Pressing Issues: The Assassination and Vice Presidents

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are here to listen to the wisdom of the show's namesake, Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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This is,

I am actually looking at Victor right now.

I'm at his happy home in California.

He is just back from

seems like months away,

two weeks away, three weeks away from madness.

Yeah.

And

it's Sunday, the 28th of July.

And we're going to get some catch-up here with Victor's views on the Trump assassination, the Republican convention, the appointment of J.D., the nomination, the confirmation, I should say, of J.D.

Vance as the Republican vice presidential candidate and the, I don't know, Victor, elevation, sanctification, whatever you want to call it, of Kamala Harris

in the aftermath of Joe Biden's decision to not run for re-election.

So we'll get to all of this, folks.

You've waited for weeks for Victor's views.

We'll get to this right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, so much,

so much to ask you about.

July, July, July.

Never had a July like that.

Never.

God knows what.

I was incommunicado.

I had to

do a skimp so I couldn't

talk to anybody.

And I had this long COVID.

So, wow.

You did post some

opinions on X Twitter, which was terrific stuff.

I kept my columns.

I've never missed a deadline.

Ever.

20 years, 20 plus years.

Victor, let's start with the assassination attempt of Donald Trump and the aftermath and the Secret Service

failure, the Secret Service reaction to what happened.

Victor, what are your thoughts?

Well, you know, that tired adage that never think of a conspiracy when incompetency explains it.

There was a laxity there.

Let's be honest.

The Biden administration and Mayorkis and the director of the Secret Service were partisan.

So when Robert Kennedy should have had, he's getting 7% polls.

He's out there.

Everybody would like to do harm to him.

I don't mean everybody, but every person in the nut category.

He should have had Secret Service protection.

They wouldn't give it to him because they thought he was a spoiler to Biden.

They would not give adequate protection to Trump.

And the very idea that this crooks guy was

having a rangefinder, that he was wandering around, that he had a drone, that these people said it was too hot to go up on top of the roof, in which he seemed to be fine,

and that it was too sloped we were told so here we have a situation where a 20 year old kid finds a ideal straight shot and almost kills the president kills it tragically kills a wonderful person what wounds another one

and then they don't want to tell us any of the detail there's an investigation going on but We get from the government that the wolf was too slope.

You look at the slope on the FBI shooters shooters platform.

They had a greater slope than did the shooter.

And then

we don't get any of the information why Trump went on stage when the Secret Service was in possession of this knowledge.

There might have been, why not just wait six or seven minutes, ten minutes, and arrest the guy?

And so there's it's just a laxity.

The bigger issue, though, Jack, is

if you are Kathy Griffin and you cut his head off, and if you're the Shakespearean in the park troop and you say you're tabbing Trump-Caesar on a Shakespearean play, if you're Snoop Daub and you shoot him, if you're Anti Bourdeen, the late chef, and you say you want to poison him, I could go on and on and on and on, or you're Robert De Niro, you want to beat him up, or Joe Biden, I'm going to take him out behind the gym.

He said that twice, actually.

And you keep doing that.

And then you add to that narrative that he's Hitler.

Robert Kagan, who used to be a pretty responsible guy, wrote in the Washington Post that he was going to destroy democracy if you let him get anywhere near government.

And then Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, that was Rachel Maddow.

I'm reading all about Hitler now.

Well, you combine those two factors.

So you're an unhinged person,

and you fit that profile of this young man, and you think of two things now.

If I were to shoot this man who is Hitler, and Hitler killed 6 million people, then I would be iconic.

I would be in the pantheon of leftist heroes.

And two,

if a 20-year-old

can fly a drone undetected, if he can climb up with a backpack

right on top of

the law enforcement, if he can get off eight shots,

And then after he does it, the Secret Service says, well, it was too too sloped.

Or

Director Ray says, we don't even know if it was a bullet.

It might have been a shard of glass.

It might have been a fragment.

So you have that attitude, then somebody conjectures, well, I think I could do it.

And I think I'd be famous.

And that's really dangerous.

It really is.

And so I'm really worried that

someone is going to look at this and look at the environment around it and think that

it's going to be repeated.

We've got 100 days to go to the

election.

Victor, the FBI director's comments, which came just a few days ago,

how many weeks after the actual shooting, you just mentioned,

was it a fragment of glass

to,

I don't know, be a wet blanket on the absolute seriousness of what happened.

Is he still two weeks later trying to imply, it really wasn't that bad?

That's the impression I got of his testimony.

Now, the FBI has come out and said, yes, it was a bullet.

Thanks.

We all knew that already.

But between that, Victor.

He was trying to play down the narrative because

it was very funny as they gave him 24 hours of a pass, and then they went after Trump, and then they criticized him, and they tore him apart.

And no one ever said, what would it be like?

to have seven bullets whizz by you and then know that your head would explode if you hadn't just by accident turned and hit the ear and then have somebody say that it might have been just shards of glass, or you see the left saying it might be fake, or he doesn't need the ban.

And then

not to give him any leeway for a week or two.

It's just right.

Joey Reed on TV saying, well, Biden got COVID.

That's just as traumatic.

And

so.

Well, you know, I live in a farm where my whole life people have shot 22s, 3030s,

and they're kids.

And no one understands that a 22-long rifle will go a mile, and a 30-30 will go a mile and a half.

And I can remember being 26 years old, walking out in the orchard

irrigating, and a guy about a quarter mile away, I could see him on a bank, was shooting coyotes, and he had a 30-30, and the bullet went about six feet from me at about three feet on the ground.

And it was

and it wasn't, it was just an accident that he did.

And it freaked me out for about a week.

And the idea that somebody would shoot your ear and try to kill, and that was an accident, but to know that somebody was trying to kill you and then to expect that that's, oh, no big deal.

Right.

It's anyway.

And no shame from some people, Victor.

Kimberly Cheadle, the now former director of the Secret Service, any thoughts on

her response?

She should have been fired.

She should have been fired the next day.

I think they did with the director after the Reagan shooting.

She had the protocol.

They should fire all the people who were in charge of Trump's security with a responsibility for that security.

