Wisconsin Watch Dog: Interview with Ron Johnson

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Hi, this is Victor Davis Hanson.

I'm alone today.

Sammy and Jack are not with me.

We're doing one of our interviews that we do on occasion, and we're really honored to have the senior senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson.

He's been elected three times.

He's on a lot of committees.

I think you all know him because we've discussed him on the podcast during the COVID crisis.

He was one of the few voices that really early on expressed real doubt about this national lockdown and whether this quarantine that was imposed on us would actually and the end result cause more damage with missed surgeries medical procedures spousal abuse familial abuse economic damage than the actual virus I think he was proved right on that he was also a

frontrunner and arguing that some of our pharmaceuticals had off-label uses and

one of them was ivermedicine.

People demonized him for that.

Again, I think he was proven right.

We now know from a number of studies that ibermedsin has utility, as did some of the other safe but off-level drugs that Senator Johnson tried to bring to the fore.

And

we've also seen him on the Bush, excuse me, on the Biden problems.

He's been one of the most...

forthright

and powerful senators trying to get to the bottom of the Biden family conglomerate.

And we're here to talk to him today about three or four issues, especially the border Ukraine and maybe the politics of the Republican Party.

So welcome, Senator.

Very proud and happy to have you here.

Well, Victor, it's a real honor for me to be talking to you.

Yeah, we're going to take a brief break and we'll be right back with Senator Ron Johnson.

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And we're back.

You know, we're seeing 8 million people, Senator, coming across the border.

Before we get into some of the politics,

what is your theory about what they're doing?

It has to be deliberate.

Is it to get new constituents?

Is it lax voting laws?

70% don't show up on election day.

So some of these people might vote.

What do you think is behind it all?

I think it really is trying to get more voters, just change the outlook of the electorate.

There's no other rational explanation for this.

The risks they are taking in terms of our own national security, the businesses, I always call it the multi-billion dollar business model, some of the most evil people on the planet, the human traffickers, the sex traffickers, the drug traffickers.

Why would you risk all that?

But obviously they're just welcoming these people.

You know, probably at least 6 million people have come across and more than been encountered.

Why would you do it other than to gain votes?

They're highly appreciative, obviously, of Biden and the Democrats who have let them come in this country.

I mean, who wouldn't want to come to this country?

And you

throw on top of that their drive toward mail-in balloting, their drive toward absentee balloting, while at the same time relaxing all the controls or the same thing.

We always say that we want to make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.

Democrats want to make it easy to vote and easy to cheat.

They do.

What is your take about this very bizarre recent development of 20 to 25,000 largely Chinese

military age, if I could use that term people have, of Chinese nationals coming in?

Are they coming in without

the knowledge of the Chinese government?

Or what's your take on it?

It's never really happened before.

My guess is the Chinese government is well aware of it, as they're well aware of it.

I think they're actually pushing the fentanyl.

I mean, the precursors, they were sending those through the mail.

We clamped down on that to a certain extent.

So then they just started sending all the precursor chemicals into Mexico to have them.

uh compounded and then send into the united states so that that's one way that china can weaken this country send in some military age men i don't know to what extent they have connected to the People's Liberation Army.

We do know that the vast majority of unaccompanied children are 15 and older.

So many of these 6 million people who come in here are military-aged men.

And of course, they've come from more than 150 different countries.

The stats in terms of how many people on the terror watch list, this is frightening.

This is an obvious, clear, and present danger to this nation, but it's one that by and large the mainstream media has ignored until Mayor Adams and Mayor Johnson started screaming about their sanctuary cities couldn't handle it.

You think if the Republicans were to take the Congress, increase the margin and the House, take the Senate and the White House, there would be mechanisms that all of you could work together to stop it and deport the people who came in illegally?

Or is it just so far gone it's

beyond comprehension?

Well, I've always said, and it's true, that President Trump had the authority to close the border, and he did so now.

the Supreme Court in a 2018 ruling said that our existing law exudes deference to the president.

And that deference is what President Trump used to secure the border.

Now, under a great deal of resistance, there were court challenges, things that have weakened that authority.

But then President Biden used that exact same authority to open up the border.

So Biden has the authority to do it.

And let's face it, Republicans in Congress, to the extent that court decisions have weakened his authority, we'd be happy to override those court decisions and give him that full authority back to secure the border.

But the problem is he wants an open border.

Democrats in Congress want an open border.

They cause this problem.

And that, quite honestly, was the fatal flaw in McConnell's decision to negotiate in secret with people

who aren't negotiating in good faith.

So you need a president who wants to do this, or we would need at least 60 votes in the Senate to pass bills that would force a president to secure the border.

I mean, the whole problem with that negotiation was that it actually limited a future president's ability to secure the border.

I mean, I can go into detail on that, but I mean, the bill that was negotiated by McConnell, I know he had Langford do it, but McConnell was the mastermind.

That bill actually weakened a president's authority, which is why it was worse than doing nothing.

Why, when it was obvious to everybody, and I think Speaker Johnson listed 60-some

presidential orders that were overturned by Biden and allowed this border to be open, Given that fact, and given the fact that Donald Trump did not really request new authorization, legal authorization, or even a lot of new monies, why did the Republicans fall for this last-minute Hail Mary that we need new laws or we need new money when all you had to do was close the border with the resources that we had?

