The Case for Trump Update

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is one of the episodes while Victor is away in Europe that we're doing.

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

This episode we're going to be looking at Victor's new edition of The Case for Trump, which has a new introduction and thoughts on the current 2024, 2023-2024 year year and the things that have changed.

So, stay with us, and we'll be right back to talk about that book.

We're back.

So, Victor, oh, just a reminder: you can find Victor at his website, VictorHanson.com.

It is called The Blade of Perseus, and we'd love to have you.

So, come join us there.

You can also find Victor on Twitter, sorry, not Twitter, on X,

and his handle is at V D Hansen, and on Facebook he has

Hansen's Morning Cup.

Victor, so you've written this case for Trump and a study of all of the conditions that led to the election of Trump, and that was published, I believe, in 2019, and then you did a

new edition with an introduction for 2020, I believe it was.

For the paperback.

Yeah, for the paperback.

And then now you have a new introduction on this and to bring in all of the current things that are going on.

So

I would like to let you just go first on your ideas and then I have some questions to ask you this question.

Well, I started

the update because the other

paperback edition was before the election of 2020.

So what I did is I wrote 20,000 words from Trump's exit

to where he was during the primary season, roughly in April, because that was when the deadline for probably April.

And so

the theme is sort of the amazing comeback of Donald.

I don't think there's ever been a comeback like this.

Richard Nixon, when he said, you don't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore when he lost the 1962 gubernatorial election to Pat Brown, he was over with.

But he was elected president just six years later, 68.

It was an amazing thing that Nixon did.

But this is greater because I went back and looked at what people were saying after January 5th and 4th, 5th, and 6th.

We forget there was a double whammy.

The Republican establishment and many MAGA people were furious at Trump because there was no way in the world that the Democrats were going to win the Senate.

Everything had to work right.

And it came down to two special elections and red, red state Georgia.

Okay.

And neither of the candidates won the 50%.

At least Lawford didn't.

Purdue didn't win the 50%.

Almost.

He came within almost 1,000 votes, so he would have been elected and they would have had a Republican Senate.

So he didn't win it.

And Trump was so angry.

That when he went down to Georgia, he said things to the effect that it doesn't matter what you do, they're crooked, because he had lost Georgia.

And that turned away on that, I think that special election was January 5th or 4th.

It was before the January 6th protests.

There were

six to 700,000 conservative Republican voters who had voted for him in general election that did not

turn out.

offered same thing.

And then in addition,

he alienated the independent voter in Georgia.

And the net result was they elected two socialists, not Democrats, socialists in one of the reddest states.

And people in the Republican Party were furious at it.

Then there was, I know that he said, now if you're going to go, now you assemble at the Capitol peacefully and patriotically.

Nobody was found.

with a firearm.

There was no plan to take over the government.

A lot of that, the subsequent militarization of Washington for the next six weeks was Nancy Pelosi's idea of making political hay.

And we never have gotten the straight story about, and I went through this in the introduction.

We don't know how many FBI informants, although we know a New York surprise-winning journalist said they were everywhere, and he recognized them.

He said it was a joke, it was not a serious rebellion or anything.

It was a buffoonish riot.

We know that they dealt out sentences, put them in solitary confinement, did not try them rapidly as their constitutional rights suggested, overcharged them, and treated them in diametrically opposite fashion of the 14,000 who were engaged in arson, riot, mayhem,

death in 2020.

Okay, at that point,

he was persona non grata in the Republican Party.

There was nobody, I went back and looked, there was nobody supporting him except a die-hard MAGA groom.

And

it got worse.

It got worse.

He went to Mar-Lago, and then he got in this fight about his presidential papers.

And then something weird started to happen.

Nobody believed in August,

two things, excuse me, three things started happening.

Joe Biden had campaign on being a uniter

and good old Joe from Scranton.

But almost immediately, he undid every one of the successful programs and protocols that Trump had.

If he just left, finished the wall, he would have been popular.

