The Promise of Trump

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to... Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to get some wisdom from the great man himself, VDH, Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Victor has a website, the Blade of Perseus.
VictorHanson.com is the address. Victor's alive still.
We see him. I am.
Those on Rumble can see him. He's actually.
I don't look alive, but I think I'm alive. It's day nine of my flu, and I'm getting a lot of recommendations.

You should have taken Tamiflu, Victor.

I'm sorry I didn't.

I didn't get a prescription.

Somebody, a very good friend of mine who's a renowned doctor said,

your cough is a bacterial remnant from the viral infection.

Take a Z-Pak.

He said he did.

He was over his cough in one day. I've had it for nine days, so I respect that.
Completely wiped out. Still angry at myself.
Looking at the ceiling, reexamining my entire life before me. All right.
Making radical changes and then coming to the conclusion that I've had pretty good health the last six

years, except I've had three COVIDs and two flus and they all had one thing in common.

What?

Long flights.

And long flights and then going into huge receptions and book signings and meet and

greet.

So 71, if I ever get over this, I am going to have a new leaf.

No more speaking out of state. No more traveling out of state.
Comfortable existence in California. How's that? I guess I'm going to have to go out there every once in a while.
Yes, you're going to have to come out and see. I'm going to make a self-compound.
I'll bring a flatbed truck and I can pick up some washing machines and drive. It's very insidious how things do.
My mother, who died tragically at 66 of a brain tumor, when she was 65, she was working as an appellate court judge like a dog. And she was trying to help us on a money-losing ranch, 180 acres.
And she once said something. She goes, at the rate that I'm going, I will have to work to 70.
And I thought of that yesterday. I'm 71, so my dad retired from his junior college job at 57.
He went and worked on the farm, but he lived to be 76, and he was a heavy drinker and smoker. There's some hobbies you can pick up, Victor.
I'm going to ask you about smoking. My father gave me a lifelong lecture that he would always say to me very politely, do not smoke, asterisk, your twin brother smokes, your older brother smokes i smoke when the flu comes you and you alone get the flu and then i've seen some some isolated theories that the nicotine fumes are an antiviral in your lungs but whether that's worth the damage it does i don't know but i've I've never smoked a cigarette.
I've smoked two cigarettes in my life. You answered the question I was going to ask.
They were both cools. I was 18, and I was at Yale University taking, what do you call it, intensive Greek for nine weeks.
I got strep throat, by the way, and I was walking the street and an african-american young man wanted one dollar i gave him one dollar he gave me two cool cigarettes in exchange i went back and i smoked one of them it just reminded me of vick's maple rub yeah it was menthol yeah delicious that's the last time i ever smoked all right well right. I'm going to ask Victor about a pipe and we'll do that when I come back, when we come back from these initial important messages.
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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. By the way, we're recording on Saturday the 15th, and this particular episode will be up on Tuesday, March 18th, which is the day after St.
Patrick's Day and the day before St. Joseph's Day.
And later on, Victor, at the end of the show, I'll do a little Catholic, Irish, Italian, Catholic riff. Did you ever smoke a pipe? Nope.
Never? I had a professor, a very wonderful professor, John Lynch. I met him when he was 26, and he smoked a pipe.
And a lot of the graduate and undergraduates emulated him, so he would have people over to his home, and they would have red wine, and they would all smoke these various Irish blends. He was Irish.
Blends of, he died very tragically at 75 of Parkinson's disease, but he was a, that was a big thing in the 70s on campuses, pipe smoking. Pipes, yeah, yeah.
Professors, you know, it was kind of like total, they had little patches on their sport coats and all sorts of pipe cleaners and wire rimmed glasses and beards and natty dress. No, underdressed, I'd say.
He was a wonderful professor. I really liked him.
But I never, it's something that my father, who was a wonderful person, would kid me, you know, about you don't drink, you don't smoke. I never used drugs and um the result was i was kind of sickly my entire when i was a kid i was known as a sickly child pumped through antibiotics all the time and then i've had i think six or seven but it's always my mom always said you overdo it you sleep about four or five hours and you're kind of crazy.
So you self-induced.

I don't know.

But I've proven with all these COVID bouts and other other burdens you've had to bear.

You again, I say you're indestructible.

Victor, by the way, you know who is not indestructible?

Who?

Abdallah Maki Mosley Al-Rifei, also known as Abu Khadija, the head of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He was killed by a joint effort by Iraqi government and the United States.
So that's a good one. Yes? Well, I mean, that's what Trump said he was going to do the first term.
I'm going to bomb the proverbial SH blank out of ISIS. He did.
He got rid soleimani he got rid of baghdad he got rid of the wagner group he got very little credit for that um yeah i mean the question is why was he operating with impunity under four years of the biden administration and the answer to that is well why was the yemenis taking control the Red Sea with impunity? Or why did we allow a Chinese balloon to go all the way to South Carolina before we shot it down? Or why were there two theater-wide wars under the Biden watch? I only mention that because I'm getting really tired of listening to all of this hysteria from the left. We've only been here eight weeks with the Trump counter-revolution, and it's like, oh my God, he deported somebody.
Well, what do you think is the reason for that? Who let in 12 San Francisco? You people did, 12 of them, 12 1 million person cities. And out here on Ground Zero, you could see the difference.
Whether it was an increase in people throwing trash, or people gang activity, or as happened three days ago, two huge dogs just dumped out of a car wandering into our yard. The system isn't ready for that shock.
And it wasn't 12 million dispersed over the continental United States. It was 12 million people flown into particular locales along the Texas-Mexican border, in the San Joaquin Valley, in the inner city.

