Trump's Future Cabinet and the Woes and Throws of Harris' Campaign

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Friday news roundup and we have lots of things to talk about this week since Trump is of course making known who his nominations for his cabinet members will be.

And the Senate majority leader will be John Toon.

And

after that we'll look at some of the strange things about the Democratic campaign and we'll get to those things.

So stay with us and we'll be back.

Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business.

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

And the site is live.

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

Thanks.

You're all set.

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

This one's going to Thailand.

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

Whatever your stage, businesses that grow grow with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com slash listen if you're a homeowner you need to listen to this in today's ai and cyber world scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target here's how it works criminals forge your signature on one document use a fake notary stamp pay a small fee with your county and just like that your home title has been transferred out of your name then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home titlelock.com slash Victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, title lock.com/slash Victor.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor can be found at his website, VictorHanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can join for $5 a month or $50 a year to get, in addition to the free stuff on the website, the VDH Ultra material.

And it is plentiful each week.

So please come join us there and support Victor in his work.

So, Victor,

Trump has lots of new nominations or who he's going to nominate for his cabinet and other positions.

And I was wondering, maybe you could go over the ones that you were thinking were important.

And then if I have some questions, I'll follow up with other people.

You know, before I comment on these nominations, the left is going hysterical, almost all of them, because they're so non-traditional.

So can I just have a little excursus and remind our listeners who are probably as informed or better informed than I am and know it, but I would like to remind everybody of the Obama

and the Biden appointees.

They had little letters after their name, they had resumes, But John Brennan, the CIA director, lied twice under oath.

He was spying on Senate staffers of the United States Senate.

James Clapper lied under oath, and when he was caught, he said, I gave the least untruthful answer.

Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, was the architect.

of the 51 intelligence authorities.

Remember them?

That

lied and said that the laptop was a product of Russian disinformation?

And that affected the election.

You could almost say that Anthony Blinken was an election interference person.

Jake Sullivan was the architect of the, well, he really led with the Alpha

Ping hoax.

Remember that when they were saying Trump in 2016 had this bank ping in his computer and he was communicating with the Alpha Russian bank.

That was all made up.

That was Jake Sullivan that was peddling that story.

Merrick Garland,

if he had had his way, was going to fix Hunter Biden so he wouldn't face any consequences until an outraged judge said, this is horrific.

Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith the same day his legal counsel met with Fanny Willis for the Georgia case, the same day that his third person in his DOJ mysteriously quit to go work for Alvin Bragg.

That was all coordinated by Merrick Garden.

He sicked the FBI on parents at school board meetings.

Lloyd Austin was what, AWOL for a week?

Nobody knew where he was when he had the prostate problem.

He oversaw the worst humiliation in the history of the U.S.

military, modern military history in Afghanistan.

He came right out of Raytheon as a defense contractor, and he will go back to Raytheon.

We are short 55,000 soldiers.

And do you think it has anything to do with Lloyd Austin going in front of Congress and saying, I think everybody should be investigating white privilege and white rage and white supremacy with no evidence?

Then he has a task force, and they like, meow, meow.

Two years later,

let the report come out right about Christmas.

There was no white supremacy.

But you just offended 55,000 people who are mostly, if you look at your own data, the people who didn't re-enlist or didn't join were white males, the people who die at twice their numbers in your combat theaters.

That's Lloyd Austin, and they're worried about Pete Hetzke.

Before I say anything positive, I could go on.

And Pete Buttigig,

he was mayor

of South Bend, 35,000 people, and he destroyed the city.

It was a mess.

And he was lecturing us on the racist pedigree of clover leaves on freeways.

He was a complete ningamp poop.

They all were.

And some of them were.

I mean, Eric Colder,

he defied a congressional appointment.

That put Steve Benn in jail.

He was knee-deep and fast and furious.

Independence of the Attorney General?

A chef Sessions has to be independent of Donald Trump.

He said, Eric Holder said, I am Obama's wingman.

That's what my job is.

I'm his wingman.

So let's just get a grip before we get hysterical.

We are coming out of an era where we had some of the worst appointees, and they had all the right little numbers, and letters, and resume.

I mean, you hired, and I mean,

they were all bad people.

They were put in there either.

Jennifer Gramholm as energy secretary, she didn't even know how many barrels of oil we were pumping a day.

It was just a joke.

All of those people.

So

my point is, let's just.

Pete Hekseth, according to them, he's got a Princeton and Harvard degree.

To the left, that would make him automatically qualified.

He's a combat veteran.

He's a bronze star winner.

He wrote a book about the Pentagon, the war on warriors.

Does he have any

government experience in the bureaucracy?

No.

So did,

I don't know, did Earl Warren have any experience as a judge?

I don't think he was a great Supreme.

I think he was a very bright guy.

I disagreed with him.

But they made him from governor.

They made him, he was probably the most famous jurors in history in the United States.

So there's a lot of evidence that not having a long bureaucratic resume is an advantage.

Tulsi Gabbert.

She's the head of Director of National Intelligence.

It's kind of ironic when the intelligence agency put her on the terrorist watch list.

So she's in there for one reason, and that is to shake up the.

She's very charismatic.

She's very bright.

She's very well-spoken.

She knows how Congress works.

She will do a good job.

And then we go to Marco Rubio.

He's persona non grata in China.

He can't go to China because he commissioned a really in-depth analysis of what China is doing to us on trade, espionage.

And he will be the toughest Secretary of State on China that you'll ever see.

He's very realistic about Ukraine.

I think that's one of his best picks.

And he's loyal to Trump now.

He really is, little Marco, member?

He's loyal.

So I think that was a very inspired pick.

Yeah, he's really tough on Israel.

I mean, not on Israel, but about Israel.

I've talked to Mike Huckabee.

He's got a lot of experience in government.

He was a governor of

presidential candidate.

He knows the country.

He campaigned back and forth twice.

And he was governor of Arkansas.

He's been in private inter he's been very close to Trump.

He will be a he can

anything he needs to bone up, he's a very bright guy.

He'll be very loyal to Israel.

He'll be a very he'll be much better than the ambassador right now.

So that was a good pick.

So we're I guess we're the only problem I have with Matt, I'm not going to prejudge Matt Gates given, let's think about it.

Let's just go over the last,

but prior to Trump, the Biden Obama attorney generals, there was Eric Holder.

Oh, there was Loretta Lynch.

Remember, she was the one that accidentally sort of on purpose kind of maybe met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Phoenix.

Her private jet, just kind of nosed his private jet.

And they met and they talked.

And Hillary was being investigated to see if Loretta Lynch would go prosecute her for destroying 30,000 emails and devices.

But they only talked about their grandchildren.

Yeah.

So that was Loretta Lynch.

And she then just said, James Comey, you report to me.

Well, you're an investigative law enforcement officer.

You don't make the decision whether to indict, but I'm not going to make it.

You go ahead.

You just do what you want.

Suddenly, you are now head of the FBI and Attorney General.

And then, remember, he said, Well, according to the evidence, she would be culpable and be indictable, but no one would ever indict her because she's a presidential candidate.

That was it.

Kind of like Robert Hurr letting off Biden.