It was doable.

What was the logic behind the Senate leadership that thought that was it to help the Democrats?

That was baffling, as baffling to me as it was the open border.

What was the intent behind it?

They want open borders for corporate ag or what?

So first of all, it wasn't Republicans that fell for it.

It was McConnell

and a couple of his loyalists.

Again, McConnell's top priority was Ukraine.

We knew that when he wanted to attach $6 billion of Ukraine funding to one of the original CRs.

And the House, that wasn't going to pass through the House.

So in the end, Republicans forced McConnell and we forced him to actually vote against that bill that he was proposing.

You know, we denied closure on that bill.

And so the CR was passed without $6 billion worth of Ukraine funding.

But I think, I don't know who made the first connection, but it was a brilliant political point that we ought to secure our own border before we spend money to help any nation secure its border.

And that obviously applied to Ukraine.

So no matter where you fell in the spectrum in terms of support for Ukraine, the top priority should have been to secure our own border.

And so late in the year, October, November, McConnell was forced and pressured into

basically agreeing with that position.

And so he recommended we deny cloture on the first supplemental military funding bill.

Now, I didn't think he was serious about it.

I figured he was going to go through some kind of charade, but again, Republicans denied cloture on that bill.

Schumer and McConnell wanted to rush a negotiation through and pass it before Christmas.

I led the the effort to call the Republican Conference Committee in committee meeting in January.

And so that pretty well killed the rush to pass a border bill and Ukraine funding prior to Christmas.

Again, they always like using those deadlines.

The end result of that was McConnell went into seat negotiations.

They were complex.

I think Schumer probably was pretty truthful when he talked to Politico afterwards and said that we were playing chess,

McConnell's playing checkers, and we are in a far better position on the border than we were three weeks ago.

I mean, basically, the Democrats were negotiating for political cover.

Yeah.

And McConnell gave it to them.

What we were asking for, we never asked for an immigration bill.

What we were saying repeatedly in conference.

And actually, as John Hoven made, made this point first, he said, listen, we can't trust Biden to

follow through on any agreement agreement we make.

We need some kind of forcing mechanism.

So I seized on that.

And what I suggested was make Ukraine funding contingent on actually securing the border.

Put out metrics.

And I've come from business.

There's all kinds of performance metrics you apply to business.

So they wanted $60 billion

over 12 months, give them $5 billion a month if they start securing the border.

That's all we asked for.

a forcing mechanism because he has the authority.

Again, if there was some strengthening authority, we'd have been happy to do that.

But we we weren't asking for an immigration bill.

And the secret negotiations allowed McConnell to work behind the scenes, not tell anybody what was happening.

We would ask Langford, we would ask McConnell, well, you know, negotiations are so complex, it's too detailed, I can't get into the details.

So we only found out about the week before that we finally got the language.

You know, the elements, the elements sounded pretty concerning at that point in time.

And when they finally dropped the bill, the bill is actually worse than what was being leaked.

And let me just tell you exactly why it was worse than doing nothing.

you know the 5 000 threshold was bad enough okay 5 000 threshold then that it was mandatory for the president to stop um

you know processing asylum claims you know shut down the border send them home well at 4 000 it became discretionary

so what that would imply remember the supreme court said current law exudes deference If all of a sudden you're codifying the fact that the president doesn't have the discretion until we average 4,000 immigrants a day day over seven days to stop

processing asylum claims, you're reducing that power.

And then even worse, that authority would only exist for three years based on that bill.

So

all of a sudden, Congress is stepping into it and saying that the president, by codifying by saying the president or codifying the president having authority to secure the border or to shut down or stop processing asylum claims, he didn't have authority to begin with is what you're saying in CODFIN.

So that's why it was worse than doing nothing.

Very few people talked about that.

But from my standpoint, that was the worst part of that bill.

Well, politically, as we went from two to four to five to six, you could see the issue climb up in the polls from the fourth most important in the minds of voters to third to second.

And then some polls, it was the most important.

And then obviously it became, when you looked at the actual polling, it was 70-30 against the present open border.

So Biden,

it seems like he lured the Republican majority leader and hoping that he would be followed for the Republicans then to meet the demands of what was essentially, as you pointed out, still an open border.

And then when they found they could no longer do that or they were being ambushed, then the whole deal would collapse and they'd say that you own the border now.

In fact, that's what Van Jones and people.

on MSNBC and CNN said.

Well, the Republicans had a chance to close it.

They collapsed.

They own it now.

The reason many of us are so outspoken now about what McConnell did is a complete breach of what we were talking about in the conference.

He didn't get lured into this.

This was his game plan.

He masterminded this.

Okay.

So

we weren't duped.

We weren't lured into this thing.

All we were asking for was a forcing mechanism to force Biden to secure the border and use

his desire for Ukraine funding to leverage, as leverage, to secure the border.

And McConnell does these secret negotiations with people that want an open border, that were just looking for political cover, and he gave it to them.

Do you think he wanted an open border?

