Crime and How To Get Elected in 2024

1h 21m

Listen to Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss our current crime wave, what needs to be done to win in 2024, Trump attends NYC policeman's funeral and the Democrats fundraise, the rise of snark among our comedians and commentators, and the case for Trump.

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

You're here to listen listen to the star and namesake, Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, an official website.

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Its web address is victorhanson.com.

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Victor, before I go on, I do want to get this up front.

Later

next month, May and

June, there'll be some times where Victor's away, but

we've never gone on hiatus with this podcast.

And we're going to pre-record some podcasts with your questions.

So, how do we get your questions?

If you send them to me, I'm a Jack Fowler.

My email address is Jack, J-A-C-K-R-S-L-C,

Jack R-S-L-C at gmail.com.

Send the question that you'd like Victor to answer, and we will try to work that into one of the special podcasts that we pre-record.

Anyway, I think that's a lot of info up front.

Today is Good Friday.

We are recording on

Friday, March 29th.

This particular episode will be broadcast on, I think, Thursday, April 4th.

And today's episode, Victor, we're going to get your thoughts, a little bit of Law and Order, and a lot on Donald Trump.

And we'll start with the Law and Order aspect right after these important messages.

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Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, you know, there's never not

maddening headlines of criminality in America as it runs them up.

But two stories I think I'd like to get your thoughts on.

And then we're going to talk about some Donald Trump

and Biden

political issue stories.

So first story, and I'll give them both.

In 2022, and I think our listeners may remember this, two punks in Philadelphia, teens,

they beat to death a 73-year-old man.

They beat him to death with a traffic cone.

Well, a few weeks ago, a leftist

activist judge in Philadelphia by the name of Barbara McDermott.

She tossed the charges.

One of those 16-year-old boy totally tossed the charges out on him.

And there was also a teen girl who committed the murder, although I'm not allowed to say it's a murder.

And the judge sentenced her to five years with time served and then released her to a house arrest.

So this is how crime.

is handled in Philadelphia.

And then if you go up the Sala corridor a little bit to New York City, Victor, we have a spate of new

sucker punching stories by young women walking around lower Manhattan, and clowns are coming up to them and just like belting them in the face.

And some are recording it and walking off.

So this seems to be

a new craze.

There's been a lot of sucker

punching in the past in New York City, a lot of it against Jews, a lot of it against Asians, and now against women.

Victor, your thoughts on law and order in America.

Yeah.

I think it was called the knockout game, wasn't it, when it was with against Hasidic Jews?

Yes.

And

it was reflected in the

FBI crime statistics

when they were, it came under the category of hate crimes, right?

But I think, and maybe you can correct me being closer to New York than I am, that they caught the person who had hit these women, didn't they?

As of today, I don't think so.

I think they know who he was, some guy who had, but I think there have been more than one person doing this.

So, so it's, it seems like there's a spate of this happening.

But there's some guy who was an ex-ubernatorial candidate.

Yeah, I thought his name was

Skibogi

Stora or something from Brooklyn.

He was an African-American guy that had been kind of a perennial lower tier candidate, right, for office, of local office.

And he and I think he was connected to seven or eight of them.

Well, so we'll see what happens.

But if your Philadelphia

story, you know, is applicable, it just shows you that nothing's going to happen to him.

And,

you know,

it's like like

the policeman who was killed by those two career criminals that were let out again and again.

And

I guess there's two things that I gather from this.

And I know it's anecdotal, but I always try to look at not the anecdote, but the statistical profile.

When you go to the FBI, it's about two years behind.

You know what I mean?

When you look at crime statistics.

But there's two things that come up.

One is this weird idea of what qualifies as being liberal or humane.

And for some reason, these judges think it's humane to let people out who've committed horrendous crimes on the idea, well, it's so inhumane to keep them away from society.

And they've thought about it.

And we're going to let them out.

But

there had to be...

They never let them out into a situation in which they or their own are endangered by the consequences of that ideology.

So what I'm getting at is what's happening is it's the same liberal philosophy of the left that says,

I love teachers' unions.

I hate charter schools.

My kids are in prep school.

I

want 30 cent kilowatt, raise the price of kilowatt electricity for air conditioning, but I live along the California coast where I don't even have an air conditioner in my house.

And so

by the 70s, I want everybody bus, but my kids go to prep school.

And I guess what I'm saying is the legal profession has become kind of a high caste, especially the judiciary.

And when they make these rulings, they just assume that if they make a mistake,

that that's not going to impact them.

It's going to impact somebody far distant.

And until they see the consequences, and I'm not advocating that there's some mechanism in which they should,

but if they keep doing it and letting these people out, they're not just going to kill police officers.

They're not just going to hit women in the face.

They're just not going to throw people in the subway.

They're going to gravitate to the suburbs and it's going to affect people.

It's happening in Los Angeles and places near or at Beverly Hills.

But I think they do it, Jack.

These judges do it because they're just assured that they can be cosmically,

what's the word?

They can be cosmically liberal.

and they don't have to be concretely

aware of the consequences.

In other words, that person they let out never shows up at their daughter's home.

And they just assume that's never going to happen.

And so they're protected.

They're in a bubble.

And it's kind of like the Middle Eastern students who are disrupting all of these events and

breaking the law and should be expelled, but they know they won't be expelled because we're too afraid to cancel their student visas, because their worst idea in the world was that their parents or their state is paying these exorbitant tuition,

non-discounted fees.

And if they get sent back home, they're going to be in big trouble.

That's aside from the fact they love university communities.

They love liberal atmosphere.

They like the culture, the cappuccino bar, the rock climbing fence in the gym.

They like all of that.

And they think there's no consequences, and they like to be romantic and have all of the American college students fawn over them as if they're

on the barricades as revolutionaries, Che Guevara types.

But if they enforce that, and there's consequences to what they do, they'll stop it really quick.

You saw that Vanderbilt protest this week where I think they broke through the door of the chancellor's office.

And then they were told that they were going to be arrested or expelled.

And one of them made up this crazy excuse that they couldn't be because her friend was in the bathroom with a tampon and needed a new tampon.

And therefore, you couldn't take her away because she was trying to solicit help as if this was a major crisis.

And the other woman started talking in a very haughty, condescending fashion to this African-American police officer and said, if I go outside, I might be arrested.

And you could see it was a capsulization of this no consequences generation.

They're so entitled that they just, they think they can do it, disrupt, break the law, spout hateful speech, be racist, anti-sexist.

It doesn't matter, but they're never going to get expelled.

But, you know, to quote Voltaire, as he talked about Admiral Bing and his hanging, if they, all they have to do is hang a,

I don't mean hang a student, but hang an admiral, and that, he says, encourages the others.