They should fire them all.

They should fire the people who turned down his request for added protection.

And to go before Congress and not even be prepared,

you know, not even to, is there videos of it?

Well,

do you really believe that that slope is greater than where you stationed your own snipers?

And

was the heat the reason?

Did they see it?

And then this idea, I take,

everybody that's listening is so sick of this Washingtonian phrase, I take full responsibility.

It's in the same league with that was inappropriate behavior on my part, inappropriate.

And so there's never any consequences.

So finally, she resigned.

She lasted a long time.

The only reason she resigned was she went in there thinking,

well, Biden and Harris and the left, they're always cover everybody.

And we get a pass.

And then they went in there, and she was so bad, those congresspeople flipped.

And they thought, I'm not going to go down with this Titanic, and they turned on her.

And then she finally resigned, but otherwise, she would know.

The other person, Victor, who should be shamed, I think, is

Congressman Congressman Benny Thompson, who chaired the January 6th committee hearing and had the legislation to strip Trump of Secret Service protection.

But how about the nine?

I think there were nine congresspeople who voted to do that.

Who co-sponsored that?

And they were all radicals.

I think eight of the nine were in the black caucus.

And they were all mouthed off about he was a felon, he didn't deserve it.

And they were basically playing with his life because when you add add the rhetoric of what people said about him and then you deny him the traditional protection accorded an ex-president,

you know, it's one plus one is two.

So they knew what they were doing.

And he's a despicable congressman, Benny Thompson.

He got up in the January 6th and he lectured and lectured and lectured and then he didn't tell anybody that in 2004 he was one of the congresspeople who voted to reject the electors in Ohio, which if they had been successful under the tutelage of Barbara Boxers, they would have thrown the election to carry.

So he was an election denialist par excellence from the very beginning.

And you put this guy in a position to, what, investigate election denialism?

And then when people said just what I said, then it's, oh, you're racist, you're mean, you can't do that.

Benny's a great guy.

So

it is.

And then you add into that equation that he voted or he introduced a bill.

And did you remember the name of the bill?

It was just absurd.

It was something like

the legislation to not give a felon protection.

It was just pathetic.

It was a bill of attainder also.

Yeah, it was.

It was.

It really was.

Well, Victor, there's much more to get your quick thoughts on.

And I think the next item should be,

let's talk about the Republican Convention.

Maybe we should get your thoughts on how Biden

bowed out, but let's do all that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, I know you were on

some luxury cruise liner and probably not sitting in front of a television set to watch the Republican Convention take place 10 time zones away.

But

any quick thoughts on

the convention and how you perceived it?

It was very successful in the sense that Donald Trump

and this national conservative MAGA movement is trying to do something that's never been done by the Republican Party.

I don't think anybody's ever done it in the modern era.

And he's trying to substitute class for race.

So the people up there had

no commonality as far as race.

It wasn't a bunch of wealthy white golfers up there, aristocratic cadres.

They were blacks, they were poor people, there was a union person,

they were populist, Hulk Hulgan.

It's the kind of things that just irritate the elite left.

So they're there, and he's trying to say there is a common denominator.

These are people of the middle class that were hurt by the Biden agenda.

And if he can pull that off and be ecumenical, he'll get a record number

of so-called Mexican-Americans or blacks or whatever particular group we're talking about because they will be more aligned with what I'm trying to say: is if you're a black sheetrocker sheetrocker or you're a

Hispanic electrician and you're a white long-distance trucker, you all have more in common than that white trucker does with Rachel Maddow

or a college president or the people that run the Chamber of Commerce on either party.

And you have more in common if you're Hispanic than with that truck driver who happens to be so-called white than you would your own UC Berkeley graduate, Latino La Raza Chicano, Politico.

And the same thing holds true for blacks.

And that was refreshing, where

I think there was a problem, and I'm not going to fault him because, again,

you get your ear torn by a bullet, and

you're not the same.

But he had a golden opportunity to give that lecture if he had

and I don't blame him, I blame his handlers and speechwriters because I think what they needed to do was 10 minutes out of the gate,

thank the Almighty for providence and protection.

Remind everybody, and he did this, and remind everybody the tragedy of these two other people have shot, one lethally,

and a call for unity,

and an end to this

Hitlerian rhetoric, and then just just another 10 minutes.

This is what the Biden administration has done.

Bam, border, bam,

foreign policy, wars in Ukraine, wars

in Gaza, the Afghanistan humiliation, the Chinese balloon, the defense budget, then 20% higher to 30% on staple goods since this man came in.

$7 trillion wasted for nothing in borrowed money.

Crime has gone up.

He says it's gone down only because because he takes the high point, which is if it was sustainable at that record and had decreased as it had the first three years, we wouldn't even be alive.

But you look at where crime is now versus where he came in, and it's much higher, especially murder and assaults.

So if he hadn't done that, the Biden, and here's my record: bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

And then good night, 25 minutes.

But 92 minutes is too long and it's too rambling.

And so

he's very effective at a rally, but that does not work for a televised address.

He has,

if

the speech writers are going to write, they cannot calibrate words and minutes because he ad-libs, sometimes very effectively.

So if you write a speech that's going to be 30 minutes on the teleprompter,

he will, every paragraph, go off on a sentence or two that he thinks of, you know,

at the moment.

And that will add to the length.

So it was too long.

And it was delivered fine, but it was too long.

By the way,

you mentioned Hulk Hogan before on the convention.

We talked once about

wrestling memories as kids, but

I thought he was fantastic.

I really enjoyed it.

He's an actor.

He's a great actor.

All of the people were all from,

they were from all walks of life.

It was really embarrassing

they were very authentic

everybody listening you should remember that this is really embarrassing to the never Trump and the old aristocratic party of which I supported and I voted for all of them but Bush the McCain's the Bushes their narrative was this man is a racist

and he's going to alienate minorities and the only way that you can

triumph over the left and their demography as destiny or the new democratic majority rhetoric is to have open borders or comprehensive immigration reform or amnesties or huge federal spending projects or more affirmative action.

And that's not true.

People are people, and they don't want that traditional left-wing message.