I'm not dropping that shumer in that quote to Politico, basically admitted, yeah, we were playing chastity, playing checkers, and now we're in great shape on the border.

I mean, it's so stupid.

Was the open border actually something he would prefer?

Was his view on the border, if you take Ukraine out of the equation, was it any different than the Democrat?

I think his top priority was getting Ukraine funding any way he could do it.

He realized that unless he did something token on the border,

and he also realized the Democrats weren't going to be serious about actually securing the border, so it was going to be a difficult negotiation.

So you have to do it in public.

I mean, you can't do this behind closed doors.

So again, I can't explain.

And I hate to say this, but I'm going to say the stupidity of McConnell in doing this.

It was just utterly stupid what he did.

And the result, again, I can't imagine a leader of a party in the Senate giving political cover like McConnell gave to the Democrats.

Has it ever happened in history before?

This is a winning issue.

I've been here for 13 years.

There's never been an issue in which the American public is on the side of the Republicans than on the border.

And McConnell pretty well frittered that all away.

Now, our only savior here might be in the House if they can stand strong and continue to use that leverage for Ukraine funding.

Yeah.

Let me get to Ukraine.

So

we had Vladimir Putin go into Georgia in 2008.

He went in

in 2014 to the Donbass in Crimea during the Obama administration when Biden was vice president.

We had that strange hiatus under, not strange, but under Trump for

four years.

And then he went in again in 2022.

So three out of the last four administrations, Putin has gone into the board.

I think you make the argument that whenever he senses that a president has lost deterrence, and maybe in 2008 Bush had, given the quagmire in Iraq and maybe Afghanistan, he acts.

But what I'm curious about is at no time

during the Obama administration was it the position of the Obama State Department to say we have to restore Donbass that we lost and Crimea to Ukraine.

In fact, they cut offensive weapons.

So then we go into the Biden administration.

Well, even Trump said,

Trump never said we have to force Putin out of Crimea and Donbass.

He just accepted it from the previous administration.

Didn't like it, but he accepted.

Biden didn't come in and say, we've got to force them out.

Once they expanded their aims by trying to take Kiev,

then everything changed.

But my point is,

do you really think given the long, complex history of Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine and the fact that Crimea had been a part of Russia since 1873 until 1994, and it actually declared itself an independent autonomous country?

for I think three years before Ukraine seized it, and they seized it before they, I guess they thought Russia would.

But given that history and given the fact that they're right on the borders and they have large Russia,

was it ever going to be possible for NATO or the United States to reclaim those at a cost that would be tolerable?

Did you think it was?

So, Victor, I have a unique perspective on this.

I was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe, chairman ranking member for about 10 years.

So I've been to Georgia.

I've been to Ukraine probably six times, whatever.

I was the only member of Congress who went to Zelensky's inauguration.

I went back a few months later with Chris Murphy, who was, I think, then the ranking member.

And so I had discussions with Zielinski.

And at that time, Zelensky wanted to do a peace agreement with Putin because he knew he couldn't dislodge Putin from the Donbass or from Crimea.

He knew it wouldn't be popular, but he was, I mean, he was saying that was a major goal of his is to do a peace agreement with Putin so he could move on and you know build Ukraine and try and defeat corruption.

I think he was absolutely sincere about that.

I would love to hear what Boris Johnson said when he flew into Istanbul as they're trying to do a peace agreement a few weeks into the war.

So Zelensky knew at that point in time that he couldn't dislodge Russia.

Now two years

into bloody stalemate, over 100,000 Ukrainians dead, over 100,000 Russians dead, hundreds of thousands more wounded, probably a trillion dollars in economic destruction to Ukraine.

The only way this ends, because Putin will not lose this war.

That's the point I'm trying to make clear.

He won't lose this.

They got four times the population.

The average age of the Ukrainian soldier right now is 43 years.

They can make 4.5 million, 155 million millimeter shells a year.

The West is about a million.

By the way, they make them for 600 bucks a shell.

We get charged $6,000 by our military-industrial complex.

That's a different subject.

So again,

losing the war is existential for Putin.

He's not going to do that.

So the only way this ends is with the negotiated settlement.

Because every day that goes by, it gets worse and worse.

So, you know, more Ukrainians die, more Russians die, more Ukraine gets destroyed.

So, our policy ought to be moving toward forcing some kind of negotiated settlement.

We should have been doing that really from the get-go, but we didn't.

But two years into this thing,

we have to recognize that reality.

And unfortunately, there aren't many people in Washington, D.C.

that are

dialed into reality.

Don't you think it would be wise?

I mean,

what the left is trying to do is saying the Republicans are isolationists.

They want to cut off Ukraine.

Ukraine will be swallowed.

They're pro-Putin.

But wouldn't it be better for the Republican congressional leadership to say, look, we have an outline, a general outline that was de facto accepted by Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden until the end, in which

something along the lines that

Putin gets to say that he institutionalized what was going to be there anyway, the Russian control of these long-disputed borderlands in Donbass and Crimea.

Ukraine is not part of NATO, but we will give it aid to defend itself if they try another attack into the middle.

And then we have some type of...

Finland neutrality where they don't join NATO, but they're armed enough to defend themselves.