So

then we went to Eric Holder, I mentioned, and then, of course, we go to Merrick Garland.

And

his big thing is he sent a SWAT team in to go into Melania's drawer.

He sent a SWAT team to go after Roger Stone.

They called CNN to make sure it was a performance art event.

They roused out James O'Keefe and his underwear because they thought because of the diary, he didn't even have the diary in his possession.

Then

they were a retrieval service for the Wayward Biden family.

So I lost my diary.

Oh, get the FBI and go find it.

Oh, I lost my gun.

Get the FBI and look in a dumpster.

You know what what I mean?

Oh, I left my crackpite in a window car.

I lost my laptop.

Get the FBI to put, that's what the FBI, when they weren't working with Twitter and Facebook.

Or after Catholics weren't.

So you can see what Trump is doing.

He's saying to these people, I'm only here four years, and I know what you did with the country, and I am...

Not your revenge, but I am your revenge.

And I'm going to get people who

are going to cut back the administrative state.

Now you have to be very, very careful when you do that,

because there are some very valuable people within the administrative state.

And you've got to find out which people are irreplaceable and

which people are superfluous.

The next big shoot-to-fall will be the health, because

remember, the National Institute of Health has a $50 billion

budget.

It's more important than HHS or CDC or FDA or National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

I mean, that's bigger than most corporations.

And that's how Fauci worked as was as the director under NIH, Redfield, but he basically did whatever he wanted with NIH.

And they were really predicting that huge budget with people like Peter Dasick.

You had to kiss up and be obsequious, and then you got a grant, gain of function, all of that stuff.

The person who would be ideal for that job was Scott Atlas.

I've known him for 20 years

and he

has impeccable medical credentials.

He was chief of radiology at Stanford University Med School.

He came over to us and worked on health care policy, but kept kept active in scholarship about radiology and neural radiology.

And he worked for Trump.

He understood what Fauci was doing.

He understood what Berks was doing.

He tried to stop the quarantine.

He tried to bring a little bit of realism.

He wasn't an extremist on vaccinations.

He said vaccinations are very important, but

these mRNAs need additional scrutiny.

If you're going to have a lockdown or anything, you just target it to the elderly people who are vulnerable, but don't destroy people's livelihoods and their schools.

He would be wonderful as the head of NIH.

I hope he is.

And we have another colleague, Jay Bacharya, he would be wonderful.

John Yannidis at Stanford would be wonderful.

I hope they get these people because they have something that maybe the other appointees so far, not all of them have.

They're Mavericks, which the others are,

but they have impeccable professional credentials, and yet they're not part of the Borg.

Yeah.

And that's.

Everything.

It really is.

That's everything.

See, the problem, I think, with Matt Gates, he hasn't been a prosecutor that much.

He hasn't been a prosecutor.

You need somebody that knows how the DOJ works.

You know how all these federal

prosecutors work.

You need to know how they abuse the system.

You see how they do good things, et cetera.

If you're going to be a reformer.

The only other thing is that appointment will be hard to confirm because all the others are going to go through because after January 3rd, the new Senate will be 53, 47.

If you count those two independent socialists that will vote with the Democrats.

But I'm not sure that Matt Gates

will not lose three or four senators.

You know what I'm saying?

Not because

they just have a long history with him.

And they blame him for the coup d'état that took out Kevin McCarthy.

Whatever people think of Kevin McCarthy, I've known him.

I really like him because I'm prejudiced because I'm a San Joaquin Valley guy and his district is right one district over from mine.

I thought he was pretty, he was, he could fight the Democrats.

He knew as much about how to run the Senate as Nancy Pelosi, I mean the House as Nancy Pelosi did.

And then I thought, well, you only have an eight-person, an eight-member margin, why are you committing Harry Kerry?

And

because he's not quite 100%

ultra-maga, as Joe Joe Biden says.

I don't understand it.

So there's bitterness there, is what I'm saying, and that filters into the Senate as well.

Yeah, it sure does.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a moment for one of our sponsors, Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses in the most important and enduring subjects.

You can learn about the works of C.S.

Lewis, the stories in the book of Genesis, the meaning of the U.S.

Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian church with Hillsdale College's online courses.

All available for free.

That's right, for free.

Go right now to hillsdale.edu backslash VDH to enroll.

There's no cost and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu backslash VDH to register, hillsdale.edu backslash vdh.

So what did you think about

the nomination of Christy Noam for DHS and Lee Zeldin for the EPA?

I really

like Lee Zeldin.

He's mild-mannered.

He's very intelligent.

He's a very good guy in the House.

He gets elected in a purple New York district.

He ran for governor.

He would have saved New York hadn't they not voted for that crazy Hokkel.

So I think that's a wonderful appointment.

And he's very methodical, thorough, professional.

Nobody's going to criticize that appointment.

No.

And then

Christie Noam, I read it.

It was funny.

There was a, was it Whitman, her name is, that she attacked Christy Noam and the Federalists today and said that she was what, a rhino because she was waffling on remember that

the transgendered issue where she didn't come out

and bar men in North Dakota from competing in,

biological males competing in women's sports.

And

she got in trouble for that.

And then, of course, the dog story.

She put down the, was it the

wolfhound or the pointer or something that was too frisky and was untrainable?

I thought it was a pointer, but it was also killing fowls.

Yes, if you're a fowl lover, you should have been.

You mean chickens and ducks and geese, domestic.

Yeah, domestic.

So that was 20 years ago, too.

So I thought it was pretty good.

She's pretty tough.

I think she'll be really good.

And she's got that bulldog who's a great guy, Tom Holman.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

People forget that he, I can remember him under Obama.

There was a point where Obama was so worried that he was not going to get elected that he ran on secure borders, which so did Bill Clinton in 92 and 96.

And Obama really, and when he came in,

he praised that Holman because he said, you know what, this guy, everybody's afraid of him, he's going to close the border.

He did.

And it's kind of ironic that the left is going after him now.

Yeah.

But he's very good.

He'll have the complete loyalty of the Border Patrol and ICE.

The Peace de Résistance, as the French would say, is Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as the Department of Efficiency.

I think it's going to be great if they can.

That's going to be funny.

How do you cut $2 trillion

if you don't touch the defense budget, which is almost a trillion, and Social Security, it's over a trillion, and Medicare, probably another trillion.

It's no government left.

But,

of course, you could always grow the economy and get more revenues.

I like that story the left is circulating that have you heard about it, that Elon is camped out like a homeless person at Mor-Lago and he won't leave.

Oh, no, I haven't heard that.

Yeah, they're kind of running a narrative, a hit piece that says, well, he's can't take the hint.

Like Franklin said about guests that stay after one day, they kind of wear like something.

I like Elon a lot, so I think it's going to be great.

I like I was skeptical of Ivak, but I've been won over by him.

Yeah, he definitely can articulate his position.

They're both so energetic.

That's what I like about them.

What about Stephen Witkoff as the special envoy to the Middle East?

Do you know?

I don't know.

Which one now?

Stephen Witkoff, I think his name is.

Yeah.

He's going to be a special envoy for the Middle East.

Yeah, I don't know him very well.

Yeah, I don't know.