If he just supported Israel like Trump, did he be popular?

If he just left 3,500

secure Americans at Bagram in Afghanistan, he'd be popular.

If he had just let pump more oil, he'd been popular.

But he deliberately demonized Trump, split the country in half, turned over his administration to the Obama hard-left wing.

And by August,

when we had the humiliating

pullout, he was below 50%.

And that was one thing that really helped Trump.

He was starting to show that he was cognitively impaired, one,

that his policies were destroying the country, two,

and that he had turned the country over to the hard left.

And Trump didn't have to do anything.

So already in the polls, Trump was four to five points up.

That was number one.

And I wrote about six or seven thousand words on it.

Number two,

they went after him.

So Jack Smith then and the FBI did this performance art raid at Mar-Lago.

And we know they doctored the pictures.

They ransacked Melena's underwear.

They were armed to the teeth.

They went into an ex-president's residence over a civil dispute of which papers were classified.

Adjacent to that, not only was that shocking,

but there were rumors that Joe Biden, of course, when he picked the special counsel Jack Smith,

was worried that he had culpability of the same magnitude.

And so then it was learned that Joe Biden and more residences for a longer time with less security, and he had violated classified statutes by showing a speechwriter classified materials who then destroyed subpoena evidence.

And that started to help Trump,

that it was an asymmetrical.

So now you had two things, the beginning of lawfare, and this was going to follow with Fannie Willis and Alvin Bragg and Eugene Carroll

and Letita James.

And they were all common in this sense.

Everybody in America knew that if he had not announced he wanted to run again, he would not be charged.

If he had been left-wing, he would not have been charged.

And all of these people had made preliminary statements that they were going to go after him.

And they all had coordinated, it started to leak out, they coordinated with the White House, which they denied, but they did.

Nathan Wade did.

Jack Smith did.

And of course,

the DOJ and Alvin Bragg did.

They sent, he said he volunteered, but people don't leave high-billet jobs like that to go work for a guy like Alvin Bragg.

So that was the second thing.

The law fair started to boomerang.

But at this point, in November of 2023, when you looked at the polls, Ron DeSantis, maybe I'll back up a little bit, September, he was ahead of Trump.

So there was a movement that said, yes, we're now sympathetic to Trump because of what they're doing to him.

And yes, Biden has been a disaster that nobody anticipated.

They did, but the left didn't.

But you can get MAGA

government

without

the excesses and tweets and all that from Trump with DeSantis

or Haley or others.

And so then there was Pence, there was Christie, there was a whole big field.

And guess what?

All last summer,

the summer of 2023 and the fall,

Christie came off as a buffoon full of hatred.

Pence's campaign was self-righteous and sanctimonious.

I'm not saying that he was, but it just came off that way.

Boring.

Haley

lasted the longest because she appealed to the Never Trump donor class, but she never had traction with the voters.

DeSantis,

he had a good debate with Gavin Newsom,

and he's got a photographic memory, but that debate, that campaign was not handled well.

And he came off stiff, not as charismatic and relaxed.

So that was a trifecta that I cover in the introduction.

How did this guy get to be leading Joe Biden when he was the most disgraced and

attacked person in the political scene?

It was Joe Biden blew up the country and people were furious at Joe Biden, especially the hyperinflation.

And it was the lawfare was so egregious and outrageous and so unprecedented that people started to feel empathetic to Trump as a victim.

And when they looked at the alternatives in this long primary process, they didn't see anyone who would excite the base and whatever they thought would be lost by Trump in terms of independence, they thought more would be lost with the base would not turn out for anybody but Trump.

And there we are.

So it's a long discussion.

It's come back and then also what he might do.

Well,

I was reading, and I noticed that you said

no one knows the ultimate fate of Trump's legal jeopardy or its political consequences.