It wasn't the people of Malibu, and it wasn't the people in Newport, Rhode Island. It was the other people who bore the consequences of their policies.
And the same thing is true of the Soros crime wave. The same thing was true of borrowing $7 trillion and getting a hyper 9% inflation in 2022.
The same thing was true of what we're learning from USAID. So I guess what I'm saying, Jack, is what is the alternative? He's cut off a billion, $100 billion.
That's nothing. Nothing.
We are borrowing $3 billion a day in interest.

$3 billion.

That would mean that every single day before Elon Musk can cut anything, he has to cut $3 billion to make up for the interest, which is about over a trillion dollars.

And then he's only done $100 billion, and the country is falling apart. So what was the alternative? Same thing about the Ukraine thing.
You can't do that. You shouldn't do this.
That's naive. That won't work.
Okay. What was the plan before Donald Trump? He didn't start the war.
The war occurred because Joe Biden, like Barack Obama, lost deterrence and signaled that he wouldn't do anything. So then Putin went in, maybe a million, a million and a half dead, wounded, and missing.
What is the alternative when all these people are screwed? He's like the wall street journal jack but have you noticed that almost every article is negative now in the news section i was looking at it today it said uh people cutting back uh delaying trips cutting back and then there's a little article below that says gas prices. I'm thinking another

one delaying trips, cutting back. And then there's a little article below that says gas prices.
I'm thinking another one is people sneaking in eggs from Mexico. And I thought, well, why don't you just have a little article that say egg prices have dropped $2 a dozen.
Donald Trump was elected rather than saying that there's an egg shortage. Or why why not say it was caused under Biden and it's getting better but they never do that and then they said people worried about prices and cutting back and what they actually gas is the lowest it's been in four years or why don't you say the consumer price index was much less than what everybody expected?

And after, what, eight weeks, you can't really have a policy. But I don't know who's writing.
But when I see names like Molly Ball writing for the Wall Street Journal, this is the woman in 2021 for Time magazine, wrote that triumphalist essay about the cabal. her words, not mine, the conspiracy that modulated street protest, partnered with the government to censor news and change the voting laws and ha ha ha, we won.
And that is one of the marquee Wall Street Journal reporters. So I don't know what it is.
I like a lot of the op ed writers, but I wish when they start in on it and they all do now they would just tell us what the alternative is and when they get on ukraine i just feel like saying the closest historical model to what we see in ukraine on a larger scale was world war one no one in the allied camp had any idea how to stop the German juggernaut. They tried at Verdun.
They tried at Somme. They tried at Passchendaele.
And after two million dead, Russia was knocked out. And 500,000 German troops were transferred to the West.
At that point, the only, was there a change in strategy? No. Was there a new technology? Tanks, airplanes didn't really.
One thing stopped it. Two million Americans were drafted, and a million were sent in 1917 and early 19, and that stopped the German offensive.
So my point is, if you think you're going to break up this Stalingrad or this World War I Verdun, what is your new technology? What is your strategy? Because I don't see a world, I don't see a United States sending 2 million people over there. And unless you can come up with 10 divisions, as I said earlier, NATO non-American aircraft, 2000, maybe Sweden, Britain, France.
They could all get together and send a thousand jets and run surface air control. I don't know what they can do.
They can ground support. But let's hear something rather than take, we're going to do what it takes.
We're going to go stand with the end. Well, what is the strategy? It's very easy to say that Trump doesn't understand Putin, that Putin is sneaky.
We all understand that. But who who was making any effort to find a resolution to this other than just give what it takes? We're 36 trillion in debt.
Just send another $200 billion every year or so.

Or, as I said last time, 500 million Europeans screaming about a war of 140 million Russians

attacking a country that's got no more than 30 million left while they're all faulting

and blaming a 330 million Americans 7,000 miles away. It doesn't make any sense.
But I just want to hear something positive, that's all. Just a constructive, you know what I mean? Why doesn't the Wall Street Journal have a long essay and say, this is the strategy that will lead to Ukrainian victory, recovery of the borders in 2022 or maybe 2014, a strategic resolution.
Why don't they do it? Outline it. This is how much more money we have to borrow, and this is how much it will cost each year.
Just say that, but they don't. Same thing with Doge.
Have you noticed, Jack, where are you going to get the cuts? In 2010, you remember Barack Obama had something called the Simpson Bowles Commission for Debt Relief and Government Efficiency, basically, and they came back to Barack Obama, and it was Al Simpson who just passed away. He was a good friend of mine, and it was a wonderful three-tier tax simplification, just three tax brackets, cutting government.
And had we adopted all of those modest Social Security reforms, I think we would owe something like $8 trillion now had we done that. And this was a liberal president, and he could have easily reformed entitlements in a way no conservative ever could have.
He had the House. He had the Senate.
And what did he do? He said, that's a great job. See, I wouldn't want to be a, that's it.
And they just canceled it. So, you know, we've tried this before.
Everybody talks about waste fraud. Nobody does a thing.
Nobody does a thing. And so, and the judge that just, just one other rant, the judge, did you see Judge Furman, Jesse Furman in New York that issued the stay on Mr.
Khalil. Turns out his mother was a very big liberal donor to the Tides Foundation who is funding some of the various activities that this Mr.
Khalil has engaged in. The Tides Foundation is like, for our listeners, like Arabella, part of the huge funding of these very police.

I know if I was a judge and my mother was a big donor to a liberal organization that had a role in the case that I was, if this is true, I read it today, I'm not going to verify it, but I would have disqualified myself. But then if I was Judge Mursershon i would have disqualified myself when my daughter was making a fortune on her democratic consultant consultancy ship ship why i was adjudicating the alvin bragg case or maybe judge kaplan i would have disqualified myself the minute i said that don Donald Trump had basically committed rape when a jury found that he had not.

And on and on and on.

Victor, I want to, that was quite a rant.

I think there's more juice in that orange to be squeezed.