I just heard the name.

That's going to be decided, though,

by Marco Ruvio.

You know what they're going to do in the Middle East.

They've already talked about it.

Trump is saying, look,

I ran on no endless wars.

And I ran on, I'm not going to get, and that's what Tulsi and RFK came in.

So I've got that commitment.

But I also know that under Biden, with the balloon, the Chinese balloon, Ukraine, Afghanistan, humiliation, Houthis, they've been running wild.

So I'm going to have to have some deterrence.

And that's kind of contrary to what Tulsi and Tucker and a lot of people are advising me, RFK.

But the only way to avoid endless wars is to have a big club, speak quietly and

take out the Wagner group or take out Soleimani or take out Baghdadi, which he did.

And so I think he's telling Netanyahu,

we've got to deal with Iran, but I do not want a Mideast quagmire.

So I'm not going to put any troops in, and I don't want to preempt and take out that nuclear site in America.

Now,

if you want to, we will give you the wherewithal.

And unlike the prior administration, we're not going to tell the Iranians in advance what you're going to do.

And unlike the prior administration, you've got all of our intelligence at your disposal.

And unlike the prior administration, whatever munitions and ordnance you need, it's yours.

So maybe kind of sort of, if you want to take the Iranian thing out, if they attack you again, go ahead.

I don't don't care.

But I do not want, I would prefer you do it now

than later.

Yeah.

And that's a perfect partnership for Israel.

That's all they want.

They don't want the United States in there with their troops.

So

they're very creative.

Nasrallah, everybody said they had to have a big bunker buster to get him, but they had this sequential dropping of 2,000-pound bomb, doom, 10 seconds later, doom.

You know, it was kind of like a

compression drill or an air drill, a jackhammer.

It was jung, dung, dung.

And each successive explosion, when it was timed right, went deeper and deeper without having a huge

bomb.

Because I don't think they have

the aircraft that can carry a 15,000-pound bomb.

No.

What did you make since we're there on Israel?

What did you make of this argument between Netanyahu and his defense minister, who's recently fired, but his last name was Gallant.

And his defense minister, Gallant, said he did not want to

activate those pagers and walkie-talkies.

He was forced to have a coalition government by us, wartime government.

So he brought in somebody from the opposition, and he was doing two things.

He was undercutting publicly

the Prime Minister, and number two, he was in direct contact with the United States and the people in the Biden administration that were, let's be frank about it, they were trying to overthrow the Netanyahu government.

So why was he there?

Because Netanyahu had to wait until there was a favorable landscape of public support.

If he had tried to remove Gallant right after October 7th when he was polling 30%,

he would have lost his job.

There would have been a vote of no confidence.

So he waited until the pages went off.

He waited until he got rid of Nasrallah.

He did the impossible.

Just as a thought experiment, I went back and looked at, I googled Hezbollah

2019.

You should see the propaganda.

Maybe it wasn't propaganda.

They said, 100,000 strong, 150,000 missiles, the indomitable force in the Middle East, the Iran enforcers, you can't deal with them.

Israel has a problem that's unsolvable.

And what did he do?

He's decimated it.

And once he decimated it, he was able to fire someone that was disloyal and trying to undermine him.

So, okay.

That's what it was.

Well, let's take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Republican majority leader, John Toon.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Bombus makes the most comfortable socks, underwear, and t-shirts.

Warning.

Bombas are so absurdly comfortable, you may throw out all your other clothes.

Sorry, do we legally have to say that?

No, this is just how I talk, and I really love my bombas.

They do feel that good, and they do good, too.

One item purchased equals one item donated.

To feel good and do good, go to bombas.com and use code audio for 20% off your first purchase.

That's bombbas.com and use code audio at checkout.

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dalliance with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander.

And of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com/slash wondery.

That's audible.com/slash wondery.

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

So, Victor, I was wondering what you thought because they had a little bit of a tussle between John Thune and who Trump supported, I believe, which was Tim Scott.

And I was wondering your thoughts on the Senate adjustment to a new leader.

Well,

he was somewhere in between John Cornyn and Scott, right?

Cornyn was

kind of a Romney rhino guy,

and that wouldn't have worked.

Scott was a loyaltist, very successful in business.

I would have picked Scott because

if I was a senator, I would say that we did the impossible in a year that we were supposed to lose all these races.

We flipped four seats, one of them, West Virginian, that was a given, and we almost flipped three more.

In fact, they would have flipped three more if the left hadn't have got

Machiavellian in Wisconsin, for example.

They ran two conservative candidates, third and fourth party.

If you look at the libertarian and the ultra-mega right-wing guy, and you put their votes together, that's the margin.

by

Hodby.

He lost by that margin.

Oh, yeah.

And so they did very well, and they did very well because Donald Trump did very well.

And Donald Trump has an agenda.

So I would have said in the Senate,

we don't want Mitch McConnell fighting with Donald Trump.

That was counterproductive.

And we didn't want Mitch using that huge war chest that he raised to not...

I mean, why was he giving money to Larry Hogan?

That guy had no chance at all.

He should have been pouring money into Kerry Lake's race and Sam Brown in Nevada and McCormick, right?

But he wasn't.

Why do you think he wasn't?

Because I think that they were MAGA people and he thought that they were another Oz candidacy or something.

He gave them some at the end, but he should have been giving them a lot more.

She, he should have got a lot more.

So he was at war with Trump.

And Trump, you know, said something about his wife and their company and the Chinese connection and stuff.

They go away.

That hostility.

So you can't have that

because they don't have a margin of error.

If they're going to do what they say they do in the most radical shake-up of government and policy in 50 years,

then this narrow margin in the Senate of just three senators and

this narrow margin, I hope, of nine or ten House seats, you can't have dissension.

So, why would you pick somebody, Thune, who's really good?

I like him, but he's on record again and again of saying that Trump should not be the nominee, shouldn't have run.

A lot of it was in the context of January 6th, but

the problem with all those guys is they had, I guess they had a right and maybe a duty to object to January 6th or to Trump's contesting, but they didn't have any common sense.

They should have said, I mean, I know his approval rate was 34% in January of 2021, but

he was irrepressible.

In November of 22, he said he was going to run again.

If you thought that that was a bad thing and he couldn't win in DeSantis, then you should have kept quiet about it.

But they didn't.

They went out and were loud.

And

so

I don't think they understood the Trump phenomenon, is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, well, do you think he will be a problem for Trump as time moves forward?

It depends on what Trump does.

And I don't mean does to him or he to Trump.

It depends on whether we have inflation.

And I mean, a lot of Trump's things.

Can I just give you

an example of what I mean?

The world is much more chaotic and dangerous in 2025, it will be, than it was in 2017 when he took office.

The border under Obama was bad, but it was not non-existent.

So he has a new Hispanic coalition.

But he also has 12 million people he has to deport, as he promised.

80% of those people are going going to be criminals, came in from all over the world, da-da-da.

But there's going to be 20% that are the cousin, the brother, the granddaughter of a green card holder who voted for Trump.

So to deport those people, he's got to cool the rhetoric.

And he's going to say, I don't want to do this to everybody.

But then

massive deportation follows massive importation.