All you'd have to do in the modern context is take six or seven students who were breaking the law, arrest them, and expel them from university, and then ensure that their student visas were canceled because they broke American law and send them back to wherever they came from in the Middle East.

And I guarantee you, it would stop immediately.

And the same thing with these random attacks.

They take this suspect, they try him.

If he did hit these women, they 9, 10, 20 counts of assault.

They sentence him if he's guilty and then put him away for 30 years and do this three or four times and it would stop.

It'll stop.

It didn't

three strikes.

Right.

You remember when National Review had their San Francisco

retreats or fundraising lectures, I would go up, I think you were there a few times.

I was with, yeah.

And I would walk up.

Stepping over dog do.

Yeah.

And at the end we did.

But I'm talking about 15 years earlier.

I would walk over to that venue.

I think it was the city chambers or somewhere.

And I walked maybe almost a mile from the hotel.

And I would leave there at 10.30 at night.

And it was amazing.

The lights were on.

People were out in the street talking.

The restaurants I'd go by.

They were still full of people it was completely safe completely and that could be restored very easily uh again

that was all

that was all these all of three-star strikes are out yeah but and but as you've talked about many times when when the free fall happens it happens damn quickly because i think it was seven years ago is the last or thereabouts last time i did that and then in san francisco and i'm walking over to to this nr event and then

I couldn't believe what I was walking through that I had not experienced before.

And I was like,

I was scared.

I don't know.

Yeah, that was the best.

That's what the hell's happened to this.

It started about eight years ago when they started not to enforce three strikes.

And I do fault Donald Trump.

Do you remember when this first year when there was Candace Open, O-Owen, and Kenya West, and they was following George Floyd, and we were, I guess it was the third year of his administration.

And there was this new idea that anybody who was locked up was unfairly incarcerated.

And Trump supported just letting a lot of people out of prison, remember, and commuting their sentences.

It was a big mistake.

And they were there for, they weren't just all nonviolent drug offenders.

They really weren't.

Every time, I have a little habit that every time I read about a drug offender that's busted with so many kilos of hashish or cocaine or oxycontin or fentanyl, it's always interesting to see what the circumstances are.

And they're always armed.

They have guns.

They have a prior record.

And it's very rare for a major drug dealer not to be armed or have used violence in the past.

Right.

And so

deterrence is non-existent.

The funding the police was sort of like

cutting the defense budget abroad and so suddenly and deprecating the the

humiliating flight from Afghanistan that birthed Ukraine, that birthed Gaza, that birthed the Chinese balloon, that birthed the threats to Taiwan and defunding the police here and the Black Lives Matter propaganda, the Antifa propaganda, the idea that America was inherently a racist

country that was waging war on African American males, the police were, when the statistics didn't prove that at all, but didn't matter, That destroyed deterrence.

And the people who suffered the most, not only the people, but the people who suffered the most were from the inner city.

And I think one of the

reactions, it's so strange about life,

the reactions are so unpredictable.

If it is true, if Donald Trump can control himself and speak quietly while carrying a big stick rather than loudly with a twig,

if he gets 20 to 25 percent of the black vote or 40 to 50 percent of the Latino vote,

then the whole idea that

voting is racist or IDs are racist or mail-in balloting should not have authentication to the same degree as it once was when it was called absentee balloting.

And you can, that would, that will, you'll, when you have a lot of minority voters who are supposedly the beneficiaries of these liberal crazy ideas that we just mail in if you don't sign the ballot or if your name's wrong, it doesn't matter, or if you don't have an IDE in person.

But if they're not on board with that ideology, or if they're voting for a candidate that's not a beneficiary of that ideology, then that whole strategy starts to fall apart.

And we'll see what happens.

But if I were Donald Trump, I would be barnstorming the inner city and the key swing states and communities

so-called of color.

And I would make the argument, as you just did, let's look at the price of groceries.

And what do you just have a speech and say, okay,

what's your grocery bill

now?

This is what it was when I was here.

What's the price of gas now?

This is what it was when I was here.

What's the crime?

This is what, and just keep making, and this is what I'm going to do for you and all of America.

And I think he could really find traction, really do.

Yeah.

Also, even, by the way, in many communities, there won't be a grocery store nearby to have

they'll have to buy food somewhere, but they're being shut down.

And we've talked in the past about these pharmacies shutting down because they've been robbed blind.

I mean, the folks who live in the communities are not obtuse to what's happening around them.

And it's just making that conscious decision at the ballot box to assign the blame, right?

Yeah.

And I think a lot of the left-wing propaganda in places like philadelphia or pittsburgh or atlanta or phoenix

or las vegas these are all swing state major metropolitan uh areas with large minority populations that These people are racist.

They're trying to deny you

your right to vote.

They're suppressing the vote for racial reasons.

The only way we can contact that if we have a monopoly over

getting third-party vote harvesting, being passmasters at ballot curing, getting drop boxes everywhere, and we have to be in charge of the county, I don't think that would work.

I think a lot of people would say, no,

I'm not going to be the, you know, the mayor daily that you think I am.

I'm not going to,

I don't want your candidate.

And I'm going to make sure that if you try to tamper with the balloting, I'm not suggesting they're going to do it, but if they do, I think there's going to be a lot of people, unlike 2020, who are going to get angry about it.

Well, Victor,

I said that before, that I think when I talk to people, and again, it's anecdotal, but when I say people in my community, they're 100% Mexican-American.

It's just uncanny how they resemble the white working class that Bill Clinton had captured and which for some part Barack Obama kept some of them.

They started defecting during his reign, but

they

just disappeared as Democratic voters.

And it was because they were sick and tired of that bicostal, nasal, twangy, you're going to do this,

you're not going to use gas, you're going to get an electric car, we're going to have abortion on demand, you are going to have global warming, we're going to shut down the power plant, you're going to have to have this, we're going to have more regulations, we're going to have three genders.

You're going to have all of that.

They got sick of it.

And I think it's happening to the same degree.

I think just as the white working class got sick of MSNBC lecturing or,

you know, of all of that crazy Biden lectures that we saw with Obama earlier, I think a lot of the minority communities are saying, you know what?

I don't want to listen to what Al Sharpton says.

I don't want to listen to Oprah.

I I do not want to listen to Megan Markle.

I do not want to listen to Michelle Obama.

They are privileged people.

They have lives that don't even resemble mine.

And they are no different than the wealthy white bicultural elite that are out of touch with the white working class.

And if that should happen, then you would see class starting to reassert itself as far more important than race, which it always is, to tell you the truth.

And you would start to see what makes people hate Donald Trump the most, that he's a billionaire that is able to replace racial, tribal distinctions with class solidarity.