And they never come out and explain.

I mean, I would like to hear the Never Trumpers or Mitt Mitt Romney explain to me and to people listening why Donald Trump will get more Hispanic and black votes than did Mitt Romney.

Can he just do that?

Hi, I'm Mitt Romney.

I got 7 or 8% of the black vote and 35% of the Latino vote, and Donald Trump got more than me and both counts.

And he

would say, well, I was running against Barack Obama and a black person, and he can say, well, well, I'm running against Kamala Harris, a black woman.

But I want him to say that.

That's something they can't even get near to explaining.

It has something to do with, besides being conscious, there's something about Trump.

I don't know, you're from the Bronx accent.

Yes.

And

the

orange complexion, and he's never changed.

He'll wear that suit, as I said once, and Tulari at 110 degrees.

So they thought that he was authentic at least.

And then when you add the mugshot and all the rest of it, the fist in the air,

that's something that the Republicans

can't quite digest.

They can't explain.

They should, because they have not won the 51% of the vote since 1988.

And they've lost seven out of the last eight popular votes.

Trump lost the popular vote in 2020 and 2016, and Romney lost it in 2012, and McCain lost it in 2008,

and then Bush barely got 50.3 or 4 in 2004.

He lost the popular vote in 2000.

They lost it in 1996.

They lost it in 1992.

Yeah.

Seven out of the last eight elections.

Well, Trump's talking about culture more so than legislation.

I remember Mitt Romney's national coming out, so to say, was actually at a national review event.

And

he had done

well, whatever the hell that means, as governor of Massachusetts, and he was that at the time.

And what was his instinct?

It was to talk about Romney Care.

That was his coming out party.

They want to talk about government and government programs.

And Trump talks much more, it seems, about the actual culture wars we live through.

And he comes off as the enemy of my enemy.

That's kind of what he did.

Speaking of Romney care, Obamacare,

everybody knows two facts about it.

Number one,

before Obamacare and the Romney versions and all of this federal socialized

Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and the Clintons and the Obamas had concierge health care and they do now.

But the middle class would go into a specialist and could get an appointment.

And they would go into a waiting room where there was a chair available.

And I'm speaking maybe from a unique experience in California, but that's not true anymore.

You cannot get into a doctor for six, eight months sometimes.

And when you go there, it's packed and there's no room to sit.

And when you go in there, the guy is on a computer and he's talking to you while he's typing and you get three minutes.

And that was the legacy of Barack Obama.

They always have a...

I'm writing a column right now, Jack.

It's called our We Lab Rats.

And the American middle class are the lab rats, and they're the men in the white coats that experiment on the idea that we're going to try EV vehicles, we're going to ban natural gas, we're going to have wind turbines offshore, we're going to do all, we're going to ban fracking.

We don't really care about you, lab rats, we'll see how it affects you.

We want to try this experiment, but you know what?

To help you, we have to have big homes and we have to have private jets and we have to have our kids immune from woke affirmative restrictions on that affirmative action.

They're never subject to the consequences of their agendas and ideology.

Well, Victor,

still much more to get your opinions on.

We have, I think,

Biden's exit.

Well, while the Republican convention was happening, Joe Biden was still the Democrat nominee for president.

And let's get your take, Victor, on

his exit right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, again, I know you may have been, not may have been, you were

out of pocket mostly over there in Europe.

You must have caught some of the

news about the, you know,

the defiance of Joe Biden.

I'm not leaving.

I'm not leaving them.

There he goes up on Twitter,

an announcement that he's bowing out.

And then about an hour or two later, or maybe an afternoon later,

coronation began of Kamala Harris.

Any thoughts on Biden's exit?

And we'll save Kamala because we'll go after

both vice presidential segments.

So go ahead.

Well, everybody should, first of all, get the environment of the background.

We had three successive de facto coups in the sense that the party that says democracy dies in

darkness.

And by the way, right now they're going to try to pack the court.

That's what Biden said.

Right.

But

we go back to March of 2020.

Bernie Sanders is in the lead.

Pete Buttigig, Elizabeth Warren behind.

People like Amy Kobuchar still in the race.

And Joe Biden has lost the Iowa caucuses.

He's lost the New Hampshire primary.

He has lost the Nevada caucuses.

And he's going into South Carolina.

And the donor class, the backroom boss tweed bosses, or whatever you want to call them, they get together and say, oh, my God, the polls show that if we nominate these socialists, we're going to lose.

And we've got to resurrect good old Joe Biden from Scranton.

And we know that he's cognitively challenged, but

we're going to give him an order.

Joe,

Representative Clyburn's going to get the black vote out.

We can eliminate everybody.

You can win South Carolina, and then we'll buy them all off.

Who knows what they did?

But they all dropped off.

They all fell over like dominoes.

And then overnight, the new narrative was before that, remember Camilla Harris talked, she attacked him.

Corey Booker said, I can't remember, I don't know what he said.

He said that on stage.

Camilla Harris called him a racist earlier before the primary.

So my point is this.

The Orwellian narrative was simply, it's now old Joe Biden from Scranton because he has a moderate veneer.

Okay, that was Ku 1.

And he agreed to the Faustian bargain.

He and Jill get to be president.

They get all the glory, and then they outsource the agenda to an Obama third term.

And all of the familiar faces come back.

Samantha Power, Erica, they're all in the shadows, and Obama's the first president in two generations that didn't move from Washington after the end of his second term.

Okay.

Then we go on and we have coup number two.

Coup number two is

this guy is failing at a geometric rate.

He's not viable.

He's not even a veneer.

He's not even camouflaged for our agenda.

And

we don't have any other choice.

And we don't know what to do.

So what we're going to do do is we're going to give him an ultimatum.

Joe, but

before I say the ultimatum, remember was anybody who dared to say what they were thinking,

Corinne John Pierre said, you were engaging in what, cheap fakes?

Cheap fakes.

And they attacked you.

I got attacked a lot.

I got attacked, I won't get into it, for saying that on Fox News.

Okay, so then

they tell Joe, you're going to do something that's never happened.

You're going to challenge in a

braggadacious fashion.