And I was wondering if you agree now at this late date that the trials are going against the prosecutors and in the favor of of i wrote that before the nathan wade uh illicit relationship with fannie willis the junketeering at public expense that they engage in they both probably perjured themselves i didn't see that coming but uh i did say that they were so politically rigged that i wasn't sure what what the result was going to be i don't think fanny willis will recover it's going to be hard in new york with new york slanted judges to reverse the Egyptian Carroll Mega $73 million or the 250 Letita James, those two convictions.

It might happen.

I don't think Jack Smith's going to go anywhere because

usually the Department of Justice says we will not indict a major...

That's why they told us this about Hillary when she destroyed subpoena materials.

We were told that the

Loretta Lynch told us that it was long-standing policy.

Eric Colder had told us that you don't indict a major political figure in an election right before the election.

And yet that's what Jack Smith's trying to do.

And I don't think that's working.

And then the disparity between the treatment, Robert Hurst said that basically Biden was guilty and yet he wasn't going to do anything.

And now nobody's proven that Trump is guilty.

And yet

they're going to try to destroy him.

That's the last impediment right now.

Yeah.

Unless Alvin Bragg.

Don't put anything past the left.

Alvin Bragg could come out and he could say that, yes, nobody's ever been sentenced to jail for these made-up crimes of bookkeeping, but I'm going to put him in jail for 15 years.

You know what I'm saying?

And given Biden's performance, that would give him,

and he could be doing podcasts from jail from Rikers.

So we don't know.

We don't know what's going on.

But the Democrats assume that the people have turned on them, that Donald Trump under his

new team is much more professional.

I mentioned that.

Susan Wiles and the people, Stephen Miller is much more experienced.

They have other people that they've brought on.

The kind of loony people, you know what I mean?

The Roger Stones, the Omarosa, the Scaramucci's, they're not there anymore.

And they've got Devin News,

Devin Nunes, who runs Truth Social, I'm sure that although he can't participate in the campaign, he is a steadying influence among people, his staff.

And so the left is terrified.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about his team and then also his agenda.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and we're talking about the case for Trump with its new introduction and its great analysis of how Trump made it in the 2016 election in the first place.

Victor, so you were talking he does have a better team around this time, and I didn't know if you had more to add to that.

That was one of my interests in what you have to say

about him.

I had never met Trump.

And last December, I was speaking in various places in Palm Beach and people of that staff invited me over for an afternoon with some of their donor class.

And I did meet him, but I met the staff and I was very impressed by the staff.

They're a soothing, calm bunch.

And

they're highly professional.

And they've been tested in the primary against very seasoned candidates.

And they're raising a lot of money.

Last time they raised a little over a billion, and Joe Biden raised $3.5 billion.

And I think they're about dead even right now

with Joe Biden.

And I think if Joe Biden stays in the race, he's not going to win.

He's not going to raise much money because I think people will think he's going to lose.

And what's the point in dowing a loser?

And they're fighting among each other.

Jeffrey Kasenberg,

the big Hollywood donors and the big Silicon Valley donors are pointing fingers at each other and saying, you told us he was well and I gave him a million dollars and look at him.

Well, he was well when I talked to him.

Give him another million.

Give him, no, I'm not going to give him anything.

What would I get out of it?

He doesn't know where he is.

He's going to lose.

Then Trump,

I'll have no insight with Trump.

I'll have no inside

passage.

I have no inside communication.

That's what a lot of people do in this,

if they think that Trump is going to win big

by August,

there will be a lot of late money coming in.

Because a lot of people have no ideology and no politics.

and they want things.

And they don't know whether Trump will get it.

But if it's Trump, they know they're not going to get anything from Biden because he's not going to win.

So if you give to Trump, who knows?

Yeah, I like that he's making an effort to serve or to help an underserved segment of the community.

He has these really smart blondes out there talking on the news shows on his behalf, you know, his spokespersons,

spokespersons, his spokesmen.

And I was wondering, they're doing a great job speaking of people who are doing a great job.

They're very good.

He's got a very disciplined public relations group of people, rapid response.