I didn't create this problem.

I am the solution.

And maybe not the solution that I want my supporters to experience, but I have no choice.

They came in illegally.

They were welcomed in.

It was the greatest subversion of U.S.

immigration law in history, and I've got to address it.

But he has to have a reluctant, tragic sense when he voices it.

And then he's got another problem, and that is

he is

no endless wars, as I said earlier.

But he,

the world,

the Houthis are out of control.

I mean, they said as soon as he was elected, we will end this war.

They won't end the war.

And then there's Hezbollah, and there's Iran, and there's Russia, and there's all of these actors.

They're threatening.

North Korea's back, threatening Japan and South Korea.

China's threatening Taiwan.

So my point is,

if you say, and you've got Tulsi and RFK and Tucker around you and they say, and JD, and they're all saying, no endless wars, but the only way you stop an endless war or prevent one or don't get in is to have a big club.

You know, the great Roman strategist

Begetus said,

si wis pacum prepare bellum.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

So you have to have a big stick, and every once in a while you have to use it in very controlled circumstances.

And

that will prevent you getting a war.

But if you're going to say, we don't want to use any force at all, you will get in a war because Ukraine won't be the end of it, and Taiwan will be next.

So that's going to be weird.

The other paradox he's going to have is

we owe $37 trillion in debt.

So when he says

he's going to cut taxes for Social Security holders, he's going to cut taxes for people to get tips, he's going to cut taxes for, was it, I think it was, police and military.

So

where's the revenue?

The only answer to that is he's going to have to grow the economy by deregulating and letting people be entrepreneurial and create more taxes, but he's going to cut.

He's going to have to cut.

If he's going to give a $2 trillion tax cut, he's going to have to get $3 trillion in cuts.

I hope he knows that.

And then the other thing is Israel.

As I said earlier, it's going to be a little bit tricky.

It's kind of, he has to navigate that carefully because we all want him to

let

Netanyahu

finish, but he wants this Abrams Accord.

And he's got new constituencies in Michigan.

Did you see those figures about Dearborn?

The Muslim population voted overwhelmingly.

Republican.

Not overwhelmingly, but they voted more for Trump than Biden.

Oh, really?

Yes.

You mean than Harris?

Harris, yes.

And they were,

and And so he's got a constituency that he didn't expect because he said, I'll solve the Middle East problem.

Well, they interpret that as he was going to pressure Israel.

He's not.

So, and he's got Saudi Arabia that's ready to come in and recognize Israel, but doesn't want to get ahead of the public view of the Arab world, that they're on the side of the people who bomb Gaza.

So he's got to be very careful.

He's got to.

He's got to be a staunch supporter of Israel, but he's got to at least superficially be even-handed with the Arab world that's not part of the Iran nexus.

So he's got to be very pro-Jordanian and Egyptian and Gulf monarchy.

There may be a lot of Muslims in Dearborn and places like that that

like what Israel is doing in

privately.

Yeah.

There's a lot of people that come from Gaza and they know that they just released those

films of torture where those Hamas torturers have been killing and maiming

almost in medieval style,

Gazan citizens that were not on board with Hamas.

So there's a lot of people that don't like Hamas in the Arab world.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, then I wanted to just ask one question because there's so much, and maybe it is the right-wing news

Fox venues, but there's so much, it seems like post-election euphoria that maybe it's just going to go away.

Or are we entering a new age, as Trump has suggested in his campaign?

Can we answer that now, or do we need to?

Yeah, it depends again on Trump.

If he can grow the economy at 2% or 3%,

he can get inflation down to 1.5%, 2%.

pump a little bit more oil, get prices down,

get rid of the Soros mentality, the critical legal theory mentality, so that our downtowns are recoverable again.

If he can close the border, most importantly, build the wall immediately.

He didn't do that last time.

He was hung up by courts, the Pentagon, internal disloyalties.

But he's got to get the wall done as quickly as possible, stop all illegal entries, and then

go after the 350,000 violent felons, number one, nobody will object to that.

And then go after the people people who came in and are on public assistance, not working, and then iteration after iteration.

And if he can close the border and

while he does this, he needs to champion legal immigration.

I'm not against immigration.

I'm for legal immigration.

And the people who let these 12 million, they're not for legal immigration.

They're hurting legal immigration.

I'm for saving it.

She broke legal immigration.

I'm here to fix it.

If he can do that, and then he can get calm in the world without a war, and I think we know what he's going to do in Ukraine, he's going to go over to Putin and he's going to say,

look, you've got the Donbass, you've got Crimea, you had them, you took them under Biden, I didn't try to take them back from you, Ukraine didn't.

Then you invaded because you thought they were going to be in NATO maybe or just wanted to take it.

I'll tell you what, they won't be in NATO.

You can have the Crimea and Donbass go brag at everybody that you invaded to institutionalize your prior acquisitions and now that you proved your point and they're not in NATO.

However, you've got to go back to February 24th, 2022, where you started for your latest attempt at acquisition.

And you have to let them in the EU and they're going to be armed.

And there's going to be a demilitarization.

And I think he can get a deal.

And if he does, that would be phenomenal.

And if he lets Israel deal with Hezbollah,

and the ball is in Iran's court now because Israel took out its defenses and they said there's going to be a massive retaliation.

And everybody's going, promises, promises.

So you have no way to stop the Israelis.

And now you've backed yourself in a corner after sending 500 projectiles in two waves.

two separate occasions that didn't have much effect.

You're threatening to do it again.

This time, if you do it again, there's very little likelihood again that you're going to take out any real target given Israel's defense abilities.

But, but, but, you're going to finally give the Jewish state a reason to take out anything they want, because they can tell the world, these people sent 180 missiles into our homeland, and then they'd send in 320.

And we, in each case, replied commiserately, sober and judiciously, and disproportionately disproportionately weakly.

But now they don't have air defenses.

And they do it again, and we're going to take out Karg Island and all their export income, and we're going to bomb for a week and take out all of their nuclear facilities.

And you know what, Iran?

The world will be happy that we're doing this.

And your allies, you think they're going to protect you, China and Russia?

They'll say something publicly and privately.

They'll tell Trump, well,

you think we want an Islamic radical country on our borders almost that's got a nuclear weapon?

So that stuff happened.

Exactly.

I would like to take a moment for our friends and sponsors, best hotgrill.com.

Football is back, and so is tailgating, whether it's Friday night lights, Saturday college, or pro-Sundays.

Soler

tailgate infrared grills set up fast and heat up quickly.

Only three minutes to searing hot temperatures, just like the big backyard soler's.

A Soler grill will make you the master of the tailgaters with the juiciest and most flavorful food in the parking lot, and the fast grilling times leave you more time to enjoy

pre-game festivities.

They also cool down fast, so you won't miss a minute of the game.

The USA-made Soler, anywhere, everywhere, and all about infrared grills are portable and perfect for any grilling on the go.

From picnics to camping, RVs to boating, but especially tailgating.

Amaze your tailgating friends with the great food you grill with your Soler Infrared Grill.

Learn more about these fantastic grills and Soler's Try Before You Buy demo rental program at bestthotgrill.com.