You're going to bait Trump, and you're going to have a debate.

And it's going to be before either convention, and it's going to be before the deadlines to remove names off ballots in the states,

and it's going to be before anybody's nominated.

And you're going to debate him.

Now, if you do well,

then you stay on.

If you don't, you're out.

So he blew it.

And then there was a big fight.

And we were still told that anybody who questioned his sobriety, his cognitive abilities, was ageist, mean,

lying, cheap faking.

And then they had an existential problem, Jack, is it wasn't a one, it was never a one-time occasion.

It was serial.

It was

inevitable.

It was him.

So as soon as they get out of the debate, they said, well, we put out that forest fire, but oh my God, he had the big boy press conference, and

he doesn't know who Zelinsky is.

He doesn't know Trump.

He's just,

it's going to be, he's bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.

These are sparks, to use another metaphor.

It's going to be endless.

So let's change the narrative.

And the narrative was, you got to get out.

because you're cognitively challenged.

Now, that wasn't the reason.

It didn't bother them one bit that he was cognitively challenged.

It still doesn't, because he's still president.

But they looked at the the polls and they said, you know what?

He is going to lose not just the president, he's going to lose the house and the senate.

And a lot of the senators in the house said, we're going to be unemployed.

And the donors say, we're not going to give money because we're not going to get anything from it.

He's going to lose.

So then the narrative changed almost overnight.

They leaked.

They said he was incompetent, non-compos mentes.

They said to him, If you don't get out,

we're going to 25th amend you.

We're going to get people in your cabinet to get a majority vote and if it gets to the congress they're going to 25th amend you

and with all your legal exposure and you and hunter you'd be very wise

to drop your candidacy if you drop your candidacy you get to stay as president notice there's so he does

and that's coup

we had the coup to get him out

and the charade of the veneer now we get coup number two and we vitiate the will of 14 million voters in a primary.

So he's out.

And all of a sudden the narrative changes.

He was really bad.

He's got to get out.

He's going to get out.

And he gets out.

He was selfish.

If he doesn't get out, he's mean.

He's selfish.

He was always selfish.

He gets out.

July 21st.

All of a sudden, he's George Washington in a farewell address.

He's idealistic.

He's selfless.

It was almost like a prabda, you know what I mean?

The Commissar says, change the narrative.

The German Nazis are no longer our partners.

They are evil.

They invaded.

It was just like that.

The United States is no longer a capitalist monster.

Now it's giving us Lin Lees.

That's how they did it.

So then they have a problem because they had said Joe and the narrative before

When it all started, if you suggested that Joe Biden was cognitively challenged, they said you were lying and you were mean.

And then they said, and he's going to stay no matter what, because Kamala Harris, we agree with you, she can't do it, and she's not going to be there.

And then as soon as they get him out, Camela Harris goes from

word salads, cognitive dissonance, to Cicero or Demosthenes.

She's brilliant.

She's eloquent.

She's empathetic.

She's a moderate.

Moderate.

And we had the final coup.

We're not going to have a delegate count.

We're not going to have any opposite.

Poor old Joe Manchin.

He's orphaned from everybody.

He just kind of goes on a couple of TV shows and says, I think I might be a candidate.

No, you're not.

It's already done.

You're done and dead.

It's over.

It's a coup.

It's fiat.

So that's what they did.

And now they're in the process of

creating Kamala, the dynamic woman of color who's

really a moderate.

And

she never said that Juicy Smollett was a heroic person who was a victim of racism.

She never said that Trump was sterilizing immigrants at the border.

She was never border czar, and the way that they use that term, they used it themselves.

It's kind of funny.

Axio says, well, she was never given the formal title of czar.

That was just something to write.

And then they found out how that they had used the term itself.

Repeatedly.

Repeatedly.

So that's where we are now.

And

you mentioned the candidacy.

James Pearson is a really smart guy.

Yeah, well,

tell our listeners who he is.

Well, for years,

he worked for

this big foundation that went out of business.

The Smith.

No, no, I'm sorry.

Yeah, the William Simon Foundation.

Sorry.

He did about three foundations.

He was a wonderful organizer.

He's also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Yes.

And he wrote an article about the

familiarities with the 1988 race.

And I don't want to repeat what he wrote, but basically, he was making the argument that this is another cycle of hysteria.

And

I went back and looked at some things.

After

Dukakis won the nomination and after the convention, I was in Greece at the time in 1988.

I was leading a Cal State tour.

And they were ecstatic to act the Greeks.

You know why?

Because he was anywhere from 15 to 17 points post-convention high bump.

It wasn't a bump.

It was a coronation.

And George H.W.

Bush was really incompetent and apt.

And they hadn't had a good,

and then that quayle, you know, everybody was saying that you should dump Quayle.

He's not, you know, he's...

So it would look very bleak.

And

Dukakis was just like Harris.

I'm not an ideologue.

I'm not a left-wing Massachusetts person.

It's not about ideology and politics.

It's about competence.

I'm a technocrat.

I balance budgets.

He didn't.

And

the challenge for George H.W.

Bush was,

well, I play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules, and I would rather lose

nobly than win ugly.

And he was going to win ugly.

And then they got, you know, who?

Lee Outwater.

And when Lee Outwater was done with Mike Dekakis, two things happened.

After that tank had, remember he had that bubblehead

helmet?

He looked like a kind of a spermozoa.

Yes, he was actually a very nice person.

And I think he was a very good person.

But then there were the stories floated that his wife drank some type of cleanser or something.

I don't know.

That was kind of bad.

And then there was the Willie Horton ad, The Revolving Door.

He was just around there.

That was a true ad.

That Al Gore had created.

Al Gore had created it.

Absolutely.

And then there was the most devastating, I thought it was one of the worst, was the Boston Harbor, the big green guy, and there was all this floating debris.

Right, yeah.

So when they got done with him, he was a far-left kooky liberal and who let criminals out and

talked to Great Dame about environmentalism, but he didn't, and he was soft on defense, and he was trying to fake it like he was a moderate

because otherwise nobody would vote for that Massachusetts agenda and it worked and I think

George H.W.