And this time,

he's not the outsider that he was in 2016 and 2000, even 2020.

He has got, Laura Trump is doing a great job running the RNC, and they are melded and fused together.

They're not at each other's throat.

And he's got the Republican leadership.

It's not Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell in those years.

Remember, it was Paul Ryan in 2016, 2020, it was Mitch McConnell.

It's not those people anymore that represent the Republican congressional leadership.

It's people like Tom Cotton.

It's people like Marco Rubio.

It's people like Tim Scott.

It's people like Lindsey Graham, and they're all pro-Trump.

So

it's a lot lot more steady, professional.

And he's been there before.

He's been in the White House.

He knows what the administrative state is.

He knows what they're capable of.

The only,

you know,

he's going to be 78.

He turned 70 when his first run.

And I can tell you, 78 is not young.

I know everybody says it is, but he's got to be very careful.

But he only has to go four years.

The vice president nomination in both parties is very important because it could very well be that that person will be the president.

It's not just going to be a holdover position or something like that.

And I think the Republicans have a lot more bench talent than the Democrats do.

When you look at the type of governors and senators that could serve, Glenn Young, as I said, or Marco Rubio, or

any of those guys, they're all good.

And who do they have on the other side?

Josh Shapiro?

What's Gavin Newsome going to run?

I'm going to do for the United States what I did to California.

I can do it.

I can run up a big debt like we did in California.

I can get a million, half a million homeless people on the streets like I did in California.

I can give you a rail project, $15 billion without a foot of track.

I can let out 90% of

water

when it's 115 degrees now.

We had a wet winter and where's the water?

Yeah.

So that's what I can blow up four dams on the Klamath River with money that was designated to build dams for water storage.

Yeah, and I can build, I mean, I can put billions into solving the homeless problem and only increase it.

Yes, and I can tell you that I can import.

We've got a great industry.

It's called Smash and Grab.

And whether it was Oakland the other night, where they just went in the poor man's 76

gas station mini-mart and tore it to pieces, looted it, or they went down to Los Angeles the week before and looted and destroyed that.

And where has he said one word about that?

Has he gone to talk to those people?

Does he call them?

He doesn't care.

They don't do that.

What's he run?

Plumjack or something, some company that he has?

What would he do if they swarmed his company in the wine country?

You know what I mean?

All those people.

These are all collateral damage people.

They don't give a blank about.

But that's what he's going to run on if he's going to be governor.

That's his record.

We have the fifth largest natural gas.

We have the Monterey Shale Formation.

We have oil.

And we import most of our energy from Alaska and Saudi Arabia.

We used to have 38 timber companies, and you know what?

We drove out all but two or three, and we let 60 million trees burn in the last four years.

And our organic green let the forest take care of the forest naturally burn, burn, burn, baby.

Burn, baby.

That's what he does.

Do you think Trump's agenda will be different this time?

Well, he has one big problem.

It's not,

we're borrowing a trillion dollars every 90 days, and the interest rate is not 1.8 or 2 when he was there.

You're borrowing 5.5 on T-bills and federal bonds.

So the interest on the debt is not 200 billion.

It's

$1 trillion.

It's bigger than the defense budget.

So,

yeah, he's not going to be able to do a lot of stuff unless he addresses that.

And I would suggest that he calls up Erskine Bowles and

Alan Simpson, who's in his 90s, who's a senior statesman, and talk to them and say, look,

This is what you did.

It was

three tax brackets, simplification.

There were incentives for investment and spending discipline.

And it would take four or five years to balance the budget, and then you would be on a 50-year trajectory to pay down the debt.

So he's got to do that.

He has to.

And that's not his nature because he's a business person.

And he hates high interest rates.

But the only way to get high interest rates down is to get inflation down.

The way to get inflation down is not to spend so much money

and print so many dollars.

So that's going to be his overriding concern, whether he knows it or not.

He can close the border.

That's the first thing.