And if that happened and he was able to, as I said, get half or 45% of the Latino vote, 20% of the black vote on class, shared class concerns about food prices and gas and national defense and cultural values, I think he would he could win the Senate and the House in a landslide.

But it would require very, very adroit campaigning and very careful what you say and very selective strategies about who you pick as vice president and

how you campaign.

And I think he could do it.

Well, you've written a few pieces on

Trump versus Trump, and we're going to talk about them a little more later in the podcast.

And I want folks to realize

these are pieces Victor writes for exclusively for the Blade of Perseus.

Talk more about that later.

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victor we've got a lot of uh a lot more trump uh and a little biden stuff to come up and let's start with

the uh news from this uh a couple of days ago

from when we are recording again we're recording on on the 29th of of march

um

New York City police officer Jonathan Diller was murdered, killed in the line of duty at a traffic stop.

Some

murderer shot him underneath his

below, I should say, his bulletproof vest, and he died in Queens.

Donald Trump called the family.

The family invited him to come

to their sons and husbands' wake, and he did.

Meanwhile, at the same time, Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were having a big

fest, a fundraising event at Radio City in New York City.

It was,

they had a,

I think you had a, if you want to get a picture with the three of these choo chases, you have to drop 100 grand for that.

Stephen Colbert, ha ha, Stephen Colbert moderated a discussion between the three.

He's such a jackass.

We can talk a little more about him separately, Victor.

I just want to mention that.

terrific uh not charity tunnel to towers they paid off the mortgage of for the for the widow of Jonathan Dillard.

I just think immediately, boom, they did it.

A terrific group.

Anyway,

Victor, your thoughts about a couple of these things.

Donald Trump going, very authentic, I think, going to the wake and

offset against this big political event in New York City, which in itself,

there was uproar there by,

I think some folks got actually into the event and were attacking Biden about

Gaza and Hamas.

Victor, your broader thoughts on all these things.

Well, it was kind of a bad, I mean, I'm not one to exaggerate individual days, events, but it was very iconic of what this campaign could be like.

Because on the one hand, you had Donald Trump going

out of his way

to go to the funeral of a working-class law enforcement person who all he did was try to pull over some person at a traffic violation.

And the person had a long, long record, should have never been out

and killed this

law officer with a young one-year-old child.

And Joe Biden, who calls everybody, Jack, he calls any person who's transgendered and says he's been offended, he calls.

He calls everybody.

And he can't call.

He won't call.

It's like East Palestine.

He won't go to East Palestine for months.

He won't even call the officer's wife.

Okay, that is bad and enough because it shows you what people say about the left-wing

movement in the country.

They don't want to talk, A, to the white working class at all.

And B, they don't.

They're for funding the police, so they're embarrassed.

He didn't call because he, A, he doesn't care.

and B, he was afraid that he might hear something he didn't want to hear.

And that's why Pete Buttigig and Joe Biden didn't go to East Palestine.

Had that been anywhere else, if that had been in a very wealthy community in Martha's Vineyard, or if it had been again in a black community, they would have been there in two seconds.

So that's the one thing.

But then to juxtapose it at the very same time,

to get Obama and Bill Clinton, and neither, they didn't comment on either.

And then Biden, these three ex, these three lifelong liberal polls, and their whole purpose was to shake down this new Democratic Party, which is the party of the wealthy, for $25 million.

I guess Queen Latifah was there, and they've got all these celebrities that raised $25 million.

And so if that is what this campaign shapes up to be, and Donald Trump,

did you hear what he said at the aftermath to the camera?

He said once

at the place of the funeral and again on an airplane.

He was at his best.

He said something to the effect, we're going to take care of this.

This can't go on.

This is not right.

This person should have never been let out.

This was a wonderful, it was really soft-spoken.

It just...

It really sharpened the difference.

If he can continue to do that, and it was sincere, it wasn't just opportunistic.

And if the Democrats are going to allow themselves, and I don't mean that, that's the wrong term,

they're naturally the party of the rich now, but they're going to remind people they're the party of the rich, that they're the Silicon Valley, Wall Street, bicoastal, academic, well-off party.

And they are going to, the Sam Bankman-Freeds, the George Soroses, the Mike Bloomberg, all the big donors, that's what they rely on.

And they're going to outspend and they're going to outraise the Republicans because that's where the money is.

And the only chance to stop that is to be a party of law enforcement, middle-class people, and share their concerns.

And Trump did a wonderful thing by going there, but they don't care.

It's just like we talked about judges letting people out.

And

they don't care.

Believe me, if this had been a trans swimmer who was snubbed at an awards ceremony and somebody said something untoward, Joe Biden would have called her, called

he or her.

He would have.

And he's done it in the past, but not this.

It's just something that he sees as a lose-lose situation.

He saw what happened when Letita James went into that

fireman

event and they started booing her and yelling Trump and she tried to quiet them.

She had no success whatsoever.

And so

it's really something class, class, class is the theme.

Class, class, class.

Be the party of the middle class.

Be the party of the upper middle class.

Be the party of the lower middle class.

Be the party of the aspiring poor.

You don't have to be the Mitt Romney stereotype anymore where they make fun of you because you didn't talk to your garbage collector outside your house or you have an elevator or you bought a Lincoln, all that stuff.

Don't let them do that to you.

And just mingle with people.

Don't just hang around with the old Republican constituencies, which are good constituencies.

I'm not making fun of them, but I'm thinking that this is very radical.

That never in my wildest dreams, when I grew up in a Democratic family, and as I said before, in 1980, I told my parents I could not vote for

Jimmy Carter.

And I voted for John Anderson Umrahim.

I was an idiot.

Yeah, I was an 18-year-old, stupid idiot.

Yeah.

Victor, I did also.

I mean, I was 27 years old.

Yeah.

And

I just said, I'm not voting Democratic anymore.

Yeah.

And I voted independent.

I voted for Ross Perot, too.

I hadn't made the change.

I'm still a registered independent, but I've never been a registered Republican.

But I vote for Republican candidates.

But in those years, I've kind of wasted my vote.

Rush, I talked to Rush.

I used to talk to him when I was in Miami a few times.

And I told him about Perot, and he turned white.

He goes, Victor, Victor, Victor.

What will you think?

Remember how Rush hated Perot?

Oh, yeah.

I said, Rush, I said, Rush, it wasn't like George H.W.

Bush was our conservative.

He says, I know, I know, but lost Perot.

And he went into that.

Remember that genius mimic he had of Perot's voice?

It was almost uncanny.

And he did that to me.

And it was really funny.

And I said, mea culpa, mea culpa.