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and we thank the good people at American Alternative Assets for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, two things.
One, I want to plead my continued ignorance on one thing you mentioned. It's had to do with immigration.
I still don't get the flying illegal immigrants into the united states i can't get my arms or head around how the biden administration actually put people in airplanes overseas yeah and flew them here i saw them come in i saw them come in i was at the fresno airport on a late flight i saw them come in. They came in with apps from Mexico.
They just got on a little app and they applied for asylum and there was no diplomatic passport control when they arrived. I felt bad for them.
They looked like some of the poorest people in the world and they were coming in on two or three flights in the middle of the night there was no accident that flights from mexico were scheduled at 12 30 1 30 3 30 in the morning and the airport took on a whole new life that you know i'm sure there were some people who were legal aliens and citizens that were on those flights but it seemed like the majority of them from from talking to security, were not. And, you know, this was an area where a lot of people were brought in.
Governor Newsom just announced that he doesn't have $3.4 billion in Medi-Cal, what we call Medicaid here, for illegal aliens, mostly. It's exhausted.
And I could have said, if you'd gone two miles from my home to a big medical center and you had gotten there at eight o'clock in the morning and seen the line, you would have seen why that is. Or if you'd gone to one of the specialists that I go to in Fresno and see the waiting room as compared to five years ago, you would have seen why.

You know, I don't want to be reductionist, Jack, but do you think if Jill and Joe Biden had to,

let's say they had the flu and they wanted to go somewhere to get Tamiflu and they went into the local er and it was like the fresno county er's what would they do that somebody would say this is your policy stand in line and i don't think they would have said well who did this i got to get my health care and that's how they that's how this whole bicoastal elite functions it's all based on everybody's a lab rat. We experiment with all these ideas.
And what do you expect? Picking up, Victor, on your, I think rant's the wrong word, soliloquy, but regardless. Exegesis.
Okay, exegesis. There you go.
On Ukraine, two things. One is the experts, the Kvetchers.
Actually, part of the Kvetching crew on the Bush administration, they were glorifying or obsessed with that countdown. When was the 3,000th American soldier going to die at the TV screens? Yeah, I remember that.
And millions of people are dead in ukraine and the oceans of blood and it's it's just doesn't even come across in there in there no they don't care no no no they want to uh it has some sick thing to do with the russian collusion russian disinformation in other words what i'm saying is they felt that that James Comey and Andrew McCabe and all of them had the goods on Donald Trump in 2016. And it was a deal dossier and the whole thing blew up as a farce.
And then they thought four years later they had the goods with Russian disinformation on the laptop. And then that blew up.
And they wanted to say that Donald Trump is a Putin asset. They looked at the actual way that Donald Trump had treated Putin, and I've gone through that before, whether the Wagner Group's destruction or warning about Nordstrom II as a bad idea, sanctioning it, or flooding the world with cheap oil, getting out of a missile deal, et., etc.
It didn't matter to them. So they had this obsession that by, and then when you looked at Putin and you said to the left, and I've said this to people on the left, well, who were the people who pushed that jacuzzi button in Geneva? It was Hillary.
You were the people who wanted reset, not the conservatives. You were the ones that said George Bush was too hard after Osatia and Georgia on the Russians.
You did. You, you, you.
You were the one that did the worst thing in the world. You appeased him.
You let him go into the Donbass. You let him go into Crimea.

And then you went over to South Korea at Seoul. You had an open mic and said, This is my last election.
Tell Vladimir I'll be flexible on missile defense if he'll give me space. That was an open invitation.
And then when he started to mass you, you, Obama, forbid the gifting of javelins to Ukraine. And then Biden came in and he reversed the Trump order and he put a suspension.
And you hear none of that from these people. It's always Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.
and we have to fight to the last Ukrainian to stop this horrible. Yes, but you were the one that empowered Russia.
And there was a reason. It's almost a heresy among the left.
If you say something like the following, and I've had this conversation. Well, who do you think in the last four presidencies, Putin, during the last four presidencies, he did not leave his borders? Don't even go there.
That had nothing to do with it, Trump. That was just an accident.
Maybe it was because he liked Trump. Oh, whatever.
But he did not leave his borders during the Trump administration. And I understand Trump's art of the deal rhetoric and all of this stuff.
But this was not his war. It was not his mess.
He inherited it. And he was the only one trying to stop the bloodletting.
They have destroyed that country, Ukraine, and they are running out of people. And one of the biggest problems he's having is that Vladimir Putin is using this meat grinder to wear down the Ukrainian manpower reserves.
And if this thing goes on much longer, the Ukrainians are going to crack. And Putin knows that.
And so Trump is trying to find some leverage to call him off before he just goes in there, because he doesn't think the Europeans are going to send more tanks and planes,

and he doesn't believe any of their rhetoric at all.

Not a word.

Well, Victor, there's an interesting article I've come across on the German military on that point.

Let's get to that and some other thoughts still related to Ukraine when we come back from these important messages. We'll be back to our show in just a moment, but first an important message for anyone concerned about their financial future.
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Visit us at 2525 Martin Road in Fairfield or at fairfieldsubaru.com. We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show recording on Saturday.
Well, this is the Ides of March, actually, the 15th of March. This episode is up on March 18th, Tuesday, March 18th.
Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus. You'll find it at VictorHanson.com.