That's best hotgrill.com, best hotgrill.com.

And we welcome the continued sponsorship of best hotgrill.com, the Soler Infrared Grills.

So, Victor,

let's turn to some of the peculiarities about the campaign.

And the first one that has been going around and people have been touching on is that the Democrats lost or did not win 15 million votes.

So, in 2024, they were at about 66 million for Harris.

And from the high in 2020 with Joe Biden of of 81 million, where did those 50 million people?

And remember that the Trump vote is almost identical.

Yeah, and the Trump is a very good idea.

So he wins with, what, $75, $74 million, but he loses with $74, $75 million five, four years earlier.

Yeah.

So in other words, we're telling everybody that the United States population is growing a percent or two.

There's four or five million people more.

There should be a lot more voters.

It's Donald Trump again.

And there was even a more fanatic hatred of the challenger Trump post-January 6th Trump on the part of the left than there was incumbent Trump.

So nobody can explain that, can they?

No.

And

if you are a leftist, you say the following.

How dare you suggest that?

Are you an election denialist?

I know what's really wrong.

You don't want to admit it.

Donald Trump, Donald Trump never had those votes.

He never had them.

And what does that mean?

It means that he never had 75 million votes, that he always had 60, and he's added 15 or something.

That's what they think.

Oh, is that what they're trying to say?

Some of them say that, yes.

It's ridiculous.

If you think about it, it's illogical.

The other thing they say is, you're an election denialist.

I think that we know the answer.

The answer is very clear, that that was the year they changed the laws in all the major states so that 70%

did not vote on Election Day, and they were flooded with double, double, almost 70% the number of mail in.

California was like 80%.

And the error rate went down by a magnitude.

So the average state was rejecting 4% to 5%

when mail-in ballots were only 30% of the total votes.

And when they were double, so think of that scenario.

You get twice as many ballots.

You should be really worried because

you just say,

well, we're only going to do a tenth of ejection that we used to.

It doesn't make any sense.

And then they also changed the laws for things like, oh, you didn't have your complete signature.

Hey, we'll call you up and you have 10 days to go cure your ballot.

Ah, you have the wrong address.

Huh, your name doesn't match the registrar.

Hmm, you came in a little bit late.

So all of that together meant that there were a lot of ballots that were mailed out to people that were returned that under normal circumstances would not have been.

And that statistic, if you think I'm on election denials, which I was accused of in 2020 by the Stanford Faculty Senate, I guess, because Tucker at one point said, you think there was

basically irregularities.

And I said, not with the actual day, it was the changing of the laws.

But I guess that was my felony.

But

remember that statistic

that

every state, I'm going to be very careful, every state that Harris won had no ID law.

You didn't have to present an ID.

Almost all but one that Trump did, you had to present an ID.

The left would say, well, that was because you were discouraging people of color and the poor to vote.

No, I go to the May.

I live in a very poor neighborhood where the average per capita income is about $13,000.

And I go in and see people with checks and IDs you wouldn't believe.

So it's not, it's, you know why that dichotomy exists, because

the right says only people who are citizens should vote, and only people who are not felons should vote, and only people who are registered should vote, and only people who have one ballot should vote.

And the left says, meh, the more the merrier.

So all of that is an explanation for why that is.

For 15 million less.

I don't know if it's 15, I hear 12, I hear 19, I've heard 20, I've heard 16.

I've heard that this is very natural, that this was the first time we had mail-in ballots.

Everybody was enthusiastic.

Whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, let's take a break and come back for a few more strange things about the campaigns this season.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

You can find Victor at X.

His handle is at V D Hansen.

And then on Facebook, he has Hansen's Morning Cup.

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

And we're also on Truth Social.

So please come join us there.

And I believe it's V D Hansen as well at Truth Social.

So another very

different thing, I think, about a campaign, I don't know that it's illegal, but it sure seemed strange, that the Harris campaign raised over a billion dollars.

And as a lot of our listeners know, she's 20 million still in debt.

But she did things like pay $500,000 to, or donated to Al Sharpton, or paid Oprah's business a million.

Of course, Oprah said she didn't get that money, but nonetheless, apparently her business did.

And other celebrities that were being paid, and I was wondering.

All they had to say is, why didn't they just say when Al Sharpton was interviewing her?

Why didn't they have a little chi round the bottom?

This is a paid advertisement to the Sharpton group.

Yeah, definitely.

And then we would have known that it wasn't an interview at all.

And, of course, we're in a period of an epidemic of anti-Semitism.

And we go back to Freddie's Market and Crown Heights.

Michael Pack, we had on

the podcast, just did a documentary about Al Sharpton.

Remember what he said?

You Jews, put on your yarmock and come over here.

And what else did he say?

You know, when

did he say when black people were building civilization, you Western homos

in Greece, he said that.

And

he was the one that led on the riots.

And of course,

he was, everybody kissed his ring

because Obama fell out with Jesse Jackson and Sharpton just kind of squeezed in and said he was the authentic black leader.

And he visited, I think he visited the White House during the Obama years more than any other public figure.

And

so right in the middle of this, she's courting this anti-Semite.

who's crazy, and then she can't even get him to do anything for the principle of getting her elected.

She has to pay him $500,000.

Remember the Obama IRS gave him a pass.

They gave him all sorts of amnesties.

He didn't pay taxes.

He became,

he was trying to follow the Jesse Jackson model.

Jesse Jackson would call up Coca-Cola or Toyota and say, we're going to picket you.

We're going to have a boycott because you're racist.

Just like...

In the Godfather, a guy walking down a street in an Italian corridor in New York and saying, you know what?

You need to pay protection money.

And that's what Jesse Jackson did.

That's what Sharpton did.

And then, as far as Oprah, person is worth $2 billion.

I suppose she's thinking, well, I had to bring in my team, my sound,

my video, and I had a crew, and they have to be paid.

But why not just do it for the campaign?

If you're telling everybody that

it's between Hitler and

Christ-like figure, then do it for free if you're a billionaire.

And that's just what we don't.

We don't know who all of those people.

I have a suspicion that all of those people got money.

Because who would else do it?

Who would do it for free with her?

She busts people to rallies.

I think everybody's waking up and they're looking at her campaign in retrospect and they're thinking, you know,

if you're ancient like I am, you can remember George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1980.

It was worse.

She was the worst kind worse.

George McGovern was Einstein compared to her.

But that was a terrible campaign.

And it was truncated because he had his vice president.

Yeah, and she sort of tried to compensate by putting all of these sets around.

You know, she even paid $100,000 for that set with that young population.

She was your daddy or whatever.

That was...

I mean, I think anybody in our audience could get some plywood and spray paint and do it for 500 bucks.

Maybe in the Biden era when you pay $180 for a three-quarter inch

plywood sheet.

But still, you could do it.

You get the impression that all of these trillionaires in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, they just hated Trump so much.

They just said, what do you need?

And she said, we're going to take you to the cleaners.

Give us all the money.

And they were living it up and jetting around.

And then when people got,

well, what's going on?

They said,

well, look at Sienna and look at ABC and Quinnipac, all these crooked pollsters that were in their pocket as well were saying that they had the big momentum and she was winning.