Bush I think he won by seven eight points in the popular vote and that's the last time they've won 51 percent of the vote he barely got 51 percent okay

and what did they do after that Was Lee Outwater canonized?

No, he got a brain tumor.

They got angry at him.

He apologized.

And basically, if I could extrapolate, the Republican dynasty said, we're never going to do that again.

And they didn't.

And they, you know, Carl Will managed to win one popular vote for George W.

Bush.

That was the last time they won the popular vote.

And that was in 2004.

That was a brilliant campaign he waged.

It really was, because Bush was headed for defeat after Iraq.

So my point is this:

that is what is, and I think Jim Pearson was trying to say to everybody, there was a hysteria then.

Dukakis is a technocrat, he's a moderate, and this is what Harris is doing now.

They have recreated her in 48 hours from a bumbling dunce that they would not ever turn over

the nomination to, and more importantly, that this was a Machiavellian ploy by Joe Biden to get an incompetent so you would never remove him.

But he was so bad they had no choice, given the polls.

So then they had to reinvent her, and they reinvented her in 48 hours.

She was a moderate.

She was never.

She took credit for 10 million people.

No, she didn't.

We've got to stop this stuff.

And,

you know, we have to support the police.

She wanted to fund the police.

She helped bail out people who were rioters and violent demonstrators all during 2020.

And my favorite quote from her was, all the fact-checkers went into double time.

Remember that when she said,

these riots, these protests are not going to stop.

I think it was on MSNBC, maybe CNN.

She said, they're not going to stop, nor should they stop.

They're going to keep going.

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

And that was right after they had tried to burn the Episcopal Church.

They had burned a courthouse, federal courthouse.

They attacked a police precinct.

They tried to storm the grounds.

And then the fact-checkers went into high gear.

She didn't mean that.

She was talking about the peaceful things.

No, she wasn't.

That was the environment.

She was riding high, and she was nominated shortly after that.

And so she's been, and here in California, she wanted to ban fracking.

She wanted to ban offshore drilling.

Now she's in Pennsylvania saying,

we have to protect middle-class jobs.

So

what I'm getting at is, and I think Jim Pearson was trying very successfully, I shouldn't say trying, very successfully saying, just hold on, take a deep breath,

and

don't get distracted.

Don't let them redefine her.

Tell the truth of what she represents, which is the most left-wing agenda in the U.S.

Senate to the left of Bernie Sanders.

And that would be, that would make the last four years of neo-socialism look tame.

And everybody knows if she gets elected, it's going to be

woke DEI,

radical New Green Deal, all of that stuff will come, just like Biden did.

Victor,

you mentioned Bernie Sanders, but we went through everything we went through the last few years and in 2020, Joe Biden being elected, as you mentioned earlier, because of Bernie Sanders and how he would be unpalatable.

in a general election.

And now we have Bernie Sanders in high heels and worse.

You know, you can see what they're going to do.

Everybody knows how Joe Biden got elected.

There were three strategies to his success in 2020.

And they're going to try to repeat it.

Number one, you cannot let him out on any spontaneous.

He'll say,

lying dogface pony soldier.

Hey, fat.

I'll take Trump behind.

That's when he's cogent.

Otherwise, he's completely

unfathomable.

You can't understand.

So they put him in the basement and they had COVID as an excuse.

And we never saw him.

Remember those drive-in movie type rallies where they honked seven or eight cars?

Trump had 50,000 people.

That's number one.

So they want to reproduce the successful formula of 2020.

So number one is we're not going to see or give any spontaneous interviews, no big rallies off the cuff, no extemporary speeches.

It's going to be staged events, televised

among left-wing audiences, strictly teleprompted.

And that may work because it worked for Biden.

Number two is

the Republicans who asleep at the wheel in March, April of 2020.

In the key states, they changed the voting laws.

They made it, you know, the deadlines didn't matter when mail drop-in vote

absentee, I shouldn't say, I should call it mail.

They got rid of the word absentee.

They got rid of the idea of the Election Day, basically, because 70% of the people in some of those states did not vote on Election Day, either through early voting or mail-in balloting.

And everybody understood that when you're mailing ballots out to people, whether they request them or not, when you allow third-party people to harvest them, when you can cure post facto the ballot after the election, when it can come in 10 days, when it only has a partial name or a partial address, when maybe it doesn't match the register, registration, and that all is legal, that favored the Democrats.

Now, that is still in effect.

So they're thinking, keep

Camilla out

and

get that 70% non-election day voting because of these change laws up to 80 or 90%.

I won't even get into the 10 million people who crossed the border mysteriously, but we know what that was about.

And then there's the third.

Joe Biden is old Joe Biden from Scranton.

So he smiles.

He talks about unifying the people.

He talks about we've got to heal the country.

We have to unite.

We have to find common ground.

And everybody naively thinks, I remember Joe Biden.

He was kind of the Clinton Democrat.

And

that's what they're going to do with her.

They're going to say, Camilla's in the basement, basically.

We'll handle the voting.

The absentee, mail-in, early voting, will handle all that.

And she's a moderate from this day on.

She is not a leftist.

Everybody got that narrative.

Moderate, moderate, moderate, moderate, moderate.

Her parents were actual Marxists, weren't they?

I used to see her father walk on the campus.

He was Stanford University.

He was an economics professor of Jamaican, I think, as I recall.

He was hired as a Marxist economist, and then

right before his retirement, he became,

I don't know what the word is, either disillusioned with his politics or disillusioned with Kamala.

Because she said some things about

slavery and being a descendant of slaves.

And he kind of, remember that?

He kind of corrected her and said, I would be careful what you say.

Our family owns slaves.

And then her mother was

a child of two PhDs.

She was privileged.

She grew up in Berkeley and Canada.

And all of a sudden,

she tried to do that so

to do the you know the yeah the DEI queen of intersectionality yeah and the problem they have with her and then I'll just say a couple other things about her she is like Joe Biden they feel that because they recreated her in this 48 hour interim that that's the end of the game Joe survived he's uh we we survived after the debate he's got some pressers.

And we put out all of it.