You should be subscribing if you're a fan of Victor's writing. He does two pieces a week exclusive for The Blade of Perseus, plus an exclusive 10-minute or so video on a hot topic.
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Victor, here's a headline, German military faces massive shortage of soldiers. An official report on the state of German military painted a grim picture on Tuesday with a whopping 28% of positions among the lower enlisted ranks unfilled as of the end of 2024.
The numbers were slightly better at higher service tiers, but the Bundeswehr was still missing nearly 20% of the required commissioned officers. The documents said, how's this, how's Germany? Oh, by the way, the average age of a soldier in Germany is 32.4 years.
It was at the end of 2019, and now it's 34 years. Maybe they'll be handing out canes eventually along with guns.
Yeah, I mean, the German defense minister, remember, he dressed Vance down at the security conference. They all do that.
Stormer and Macron were, as soon as Zelensky had the blow up in the White House, they started grandstanding. I did a telegraph daily, I mean a London Times interview where the host was pretty rude and they were all sky high.
the other guests oh this is a new era we can't count on the americans we have all this wherewithal over here we're're going to redirect. We're going to rearm.
We're going to be independent. And I'm thinking, I don't think so.
I wish you would. Promises, promises.
But since the EU was created, you were roughly the same GDP as the United States. And you've added a lot of countries and population, which should have had you just soar ahead of us as far as gross domestic product.
And you're about 60%. Your per capita income is about what Mississippi is.
And Germany, the powerhouse or the former powerhouse of Europe, spends about 1.65 on defense. And nine other countries say, if Germany's not going to do it, we're not going to do it.
So, you know, that's just the way it is. They have a lot of, there's 500 million people.
They have 2,000 jet fighters. They've got more artillery platforms than Russia does now.
And Russia's exhausted. I mean, they've lost a lot of wherewithal and manpower.
So they could step up big time. They could spend four or five hundred billion dollars.
They could send five, six hundred planes tomorrow. And then they wouldn't have to start yelling and screaming about how tough they are and how independent.
They don't need the U.S. anymore.
But they don't do that. They just, you know, they have a socialist state-run economy, and it's never going to be very productive at that way.
And they hate Trump, and they hate the MAGA movement, and all they want to do is appeal to their bi-coastal kindred in the United States. Victor, pick up one other thing, and we'll move on to some other topics, about Ukraine and the meat grinder.
I just finished reading de Gaulle's memoirs, which I recommend. It's a big book.
It's a doorstopper. It's a tremendous bit of writing.
I mean, he's a terrific writer. So France and war is on my mind.
The bloodletting of World War I and the depletion of men in France. So what happens in Ukraine now is, I mean, we're possibly setting up some crisis 10 years from now or 20 years from now just based on the bloodletting.
Well, I mean, they're not going to have a – they lost a whole generation. And nobody will tell us how many people.
I think both sides are lying, and they're lying under Esther. They probably have 500,000 wounded casualties, dead, missing prisoners, in a country where they've lost 10 to 12 million people have left the country.
They're very brave fighters, but the whole cohort between 18 and 22 is missing. I mean, they're not in the Army.
The Army is average age is in their early 30s. So, and yet they've held out.
But if you try to talk like this, Jack, and I work in an area where we have all of these famed experts in foreign policy, and you say something empirical like can you give me an example

to We have all of these famed experts in foreign policy. And you say something empirical like, can you give me an example during the 50-year Cold War in which, according to the protocols of the Russian-American nuclear tension and standoff, There was a war on the border, the direct border of either the United States or Russia, in which the other proxy tried to use a third party to harm its nuclear rival.
And the closest I can come to is Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, in which Russia thought it was cute

to give them both conventional

and nuclear-tipped missiles.

And we went berserk

and went to DEFCON 3 about it.

I think, actually, we went up to DEFCON 2,

but I'll have to check that.

DEFCON, I guess DEFCON 4. Is that what it is? It gets bigger or smaller? I wasn't being DEFCON myself there.
I'm in trouble. What I'm just trying to say is you're not supposed to say that it's a dangerous thing to feed an army right inside Mother Russia right now.
Even though they have every justification to be there, they were attacked first. But there's just, it's just, and then nobody can say, I mean, I don't hear anybody saying, you know, at least Donald Trump talked about the bloodletting.
He always does. He always talks about the human costs and how horrific it is.
And that alone has suppressed some of the tensions with Russia. And you're not hearing all of these things, you know, that we're going to nuke this and we're going to send a missile there that you heard for the last three years.
So we'll see. And you have to be very careful with Putin.
And he thinks he's in the driver's seat. But Donald Trump is going to have to have some lever to say to Putin, if you don't come to the conference table, we're going to sanction anybody who buys your oil.
And that can include Turkey or oil, India or anybody, China, or it's going to have to do something like that. If he's going to have any, I'm not advocating anything, Jack.
I'm just saying as an outside observer, if you're art of the deal and he will not make a deal because he thinks that Europe is finished and Ukraine is exhausted and he can take over the whole country and you don't want that, then you're going to have to find some pressure on him. And the only thing I can think of short of just, and it's not politically possible to send another $300 billion to Ukraine or $200 billion or whatever we've sent.
Politically not feasible. I mean, Americans don't want it.
Well, Victor, let's talk about a little Trump rhetoric that's domestic. The president was yesterday, the 14th, he was at the Department of Justice giving a speech.
And this is from a New York Post article. Trump says, as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.
Trump said in remarks that repeatedly focused on the criminal cases that the department's attorneys brought against him, quote, our predecessors turned this department of justice into the department of injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over and they are never going to come back.
Trump told the crowd that included department members and members of Congress. Final paragraph here, folks.
We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. We will expose and very much expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct, of which was levels.
I'm sorry about the English. You've never seen anything like it.
It's to be legendary victor your take on donald well i mean nobody wants vengeance but if there was wrongdoing and there was wrongdoing and it went back to the 2016 campaign when you had loretta lynch the former attorney general meeting with bill cl Clinton on the tarmac in the Phoenix airport, basically negotiating about what would be the fate of Hillary Clinton after she committed a felony of using an unsecure server to transmit State Department communications. Then she destroyed subpoenas under subpoenaed documents or emails and she destroyed the devices the hard drives and nothing happened to her and then we went full we had everybody involved we had bruce or at the doj we had nelly or wife, working to disseminate the false dossier.
We had Sally Yates, who was trying to destroy the Logan Act, to destroy Michael Flynn on set up and sent Comey in there, or Comey went in there and tried to and did without any warning. So that was all politicized, the DOJ.
And then, excuse me, I go back on that iconic date of, I think it was November 18th, Jack, 2022, when you've got to remember what happened right there at that period. We're talking about the weaponization of the DOJ.
So Donald Trump declared his candidacy on November 15th of 2022, and he probably did it in reaction to the week earlier spectacular victory of Ron DeSantis, who won by a million votes in the 2002 gubernatorial race. Remember, that was supposed to be a red wave, but Trump was being blamed, fairly or not, for using MAGA candidates like Blake Masters or Dr.
Oz or the guy, I thought he was pretty good, Adam Laxalt. But the point I'm making is they thought they were going to go to the Senate and they didn't.
And they felt that the MAGA candidates who had been endorsed by Trump in the primary were not effective in the general election. More importantly, the only bright spot, they did take back the House, but Biden only lost nine seats, which was historically pretty good.
And, you know, I wrote about it at the time. Well, maybe it was because of Roe versus Wade.
Remember, that was in this early summer. They had overturned Roe, and that got a lot of money for the midterms.