And I had people, you know, I was at Stanford Election Day.

And there were people the day before telling me that she was going to win.

Everybody they believed those pollsters.

They believed those pollsters.

They believed that crazy Seltzer woman that said that he was

Iowa 3%.

And that spread was, we said, 13%

because he won by almost 10.

Wait.

Didn't you win?

Trump won.

Yeah.

So she was 13 points off.

And you look at those polls after the election.

Elon had them up, I think, in his ex-account.

They were down.

They were like eight points off, seven points off, six points off.

And they made fun of, you know, every every time Robert Cahaly, that guy in Travel, he's really good at Trafalgar and

Atlas Intel.

They were, oh, that one's Brazilian.

Robert Cahale's kind of crazy looking and Rasmussen, you know, Rasmussen.

But what were the Washington Post, New York Times, ABC, CBS, Wall Street Journal?

No, you're just all

partisan.

You're all partisan.

You were trying to gent up the polls to get greater turnout, greater last-minute donations, and you were all bankrupt.

And you know what?

You learned nothing and

you forgot nothing.

You'll do it again.

And all of those donors were just deceived.

And I got a sense from all the news stories that they were really angry.

Some of them were about that.

Well, yeah, they called them up in the last 48 hours and said, you know what, I know you gave me 10 million, but you should see these internal polls.

And you've seen the polls.

We're ahead.

We're ahead in Pennsylvania.

We're ahead in Michigan.

There's no way he can win Wisconsin.

We're going to get the popular vote again.

And they knew that wasn't true.

Yeah.

Well, perhaps worse than that is one of the FEMA leaders who advised

her

acolytes, the people that were going out to do work, that they should not help Trump supporters and skip poems that had Trump signs or other paraphernalia on it.

Can you believe that?

That is just criminal.

Of course, Trump with his,

what's the word for it?

Innate cunning, animal cunning.

He said that.

He said that right during the hurricanes in the Carolinas and Georgia and Florida.

He said,

they are FEMA is screwed up.

They're not helping people because they're playing politics.

And everybody, how dare you do that?

That was one of the worst things people need.

And there's two things about that story we know are true, even though they're not reporting it.

Number one, we know that she she just didn't freelance on her own.

She wrote it down in her little memoranda.

So somebody read that.

She had supervisors.

It was disseminated.

People knew what she was doing,

right?

We knew that.

And then I imagine that the highest echelons knew that.

The only problem they had was she got caught.

Somebody ratted her out.

And the second thing is, we knew that they were going to make up a story afterwards.

So she did and said,

well,

there were other people, so they're just picking on a proud black woman.

And two,

these people are mega.

When you go to their house, they have guns.

They get angry.

They're anti-government type.

So all I was doing was warning.

I didn't know, had nothing to do with politics.

The sign for me was that they were likely to be gun owners, and they were likely to be trigger happy, and they were anti-government nihilists.

So I was just trying to protect my own people.

That's what she's been telling you.

I mean, that's a little bit more eloquent than what she's saying.

This should tell Trump something, that that culture is deep within these agencies.

That that is not the only woman doing that.

They're doing it everywhere.

That was anonymous when Trump was there, bragging that they were trying to over that was what the Pentagon was doing.

That's what the State Department was doing.

That's what the IRS was doing.

That's what Comey was doing.

McCabe was doing.

And

all of them were doing that.

CIA was doing that.

And I don't know what you do, how you deal with them.

And if everybody's critical of someone who's important, I think I know how you deal with them.

You get somebody who was put on the terrorist watch list and had her life ruined, who's very eloquent and knowledgeable, Tulsi Gabbard.

And you say, go to it, Tulsi.

Or you get somebody like Tom Holman, who was ridiculed and called a racist nativist, and he was just trying to follow along and say, go to it, Tom.

You unleash them.

And that's what he's doing.

Yeah.

The last big story this week is that it's not only the Democratic Party that was shocked by November 5th, but that the left media is in a crisis and in a massive change over.

And I was wondering what you thought about some of the things like ABC needs more Trump voices, they said,

and the shake-up.

And the LA Times, you know, they used to run columns that I used to subscribe to my columns.

I had to deal with them.

And then they went nutty after George Floyd and so the owner said the other day that we have to reflect the all of the people and everybody's angry they can't be biased anymore the one they need to go after I was hoping that Byvac would run uh the public broadcasting and deal with PBS they need to really shake up PBS and NPR and say you know what

you represent the taxpayers and the voting public

and

the voting public has been very clear.

They voted for Donald Trump.

And you don't reflect 50-50.

You reflect 90-10 in all of your stories.

So you're going to not going to do that anymore.

And then they should find the people who are the most egregious and fire them to encourage, as I said, the other, the quote volatile.

Remember that about Admiral Bing?

Every once in a while, the English

hang an admiral to encourage the others.

Well, they need to do that.

And

the LA Times has has been mea culpa, mea culpa.

Chris Wallace, he said he had a seven-figure income.

That's got to be 10 million or above.

For what?

He had an audience of like 100,000 people.

Then he can't even say that they fired him.

They didn't renew his contract.

He said, I'm going over to podcasts where all the action is.

No,

I'm a podcaster.

We do very, very well.

But if somebody came to me and said, Victor, do you want to podcast or do you want to podcast and get $10 million

a year for you know, no matter what your ratings are?

Yes, so we don't believe you, Chris.

And then they said that Jake Tapper

and Anderson Cooper is getting $20 million and their average audience is less than a million people.

I know.

That's $20 million.

Why?

I guess they're losing so millions.

They used to have millions of subscribers.

They don't even have those anymore.

It's kind of like the meltdown of National Review.

You know, when I first went to National Review, they had millions of subscribers online.

They were printing like, I don't know, 150 weekly magazines, hard copy.

It's just, it's like the McClatchy newspapers in California.

They just evaporated.

And that's because they don't, people don't like snark

and smartass.

Excuse my language.

They don't like that.

They don't like finding a hundred different ways of saying you hate Donald Trump.

We got it already.

They don't like telling us that he's an insurrection.

He's Hitler.

Well, she said he's Hitler.

I say he's Mussolini.

I disagree.

I think he's a mass murderer.

How do I talk?

Dictator, dictator, dictator.

It's just boring.

That's all they did.

They ruined their brand.

Yeah, you know, since you're on that topic, I was thinking of the whole logic of their identity politics is to just keep dividing and dividing in population.

And eventually there are people that are divided that they can't find commonality with the other ones.

And so now you've got trans and abortion and open borders as part of this division.

I will make a correct.

And I don't think they can.

No, they're going to fire the biggest racist in America in the media is Jory Reed.

This is a woman who cannot open her mouth without talking about uneducated white women and white people to be blamed, white, white, white, and happy.

I'm so happy that today white people are the smallest proportion of the population, just

unadulterated hatred.

And she has no audience and everybody was so scared after George Floyd, but she is emblematic of destroying that MSNB brand that's lost millions of dollars.

And Rachel Mattel, not even full-time and gets, what, $20 or $30 million a year?

And they have no audience.

Fox had double the audience.

on election night.

Fox had more than the network news.

And I can tell you the people that Fox didn't make that kind of money.