Boy, if he gets in there, he should finish that wall and then go down and talk to those border patrol people and say,

there's no more catch and release.

Refugees apply in their home country and we're going to deport these 10 million people.

And

they would be so enthused to do that.

And then he should go down to tell Obador

100,000 Americans are killed because of your cartels and your importation of Chinese fentanyl.

Here's what's going to happen.

You either close the border on your side and you stop importing fentanyl, or we're going to put a 15 to 20 percent tax on every dollar from any source whatsoever that leaves the United States that goes to Mexico.

And it's $60 billion a year.

So we may want to take $10 billion out of that right now.

And we're not going to let black market stuff and see see what he says and his successor.

And I think he'll get a lot of results.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back for our final segment.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, and you have joined us while we're talking about the case for Trump as the campaign goes on.

I know you said a few things about Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about

why they couldn't defeat Trump.

They had so many things about each one that were so appealing, and yet they lost and they lost very quickly in the campaign against Trump.

And I think that that question leads into my next one, which is, do you think Trump's populism is working because of the left elitism?

Yeah, I think what's happened is

there's something going on that's parallel to politics.

It's connected, but it runs in a parallel direction.

And that is people, that's what James Carville came out of his hopefully long-up obscurity, and he's back again with his foul mouth.

But he has some points that he represents

he is as a part of the Democratic Party, it is a sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical, scolding party.

And it's run by these people on the two coastal corridors where half the population is.

And it's got all the corporate money of Wall Street.

It's got all the corporate money of Silicon Valley.

It's got Stanford, USC, Berkeley on the west, University of Washington, the Oregon County, and on the east.

It's got the Ivy League.

And it's got Hollywood.

It's got the New York Entertainment

media.

It's got the Washington media, political and media class.

It's got all the foundations,

and they run the country.

And they tell people,

you're going to buy an IV because we're going to make it so impossible to buy a V8 engine.

You're going to regret it if you try to.

And we're going to tax gas, and you're going to have to buy our EV, and you're going to get...

You're going to have to, if you're a trucker, you're just going to, you know, you're not going to drive a thousand miles on your diesel tank.

You're going to, every 300 miles, just take a break while you line up and wait at a charger.

That's what they want.

You're not going to have a natural gas stove.

There are three genders.

Get used to it.

Your daughter's going to have to compete against a girl that has testicles and testosterone.

Just get with it.

That's just the way it is.

And

we're going to privilege people who, by the superficial appearance, their color.

DEI, get with it.

And

Iran is not our enemy, get with it.

Hamas is not a terrorist organization, get with it.

Israel is a neo-imperialist, and we're going to distance themselves.

And the Gulf Arabs, they're not radical enough for us, get with it.

And we want to be more like the European socialists, get with it.

And

we want to consider crime a social justice issue that people create crime and do terrible things because they're forced to by you people.

And people are saying, I'm sick of that.

I'm so sick of that.

I look what they destroyed.

The country, they destroyed immigration, they destroyed the border, they destroyed deterrence, they destroyed unity, they destroyed racial relations, they destroyed everything.

Hyperinflation, they destroyed a 1.9% inflation.

They did all of that.

And I'm going to vote for somebody who's crazy and says, you know what, I'm not a politician.

I don't give a blank, blank.

I'm going to go in there and lop off heads and get this done.

Now, whether that's going to happen or not, I don't, but that was his argument.

And people said that DeSantis and Haley, although they

had good records,

that

their message

that we don't, we're not as excessive, we're not as undisciplined, we're not as crude, we don't lose.

He lost the 2018 midterms, he lost the 2020 midterms.

General, he lost the 2020.

We win, we win, we win.

And we're politicians.

We know how it works.

That was not as resident a message as Trump's.

Yeah.

I am your retribution, or my retribution

will be success.

And so.

I don't see Nikki Haley down in the Bronx in New York like Trump, right?

I don't see that.