Is there something that you guys could articulate so that when you talk about restricting aid, they don't just characterize you and demonize you as isolationists that are going to let all the poor Ukrainians be slaughtered by Putin?

Is it wise to be given a general outline of how you on the Republican side can see this could be solved and then in some way package that with an aid program that is not expansionary or aggressive or preemptive into Mother Russia like some of these crazy people want to do?

Well, it's always good to be for something.

I agree with that.

I mean, when you're starting to talk about how do you end the war, it gets pretty complex.

And to come up with a proposal for that would be pretty complicated as well, and get all Republicans on board.

I mean, that's not really, I will say, I think this war was entirely preventable.

I don't think

Putin ever would have invaded with Trump as president.

No, he wouldn't.

But even early on, I was talking to Wendy Sherman.

She's making a trip over there.

This was way before they invaded.

And I was just asking, so are we providing them lethal defensive weaponry?

So, oh, yeah, Senator.

Well, are we doing it visibly?

Are we doing enough?

Well, we don't want to get in an arms war.

So they did nothing to deter Russia in terms of showing them what we would do.

You know, I remember being briefed, you know, in a skiff, but afterwards, I was sitting around talking to Senator Murphy and I think Senator Lee, and I said, you know, there's two ways we could avoid this.

We could first pledge never to allow Ukraine into NATO.

Or we could send NATO troops in there, just a tripwire.

I said, neither one of those are we going to do, but we could have prevented this.

But instead, Biden just sat back and basically let it happen.

So, you know, now we are where we're at.

What I was saying, this is where I'd love to sit down with you for hours, squad honestly.

You're a military historian.

Yeah, I was just in Hanoi.

We never should have been bombing and going to war with Vietnam ever.

We need, I asked Conde Lisa Rice, she came to lunch.

I mean, Madam Secretary, do you ever

think in retrospect

what the result is of going to Iraq, going to Afghanistan?

You know, what we've done in Ukraine,

we need to start doing that.

What has been the result of all of America's foreign entanglements?

And I'm not an isolationist,

but we really do need to look back.

I mean, I think we're the good guys, no doubt about it.

But we have to take a look at what actions we have taken and what have been the results.

And we need to be looking at that right now in terms of Ukraine.

And how could we prevent this?

What do we need to do to shut this thing down?

And do we really want to just continue to be antagonistic toward Russia?

I thought the interview between Tucker Carlson and Putin was fascinating.

Now, he's an evil war criminal, but I've spent a lot of time, for example, with President Buchic in Serbia.

He approaches a conversation the exact same way:

half hour or an hour of history.

And that's important to them.

And it goes back centuries, centuries of history.

It's the reason why Russia refers to itself as the motherland you know what what 1.1 million russians died defending stalingrad napoleon couldn't break them you know why do you think the west giving our our second to third rate weapons weapons to ukraine think that ukraine can all of a sudden bust through

it's insane i mean you have to deal with the world looking at reality yeah part of that reality has to be a a real serious look back in terms of what our foreign entanglements have have resulted in and maybe taking a different approach, maybe not being quite so antagonistic.

Yeah, well,

the thing about Trump was they called it, you know, Russia-Russia, the collusion, disinformation, all this.

But when you actually looked at his record, it was a Jacksonian, don't tread on me, no better friend, no worse enemy foreign policy that really precluded optional military engagements on the ground anywhere.

And when you look what he did to Russia, he upped the sanctions.

He flooded the world with cheap oil they hated.

He gave javelins to Ukraine Ukraine that Obama had tabled.

He put sanctions on the Nordstrom pipeline.

He killed, I think, somewhere around 300 of the Wagner people who attacked our base in Syria.

So he got out of that asymmetrical intermediate missile deal.

He was really tough on them.

And yet he ended, and I think in a way that if, but he didn't demonize them.

In other words, he kept quiet about Putin, but he carried a big stick.

And when you start calling him a murderer and a thug and you don't do anything and you have a twig, it sends this, it gets them angry, but then they're not deterred by words.

And I think if we could get back to that Jacksonian idea that we deal with Putin as he is and stop this crazy alliance between China and Iran and Russia and

do what Kissinger did, you know, no better friend of Russia is to China and to us.

China is no better friend to triangulate or do something to balance the power and not get into this situation where we're on to Moscow with a blank check.

And it seems to me that there has to be some Republican leadership that says, in a humanitarian sense,

do we want to save Ukraine by destroying it?

Can't we help Ukraine, but

understand that we're never going to get back to Donbass or the Crimea?

Nor did any other president ever say that we should.

And then maybe

it would be a way of neutralizing the issue.

Because I can tell you from where I work and talking to a lot of people, one of the issues that the left is going to try to use against the Republicans is they lost Ukraine.

It's a humanitarian disaster because they cut off aid.

And I just hope that there can be a way that we can preempt that.

Well, I said this on the Senate floor.

If you're concerned about the Ukrainian people, I think most Americans are.

Okay, we want to support people fighting for freedom.

But if you want to support the Ukrainian people, you're concerned about them, you ought to take take a good, hard look at what is happening to their country.

Yes.

And when I say, you know,

take a look in retrospect, what's happened?