But the point is that never in my right mind did I think that the

old JFK Hubert Humphrey

lunch bucket party would be the party of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

and

Jeff Bezos and his wife and

Steve Jobs, his widow, all of those people, all the academics, all of that left Sam Bain.

I mean,

I never thought the Democratic Party, and it started with Bill Clinton.

He was enraptured by celebrities and big money, and he really courted them.

And I never thought that the Republican Party, Bob Dole

and George H.W.

Bush, a little bit with George W.

Bush.

He appealed more to the middle class than his father did.

And he started a little bit of traction with the middle classes on cultural issues, especially.

And although I know that he did things that didn't work out, but

I don't have a negative view of George W.

Bush.

I don't.

I got criticized a lot for that, but there was something about him that was earthy, you know what I mean?

I know that he was entitled and all that, but he tried to reach out to people of a different class.

Did you ever engage him in anything?

Yeah, I did.

You got some award from him, didn't you?

I was the National Humanities Award, yeah, the medal.

But he had

a group of people that would

He said that each year or twice a year, some historians could come in.

It wasn't about politics.

It was just about issues.

And

he had a piece of paper and he wrote down, what books would you like me to read?

And I'm serious.

And then six months later, he asked you to come back.

And he discussed, he actually read those books.

And he talked about ideas and where do you think the country's going?

And it wasn't how do we screw our enemies?

And the rule was, if you told anybody you were going in, you didn't go back

and i went a number of times and this is the first time i've disclosed it but it was always i never told a soul a lot of people did it was very i it was kind of bad though because people it was a great honor to go to the white house and talk about books and history right right

but

some people really

like to tell people they were in the white house but then currency yeah yeah but then we got very very

unpopular some of the people that were asked tried to deny they ever went in there because it was rumored they had.

And I thought that's the time to be nice to somebody when he's down.

Well, we're recording on Good Friday, the day the cock crowed

for Peter.

It's always a good idea that you should avoid people at the height of their popularity and be nice to them when they're at their nadir of their popularity.

My mom always told me that.

I mean,

there was a judge who was unfairly, she was a judge, and there was a judge who was unfairly, she felt

smeared in the local papers, and he was under pressure to resign.

And

she had something at her, they had a little condo in Fresno, and they had a little party for judges, and she made a point to have him come over.

and lavish praise on him.

And I remember somebody told her, why is he here?

And she said, why shouldn't he be here?

He's innocent until proven guilty.

I don't think he's done anything wrong.

They're out to destroy him.

This is the time to

show your solidarity toward him.

And I think that's a good rule.

But anyway, I got off track, but the Republican Party has a historic opportunity to appeal to the middle classes and to get us off this tribal chauvinism and get us unified.

by the by solidarity with the middle classes.

And I think he can do it if he's careful.

Trump has good instincts about that.

He really does.

He feels

comfortable about that.

I've had so many people in New York tell me that Donald Trump was ostracized by the powers that be in New York, partly because of his class.

They thought he was crude, his accent, everything, but that he had a natural affinity for policemen, firepeople, construction workers.

Yeah.

And he really needs to develop that.

He did, he did.

That's how he got elected in 2016.

And to the degree that COVID overwhelmed him and he he wasn't able to do that he lost and he was outspent but

he's they should have something like that vote blue thing it should be vote red it should be a national

massive effort for small donations just to get people to donate and to middle class, working class, middle class, gas, gas, gas, food, food, food, safety, safety, safety, border, border, border, all the things that people care about.

And parents, I think.

You know, future education.

Education and parents.

We're the party of parents.

And then all of a sudden they stopped saying that.

They the Republicans.

That was

terrific.

I can remember when I was making $6,000 a year.

That was my Social Security shows at that.

From 1980 to 84,

I had two and then three children, a wife that could not work because she was home with the kids, an old house that was falling apart, and raisins at $600 a ton, $400, which was below the cost of production.

And I went to a George H.

Bush rally in Fresno, as I remember it.

And I went to a Michael Dukakis rally just to see them.

And it was really funny because Dukakis, who was an elite, was talking about the cost of living.

You know what George,

you know, he said, we got to get those capital gains taxed down.

That's all we got to do.

We got to get the taxes down and get those capital.

That all made economic sense.

He's right.

It would spur the economy.

But I didn't even know what a capital gains tax is.

I had no capital.

Nobody in my hometown had any capital.

If they were farming, they were broke.

Only the wealthy people had capital.

And I know that it's good for everybody to lower the capital gains.

I believe that sincerely.

But that's not a winning political issue to talk about.

you know, investment this and capital gains that.

You can do it, but that shouldn't be what you talk about.

And I think Trump understands that and

he can really appeal to people if he does.

Well, before we get more thoughtful about Donald Trump, Victor, I do want to

do want to close off talking about what happened in New York City with the

Biden Obama Clinton.

And I hope you'd be in the mood to trash, despite what your mother would say, you know, be nice and God bless your mother.

let's trash stephen colbert and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Good Friday, March 29th.

This episode is up on Thursday, April 4th.

So Stephen Colbert moderated a conversation between Biden, Obama, Clinton, and the clips I saw and the little reports I read about him.

Just he's he's he's like everybody else on late night television, except for Greg Gutfeld.

He's, he is absolutely insufferable.

But, Victor, this was a nice little petard hoisting, I thought, because the day before

in the New York Post, Pierce Morgan wrote a column attacking Colbert.

And this has nothing to do with Biden and the event.

It has to do with

Princess Kate

in the UK.

And a few months back or weeks back when

there was talk that why was she, you know,

hadn't she come out yet?

And there was gossip about that maybe her husband, the prince, was having an affair.

Stuff that's all blown up since when found out this poor lady's suffering from

cancer.

But Stephen Colbert was out on his TV show

sharing the mic, mocking her, mocking the at the time

having, he was having an affair.

Ha ha.

And then, oh, he had to apologize, as a number of people have since the princess announced her, that she has cancer.

But he didn't.

It's one of these non-apologies, total non-apology.

Yeah, you know, we said a little something, but now let's move on.

And Pierce Morgan drilled him a new one in this New York Post column.

I recommend folks go find it.

But it's A, nice to see Colbert hoisted on his petard, but also not unpleasant to see, I should say, not unpleasant, but unpleasant to see another example of some phony celebrity's non-apology.

He never,

he implied or acted like he was apologizing, but didn't.

And I don't think they think they have to.

And we've talked before, I don't think they have the sense of shame.

You know what I don't like about him, and I'll say that candidly, is this, it's the rise of snark.

It's always the double entendre with these people.

They look, they say something and they kind of wink at you or they kind of be, and that started with David Letterman.