Then he tried to cancel student loans right on the eve of the midterms.

He drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

But whatever the reason was, the one bright spot was Ron DeSantis.

He won by a million votes.

Everybody should remember in 2018, he was an obscure congressman.

And he was going nowhere in the primaries. And then Donald Trump endorsed him.
And he won the primary, I think, over the ag commissioner. And then in 2018, he only won by 30,000 votes.
Remember that creepy guy, Gilliam? Didn't he end up in a hotel room naked with a couple of other men taking drugs? But in any case. A hundred by nest type of.
Yeah, he was. And I think neither one won 50%.
But when he came back four years later, he won by a million votes. And everybody, I went back once and looked at the polls.
He was leading Donald Trump. So Donald Trump then immediately, a week later, declared his candidacy on November 15th after the midterm.
And then all hell broke loose. The left went crazy.
And three days later, on November 18th, think of it, everybody, three things happened. Mr.
Coangelo, the third ranking DOJ, we're talking about the Department of Justice Corruption, he had been hired by Merrick Garland after he had been working with Latita James and had gotten that mega settlement. Originally 400 something million reduced, I, 380 million on a bogus real estate civil suit as attorney general.

So then he was riding high.

He went to the DOJ to formulate, obviously, anti-Trump policies.

And then he quit on November 18th. And he turned up four or five days later working for Alvin Bragg.

Thank you. And then he quit on November 18th, and he turned up four or five days later working for Alvin Bragg.
The same day, Nathan Wade, the paramour of Fannie Willis, went to the White House and met with Biden's legal counsel team, formulating strategy, obviously, about that. And that was on a RICO Act.
That was so bogus, the idea that Trump said, I know there's votes there. Find me the 15,000.
They're there. Oh, you broke the RICO Act.
You're a mafioso-like character. They indicted, I think, 19 people.
So that was the second thing on the same day. And then, you know what the third was, Jack? He appointed Jack Smith special counsel.
All on the same day. And then they said, that had nothing to do, we're not coordinating.
It was that type of corruption that Trump was talking about. Five civil suits.
And then I think they coordinated with, what, 26 states. Tried to take him off the ballot until the Supreme Court stopped that in March of 2024.
So they waged war and they politicized the DOJ. They went after parents at school board meetings that objected to trans stuff.
They went after abortion, anti-abortion protesters. They did SWAT team virtues.
Virtues, the whole Mar-a-Lago thing didn't need a SWAT team to find what, 102 classified files out of 13 or 14,000. So they were out of control.
Sins of omission there also, Victor. Do you remember the people threatening the Supreme Court justices.
Nothing was done by the DOJ.