I don't see

her in Philadelphia being hugged by a black woman who's so happy to see him.

And why is that?

It's because he's authentic.

He has that Queen's accent.

He never changes.

Can you imagine Trump going to

a group of black professionals like Biden and saying, gonna put you all in chains?

Or with Hillary Clinton going, I'm so tired.

I've come so far.

Or Obama every time he got in front of, I just want to say, you know, that black portois.

He wouldn't ever do that.

He has that, he's himself.

Or do you think every time Mitt Romney went in 2012, it seemed to a working class, he had a work shirt on and jeans, you know, and they all wear cat apparel.

He wears a suit and that ridiculous long tie.

And I don't even know if they're wingtips, but black shoes.

And he doesn't change.

Yeah, he doesn't.

He has more respect for people and doesn't pander to them.

He doesn't pander to them.

He's authentic, and they look at him and they say, he's weird, but he's genuine.

And then the other thing is, they've made so much fun of his orange skin and his comb over that you think that they his advisors say hey donald trump just gradually we're gonna tone down that orange and we're gonna let you have kind of a short bald look and he said no

and he not only said no he convinced joe biden it's a good idea so joe biden is the new orange man he's copying trump

thought that would happen if i was doing this podcast six months and i said to all you people listening now i want to be an ostradalmus for a second i predict by July 4th

that Joe Biden will be in bad shape, he will fail, that he will emulate Trump's yellow concoction and smear it all over his face and appear two days later so he's no longer ash and white, and he will be the new orange man.

You say, Victor, you are a raving lunatic.

And that's exactly what happened.

I didn't predict it because I think it would have been impossible to conceive, but that's exactly what happened.

It is.

Have you heard those,

no, no, some of their celebrities, and every once in a while they'll start talking about how their makeup artists can spray a tan on them, basically.

But a legitimately looking tan, like without, with some variation in the dark and light.

I was in a studio, I won't mention it, but when you go to New York, you do some of that.

And a person walked in with a bald head, and after his interview, he walked out.

And I thought, wow.

Great hair.

They can spray spray on those spaghetti little strands of hair, you know what I mean?

On your hair in certain places and they have those little airbrush.

They're pressurized makeup that spit out.

Yeah.

And I watched, I watched, most of them are women, a few gay guys.

I watched them at the Fox studio.

They're absolute.

I mean, I look pretty bad.

I went in there once and this very

professional woman said, Sir Hansen, I said, nah,

you will be surprised what I can do with your face.

And I went on about 10 calls.

He goes, what happened to you, Victor?

Did you get a Botox?

You look great.

You look great.

And then I started to go out, and I said, can you please take it off?

And she said, why take it off?

You've got a whole day to be young.

So just go, what are you doing today, Mr.

Hansen?

I said,

well, I'm going to go, well, you'll look great at lunch.

You'll look great at dinner.

So I left it on.

Well, maybe that's what happens with Trump is that it doesn't really, it lasts for the hour that you're there, but after that it starts to look orange.

I don't know, it's not good for you, probably all those chemicals on your face, but I've never had Botox, I've never had any of that stuff.

It was very funny because I had a catastrophic bag accident in twenty fourteen that split my lip to

I shouldn't say split, severed my upper and lower lip, embedded asphalt in my face and I had one hundred and sixty stitch stitches and I had to go to the emergency room for hours.

But when I went to a derm what would be the word dermant surgeon to fix it

fantastic surgeon yeah he was a wonderful man I won't mention his name I really liked him

and

the person who did it that day to close the wounds that because I had to go on my tour eight days later I had a concussion I looked awful

and

so a week later I had to get the stitches before I got in the flight.

And the guy said, he was very, funny, he said, you know, you're a candidate to fix this stuff up.

You're going to have a permanent wrinkle.

Your lips are going to look terrible.

You have black spots under your nose and forehead from the embedded asphalt.

I can't get it all out.

I can do a little bit.