When you looked at Johnny Carson, he didn't really do that.

And you did it.

And

when Letterman started getting popular, he would kind of be sarcastic or snarky or cynical.

It just didn't, it came off as mean-spirited.

And that has, and he wasn't that bad at it.

But Colbert is the epitome.

So is Jon Stewart.

It was, you never really knew what, there was nothing ever they could really say that was positive about anything other than their narrow partisan ideological agenda.

And they were so hypocritical.

And you're right about that.

He's so self-critical of everybody.

He's so critical and so self-sanctimonious.

Sanctimonious, absolutely sanctimonious.

And yet here he is, and he really goes after a woman who was struggling with cancer, and he just feeds all these rumors, and then he can't, and he has this podium that he influences people, and he can't even apologize.

And almost at the same time, that's why I mentioned Jon Stewart.

He was out there demagoguing Donald Trump.

And, oh,

he thinks that Mar-Lago has a half a billion dollar

market value, but it's evaluated at $17 million, so that's the real value.

And then we find out that his

luxury house or condo, whatever you call it, in New York, his taxes are assessed at $1.8 million.

He sells it for what, $18 million or something?

Yes.

And I mean, it was,

and

hello, John.

That's what you do, don't you?

You get a tax bill from what they feel is maybe not market value.

And then you try to sell it for as much as you can.

And guess what?

The real estate market is volatile and things go up and down.

And you wanted to capitalize it.

And you never said to anybody, oh,

I just sold this thing for $18 million.

I want to pay back property taxes because I was paying 1.8 and I should have been paying an evaluation based on an $18 million.

And I have to do this because this is what I demagogue Donald Trump about doing.

They never do.

They're so sanctimonious.

They think that, I don't know what it is about this elite left.

They think they're just everybody's moral

superior.

And he's one of the worst.

He really is.

And he's not funny.

And he has that little shtick that he, didn't he play that he was Bill O'Reilly or some type of conservative?

And I think he even ran for president, didn't he?

He had a fake candidacy.

And

it's just snorkel.

Who wants to watch a snorkel puss?

I don't.

He also, you know, the few times he's been interviewed, he plays this game, you know, I'm a practicing Catholic and I teach Sunday school.

And I'm like, wow, look, I'm a practicing, I'm a freaking sinner, excuse me,

a practicing Catholic sinner.

But he's, oh my gosh, he's, they broke the mall with him.

Hey, Victor, I got to tell you one last thing about this.

We'll leave Radio City Music Hall behind.

A listener.

who calls himself the original BDH, because I think those are his initials of his name.

But he wrote, what do the three presidents at yesterday's Democrat New York City fundraiser share in common?

All three grew up dirt poor, never had a private sector job, and are all fabulously wealthy, even billionaire status, include LBJ in that group.

How do you say grifters?

Yeah, it's hard.

That's a very good point.

I'm just, when I listened to you, I was just trying to think who was the most egregious.

The Clintons left office broke in 2001.

And the next thing we knew,

Bill Clinton, didn't he get $500,000 for

a speech in Putin's Moscow paid by the mayor of groups that were associated with the mayor of Moscow at the same time Hillary was,

I think she was either running or she was a U.S.

senator.

And then he, excuse me, he did that not in 2001, but much later when she was Secretary of State and she was adjudicating the sale of Uranium-1, remember, North American uranium to Russia.

And then when you look at what he was doing during the 2016, was it Vanity Fair or Atlantic?

It was one of these liberal megaphones where they were very, very worried about Bill Clinton.

They thought that he could hurt Hillary because he was on that Lolita Express or his version of it, and he was completely out of control.

And he was flying here and here, and he was getting all this money from dubious sources, and there were supposedly girls, and it was just.

I think they ransacked Haiti also.

Yeah, they did.

They did.

Through their foundation.

Their foundation was the big shakedown.

And then all of a sudden we find out that they're worth the

quarter.

She was.

giving corporations a list of gifts to get for home her home warming of her new home.

I remember that that came out, which kind of crystal.

Remember, these people who are socialists really do are materially

acquisitive and snobbish.

But they're DACA.

Exactly.

And it was weird that,

and then you look to the second one, Obama,

and he had nothing.

And he was a small-time grifter.

And we talked about Tony Resco in the past with that little lot expansion deal he did with that crook who was a felon, later incarcerated.

And then we had that little scam scam where all of a sudden, remember Michelle Obama got a triple in salary when he became a senator for working for the University of Chicago hospital.

She was taking over 300 grands.

She was.

The job was basically steering poor people away from the ER and the hospital.

And then

coupled with her rhetoric about raising the bar and we can't make it and they always do this to the victim thing.

But then he did something very strange, and I mentioned that before, the last year when Trump and Hilley inherited the political attention the media attention he bowed out and he understood a central truth that the more you didn't see him and the more you didn't like the more you didn't hear him the more you liked him he was the first black president he was

you know he was charismatic he looked he was out and he did what he wanted to do which he was he said not me they asked him what is your chief uh fault he said i'm lazy and he he went out and he just played golf the last year.

And he went from about 40% up to 52, 53%.

And it was amazing.

And he used that time to leverage his office.

So suddenly he got out and it was this next, was it $50 million from Netflix?

And it was just the memoir contracts and it was just...

It was just lavish.

Corporate America wanted to give all of their money to this couple.

And then all of a sudden, this man who had said

that we've got to bring the inner city, remember, to the suburbs.

And the suburbs

were culpable for their apartheid.

And he even had said at one point when he was a community organizer that it was perfectly okay to go to the homes of bank presidents and accuse them at home of redlining and discriminating.

All of a sudden, that was dropped.

And he had the wherewithal in succession to buy that

calorama, was it $8 million

for that mansion in Washington's tonious

environment, suburb?

And then he goes out and buys this 14-acre Martha's vineyard overlooking the coast.

I thought you never were supposed to buy coastal property.

Right.

According to Obama, global warming was going to destroy it.

And

indigenous Indian land, also.

Yes, it was.

And we, the public, shouldn't be responsible for the rich that live near the coast because we warned him about global warming.

And then we learned he's got like 2,000 gallons worth of propane that he's burning.

I thought, oh, that's a big false.

And the thing is huge.

So then I thought, well, he had a beautiful home in Chicago where Bill Ayers supposedly, allegedly wrote his memoirs.

Then he's got Kalorama.

That's two.

So why does he need three?

He made fun of Joe.

Remember he ran in 2008 making fun of John McCain, couldn't remember how many houses he had?

That was the insinuation that John McCain was the idol rich and he was senile.

But in any case, that was three.

So I thought, you know what?

That'll be it.

He's not going to do another one.