No, no, you can't.

He can't.

He can't survive because that's who he is.

And that's who she is.

And they think, well, we've put her on ice and people won't see who.

No, that's not going to happen.

I think people are going to see her and she's going to talk about yellow school buses

and

the border or

space.

It's funny to be in space.

And Ukraine is a big country and it's next to Russia and that's a big country, that kind of stuff.

And so they're problem that I think they're going to have a lot of problems in the next hundred days.

But we know what they're going to try to do, and we know, I don't think

if I were the Republicans, I would just forget the

she was an affirmative action candidate, or Joe Biden promised in advance, or

just go after not the personal stuff,

just go after what she has said and what her voting record is and the bills that she's co-sponsored to the degree she's done any of them and what they would have in

what they would have had resulted in and if they had passed in some cases.

Some of them did.

In California they did.

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And we thank Field of Greens for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, before we take one last little break and talk about J.D.

Vance,

do you, I mean, that episode of Biden getting COVID and having to be flown out of Nevada back to Delaware and his

torturous

climb up the stairs of

Air Force One and then down just showed, as you talked before, about

the speedy progression of whatever, all the things that are ailing him.

Unless he goes feet first, I don't see him leaving before the end of his term, but he really should not be President President of the United States right now.

They have created a reality that says the following: Joe Biden is so cognitively challenged, he's not able to represent us on the left, and therefore he must be removed.

However, for the rest of you in America, he's perfectly okay to serve out the rest of his term.

So many on the right, and I have written that, and said, this is a contradiction.

How can you be unfit as a candidate for president, but to be the actual president, you're fine.

Now, the problem with advancing that argument is, because these people are very sneaky and Machiavellian, they want you to say that Joe Biden should be removed.

And they would like him to be removed because then she, Kamala Harris, would be the president and then she would run as an incumbent.

And so you have to be very careful about what we say or do or advocate because they would like him to step down and they would like him to step down

because he's got it's not 100 days to the election.

It's almost six months to January 20, 2025.

And at the rate that he is declining, he can do some real crazy things.

And the crazier things he does,

they will tag Kamara Harris because

the Republicans will say, well, wait a minute, you were the one that assured us he was okay.

You were carrying out his agenda.

So we don't know what he's going to do.

And there's the Middle East is heating up.

Putin is heating up in Ukraine.

There's a lot of Taiwan.

There's a lot of stuff, Iran.

Hezbollah will talk about that.

There's a lot of things heating up.

And the idea that this man is president for the next six months is very dangerous.

And they would like her to take over.

but

they're in a really weird position.

I think everybody should understand that this is a very dangerous time right now because people think that the United States can't or won't react and this opportunity may never come again.

And more importantly,

the Democrats can't figure it out.

Half of them think, well,

as I said, we'll lure the Republicans in to force Biden down, and then Camilla becomes an incumbent and has an added advantage going in.

And then the other half says, Oh, wait a minute, Biden is bad, but he's a known bad commodity.

You put her in right now in this volatile thing.

Who knows what she would do, right?

What would she say when she met Zelensky?

What would she say when she met Netanyahu?

She didn't even see Netanyahu, right?

She didn't go to the Congress.

They don't know what to do.

That's what happens when you try to be too smart and you don't trust the people and you try to nullify primaries in which you rigged them anyway.

You told all the other candidates, don't run, don't run.

Biden is going to be coronated.

And then Biden is coronated and you say it didn't matter.

Who would ever in a Democratic primary vote again?

I wouldn't.

What would be the point?

Because

these people who say that they are democracy's greatest advocates, they're like 19th-century big city bosses in a smoke-filled room.

And they're all tech billionaires, the donor class

and then they were ecstatic all this money came in well yeah it all came in because the vessel that they had made this bargain with was no longer functional so then they needed a new vessel so they switched loyalties well victor we're going to end the show today with your thoughts you mentioned hezbollah we're going to have to hold off on that for our following show uh but uh

We're going to end with your thoughts on the nomination of J.D.

Vance to be the Republican candidate for vice vice president

and the upside or any downside with that.

And we'll get to that right after these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, before I ask you, or you tell us about Vance, I've already asked you,

I do want to recommend to our listeners, many of them are new listeners, to visit your website, The Blade Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

When you go there, you will find the links to Victor's many writings, his weekly syndicated column, his weekly essay at American Greatness, links to his appearances, the archives of these podcasts, his books.

By the way, folks,

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new updated 2024 edition of The Case for Trump is coming out next week.

So

15, 20,000 new words by Victor and and that.

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So anyway, that's victorhanson.com.

Go there, sign up.

Victor, J.D.

Vance, your thoughts?

Well, you know, I met J.D.

Vance

in kind of a small group 2016?

Excuse me.

Yes, 2016.

And I've talked to him once or twice on the phone.

I read Hillbilly Elegy.

And let me put the case against him, and then I will critique the case against him very briefly, and then the case for him.

Now, they're in a full panic because, given Biden's rapid decline and the pessimism, and the successful Republican convention, the fact that Trump was so defiant and courageous after being almost killed, they were resigned to losing.

And then

we got rid of Biden, and the whole thing changed.

So then they say, they, the left, and an an increasing number of some Republicans,

he doesn't, he's not going to get you an additional vote because he is a white male MAGA Republican, and you try to balance the ticket.

That's the first thing they say.

Number two,

he's only 39.

And he said things, A, in particular, about Donald Trump, called him dangerous, almost fascist.

And in general, he said other things in his 30s about women and cat women, all of this stuff.

And that's all going to come out.

And so he's not ready for prime time.

He's not going to bring votes.

He replicates Trump.

Trump just picked him in a whim.

There were other people that he was considering that he was not as close to ideologically or personally.

Okay, we got that.

So here is the counter argument to that.

Donald Trump was nominated in 2016

and

he got close to the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and maybe not as much in 2020 because he got seven to eight million voters who had been turned off by Romneyism,

Bushism, and the Republican Party.

They were working white

former union members or current union members that had been banned by the new Democratic Neo-Socialist Party.

So he got them out And they're not there all the time.

