're back at the same thing, which is, I see it in the Senate with some senators who are going to run for president.

They're, they're, they think they just being the chief resistor is the path, and it's not.

American people reject it.

They don't get it.

They're so consumed by Trump derangement syndrome, they haven't figured it out yet.

And let's hope they don't.

We come to the end of our time.

Last line of defense, How to Beat the Left in Court, Senator Eric

Schmidt, excuse me, from Missouri.

And it's a great book.

And if you don't think the Republicans know how to fight fire with fire and the law affair, then read this book because it'll be...

It'll be very encouraging.

It goes through a lot of things that we, and I didn't realize, but

they're cause for hope and that we we are sophisticated on the conservative side just as much as are more so than the Democrats.

Thank you very much Senator for spending time with us.

Thank you Victor Davis.

Thank you.

Victor Davis Hanson for the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you.

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