And then he goes over to Hawaii

and he builds this mansion.

And the people get very angry because it disrupts

natural drainage to the beach.

And he does all these environmental stuff.

And he builds another one right on the beach.

And you want to to say, Barack,

for eight years, you told us not to live on the water, that global warming was going to inundate.

And we don't want to subsidize the losses of people on the beach.

And now you build a big beach, and it's secluded.

And you were a man of the people.

And can people walk from the interior right by your house?

I don't think so.

You're not going to let them have access to your waterfront estate.

Why not?

And then, you know,

it's just, it was just, you saw what he was the whole time.

And he was somebody who was in it for the adulation.

And he,

at times, he played the right race guard.

At times, he divided the country by tribe.

And

he leveraged all of that.

And he got where he always wanted to be, an idle, retired, multi-multi-half-billionaire.

And that's where he is.

And you're right.

He started.

And then when you finish that troika on stage,

good old Joe Biden from Scranton,

never had a job in the private sector.

Oh, he had a private sector job.

Remember, he said

he had to quit because he was moral and he worked for an insurance company that went after a man with a damaged penis.

Remember that?

And we found out that that story was completely bogus.

There was no record that he'd ever been on that case at all.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, I never heard that one.

Yeah, he was told that was in the, I read the Robert Hurr report.

Out of the blue, he says, you know, I,

an insurance company,

there was a guy who got injured in the job and he had a penis damage.

And,

you know, anytime he can talk about sex and any manifestation in that same conversation, he's talking about how hot his wife is in a bikini to the special prosecutor.

Anytime he can do that, he never misses an opportunity.

But how did he end up with three

really expensive homes?

I don't understand it.

And how did the big guy, I mean, how did that family conglomerate get $25 million?

How did his brother write him a check for, was it, was it $200,000 or $400,000?

$200,000 loan repayment, loan repayment.

And then you think, okay,

you...

you get a big check from your brother as soon as the Chinese money comes into the family coffers and he writes at the bottom loan repayment.

So therefore it's a loanly payment but do you do you have any paper do you have any iou do you have any documentation that that's not just a distribution from a foreign source no

and uh do you can you tell us who paid is it true that you that hunter paid for your utilities as he attested in his emails on the laptop.

So he became very wealthy is what I'm getting at.

And when Robert Hurr asked, why did you take these things out when you knew in 2017 that it was unlawful to have classified files in your possession?

And he said, I had two purposes.

I thought they would be helpful for my political career, which is exactly what Donald Trump said, that he basically wanted these files to consult because he thought they were going to fall in the wrong hands, or they'd be used against him, or they'd be misinterpreted or abused.

And people didn't believe that.

But apparently they believed that it was okay for Biden.

And the second thing was he had an $8 million million book deal.

And he thought that he needed exclusive information that would make it interesting.

So he needed classified files to consult.

And so here we are.

You're absolutely right.

There are three working class people who went into politics.

They were all men of the left.

They all professed that the rich were the target.

tax the rich.

Joe Biden can't finish a sentence without the rich paying their fair share.

And in the case of Joe Biden, of course, his son is facing massive tax non-compliance charges.

And if there was any justice in the world, the IRS would be going after him for the monies he received without paying taxes on them, no doubt.

But

they all talked a good class warfare, and they all became multimillionaire.

And they all schmooed with celebrities in Silicon Valley Titan.

That's who their natural constituency is.

He does not want, Bill Clinton does not want to go anywhere near Arkansas.

And Barack Obama does not want to go back to his Chicago neighborhood.

And Joe Biden doesn't go to Scranton, believe me.

Yes.

Griftio ergo sum.

I think that's the correct Latin for this, Victor.

We're going to now

get your

thoughts about a book you've written, The Case for Trump, which is celebrating its

fifth anniversary, and there's a revision.

And let's get your thoughts about that when we come back from these important messages.

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

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So Victor, the case for Trump

was written five years ago in March, best-selling book.

You've written a new introduction to it.

I wonder how you've approached it, how you would make...

I mean, obviously, there's a different case to make for Donald Trump in 2024

than there was in

2019.

But how have you approached this?

And it's a new edition, right?

Or a new.

Yes, there's a new paperback.

It's going to come out in August.

And I had written an update.

of Donald Trump from the election

up to 2021,

the Biden first, or the paperback edition.

This is a new paperback, and I was asked to update it, but I didn't want to just do another little preface.

So I wrote a pretty long, I think it's 18,000 words, a huge update for the paperback.

So it has new material.

And I wanted to explain two things.

Number one,

Why I went back and looked at the polls in January, right after January 6th and on into February, that was the nadir of Donald Trump.

He was polling 35% popularity.

It was only his mega base.

I didn't want to, I don't mention all, but there were people you wouldn't imagine that were disassociating themselves from him.

And that was for three reasons.

One was, of course, the left said that January 6th was an insurrection and they had fortified the capital with 30,000 troops.

So besides the January 6th

and Broglio, there was this idea that he had Linwood

and he had Sidney Powell and other assorted characters that were insisting that the Dominion machines were communicating with Venezuela and China and all of that.

And that brought his

ratings way down.

And then I think, you know what was the worst was, on January 5th, the day before the Capitol protest riot, whatever you call it,

that was the special election in Georgia.

And no one in their right mind thought earlier that, I mean, Purdue had won the popular vote during the November election.

So nobody thought that these two Republicans could ever lose in Georgia because they didn't win a majority.

And they were going to go up, both of them.

That was very rare.

I think it was the first time in Georgia history or maybe the second that they were both up for election.

And more importantly, Jack, it determined the fate of the Senate.

And if they were to win that,

then

after losing the House, they would be able to ram through a Biden agenda.

We knew Biden was going to be president, despite the Trump effort to suggest that the election was fraudulent.

So what did he do?

He basically did two things.

He offended the independents, and then he basically told people their vote wouldn't count.

And the result was 700,000 Republicans who had voted November for Purdue didn't show up.

They lost both seats and they lost the Senate.

And with the loss of the Senate, they had lost the legislature, the whole Congress, and the presidency.

And people

blame Donald Trump.

And so what brought him back?

This is when everybody was talking about an excendent DeSantis who in 2022, when you had that kind of disappointing, squeaky win, he won by a million votes.

And they were already mentioning him and other candidates as well.

So it was the most remarkable

political comeback since Richard Nixon in 1960s, who said, you don't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore after he lost the California governorship.

And then six years later, he was president.

So how'd he do it?

I try to explain that.

And it's a long story, but I think most of us realize that there were certain things that really helped him.

And one was the complete collapse of the Biden administration.