Actually, Merrick Garland said, oh, that's a matter for the U.S. Marshals.
The guy was ready to kill Gorsuch, except he called his sister and she talked him out of it. Remember that? And that followed, what, a year and a half after Mr.
Schumer, who was in the news again, got out in front of ant uh pro-abortion mob that were hitting the doors of the supreme court when it was in session and he was yelling gorsuch kavanaugh you sowed the wind you're gonna weep the whirlwind you're not gonna know what's going to hit you that was a direct threat if any private citizen did that he'd probably be arrested Well, let's talk a little more about him. But first, I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Quince.
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Victor, we have a couple of Senate things, so let's take one of them, and that is the just aforementioned Charles Schumer, who I think he's been in the Senate since late 90s, so about 25 years. He's up for re-election in 2026.
I know you talked about this with Sammy, about the reconciliation bill, and he moved to have Democrats, some Democrats vote for it. House Democrats wanted him to fight.
He caved, quote unquote c caved. And now there's a push to get the great AOC to challenge him in a primary.
And she was asked about that and did not say no. Your thoughts? She won't win if she tries it.
The problem they all have is that when they were spending $7 trillion and the Republicans had retaken the House and they were dead even in the Senate, so there was a possibility of a Senate filibuster or a House shutdown, they're all on record. Pelosi in the house, Schumer, the squad, how horrible it would be, how terrible it would be to shut down the government.
That's what they said. And now the shoe's on the other foot, and now they're saying that's the only thing that can be done.
If you shut down the government when the Doge people are trying to cut out superfluous positions after about two weeks and the government's still functioning, I think it's a bad strategy on their part to do that. It really is.
Everybody's got to remember that the left is so hysterical about a paltry $100 billion in cuts that that's not enough. We're not even on schedule to save.
We've got to get a trillion dollars or a trillion and a half, even to get close, and we're not getting there. But yet, if they're that hysterical about this small level of cuts and this huge budget, What do they recommend? What do they recommend? They're not even faking it like Obama and Al Gore and Clinton.
They're not even faking it. They don't have any solutions other than, I don't know, eliminate the Defense Department.
That's Bernie Sanders' idea, I suppose. So I don't know what they have.
It's like, why don't they just say, look, we ran up $7 trillion, and we're happy we did. We destroyed the border because we don't believe in borders, and we got 12 million really poor people, and we were alleviating poverty in Oaxaca, Michoacan, and Chiapas.
That's what we wanted to do, and they're here in the United States now, and they'll be good Democrats in about three or four years. That was the plan, and we're not ashamed of it.
And we don't believe that people should be responsible necessarily for shoplifting or taking things that are not theirs because, you know, a bunch of wealthy white people made laws about stealing sneakers because they don't steal sneakers. And they're a f***ing libertarian.
That's their whole philosophy. And why don't they just say, you know what, this is who we are.
Well, they did in 2024. And people said, we don't like you on the border.
We don't like you on energy. We don't like you on crime.
We don't like you on foreign policy. We don't like you on inflation.
We don't like you on trans. We don't like you on anything.
And they lost. Viva Nero.
Hey, Victor, one other Senate thing. We're going to take a break soon and want to get your thoughts on Alan Simpson, who you mentioned before.
We'll do that after the break. But your favorite, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, from the former mayor of South, Ben, the finds racism in highways, Department of Transportation, Secretary under Biden, who was going to move to Michigan, was talking about running for Senate for Michigan, announced he is not running for Senate.
He wants to spend more time with his family. I don't know, maybe he wants to chest feed another future child.
Anyway, have we seen the last of Pete Buttigieg? Your thoughts about him? No one out there who's listening believes any of that, Jack. They believe one thing, that he commissioned a pollster in Michigan and said, what would be my chances of winning the senatorial or gubernatorial primary and winning a general election? They came back and said, you're the antithesis of the working class in Michigan, and you would have zero chance because you're a sanctimonious, irritating, arrogant, and we don't want you here.
Go back to wherever you came from. And that was what he found out.
So now he's going to turn his attention elsewhere. He was the one that gave us equity highways and equity this.
And if we, to the degree we have a problem with the air traffic controllers that came in during his four-year tenure, where it was all D, I, A to Z. He'll never live that down where he got into a limo and he pulled out his little bike and rode the last mile to work with that ridiculous outfit.

Again, performance art is the modus operandi for that party.

Hey, Victor.

He was terrified to go to East Palestine for months.

Remember that?

Right.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to take a break here, Victor.

We'll kind of come back and get your thoughts about your late friend, Alan Simpson.

You have one more topic to talk about also. We'll do that right after these final important messages.
We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. It's Saturday the 15th of March when we're recording.

This episode is up on the 18th, Tuesday the 18th, the day after St. Patrick's Day, the day before St.
Joseph's Day.

These are important matters when you live in New York, Victor, I don't know, out on the West Coast.

The outer borough.

Well, it's the Irish versus the Italians. You know, might as well be the Sharks versus the Jets in West Side Story.
Victor Allen Simpson, the former senator. The aforementioned also Simpson-Bowlesville.
I think he was the son of a senator, too, or a governor. His dad was.
I think his father was governor. He's from a political family.
I think his son ran office and almost won his brother has i know his brother well who's a wonderful person was a professor at you know i think it was the university of wyoming i knew him for 20 years and uh each summer i saw him and um we had a polite debate maybe 15 years ago on simpsonMazzoli, the 1986 Immigration Act. And I was very polite.
And basically, it was, we gave an amnesty before we had any mechanism of enforcing the law. And so the idea that the Border Patrol pulled back from the border, and then we turned over the enforcement to the

employer with those i-9 forms which were flooded with fake forms and there was no mechanism to verify them e-verify didn't work uh was a great idea but it was smashed so i i i think the simpson Bowles, he was in his 80s. That was 2010.
So that was 15 years ago. He was 93.
So he was, my gosh, he was about 78 when he did that. And he was magnificent.
He was tireless. People forget that he and Erskine Bowles, when they chaired that committee, came up with those recommendations.
They didn't just end there. He spoke all over the country in his 80s.
I remember talking to him. I said, Al, you look tired.
Oh, I'm having a great time. Don't worry.
I'm flying all over the country, trying to save the country, Victor. We're all going broke.
We got to save the country. And he was,

the thing about that, I went back and looked at it. It was very modest.
It was gradual. It would have been very little pain.
It was a simplification of the tax code. It encouraged investment.
It was just stop the spending and get to a balanced budget within five to eight years, and then slowly pay back the debt.

And had we done that, as I said, we would be about maybe $8 to $10 trillion right now instead of $35 trillion and with balanced budgets. And we could do that again.
All we'd have to do is say, let's just go back to the budget we had before COVID 2019. We'd have a huge surplus.

He had a very strong reputation for being a funny guy.

He was very funny.

He told a joke every time I saw him.

Hey, Victor, have you heard the latest?

He told everybody jokes.

And they were all, some of them were off color, but they were all funny.

And he had a wonderful, beautiful wife and children who were great. Very close to the Cheney family.
And very close with all the Wyoming politicians. They've turned out some powerful people out of that state.
Some of them have great disappointment, but nevertheless, powerful folks. May he rest in peace.
And I love that phrase. I forget exactly what it was, the old kazoo.
The kick of the kazoo? The kazoo, yeah. He said his mother was going to get angry if she heard him say that, I remember.
That was, can think of when you have the Senate today using the word, you know, in a video. And Gentleman Allum, since apologizing for using the word kazoo know in a video and he and gentleman alum since apologizing for using the word because zoo and that was that was he was an independent maverick he wasn't he was hard to pin down politically he was very concerted on some issues but on gay marriage and abortion he was a moderate right so he was he was very different