I said, but I tuck here, tuck there, and it's all going to be paid for because it is facial reconstruction from an accident.

And you're going to look terrible if you don't do it.

And I said,

you mean I would have a facelift?

He said, no, it's not a facelift.

It's fixing your face the way it was.

I said, it wasn't great to begin with.

So I didn't do it because I had to go on a trip.

But it might have been valuable, I guess.

Miracles.

But I don't know.

You had a lot of neurologists tell you they could work miracles with drugs to keep people alive, lively and awake.

And yet Joe Biden proved that maybe those drugs aren't so miraculous, right?

I had about three neurologists that mentioned the, who wrote me.

I like that.

I mean, doctors will write and say, I heard your podcast, I read your column, saw you on Fox, Victor, you have to be informed about what's going on.

As a board-certified neurologist, this is the array of tools I have in my kit.

And then they list about seven of them,

pharmaceuticals.

And they said, No, we're not going to diagnose.

I'm not diagnosing from a distance.

That's unprofessional.

I'm just suggesting that

when you comment, you don't want to just say Adderall, Adderall, Adderall.

There's a much richer texture in this protocol.

All right, let me just give the last thing I'm curious about.

Do you have the confidence that the people, the masses, on the average, see through all the lies, trials, and incendiary rhetoric about Trump?

I do,

but

here,

because I like Trump, and I voted for him twice, and Conrad Black and Bill Bennett and I wrote a column saying we're going to vote for him again.

I shouldn't say, I mean,

Conrad wrote it.

He really did the great.

We edited it, but we were participants.

But here's the problem, and that is that Trump, even on his more disciplined state,

he just matter-of-factly says, crooked Joe Biden, or diminished Joe Biden,

or he'll go excessive and then there's certain voters that want to vote for him.

I know I have some friends that would never consider voting for him.

They are considering voting.

And you know, that's very small.

They'll say, Victor, you know, if you'll just stop that, if you'll just stop that, I said, it's baked into the formula.

And he's not going to be able to control all of it, but he can control.

It's like a chronic disease.

You can be a maintenance regimen.

You can't eliminate it with antivirals or antibacterials or antibiotics, but he's doing a good job.

But if he could just stop that and be completely controlled about what he said,

but he's already, he's,

I mean, the heritage 2025 is sort of a radical revolutionary in a lot of its MAGA, but not all of its MAGA.

Some of it goes well beyond that.

And Trump said the other day, I'm not signing on all this stuff.

And

if you look at his judicial judicial appointments, they were wonderful.

They really were.

Yeah, I noticed he said in the

everybody said they were hard right.

Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and Comey Barrett, they will against Trump sometimes.

But I noticed he also said in, because I thought he would rely on the Heritage for a lot of information.

He will.

But he said,

I don't know Project 25, or I don't have anything to do with Project 25.

He doesn't.

It's an independent think tank effort to A, get an agenda that would undo

the damage, and two, to vet thousands of people that want to serve and hit the ground running should he win.

And I think he would agree with much of it, but he's not going to be tied down, is what I'm saying.

And

I think it's going to be, if he were to be elected, I think if he wins the Senate, the first hundred days would be like 1981 with the Reagan Revolution.

He would close the border.

He would have radical deregulation.

He would open up energy development.

Wow, do you think there's a chance he could win the Senate as well?

Yeah, I think there's a good chance.

Remember on our podcast, we had Tim Shahey, the candidate in Montana.

He was wonderful.

I interviewed Sam Brown, the candidate in Nevada.

He's good.

Stephen Dees, the

junior senator of Montana, he has really worked

in concert with the Republican Senate Committee and

the RNC, and they've got some really good candidates that are running for Senate.

And as you know, the Democrats have more exposure, given that a third of the Senate is always elected.

This year, there's more Democrats up,

and they're not going to have

I mean,

if you have a Barack Obama in 2008, that down ticket helps, right?

Or if you've got Ronald Reagan in 1981, that down ticket.