And by that, I mean that Afghanistan, as soon as the Afghanistan humiliation was fully absorbed and digested, Biden never again was at 51%.

And then it just got downhill with the hyperinflation, 9%, and all of that.

And Trump.

People took their attention away from Trump the man to Trump the record.

And they started comparing inflation, crime, foreign policy, energy with Biden, and he started to creep back up.

And then in addition, people started to look at January 6th a little bit differently.

They overplayed their hand.

Lynn Cheney and Adam Kittenzer

were the only Republicans because they were not really ever going to be elected again.

And they both had voted to impeach Trump.

And the committee was kind of one-sided.

The stories about five policemen were false dying.

The only person who died violently probably was Ashley Babbitt, who was shot unarmed.

And then we had

the New York Times reporter who was caught by Operation Veritas saying that FBI informants were.

Anyway, the point I'm getting at is there was more to January 6th than the boilerplate massive violent insurrection.

Five people died that were long, all of that crap.

And people started looking at it a different way, and they started to compare it to the May, June, July 2020 riots.

And I can go on, but basically the introduction says this is where he is now.

And no one in their right mind thought that at 76 he would be in this position.

And the old narrative that his opponents used quite effectively for a while, we thought DeSantis or Haley

or Pence that he can't beat Biden.

He's pulling behind.

He started to pull even and then then ahead of Biden.

And that just demolished the opposition.

And then I do the second thing, and nobody in their right mind thought,

A, that they would try to take him off the ballot.

B,

that they would try to, in that civil suit, if you read the E.

Gene Carroll, people forget that is the most egregious of all of them.

of all of the law problems.

And I've gone through them on this podcast.

And then to have Jack Smith charge him for the identical crime that Joe Biden has been exonerated for, and then the insurrection element is going to fall apart.

And then Letita James with no crime, no victim, no real violation of law, $450 million.

And then we get into the Fannie Willis circus, the Alvin Bragg, that no federal prosecutor wanted to pursue that so-called campaign violation of having a non-disclosure agreement with Stormy Daniel.

He did.

I think that's going to fall.

But my point is

that too, the Biden record, the rehabilitation and re-examination of January 6,

and the sheer hysteria and lawfare and get him off,

all of his opponents in the primary could not fight that.

They were in the impossible situation of saying, I'm going to criticize Donald Trump because it's a natural thing for a rival to do.

And people would say, okay,

so you're on the side of Letita James and Alvin Bragg.

And they never could square that circle.

Haley couldn't squeeze.

And the only possible,

it was amazing, the only possible argument was Donald Trump is in a possible situation.

I deplore what they're doing.

And

I am in a better situation with more ability to get Donald Trump out and make sure that he gets

fairness under the law and no one else gets into his situation again.

And then nobody made that argument.

And so he had this rapid rise and I explained why it happened.

And I end the introduction by saying, but I'm not going to suggest to you that he was passive and all of these things were just, he was carried along the river, so to speak, downstream.

No, he changed a lot.

He started to

modulate, I looked and he moderated a lot of his language.

And I think the best thing in this process was that he had been kicked off Twitter, and then he went and got the truth social.

So he wasn't back on new, he was off old Twitter.

He wasn't back on new Twitter.

He was invited, but he didn't use it.

And the result was he was not tweeting to 70 or 80 million people six, seven times a day, you know what I mean, on filtered.

And so all of that incrementally, but in aggregate, explains why right now he's three to five points ahead in most of the nine to ten key, except for Michigan.

Pennsylvania and Michigan are closer.

But maybe Pennsylvania is dead even.

But Michigan, he's got three or five.

And nobody thought that would be possible if we were back on January of 2021.

Well, Dick.

I hope people like it.

And

I also finished just quickly that's saying that the Ajaxian tragic hero is absolutely constant.

In the book, I think it's been borne out

that

Donald Trump brought to the political arena certain skills that were absolutely valuable to get this inert, ossified country moving again, whether it was what he did with energy, what he did with foreign policy, how he redirected our attention to China.

whether it was

championing the industrial base, getting tough on immigration.

But he bought the only way you could do that was to have a certain set of skills that were going to offend everybody.

And he did.

And the people invited him.

He was the, you and I have talked about the high noon, the Shane, the Magnificent Seven,

the Searchers character.

But as he got more successful,

people started to have a margin of error or they could relax or they thought things were going in them and they started to focus on the tweets,

i.e.

his six shooter and they thought not in my name now things are going well I never invited this crude gunfighter in and that's the way all tragic heroes are they're out they're outcast and they have skills that can save society but in the process of saving society they offend it by their very success and then they become expendable And that happens to a lot of people and that happened to him.

But we'll see if he has a second, you know, sometimes in America, there's second chances.

And we'll see.

So let's.

I hope he's learned from his earlier.

He's not going to learn from Professor Hanson.

Who will he learn from?

But Victor, we're almost out of time, but I just want to press on this a little more.

And

because you have a few ultra pieces on this, and let's do that right after this final important message.

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

Victor, I may be asking you to do an impossible thing in like two or three minutes.

Talk about,

it's your show, talk about however long you want, but you have a two-part.

It's going to extend it to three parts, but or more, but it's titled Trump versus Trump.

And

you're saying the greatest threat to Donald Trump's election,

potential election in 2024, is Donald Trump.

I think that's

fair compacting of it.

Just briefly,

unless you're going to repeat what you

already said,

what is Donald Trump's grandest threat to himself?

His grandest threat to himself is that he is poised because of the, as I said, the mediocre, disastrous, not mediocre, disastrous, what will be four years of Joe Biden and the mistreatment that he has suffered from this extra-legal campaign to destroy him emotionally, financially, psychologically, materially, and the empathy that naturally accrues to him and his record that was superb for four years.

He is in a position to win the Senate, to win the House, to be re-elected after this hiatus in a Glover Cleveland fashion, and to have people like the Heritage Foundation to give him 20,000 vetted names and a whole agenda so he doesn't end up with Scaramucci and Omarosa and Anonymous and all that stuff.

He has to worry about his health because he's 76 and what he's doing would kill you or me

and the stress he's under.

He's got to take care of himself.

He's lost weight.

He looks good.

He's sharp.

This idea that he's senile, that the left is peddling is not true.

You listen to him.

But there's no need to call

Nikki Haley your bird brain

or to go after Ron DeSantis about how you destroyed him.

He could even call...

He's going to need Ron DeSantis.

He should incorporate Ron DeSantis.

He should understand that he can't run for re-election.

So these people want to be in the party.

They want to be on good terms with him.

And even Nikki Haley will reach out to him.

He's got to accept that and make sure that

he does not lose that 5% to 10%

of the Republican base as he did in 2020 to Joe Biden.