What happened to the end of the Soviet Union when

peace was breaking out and all these countries were set free?

And, you know, James Baker apparently told Gorbachev, we're not going to move NATO one inch to the east.

What happened?

I've talked to people that or spoken with people that knew Putin before he became

his current position, when he was really concerned about growing Russia's economy.

Very reasonable guy to deal with.

So what went wrong?

What happened where we allow this to become such an antagonistic relationship where, quite honestly, you have to be concerned about nuclear war.

Yeah, I mean, we've had,

I just finished a book.

just finished a book called The End of Everything about existential wars in history.

And I think there's been 11 direct threats since the war started by various parliamentarians and Russian officials about using nuclear weapons.

In every single case, our State Department, our national security advisor said, oh, they're just bluffing.

They'd never do it.

You push them hard enough and they will do it.

You're going to humiliate them.

And it seems to me that

the Republicans, if they can regain power, can work with Zelensky and Putin and say,

we are not going to put it in NATO.

You always had the Donbass.

We're not going to destroy Ukraine to try to get back to Crimea.

We would maybe

have it a neutral area where they're not armed either way.

Maybe Russia would demonstrate.

And then let Putin say that he went to war and to institutionalize what he already had.

And he also got a commitment that Ukraine would not be in NATO.

And that seems to me the basis of an agreement.

One quarter of the population, Ukraine, doesn't even live there.

We had a very skilled military analyst analyst from Ukraine at our military history working session.

We have one every year.

We have about 60 people from all over the world.

And

I try to get as many different views as possible.

Neocon, paleocon, liberal,

you name it, realist.

And we had some of the guys that really wanted to go into Russia and preempt, which had a military logic, but would have been politically, diplomatically disastrous.

And they kept talking about we need to give them a thousand Abrams, a hundred F.

And finally, this Ukrainian analyst said,

well, where are the manpower?

We've lost one quarter of the population has fled.

We've got over a hundred thousand dead, and we've got maybe a hundred thousand or more casualties.

We've got draft resistance.

Our problem is we don't have enough people.

They have three and a half times the people.

They have 10 times the GDP.

And he was very pro-Ukrainian as a Ukrainian American, but he was trying to warn us that we're bleeding Ukraine dry as a proxy.

And all these humanitarians keep saying, well,

they say two things.

And I think it's disastrous politically for the left, but they say we're weakening Vladimir Putin by draining, by killing them off, using Ukrainians.

And the money's not really spent because we've got a great, it's recycled.

We're giving the money basically to Americans and arms manufacturers, then giving it to them.

So, and it's almost, it's very strange for the left to be bragging about all the carnage that's happening.

Isn't that a depraved justification for

jobs in our states to, you know, to fund death?

That is simply depraved.

It is.

It is.

And

the politics are,

you know, I can see

when I've talked to people where I work and elsewhere, just as a thought experiment, I'll say, well, what do you want to do to win?

And I'll try to think of something ridiculous.

You want to sink the Black Sea fleet?

Do you want to preempt with drones and take out all of their depots, supply depots, oil

areas?

Because that's what military logic would dictate if you want to win.

And they'd say, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what we want to do.

And I said, well, where are they going to get the wherewithal, the manpower?

And what is Russia going to do when you do that?

When Russia tried to put missiles in Cuba, we said the Caribbean was an American lake.

We almost went to DEF CON 5 over, and they were just giving supply, they were giving material to Cuba that was pretty dangerous.

But we said, no way is that going to happen.

So why, this is an area of influence they've had for a long time.

But that never comes in because

all of the criticism or the, I guess, the questioning becomes, well, you love Putin or you're a poodle of Putin or you're an asset.

No, as John F.

Kennedy said in his speech to American University, you have to take a look and understand the perspective of the other person.

You don't have to agree with them, you have to understand it.

We've heard in, I think Putin's defense minister said he drastically underrated

or underestimated Russia's ability to sustain casualties.

How could you underestimate that?

You saw Stalingrad.

I mean, that's been their history.

We have other people saying you can give us all the weapons, we don't have the men to fire them.

So I think the only way you convince Putin to come down, sit down at the negotiating table, is to lay out a scenario where this is just going to be bloody stalemate for him too.

This is going to grind down like Afghanistan.

And he doesn't want that.

We don't want that.

Let's end this thing.

And again,

you don't want a name call, but you almost have to so you don't get called a Putin apologist.

No, the guy is an evil war criminal.

Okay, we understand that.

Okay.

But

geopolitics is a hard thing.

War is a terrible thing.

And at some point in time, you have to recognize your alley situation and deal with it and then try and improve it.

And again, just continue to become more and more antagonistic.

We're talking, I guess they got even more sanctions

on Putin now because of Melvani.

I questioned this back in 2014.

I mean, are these sanctions, are we cutting off our nose spite or face?

Are we doing more harm to our allies than ourselves in these sanctions?

That's part of the Tucker interview.

He's almost mocking us.

So your biggest strength, this is my paraphrasing, your biggest strength is you are the world's reserve currency.

You're weakening that position by denying us the use of the dollar.

I mean, how stupid.