But they're going to get no help from the top of the ticket.

So there's going to be a lot of people who say, I ain't going to vote.

I'm not going to vote for Trump, but I'm not going to turn out and vote for Joe Biden.

And that means they won't vote down ticket.

So that's one of the reasons.

That's kind of the subtext of all these people.

I guess as I'm speaking right now, we're speaking that Chuck Schumer and Hike Kim Jeffries are supposed to be meeting with Biden today or tomorrow.

And they're telling them that, no doubt.

They're saying, it's not about you, Joe.

Here's the polls.

Here's the insider polls that we don't release.

Here's the swing states.

If you stay on the ticket, we're going to lose 40 seats in the House, and we're going to lose four or five senators, and you're going to go down in history as the person that created the Trump Revolution.

2.0.

And

because politicians are inveterate liars, Biden goes around all day, the the last few days, I would never leave, I'm never going to leave.

But that doesn't mean anything what they say.

He could say, tomorrow, I'm leaving tomorrow.

And if somebody could say, well, you said you never leave.

So that was yesterday, today's day, they're liars.

He said today

this

when I was

second grade, we learned something called the comparative and the superlative, the positive good, the comparative better, the superlative best.

It's basically Latin.

And he said the goodest.

Biden did the goodest.

So he's reverting back to his pre-grammatical state, maybe kindergarten.

And he's going to, it said

Biden doom loop.

Yeah.

Biden doomlu.

They can't put him out because he'll just confirm people.

And the more that they try to rig the questions in advance and keep him under wrap,

the more they're going to get criticism.

And they don't have the COVID excuse.

I can't go out.

It's 2020, and there's COVID everywhere.

And I'm

in my late 70s, so I'm going to, that was, remember that?

Yes, I do.

And he stayed, we called it, what is it, the seller campaign or something, or the base?

I always go back to that in this podcast: that one scene where he's in a car, or he's everybody's in a car, like a drive-in movie, and he says thing, and they haunt the horn, and you look out, and there's maybe 30 cars there, and then they cut to the Trump rally, and there's 50,000 people in Pennsylvania.

And then it doesn't compute what happened.

No, it just doesn't.

It doesn't compute.

Well, we'll see if Trump can turn the Biden doom loop into his own success.

Well, he's going to have to

ballot integrity, ballot integrity.

They've got to get every one of you listening to,

if you have the time or something,

you've got to be interested in a fair ballot.

Keep your eyes open.

And I hope all you people in big cities like Atlanta and Las Vegas and Phoenix and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Ann Arbor

and Milwaukee and Madison, that's where the election is going to be decided.

And there's a lot of minority

state and local workers that handle ballots.

And a lot of them are tired of what this administration has done to them.

And they can be the eyes and ears to make sure that everything is up front.

Yeah.

Well, everybody, please go out.

If you haven't bought the book before,

go out and learn about what brought us Trump in 2016, all the historical circumstances that brought the manifestation of the Trump first administration.

And it has a new introduction on it that explains the last four years as well.

So

go out and get it, get it for your friends and family as well.

Victor, thank you so much for your discussion beyond the book, actually, today.

Thank you.

Thank you for

hosting.

I've been doing a lot of hosting by myself, and I don't do a good job.

I interviewed Stephen Quay.

I hope everybody likes the Sabine Howard interview, you know, that sculptor who works in the classical realm.

Yeah, you can go back.

We have that in our artist.

I'm going to say

Sabin, yes.

Excuse me.

Sabin Howard.

He was a wonderful person to interview.

He's kind of like a heroic one-man effort to create an artistic renaissance along classical lines of sculpture.

Yeah.

I think we put him on in July of

July 13th.

It's a Saturday, so you can go back into the archives of this and find that interview.

So, yeah.

Well, thanks, everybody, for listening to the Victor Davis.

Oh, Mark Moyer, yes.

Thank you to everybody for listening to the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Thank you, everybody.

Much appreciated.

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