Maybe Tucker made 20 million, but can you imagine paying Rachel Mauro with a fraction of his audience?

The same?

So

they had an outdated model and they're going broke.

And these people are basically

money people.

I mean, you can just subsidize them for so long.

Even Jeff Bezos, I mean, he didn't want to lose $100 million every year, Washington Post.

So

they're going to fire a lot of those people.

And,

you know, Joy Reed is ridiculous.

She's the one, I think I read that she was angry about a blonde-haired woman wearing cornrows and that she was going to wear her hair naturally and she wasn't going to succumb to straightening her hair or having

wigs and, you know, extensions and stuff like that

because it was betrayal of her true identity.

And then she went out and dyed her hair blonde.

Blonde, yeah.

So, I mean, she's a tragic figure because she's of limited ability.

She's full of animus.

And she's driving away any person who listens to her.

And she knows that she's going to be fired.

And they know when they fire her, they're going to be called racist.

But I think it's, there's a good story about Boeing today in the Wall Street Journal.

And it basically says,

and Chris Ruffo has also got an interview with an anonymous Boeing executive.

And they basically said, we're done with DEI

because our brand is fading.

We're not meeting supplies because the more you do DEI, and there's another study coming out

about the University of Michigan from a left-wing source, maybe it was Michigan State, and they 10 years analysis of DEI.

And at the end of the study,

racial animosity was much greater under DEI than before.

And the number of black students was less.

Because

once

you define yourself in racial essential terms, that's essential to who you are, and then you're tribal, and then you're in war, to justify that self-identification, if you're an administrator, then you have to find racism.

It has to be systemic because it isn't there.

So you have to say it's like air.

I know it's there, but I can't smell it.

Or oxygen.

So you come up with these words.

It's a microaggression.

And only people can see the microaggression if they've got degrees in microaggressionalery.

Oh, it's systemic.

It's like water.

It's everywhere when you're underwater.

So you don't notice it.

But if you have to have a degree in systemic racism studies, that's what they're doing.

And everybody's sick of it.

And what these interviews showed was...

It was very similar to the Coma Sar system, as I said before.

You were taking a large amount of investment in labor and capital.

And it's not that you're wasting it.

They would have been better off to take the entire budget of the DEI programs at these universities and corporations and take the money and burn it up, just light it on fire and then take the employees and just have them sit in a room and party it up.

That would have been better than allowing those people to waste money and to waste labor, but more importantly, and this is my point, to curtail the productivity of other people by intimidating them and censoring them and doxing them and shadow banning them and making sure that they're afraid of them.

And so they were, that's what they were saying at Poem.

They're losing productivity because it's destroying morale and it's destroying creativity and it's destroying free expression.

And it's not helping the middle class, African-American class.

It's all for the elites.

This is all a

fight among deck chairs about the left-wing elite.

These are black people, Hispanic people, white people, Asian people that are completely identical people that are all very affluent, very wealthy, and they're fighting among each other for titles.

I should be assistant dean of inclusion.

No, no.

I should be anchor woman.

I should run the Saturday show.

And that's what it's all about.

And they're using race and gender for that purpose.

And people are sick of it.

Yeah, I think we are.

There's one thing that, you know, before we finish, I want to, I would have been in a bad mood all day, but it touches on government and bureaucracies.

Every time I deal with a bureaucracy, the people are insensitive and they're incompetent.

So today is November 13th.

It's the 10th anniversary of the year my daughter died.

She was 26 years old.

I haven't really mentioned that, but she was completely healthy.

And

she called me at work on November 11th, 10th, said she couldn't see out of one eye.

So I drove down seven hours, and she had a stroke.

And they thought it was meningitis, but it wasn't.

It was a very rare form of virulent leukemia that gave her a 200,000 count white blood count.

So they had to take a clot out, and after they took the clot out, the doctor came to me and said it was not

meningitis,

it's leukemia, and it's a very rare, deadly kind, and I can't give her

blood thinner.

So I was thinking about all this.

It was a horrific time and I miss her every day.

So I get a call today.

I'm sitting there thinking about this all day and the person calls up.

So when she died, she was interned at the Salmon Local Cemetery.

And they had a wonderful program.

It was memorial benches.

So it was her wishes, not mine, but her wishes to be cremated in a crypt.

So I got the crypt.

We had a lovely service.

We had a memorial service.

She had a wonderful service at USC.

They were very kind to her.

President Max Nikias

helped organize it.

And

they also suggested when I went in there, would you like to buy a memorial bench?

And

they told me they were going to put benches all around the driveways with engravings.

and they were beautiful granite benches and they were you know they were costly but they were nice but they were in perpetuity

so I hadn't even thought about that I go by there once in a while I do go by and look at the crypt and I look at them sit in the bench every once in a while when I'm in town

so I was thinking about this on the anniversary of her passing I get this call

Mr.

Hansen, it's been 10 years since you bought your bench.

I bought my bench?

It's not my bench.

And I said, I don't know what you're talking about.

And said, well, you bought a bench

and we want to buy it back because we have a new policy.

I said, you want to buy it?

I never bought it from you.

I went out and had a stonemason make a commemorative bench according to your specifications.

I had a private person make it.

And then I purchased from the cemetery district, you, or your superiors at that time, a decade ago.

And

no, I don't want to sell it back to you.

That wasn't the purpose.

It was a contractual arrangement.

But you're calling me on the death of my daughter.

You understand that?

Well, it's been 10 years.

I said, no, it's been 10 years because my daughter died.

You understand that?

You're calling me on the day of my daughter and offering to buy back a bench.

It's not just a bench.

It's a commemorative

moment.

And you were the ones that came to me and said, in addition to the crypt, we have this idea that it would be very nice to honor your daughter.

And here's how much it's going to cost.

And it will be a one-time in perpetuity.

So if you go to the cemetery, sit sometime and rest, and you'll be on your, you can see this.

And yet they just wait, I guess, until a 10-year period.

And they never make the connection that a person purchases that when the person dies.

So then on the 10th anniversary of the death, they would call up and try to get it back.

It's so weird.

It's so crass and disgusting.

And you know what he said?

He just listened.

He said,

so that will mean you're not going to have it.

You're not going to sell it back to us.

And I can put you on the no-sell list.

I said, you can put me wherever you want.

But

this is the anniversary of my daughter's death.

It's not the anniversary of me buying the bench, as you think.

Make the connection.

And so that just reminds me of these people.

There's something about a private enterprise where the employer can do things and he can imprint his culture.

But when you get at these faceless bureaucrats and they can't be fired and they have control over people's lives, they can just call people up and just say things on the anniversary of a departed child.

And in the crowd, they're just business-like, I don't care.

I'm just here.

We're buying back benches, and this has been 10 years since you purchased it.

And would you be willing to sell it back to us?

Why would they want them back?

Unless they want to take the space away?

They're too crowded.

They don't like the idea.

They want to give it to other people.

I don't know.

But they don't, it was, it was,

it was obscene.

Yeah, it sounds really good.

And I got really, I was really depressed all day.

I never get depressed, but I was just thinking of this, how well she was.

And then suddenly, at 26, and then

the phone rings.