So I know it sounds good, you know, sanctions good, Russia bad, but take a look at the reality situation.

Be smart about doing these things.

And again, I'm just becoming more and more of a peacenick, I guess.

You know,

I think he's true strength, but you start strength economically.

You'll fix our deficit.

It'll secure our border.

It'll cure inflation here.

You know, let's not have a war in fossil fuel.

Let's use our abundant energy resources so we're not dependent around the world.

Strengthen America.

That's how you cheat peace.

It seemed to me that for all the criticisms, though, Trump, for not an not that much additional cost, he did beef up the military, but he did with a solomani

takeout and he took out ISIS.

He told the Wagner group, you're not going to be doing this stuff.

They paid a price.

North Korea, he was able to be a credible deterrent he was he his he said that we do not want war with you we did not bad mouth people he was bad mouth for and that seemed to me that it was a very effective realist he and pompeo i thought did a wonderful job of keeping the peace

i thought the best example of trump is when iran iran knocked down a drone yes and everybody went to defcon whatever and they were they were within minutes of striking and finally trump said well how many how many iranians are going to die?

And I'd heard it was 150.

I've spoken to him as more than that.

He goes, How much does that drone cost?

It's not worth it.

I think President Trump's probably the last person that would want to take us into war.

Yeah, I do.

Trump is the last person.

But you know, one thing in terms of military strength, I mentioned earlier, Russia produced those missiles at

$600 a pop.

We pay $6,000.

I don't know if you've read Elon Musk, the book by Walter Isaacson.

Yeah, I have.

And his idiot index.

We, and of course, Congress doesn't do oversight.

All we do is spend money and we spend it so great,

there's no need to do oversight.

We need to start putting a great deal of pressure, some Elon Musk type of pressure on our military-industrial complex, who Eisenhower warned us about, right?

Yeah,

how much of these wars are literally being driven by the influence of the military-industrial complex?

Look at that.

I think we should say that any four-star, three-star, two-star admiral or general that retires should not go on a defense contractor board for five years because so many of them are.

And

they're not being high.

I mean, some of them are brilliant guys, but they're being hired by the number of people they know and the acquisitions in the Pentagon and those contacts that served under them.

And then they're become invaluable resources for pushing weapon systems that the efficacy of which is not always the arbiter of whether we should buy it or not.

And so we've got to stop that.

And I was a big,

I wrote in support because he's a colleague of mine

that they should waive the military restriction on generals for, you know, that it's 10 years before they can be a civilian Secretary of Defense.

I don't think that was the right thing to do.

I think whether it's Austin or Mattis or anybody, it's not personal.

Anybody who comes out of the military should not be the defense secretary for at least 10 years is what the statute is, I think.

We've got to really start separating those two because

the military

is getting weaponized and in a way that we never dreamed before.

And I'm really worried about it.

For short, you know better than I do, but I think it's 25 to 30,000 troops.

And they have the DEI indoctrination.

And then 8,400 people were drummed out because of the vaccinations.

And you go speak to people off topic and somebody in the audience will say, I'm not going to, you know, my dad's fought in Vietnam.

My husband fought in the first goal.

My son is not going anymore.

I'm not, no more Afghanistan.

I'm not going to do it.

No more Iraq's, no more.

And then he's not going to get promoted because he's a white male.

Whatever they're,

it's a real,

it's a real

problem.

I was looking at the statistics of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's about 72 to 74% white males, which are only 36, 34% of the population.

And if you go after them and run an internal investigation, as we did under Austin, to see if there was white supremacy, and then you demagogue them.

And then you have the DEI

and then you say they're vaccination.

They don't, they're not, they're the one demographic that's not joining right now.

And yet they're traditionally the one demographic that trends into combat units.

And nobody's talking about it.

But it's a real danger.

And they're kind of lumped in as the deplorable East Palestine demographic and they're reacting to it.

They're just not joining the military in ways.

I've often said if you were asked to design a strategy to destroy this country, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with what Biden and the Democrats would come up with.

The open borders, the 40-year-high inflation, wokeism, DEI,

let's

just completely destroy the military.

Instead of having an effective fighting force of patriots, a bunch of people signing up so they can get sex change operations.

I don't know

how recently you've watched Eisenhower's farewell address.

Oh, I have.

It's only 15 minutes.

I did a tweet on this because I I always heard about the military-industrial complex, but he had four things he warned us about: military-industrial complex, and we need to be very serious about that.

But then, don't, you know, government funding and research is going to destroy science.

It's going to create a scientific and technological elite that'll drive public policy.

That's what we witnessed during COVID.

You know, don't plunder our children's future.

We've been doing that now for decades.

And the final one, I think, is he spent the least amount of time, but I think is actually the most important one.

He said, we cannot allow global society to descend in a

state of dreadful fear and hate.

And that's what they do.

They drive fear.

And I'll apply that to foreign policy.

You know, Vietnam, well, domino theory.

Everybody's going to become communist.

So we're all afraid of that.

You know, Putin, China, whatever.

I mean, we're just driving fear, and it drives policy.

You drive hate.

That's what DEI is about.

That's what critical race theory is about.

This is being done to us on purpose.

I know.

These people are good at what they do.