well he was fierce on the judiciary committee also so uh he he was a powerful figure victor uh we're around the homestretch here and uh let's talk about one more thing we talked last week or the week before about Jamie Dimon, the head head of uh jp morgan chase he's the ceo there and he issued some uh he actually had a very um a viral phone call with staff about you you guys enough of this viral crapola you're going to come to work five days a week work hard work in the office you can't You can't make it. You can't cut it.
You're not going to work here. Anyway, there's a piece in the Daily Mail out today.
As JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Diamond pushes forward with an uncompromising return to office mandate, hundreds of JPMorgan employees have quietly banded together in what is shaping up to be a full-blown corporate mutiny. But the workers are not gathering in boardrooms or on the office floor, but in secret.
Encrypted chat groups and a kind of digital underground growing network of frustrated bankers and managers are plotting a response to the company's strict return to office orders. How dare, how dare he make them go? Isn't it funny that everybody that Trump and Vance and Mosque are these singularly polarizing public figures, and then when anybody else tries to shock the country back into normality, normalcy, or whatever term we prefer, they're demonized in the same fashion.
So what he's trying to do is so modest. He just says, you know, we pay you lots of money.
And so we need to have in-person meetings. And I just don't think those guys have a lot of leverage.
I really don't. I don't.
There's something about him I've always liked about Jamie Dimon. I know that he's very, he was very critical of Trump and then he was less critical, but every time they put him on the spot to make a predictable announcement, he always is unconventional.
You know what I mean? Contrarian. He's very well-spoken.
I think he's a cancer survivor. I think Dimon, he's and I'll have to check this, people, so I'm just doing this by memory.
I think he's from an Anatolian Greek family, isn't he? Be correct. Yeah.
I checked that out last time we spoke. Yes, he's.
Yeah, those are the toughest people in the world. They're the toughest people in the world.
They're the inheritors of the Byzantine Empire.

I mean, they lived in the roughest neighborhood in the world,

and a million of them were ethnically cleansed during the Smyrna disaster.

So many of them came to, as I said in an earlier broadcast,

I lived on Asia Minor Street in Athens.

I got to know, and that was in 1973, and they had been there for 50 years. So I met these young people, people who had come there in their 20s, and they were in their 70s, and they would say, Victor, Victor, Thavma, Thavma, you would not believe what they did.
They drove us into the ocean. They burned our synagogues.
They flayed our priests. They beheaded people.
But they ethnically cleansed all of the remaining population that had been there for three millennia. So he's from that diaspora.
People forget that that was the wealthiest part of the Greek Byzantine Empire was the coast of Ionia. It's like the San Joaquin Valley.
It's just the most beautiful, fertile area in the world. Smyrna we always know from figs, the Smyrna fig varieties.
And I've been there a lot. It's a beautiful country.
And it's the richest in antiquities at Miletus and Ephesus and Didyma, Heliconarsus down near Bodrum. It's just a wonderful place.
It's a great tragedy because that was the breadbasket of the Byzantine Empire for a millennium. Yeah.
Kind of interesting, some of the places that were once the great centers of wealth, even here in America. New Bedford, Massachusetts, which is a little now.
Natchez, Mississippi. There's a little town that my grandfather was from.
He lived in Kingsburg as a big Swedish town even today. But about six miles away, there was a little town called Traver.
And it has like one store today. But in the 1880s, it was one of the greatest wheat production era centers on the railroad, shipping for, it had that per acre production of wheat anywhere in the country, and it was just a very prosperous place.
And I'd always say to my grandfather, when did you come to Kingsborough? Yeah, I live in Traver, not Kingsburg, Traver.

So it's still there.

I drive by there once in a while.

There's all these little towns in the San Joaquin Valley that are deserted, kind of like Michigan.

When I'm in Hillsdale, I used to get my bike and go to all these semi-ghost towns.

You know, I'd ride my bike out there.

They're everywhere.

They're eerie, eerie. I'd go to Osteo.
It was very eerie Michigan. Because they'd all have been so prosperous.
They were all on the trunk rail lines and they were booming in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s as subcontractors and subsuppliersliers for the auto industry. And then they had farming areas, and then they'd had little mom-and-pop little factories, and then they would put their product and send it on the rail to Detroit.
And so it was like Detroit was the hub, and there were all these rural communities, and they're all wiped out. It's another thing I don't, you know, when I read the Wall Street Journal, get this tariff tariff that tariff tariff tariff tariff tariff tariff tariff they should come when i graduated from high school here in this local high school there was a fruhoff trailer uh production you should you wouldn't believe it um jack they they built semi-trailers And everybody in my high school that didn't go to college, which I think there was eight or nine of us went out of 240 that went to the four-year college.
But they all, when I would come back from UC Santa Cruz at Christmas, they'd go, Victor, why are you in college? We're making $7 an hour union wages at the Fruhof.

And then some of them worked at the Upright Harvester making world.

They sent them all over the world.

It was a mechanical grape picking machine. And then they used another, the Libby canning, Calcan.

There were all these big cooperatives that ship canned peaches all over the world. This is before the EU flooded the market with subsidized canned fruit.
And this little town had all of these fabrication and factories. And the whole middle classes were prosperous.
And that was completely wiped out in the 70s and 80s. Just desolate.
And that happened to all these little communities. And some of them have revived a little bit, but why can't people just say these people were not lazy, they were hardworking, and they had a good product.
But they, under George H.W. Bush, and then Bill Clinton, and then George W.
Bush, and then Barack Obama, the idea was go to China and hire a bunch of cheap labor and move your factory over there and then send it back to the United States tariff-free, undercut prices, allow us to keep spending a lot of money because you'll lower inflation by dumping Chinese assembled products in the United States and you are very patriotic because your prosperity and you're becoming billionaires and you will show the Chinese about the way of capitalism and then they will be capitalist and then after a while they'll be so affluent, they will become EU Democrat. That was the whole.
Freedom will ring. Right.
Yeah. I mean, I've had people write that to me.
I've had people tell me that. I've heard that for 20 years where I work.
And it didn't happen that way. It destroyed lives for multigenerational.
Same thing with agriculture. It was the same idea.
Well, let's go plant all of these tree fruit and vineyards all over Latin America. You see they'll just synchronize with our, they won't compete against our harvest dates, but they'll give the American consumer a winter vegetable or a winter fruit, and then they will buy yours in harvest harvest time and the problem was they can keep something in cold storage for six months and it destroyed the whole small fruit industry in california but i'm not suggesting protectionism and i have you know i'm a market person basically, but this idea that tariffs are evil

and I just, I wish Trump could articulate

and just say to all of us

and to people overseas, the Canadians and the Mexicans,

the Mexicans are running up $171 billion this year.