He's got to give those people a reason to vote for him.

And

the reason is, look at my record.

I will repeat my record again.

Look at Joe Biden, what he's done to the country.

Do you want to support that and subsidize that?

And yes, I understand you don't like it, but it's not about me.

And I'm going to try to do things that are going to reassure you that it's about my record.

And so he doesn't need to get into the ad hominem cul-de-sac.

I understand why he does it.

He goes after a judge.

He goes after, you know, these are cooks.

It's to shake them up and let the people know that he's not going to be a patsy, but

he's got to finesse them and turn their animus toward him back onto them in a boomerang fashion and make them look silly and small.

And he can do it with humor.

He's got, I don't know why he doesn't use that.

And I've mentioned that before in this broadcast when his brother tragically died young and people were trying to press him.

Well, why didn't you drink or do you drink?

And he said, oh my God, can you imagine what I'd be like given my personality if I drank?

And it was funny in a somber occasion.

And he was right.

And what he was saying is, I have a tendency to excess.

And alcohol would only accentuate that.

In other words, he was self-critical.

And if he can be self-critical and joke about himself, and he has that ability,

he's a naturally...

What I guess what's kind of tragic is he's not a vindictive person like Joe Biden is.

I know that people are going to say, Victor, are you crazy?

No, he does not want to, he didn't do the FBI what Obama and Biden did.

He didn't do the IRS.

There's no Lois Learners.

He didn't do, he didn't have a Comey

or a McCabe.

He didn't, they were all out to get him.

And

he's not going to go weapon.

He's right when he said, it was another brilliant thing he said.

My revenge is success.

All he has to do is keep reading it.

I'm going to get back at the left by uniting the country.

If we unite the country, there will be no hard left.

There will be no squad.

There will be no Bernie Sanders.

There will be no, they will have nothing to say to people because they had their chance and they failed.

And I'm going to unite you around prosperity, deterrence.

safety, local control, parents.

And he'll win.

I know people that I didn't think would vote for him.

They'll vote for him.

They'll give money to him.

If he can just control it and not get into

a non-entity.

He doesn't have to live blog the Oscars and start making fun of

master ceremony.

It doesn't need to, there's no upside to that.

Well, I just repeat the aforementioned Trump versus Trump articles.

These are pieces you, Victor, have written for the Blade of Perseus, your website at Victorhanson.com.

I'd like to encourage our listeners to visit.

And you'll find

roughly two books worth every year of Victor writings, exclusive to that.

$50 for a full year, but

$5 a month.

So it's discounted if you take the full year option.

You'll also find links to Victor's other writings, his American Greatness Essays, syndicated columns, the archives of these podcasts, his various books, including the book that's coming out in a few weeks, The End of Everything, May 7th.

If you haven't ordered it, go to Amazon and do so.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I write

Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter.

It comes out every Friday, and it has 14 recommended readings.

I have a link to an article I've come across the previous week that I think is really good, that you will enjoy.

And I have an excerpt from the article also.

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Now, Victor, if I can only find in my misplaced papers, a comment that I had pulled aside to read at,

you know what?

That's fine.

I want to say just in ending, though, that

I'm not critical.

My point is I'm trying to suggest that these areas of strength that

Donald Trump has innately and through his experience, he needs to focus on his strengths.

And that is he's funny, he's charismatic, he's self-deprecatory.

And what he's not good at, he doesn't have to do because he doesn't need it.

And that is getting into these dead-end riffs with

nobodies and just diverting his attention.

And I think he's...

The final thing I'll say is,

when I meant this is not about Donald Trump, this country is at the abyss.

I know everybody says that every election, but this time it is.

This can't endure another four years of this crazy neo-socialist Jacobin stuff.

And so he represents not Donald Trump.

He represents the aspirations of millions of Americans that see no way out.

They don't believe there's three biological sexes.

They don't believe that 10 million people from a foreign nation flooding their non-existent border is normal.

They don't think smash and grab and carjacking and the knockout game is good.

They don't think Afghanistan should ever be repeated.

They don't think that we should pull out and sell Israel down the river and pull out our support.

So he represents all of that.

And if he and he has to encapsulate that idea that it's not about me, it's that I have to be the vessel to stop this madness.

And that carries an enormous responsibility more even than 2016 or 2020.

And I'm confident he can do it.

But he has to be self-disciplined and be careful.

Every 1%

that he loses may be vital.

And I'm saying this because 70%

of the electorate will not vote on Election Day.

And the error rate, again, for those ballots has diminished by a magnitude from what it used to be with absentee.

And he's going to be outraised by three and a half, four to one.

And yet he can overcome all of that if he's just cognizant of who he has to win over and to reassure them.

And I think he can do it.

I get a lot of criticism for saying that.

People say, Victor, screw you.

He doesn't have to do anything.

They've screwed him over.

They mean exactly.

But he does need people.

that I don't agree with on a lot of issues, but who on the vast scale of 51% conservative versus 49% non-conservative, they're 51% conservative.

And I'll take them.

And I want them to get out and vote.

And that's what

he needs them.

He needs not just

an arrow, he needs a landslide to send a message to stop not just the political revolution, but the cultural and social revolution.

If he gets 53%, 54% of the vote, carries the Senate and House, he can stop this madness.

Yeah.

Well, it's got to be stopped.

And if you're looking at it, Reagan did,

and it's to his ears if that, that, that your, because your advice is look at Reagan.

He's head Jimmy Cardner, no inordinate fear of communism.

It was all started in some ways under Carter.

And Reagan, Reagan stopped it and gave you 12 years, 12 years of normality.

Well, I

did find a comment, and we're going to end the show now with this.

Folks who go to iTunes and Apple leave comments.

They rate the show zero to five stars.

4.9

is the plus is the average.

So thanks.

You appreciate Victor's wisdom.

And we also do, by the way, read the comments on Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

But here's one comment left on iTunes Apple, and it's titled The Best.

Nobody Explains It Better Than BDH, an Uber Intellect.

That is easy to follow.

Just finished up The Dying Citizen, a masterpiece that hits all bases.

Extremely thorough and informative writing by Mr.

Hansen.

Thank you for being a beacon of hope.

T.

Thomas FL.

Victor,

you beacon of hope.

I appreciate all the wisdom you shared today

and

every day.

It's a great honor to be able to engage with you in this

way.

Thanks for sharing all the wisdom, folks who,

well, thanks for listening.

And especially if you're new to this podcast, thank you.

Hope you're coming back.

And if you're interested in past podcasts, go to Victor's website.

You'll find the archives.

You can hear his brilliance

four times a week.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thanks very much.

Thank you again for listening, everyone.