RCI RCI has done it to countries all over the world, and it's being turned inward on us right now, is my belief.

We're in a critical time in this country.

I agree.

I think we're in the process of committing collective suicide unless we don't stop.

Livy said the great woman of story, when the medicine becomes worse than the disease, in other words, when you know what's wrong and you know how you could cure it, but it would be felt to be impossible to apply it, given all the restrictions or cultural noise or whatever, then you're in decline permanently.

We're going to take a brief break.

We'll be right back with Senator Ron Johnson.

We're going to talk about the Republican leadership in our third segment.

And we're back.

I'm Victor Davis-Hansen, and I have the pleasure of having the senior senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson.

Ron,

is Mitch McConnell,

is he the leader that if the Republicans have a renaissance, is he going to be part of the implementation of the, or is he going to be an obstructionist?

Or after I saw what he did on the border, and we've talked about that,

where does his support within the Senate come?

Is it his expertise in getting judicial appointments?

Or what is it?

Because he doesn't seem that he's very fond of the likely Republican nominee.

He's had wars with him in the past.

This debacle about the border in Ukraine.

Why can't people, or what's the source of support in the country?

I just looked before we came on tonight of major leaders, Biden, Trump,

Ron Johnson.

He polls the lowest of all major political figures in the United States.

It's about 28%.

What's his source of support?

Is it just the powers of the office that he holds?

I think it's what he reminds us about all the time in the Senate is he raises hundreds of millions of dollars to re-elect Republican senators.

I mean, during the Ukraine debate, once a week, you know, two weeks in a row, he mentioned colleagues.

Just let me remind you how much the Senate Leadership Fund is

raising to re-elect our colleagues here and gain the majority.

You know, I was part of the effort to replace him this Congress.

You know, Rick Scott agreed to challenge him by running for office.

You know, in my nomination speech of Rick Scott, I laid out the case against McConnell.

I said it's, you know, you got somebody like

Rick Scott, a business-like approach.

You know, somebody knows how to get something done versus McConnell, business as usual.

I point to the fact that McConnell became leader in 2007, our debt was under $10 trillion.

Now our debt is $35 trillion.

And there's been one constant in all that time.

There's been one person in every negotiation under debt ceiling,

appropriations budget, and that's been Mitch McConnell.

As our debt has more than tripled since he's become leader.

No, he's

and then and then again, for me, the final straw was the secret negotiation that

provided Democrats wonderful political cover.

I mean,

you just, you couldn't, you couldn't design a larger debacle than this.

And then what he did, and this was even worse,

when they dropped that bill on a Sunday, and yeah, we were criticizing, but we we didn't kill the bill.

The bill killed itself.

You know, within a day, he's changing his tune and saying, well, you know, the politics have changed.

You know, we have a presidential candidate now.

He doesn't like this bill, so I'm going to suggest we all vote against it.

All he was doing there was trying to deflect the blame off of his awful bill.

It wasn't lengthened negotiated.

I mean, he

might have been the negotiator.

Murphy said, no, McConnell's staff was in the room.

He wrote the bill.

So rather than owning up to it and say, yeah, I blew this.

This is an awful bill.

The public's not accepting it.

He's blaming Trump.

He's saying this is a great bill.

The border union supports.

Well, the border unions support anything to bring the numbers down.

These people are drowning.

You think that still places the bill, but blaming Trump.

And then now he's going to blame conservatives in the Senate and House conservatives.

Not blame McConnell for this debacle.

He's going to blame.

But do you think?

Because that's one of the greatest humiliations I've seen in his entire senatorial career, do you think that that made an impression on reluctant supporters who voted with him out of fear last time?

Or you think there's going to be a change of maintenance?

I sure hope so.

They should look at

Speaker Johnson, who's doing a lot of good fundraising like McCarthy did.

So anybody who's in that position is going to be able to raise funds.

They may not take as much joy out of it as McConnell does, but anybody in that position can tap into the people who want to support conservatism.

Okay.

But no, I mean, obviously there will be another challenge of next time there's going to be a vote.

I hope the vote comes sooner and later.

Let me ask you some final questions, Senator.

So

the

There's so many known unknowns.

We don't know whether Biden is going to be even able to finish the next eight months to the November or even to January and how he, the Democratic donor class or the operatives at B would remove him if they felt that he's inert.

And then we have these crazy indictments against Donald Trump, but

and then we have the Nikki Haley candidacy.

And I don't know how you can be a viable candidate and lose if she does sat tomorrow, you know, 20 points plus in your home state.

But do you, and given what we've talked about about mail-in voting, when I was looking at some of the error rates on mail-in voting on these swing states that went radically under the guise of COVID from, say, 35% or 40% mail-in in 2016, much lower in 2012.

And they had a rejection rate of most ballots in these states of 3 to 5%.

But then when they were inundated with 70% of the votes were mail-in, the rejection rate dived to like 0.2 or 3%.

So in other words, they were swarmed and they didn't either enforce a name that didn't match the register's list or a partial name or a wrong address or no name or no seat, whatever.

But given all of these things, it seems to me that what I took away from all these known unknowns is that Republican Party is really have no margin of error given the system.