And this idiot calls me up and says, We're buying back benches at the cemetery.

I'm from the cemetery district.

It's 10 years ago you bought it.

Can we buy it back from you?

I said,

It's not a bench that I just went in and bought.

It commemorated my daughter, and you're calling me on the 10th anniversary of her death.

Oh, does that mean you're not going to sell it back?

Oh, God.

It felt like driving in there, but what would be the purpose?

Yeah.

Probably arrest you, some deranged person.

I probably think I'm deranged anyway from my podcast when I get angry, but I got really angry about that.

And I just thought, this person is calling people up.

Must be every day they're calling people because they must have a, they go through their bench list and think, when's the 10-year period, right?

Yes.

And so they don't ever say to themselves,

Joe Smith next month will have 10 years and we want to buy that space back because we've changed our policy or we want to give it to another person.

I don't know.

And that'll be the 10 years when he bought it.

But no one says, well, wait a minute.

If you call that person up, it might be the day that they went in there to buy it.

And you're calling them up in a period of remembrance and you're being mercantile and businesslike.

Yeah.

And you don't.

And you sure weren't that way when you tried to sell them that.

You offered it to the families, you know.

Yeah.

Wouldn't it be a wonderful token of internal remembrance that you could go in when you go to the remains of

the memorial of your daughter's burial that you could sit on a memorial bench?

Yeah, it is.

But why didn't you just say, in 10 years, we're going to bug you on the day that she died, the anniversary, and we're going to try to buy it back?

Yeah, it's just bureaucratic insensitivity.

It is, and that's what Donald Trump was elected about.

I'm not trying to draw grand comparisons, but I wrote a column, and it basically said this is an election between those people who lecture us and those people who are lectured to.

And I think I mentioned, I don't know if I told you this, but

I was

in my local town.

And a guy came, did I tell you this?

A guy came up and he looked like a gangbanger.

Shaved head, goatee,

tattoos,

thick Hispanic accent.

And he called over to me and I was in the parking lot.

I won't tell you where, but,

hey, you.

And I thought maybe, you know, he wanted to fight or he thought I backed into his car.

So I said, yeah.

Are you Hansen?

And I said,

perhaps.

So he came over and goes, I got to shake your hand.

I love Trump.

I love Trump.

Everybody in my family loves.

We're all for Trump.

Today's the big day.

It was the day after the election.

And then I said, you watch Fox.

And he said, no, I don't watch Fox.

No, no.

I watched Newsmax.

Oh, wow.

So I saw you on Newsmax.

And you're from Selma, just like me.

This is great.

Trump, we're both Trumpers.

That made my day.

It did.

Because I had been at Palo Alto the day before.

Yeah.

And it was,

I can't even get into it.

It was night and day.

Oh my gosh.

Absolutely.

It was night and day.

It was sort of like

all these entitled, wealthy, nasal droning people that were convinced she was going to win.

I walked over and got coffee and

I was listening to two, I guess, students or professors.

Wow, I think these people are going to be enough for a big surprise today because I've looked at the Sienna Sienna poll.

Oh, yes, I know.

And

my aunt is a political science professor, and she's assured me it's going to be a humiliating night for Trump.

I thought, where have you been?

Boy, they were in for a surprise, weren't they?

I thought, wow, you're looking at all the polls that had the worst record?

Any idiot can look at the three that had the best and see he's going to win.

And he's going to win big.

I didn't think he'd win that big, but I knew he was going to win.

I said that.

And

anyway, I was listening to all that, and these people thought they were so brilliant on the Stanford campus.

Then I go to one of the poorest communities in the country, and a poor guy looks like he's a gangbanger.

He's got more sense and intelligence than they do.

And I said, how did you know he's going to win?

You know what he said?

What?

Who would vote for Marie?

Who would vote for this woman, this trends, and the crime and the inflation?

I thought, wow, you got to the heart of it, didn't you?

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

And you weren't saying you, and you didn't say, well, these people have a,

you know, if I was going to use the equivalent of their accent, he would, hey, man, it's like, you know,

all the people know that Trump is going to win.

No, he was scientific and methodical and analytical.

He said, you know, look at these issues.

Nobody wants them.

And they couldn't say that.

So he was much more disinterested than they were.

And he was better spoken.

And I just mentioned that because somebody today called me and said,

why don't you live in Palo Alto?

And I said, because that's where you work.

And I said, yeah, but it's very expensive.

I said, is that the only reason?

And I said, no.

And he said, what's the other reason?

And I said, they're insane.

And the people in Salma are normal.

And there's a big difference.

They're working class people.

They're middle class people.

They work.

They're farmers.

They're plumbers.

They're electricians.

And up there, they're utopians.

But those people tell these people how to live.

They tell you how much you're going to pay for electricity, how much you're going to pay for gas, how much you're going to pay for food, when you can drive, when you can, and in and in.

And that's what the election...

This is all to remind people about the dangers of government and what that election was about.

Yeah, and Donald Trump seems to be following up so far, which is great.

I saw the last thing I'll say.

Did you see the

meeting with Trump and Biden on the

smile?

Yeah, Biden's,

man, he was happy.

He was thinking,

Donald,

I don't know how to thank you, but you know what?

That treacherous person was trying to get rid of me, and

they overthrow me, and you just ground her down.

You made her look like a fool.

You made her look like a fool.

You made, look, all those tyrannicides that tried to stab me, like just like Caesar.

You know, the Pelosis and the Schumers and the Hykem Jeffreys, they all surrounded me when I left the Senate and stabbed me with their daggers.

And he survived it all, man.

He's not, there's nothing's going to take Joe Biden down.

No, he's going to coast.

He's kind of like, well, I'm senile and I'm demented and I'm under, but now everybody knows I'm senile and demented because they removed me.

And I still got 80 days and I can do whatever I want and say whatever I want.

Where's your MAGA hat?

I want to put another one on.

Maybe I'll have Elon in the White House.

Anything to get these people mad at me.

And where's Barack?

Barack, you went out and you lectured everybody.

You were supposed to win.

Remember?

You were the guy that told me I couldn't run in 2016 when I was sane and I wasn't yet demented.

And you pushed Hillary in on and she lost.

How'd that go for you?

Now you did another left-wing woman, and could old Joe Biden from Scranton.

You couldn't help me.

And both of your candidates blew up, and here I am standing.

The narrative is not true, of course, because

he could have run easily, and he would have lost by the same margin.

You know, to quote Shakespeare, it's not in the stars, it's in us, dear Brutus.

That message was abhorrent.

And even

the best message, even any messenger, could not have saved that message.

But they had a very bad messenger.

And with that, this is the end of the Victor Davis-Hansen show today.

We'd like to thank all of our listeners for listening.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

I really appreciate it.

Come join us on Saturday for the weekend episode.

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

Wherever you go, I'm gonna be a quattro dog.

Whatever they get into, from chill time to everyday adventures, protect your dog from parasites with Credelio Quattro.

For full safety information, side effects, and warnings, visit CredelioQuattrolabel.com.

Consult your vet or call 1-888-545-5973.

Ask your vet for Credelio Quattro and visit QuattroDog.com.