And we saw that in Georgia when Trump basically,

I don't want to say he did, but the effect of his rhetoric was that elections had been rigged in Georgia against him.

And therefore, there would be no point to coming out in force to vote against these two socialist Senate candidates in the special January 5th, 2020 election.

And what happened?

They didn't.

So my point is, there's still a lot of voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that would vote for Trump, but they don't participate.

So I think the argument was: if you put J.D.

Vance

there and he just stays in those three states and hammers away at Kamala Harris and tries to get these people out to vote, he can make a difference of 60,000, 80,000 votes in each one of these states.

That's one argument.

Number two,

there's very few people that are 39 that have had that breadth of experience.

He was a Marine.

He grew up completely in a dysfunctional family, kind of like Bill Clinton's family, but probably more challenging even.

He worked at Goldman Sachs.

He was in finance.

He tried to get in the tech world.

He was in the tech world.

He was in the Marine Corps.

So he's had a variety.

And he's the first time he runs for office, he wins a Senate seat.

That's very hard to do.

And he did it in Ohio.

So my point is that he has talents and he's young.

And once he gets over this bump, he's got a hundred.

I don't think he's going.

Most of the things that they're angry about are things he said in the past.

Same thing is true of Camilla Harris, but I think she's much more prone to say things than he is.

He's very, very bright and he's very articulate.

And then the third thing is

Marco Rubio, they could have finagled that even though he was from Florida.

Either Trump or he could have moved out of state.

I guess Trump would have declared his New York residence.

He would have, in theory, got a Latino voter, but that is predicated on the idea that a vice president pick

You know, changes.

And I think most people who are more adept in political science or presidential history say they don't really make a difference unless unless they're egregious, either brilliantly dynamic or

problematic.

So they would say that I don't think

Sarah Palin actually made, I think she bumped up McCain a little bit.

And Paul Ryan didn't do anything for him.

He was just a Xerox of Romney, and that's what people are saying.

This is kind of a Ryan vice presidency.

He doesn't bring in new people.

But

I'm not sure that

Romney...

They asked me on Hannity once, out of the blue, Hannity said, well, who do you think would be vice president?

And I said, three people.

Glenn Young

and

Rubio, and I think I said Ron DeSantis, either one of them.

And because for different reasons, and Tim Scott, of course, they have some of them, like Rubio or Scott, may get a nude voter.

Someone like Yunken's got a really savvy political

knowledge, etc.

But I keep going back to this.

If they'll just not panic, and they're talking those rumors that Trump regrets it, they usually get him off the ticket.

No, no.

Just give him confidence.

Let him be himself.

When he gets on television and when he does impromptu, he's very articulate.

He's very bright.

He's a very good person.

So I think that

in another month, they will think

it was a good selection.

Right now,

he's right out of the gate, and

they're dredging up all the things he said about Trump and all the things he said about the left,

and the fact that he's a white male.

And finally,

people have asked, well, he's just an opportunist.

He changed his political.

I don't think that's the right exegesis at all.

I think it goes more like this.

This is a person who grew up in a dysfunctional, poor white working-class family, where all of the challenges of drugs and drinking and violence were there.

And he chronicled that, and he did it in a realistic fashion that offended people on the right who championed the deplorables.

They felt he was too negative, but it delighted people on the left who said, See, look, he lived the life, and he says

their clingers are deplorables or dr.

So

he was welcomed on the left, and he was in his early 30s.

So suddenly you,

you know, you're just a normal guy, and you write this bestseller, they make a movie, and who celebrates you?

The left, the left, the left.

All of a sudden, movie contracts and bestseller status, and it was on the bestseller list for over a year.

And all of the sophisticated literary critics were praising it to the skies.

And then it coincided with the 2016 campaign.

So I think most people he he thought,

well, I was honest about how I grew up, and

he was just surrounded by this praise, but the praise was for half the book, the critical part.

If you look at the book very carefully, it's almost constructive criticism.

It's saying these people have been

shorted by the establishment, the bicosto elite.

and they turn to these pathological behaviors.

And it was kind of empathetic.

And so I think what happened that the more that he was praised by these people and the more that he looked at his values, he thought, these people don't like me.

They don't like my family.

They don't like my region.

They don't like anything about me.

And I'm getting very uncomfortable about this because I think that they looked at one element of the book and not the other element.

And I don't want anything to do with them.

So I don't think it was just predicated on Trump.

I think he went back to his roots.

I could sympathize because I grew up on a farm in a very small town, very conservative,

very judgmental.

And when I was 18, 19, 20, all the way in my 20s, I thought, I got to get out of here, man.

And I went to UC Santa Cruz right after it opened.

It was just the polar opposite.

It was just chaos.

And then I went to, you know, Stanford, and it was just, I'd come home on weekends and it was just a different world.

All the people I went to high school were sort of like

George Lucas and his growing up.

It was everybody was dragging the streets and their lowered cars or their hopped up cars.

Everybody was drinking.

American graffiti.

American graffiti, fighting.

I mean, we would go have, I guess it was fight club, you know.

We had actually a ring where a guy had a farmhouse and you went out to his place and they had a ring and they charged tickets and they had a kind of an illegal open bar and everybody got in the ring and duked it out.

And it was pretty violent.

I invited some friends from high school up to UC Santa Cruz and it turned into a riot in the dorm.

I mean there was a dorm party and they insulted these guys from Selma and they went at it.

So

when you see that and then

you get among the left-wing elite that you have never experienced before, suddenly you start to see things as you mature and grow up of the advantages that, in fact, you were given a great gift to live with the working class.

And just because you thought you were an intellectual or you were bookish, because we would go places and they'd say things like, oh, Victor, why do you study so hard?

Or why you're a nerd?

You know.

Have another beer.

You know, he called you a name, beat the hell out of him, that kind of stuff.

And you start to, you criticize that, but then when you look back at what the alternative is,

this unreal existence that is the left-wing culture in Hollywood and universities, the media, then you start to rethink things.

And that happened to me, and that's why I never left this place.

As soon as I finished graduate school, everybody said, Are you going to go to look for a job?