And the money, when we were growing up, the big money seemed to be on the Republican side.

It's all on the Democratic side, tech, finance, globalized wealth.

They have the media, they have the corporate boardroom, they have entertainment, they have silicon, they have all of the institutions, foundations, academia.

It seems like we have no margin of error.

And the only way that we're going to get back enough power to stop the madness seems that

Republicans have to unite.

And I don't know how they can do it, but do you see ways in which

we can appeal to independent voters or we can get back people in the fold?

given the danger of what we've seen the last four years.

Do you have any confidence about 2024 that we can unite and win?

I often start speeches warning people I'm not the most uplifting character.

I wish I could say I'm a huge optimist, but again, I see this nation circling the drain.

We have to win.

There's just no doubt about it.

It's not a level of playing field.

It's not a fair fight.

I mean, you mentioned all the reasons.

It's not fair.

So what we have going for us, we have the truth.

Okay.

We have policies that actually work.

It's demonstrated time and time again, history, socialism never works.

It just destroys economies.

It leads to totalitarianism.

So we've got that going for us.

What campaigns need to do is they need to focus on the ground game, on the grassroots.

They need neighborhood captains.

They need community captains.

They need county captains.

I mean, they've got to organize this.

And then we need to use the alternate media.

I mean, things like podcasts.

I mean,

you can't listen to the mainstream media.

They are completely in the tank for the Democrats.

They're the communication arm of the radical left.

You can't rely on universities.

You know that full well.

So it's got to be we the people.

I think COVID has opened a lot of people's eyes.

It really has.

You realize how all these institutions have been infiltrated by the radical left.

So people aren't trusting them.

It's hard to determine what is true, who you can trust, but it's got to be person to person.

This has got to be a grassroots effort.

And so I'm hoping the candidates, I mean, we certainly folks sat in Wisconsin.

on grassroots, you know, less money on ads.

You need ads.

I mean, you do need that, but you need to spend a lot more money.

And

it's more effectively spent.

It's just that

consultants don't make a whole lot of money on grassroots.

You know, they take their 15% cut on ads.

And so all these campaigns are run by consultants.

I mean, I'm not a fan of the consultancy class.

I'm a fan of the party workers, the people that just get down and

are patriots that love this country, God-fearing, country-loving, law enforcement-supporting patriots are the people we need to energize and let them know what's at stake.

Yeah, I hope so.

This isn't something you can sit out.

No matter what you think of Donald Trump, it's going to be a choice.

I don't do not think it's going to be Biden.

I don't think the Democrats are that stupid.

Okay,

I have almost 0% chance Biden's going to be.

So, what they'll do is they'll pick somebody at the convention that is polling absolute best.

They can't be vetted in time.

It's going to be tough.

It's going to be a tough race.

And

they've done a lot to harm Donald Trump.

You guys just recognize this is a choice between two people.

We better choose right.

I think Donald Trump, there are moments,

the Iowa victory speech, the town hall he did with Laurie Ingram.

If he can stick with that ecumenical message, and he is self-deprecatory, and I think he's got better people around him than 2016.

I think he's wiser.

So do you share my hope that a more mature Trump, if I could say that, is wiser and more sober and he understands to a greater degree than he did before how to get appeal to people who otherwise wouldn't vote for him, but are now

viable voters for him, given what they've seen the last four years.

That's going to be the key, it seems to me.

I sure hope so.

I just got his announcement on the in vitro fertilization decision in Georgia.

You know, I think very, very

empathetically put out there.

You know, he opposes the decision and wants to value life.

That was an excellent

question.

So, no, that's what he has to do.

He has to show Americans that he loves this country more than anything else.

And he loves them and he's fighting for them.

If he can convey that,

I often say, if you spend some time with Donald Trump, you cannot not like him.

No,

I don't know.

It is amazing how the left just hates him.

He's a very likable guy.

As I just talked about in terms of Iran,

I think other presidents probably would have pulled the trigger.

Probably wouldn't even thought, well, that's probably not true, but would have killed

a couple hundred Ukrainians just because he had to.

Trump wouldn't do it.

I give him a lot of credit for that.

There was a lot of pressure on him to pull the trigger on that, and he wouldn't do it.

He doesn't want war.

No, he didn't.

And he said, you know, presidents were too predictable.

And I thought, man, that's the wrong answer.

But then, as I saw him be unpredictable and how effective it was, I mean, I think we need to be pretty predictable.

We need to state our position and we got to stick to it.

But a little bit of unpredictability like Trump presents is not necessarily a bad thing.

No, it's good, especially in high-stakes foreign policy when people

are afraid to do something stupid with Donald Trump.

And I think that's a good message.

Well, we're out of time, but it's been a joy talking to you to center.

I hope you can come back again as maybe as the campaign heats up and we know more.

Because it's going to be fascinating what the Democrats, we all know what's going to happen, but we don't know how and when yet.

No, I'm happy to tune in.

Anytime you're in D.C., really stop by.

I'd like to sit down and talk to you seriously about

our history and what we can do to improve it.

Will, and maybe I'll catch you in Milwaukee the next trip, too.

Okay, that would be good.

Thank you.

Take care.