It's a record.

And the Canadians are doing $63 billion, record record and why don't they just say to them you were part of a free trade organization at one time the whole idea was that we were all going to be brothers in trade and we were going to have open borders and there would be parity symmetrical parity and no one would have a taking advantage. And then what did you do? You invited in the Chinese.
They assembled your product. Does Mexico have a better infrastructure, a better judicial system? Are you much more productive than we are? Why are you running up a $171 billion surplus? We shouldn't make fun of you.
We don't want you as a 51st state. That's wrong of us to do that.
But please tell us why you deserve a $63 billion. Just tell us.
That's all we want to know. Is it okay? You need to protect your butter industry, 293% tariff on butter, milk, timber.
Just tell us. And tell us why you don't want to spend money as a NATO party.
Just tell us. 1.37.
Just tell us. Build some icebreakers.
Help us. But don't just sit there and say, how dare you, Americans? You bullies.
You bullies. This is a modest little surplus.
If it's a modest little surplus, then you have a $63 billion. And that's a big deal.
Same thing with Ms. Scheinbaum.
Well, it's no big deal, she says. Well, then you run up 170.
And you know what? We'll send 12 million Americans illegal into your country and see if you like it. You know, it's never, you know, the same thing with the cartel.
So my attitude is, I think the people listening, the attitude is, we just want them to explain and justify what they're doing. Just say, we can't control the cartels.
We're sorry we're killing 70,000 Americans a year, but we need the fentanyl from China. We do make $20 or $30 billion off coyotes and drug sale and we do get 63 billion dollars

in remittances from our illegal aliens who you subsidize to free up cash and we do get 171 and

canada does get 63 and you put it all together you're getting close to 300 billion dollars

in capital leaving this country and they hate us you know what i mean yeah well they they

to do. Victor, you know who doesn't hate us? Who doesn't hate you? Our listeners.
They love you. I love my listeners.
Well, good. We've come essentially to the conclusion of this.
You've been terrific today, my friend. You know, our listeners do catch us on various platforms, including Rumble now.
Some people are watching this on Rumble as a video. I'll shave next time, Victor, I promise.
Those who are on Apple can rate the show zero to five stars. And once again, practically everyone gives Victor five stars, 4.9 plus average.
And we get lots of comments. I even get some comments by email.
And here's one I, because St. Patrick's Day is kind of in the air.
Sorry to ram it down your throats. This book, quite coincidental.
Got an email. It's titled, Sincere Thanks to You and Victor from Ireland, from Thomas Murtaugh, who writes, Dear Jack, I want to thank you and Victor for the excellent weekly current affairs analysis in the VDH podcast.
Over here in Ireland and Europe in general, over 90% of the English language media commentaries are consistently filled with irrational, liberal, babble. Victor's clear, logical, reasoned analysis has become my template to deal with and counterbalance that said babble from the mainstream media.
On a lighter note, I notice that you and Victor often expressed this being underwhelmed by your great Italian and Irish Catholic heritage. At least the Italian elements benefits from the great history of the Roman Empire.
However, I fear the currency of the Irish Catholic heritage element is much lower in his view. My theory is that the outcome of the Battle of Clontarf in Dublin in 1014 AD, never heard of it, where the Irish comprehensively defeated the Vikings may be a factor.
I don't know about that, Victor. There's a lot of good...
We have some setbacks, but we usually beat the Irish. Yeah.
Just to end, to let you know, this St. Patrick, St.
Joseph, you know, it's very interesting here. Well, having grown up in New York City and these neighborhoods, they're thickly Italian, thickly Irish.
And the Italians always had a chip on their... I'm half Italian.
They always had a chip on their shoulder about the Irish. A, because they came over here and the Irish spoke the language and they didn't.
And B, because their big Italian feast day is St. Joseph's Day, but it comes two days after St.
Patrick's Day. Nobody treats St.
Joseph's Day like St. Patrick's Day gets treated.
And there's some resentment. I had an Irish grandmother.
She was completely Irish. And she used to say to me, she had a slight southern accent.
She was born in New Mexico. And she said, I got to apologize.
I gave you monkey eyes, Victor. Your eyes are so reset in your head.
And I said, no, they're not. I like my eyes.
No, they're Irish monkey eyes like mine. And then she would say, and no, no.
She had 12 brothers and sisters. And she said, none of us got over five, six.
But our daughter, dear Pauline, married a six, three and a half Scandinavian and saved you. Saved you.
Yeah. The Irish are conscious of what they think are their...
She was of all the people in my family, the most upbeat and smiling. You know, always that Irish.
I know everybody says it can be brooding, but she was so upbeat. Victor, to our listeners, too late, but hope you had a happy St.
Patrick's Day.

Hope tomorrow you have a happy St. Patrick's Day.

Yes, well, I'm going to be flying out and seeing if I can kick this final vestigial fatigue flu.

And I got to go work for the Hoover Institution in Palm Beach for a week.

Hope there are no dogs sitting next to you on airplanes. Victor, you've been terrific.
At least the dogs that don't pass wind. Yeah.
Bring a can of Febreze with you. Thanks, everyone, for listening.
We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Bye-bye.
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