Are you going to what are you going to do?

Are you going to go do research and greet?

No, I'm going to go right back to where I grew up, the same house, and I've been here ever since.

And I think that's happened to him.

I think now he's older and more mature, and he says, you know what?

For all the pathologies and all the things that these people did in my communities and my family that were probably self-destructive and pernicious sometimes to me, there was something about them that was real and authentic.

And I'm appreciating that now.

And the world that I was thrust into in high-tech and high finance and high literature and universities,

I don't like it.

I don't like the values.

I think it's nihilistic and destructive.

And he made the adjustments.

And Trump was incidental to that metamorphosis.

It wasn't Trump-driven.

It was just that Trump then was looked at as a champion of the middle class.

If Donald Trump had not gone to rallies in these Midwestern towns and be so powerful, I don't think J.D.

Vance would have changed.

I think he understood that Trump, even though I think he thought he was a Bronx,

New York

fake operator, cheat, or whatever, the left, that thing, but the other side of Trump, that he actually cares for working people and he feels more comfortable with them than he does people at Martha's Vineyard.

I think J.D.

Vance saw that.

Yeah.

By the way, it's Queens, but that's okay.

Victoria's excuse me.

You've got to tell me, what is the difference between

Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn accents?

Okay.

Oh, accents?

Can you do one for each of us?

No, I'm not.

You're a Queens or Bronx?

I'm Bronx.

You're Bronx.

Trump doesn't sound like you.

No, he doesn't.

And I don't know that people think he has a New York accent.

You would be a better judge of that than I, Victor.

Well, I'm corrected all the time.

Every time.

I can't get it straight, so I've had people.

Victor, Victor, Victor, you had a podcast.

You were on TV.

You said Bronx.

It's Queens.

You said Brooklyn.

I don't know the difference.

You know, we used to say outer borough because Manhattan is the borough, right?

It's its own island.

Queens and Brooklyn are on Long Island.

Staten Island, by the way, is an island, and the Bronx is on the mainland.

I know there's a lot of academic studies that trace the geneses of these accents from the Italian, Jewish, Polish, all these ethnic communities, right?

Yeah, maybe even back to the Dutch.

I don't know.

If you want to hear a dying and authentic New York accent, go find Lou Gehrig giving his his

speech.

And

that is the classical New York city accent, and that is going away.

Victor, just before we go away,

on the cruise, the news about Vance came out then.

I don't know.

Sometimes on these cruises, you know, people ask for polls of the audience.

I don't know if that happened at all, but was there a general

upbeat mood amongst the community?

That's a good question because

I was a speaker and

part of your responsibilities are to talk in a confined space.

You can't go anywhere.

You're in a ship.

And so

when you get tea or you're typing and people come up to you and you have a responsibility to talk to them as much as you can.

So my impression was that in the first 24 hours, they thought it was a good appointment, a good nomination, because they they thought this.

They had seen him on TV, because most of the people that

are supporters of Hillsdale are very media-savvy and they're connected to the political world.

They follow it very carefully and judiciously.

And they had seen him kind of tear apart left-wing news host.

And I guess the communist

opinion was:

well, he's going to articulate the Trump position more effectively than Trump himself.

And then he is going to, in places like Ohio, which I think he would have won without Vance.

But

I guess, as some people put it, Victor, he's going to win Nevada.

He's going to need, he's going to win Georgia.

He's probably going to win Arizona.

So it's only going to come down to three states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

And this guy will get people out to vote.

Okay.

They were happy for 24 hours.

And then they watched Sky News in their room, Fox News, and MSNB, some people, and they started to learn something, that the left created this

new J.D.

Vance.

It had said things about women, or people who didn't have children, or you name it.

He joked.

And so every single thing he's ever said, that was repeated.

And then that coincided, Jack,

with

the withdrawal of Joe Biden.

So suddenly

the anchor around the neck of the Democrats was gone.

48 hours later, Kamala was canonized, deified,

and that coincided with the appointment of J.D.

Bance.

So then they looked at the polls.

They got up one morning, and Trump was ahead by eight points in the Harvard Harris.

And then they looked two days later, and

he wasn't.

He was one or two, or he was even in the Wall Street Journal.

And they said, This was, some of them said, this is a bad appointment.

And you would say to them, you have to consider the environment.

It may be a good or bad appointment, but you won't know to a month when

Harris mania wears off, like Dukakis mania and that veneer wears off, and you won't know

until the whole fallout of the Biden collapse is known.

Everybody's now so happy to get rid of him on the left, to get Camela, no messy convention fight, no more Camilla is another anchor.

And they took that fall in the polls that I think would have happened at least in part anyway, given the Biden exit and the $100 million.

Camela didn't earn $100 million.

Anybody who was vice president would have got $100 million to get him off the ticket.

That's what these donors were saying.

Look, we have no influence.

We're going to give him $20 million.

He doesn't even know who we are.

He'll forget who,

but this person does.

So I think they confused, some of them did.

So I think it was split.

I think half the people said he's articulate, he's going to be really good.

And the other half looked at the, oh my God, what happened to Trump's lead?

Oh, my God, Biden's out of the race now.

Oh, my gosh, Camilla is now coronated.

And they picked Vance.

It must be his fault.

And it wasn't.

Well, Victor, you've this is all long overdue.

I'm glad you're back in the saddle.

I'm glad you're back in your happy home here in California.

Since we've been recording, no one stopped by your house and knocked on the door.

Oh, and I've had one thing is I had so many nice people, doctors saying, you know, I had long COVID.

This is how you get over it.

Try this, try this, try that.

I learned a lot from a lot of people about how to get over this crap.

Well, you'll need it for the next few times.

You get it.

I've had it many times now.

I'd like to just repeat

to our dear listeners to visit Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Victor's also on Twitter, X at VD Hanson is his handle.

Once, twice a week, Victor's writing a lengthy post there

on Facebook, VDH is Morning Cup.

Check that out.

There's a good and friendly group there on Facebook, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

Think about joining them.

And as for me, Jack Fowler,

I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

I know you're going to like it.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

We thank our sponsors, and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening again.

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