All Things Presidential

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marjabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has,

well, while this show is, you're listening to it, and if it's

the end of the first week of July, Victor's, I think, traveling somewhere.

And that's why we're doing the special pre-recorded episodes, four of them.

This is the final.

This is the fourth of the four, where we solicited and received questions from you, the listener,

listeners, and we are asking Victor's take on some of your questions.

So thanks for submitting them.

And Victor,

the questions on this episode, at the end, we'll ask you a couple of questions about your views on certain presidents.

But we have an initial question that is about current politics, about Trump and DeSantis and just how much they love each other and whether they're telling the truth about each other, etc.

And we're going to get your take.

We'll have Victor the political analyst and Victor the historian, and we'll get to that, all that right after these important messages.

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

I should, not that I want to get this out of the way, but you know, I tend to forget things, Victor.

So let me do mention here now a few things.

One, there is a formal official website of Victor Davis Hansen.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and its web address is victorhanson.com.

And you listeners should go there regularly and you should subscribe.

Why should you subscribe?

Because you like what Victor writes.

You will not be able to read a lot of his original content that he writes.

for the Blade of Perseus.

They're ultra articles.

Victor writes two or three such articles a week and a couple books worth a year.

Five bucks gets you in the door of $50 for a full year discounted.

If you're a fan of Victor's writing and you're not subscribing, something's very wrong.

So do that.

Please, if you're on Facebook, you should visit the

name of it, the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, where some of these questions came from.

Thanks, folks.

About

60,000 people or so are members of that club.

And just good folks.

And you'll find links to all sorts of Victor-related things there.

There's VDH's Morning Cup, which is also to be found at Facebook, I believe.

If I'm wrong, I'll get spanked.

And then if you're on Twitter, at

VD Hans, and that's Victor's official handle there.

So, Victor, I have a question from Janet.

Janet's an old friend.

I know you've met her on some way back in the day, national review cruises.

A little lengthy here, but

here's what she writes: The ads against DeSantis about his wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare are beneath contempt.

They sound just like those lying ads from Dems, which show up every election against Republicans.

But the worst is the ads about fair tax and 23% on everything you buy.

Thus, DeSantis wants to raise everyone's taxes.

This lying ad I hate in the extreme.

I love the fair tax,

et cetera, et cetera.

Now, you think this comes this question, Victor comes from someone that can't stand Donald Trump.

Let me continue reading what Janet wrote.

I want Trump to be president in 2024 and DeSantis in 2028.

I'm not in charge, but that is what I want.

And I want to be alive to see it.

But whoever is giving Trump this advice to use these scurrilous ads is not his friend.

I want Trump not to badmouth DeSantis, but especially not to lie about him.

What does VDH think about my thoughts?

Victor, I pose not to not to get you in trouble with certain readers and any of your answers is not necessarily saying, yes, Trump lied in his ads.

I think, though, the essence of what Janet writes here is

represents how a lot of people might think.

I want Trump to win.

You had DeSantis be in the on-deck circle, but what Trump is doing right now with some of these attack ads really I find unsettling.

Whether you agree with that or not, Victor,

I don't know.

We'll hear.

Any reactions to

yeah, I agree with, I'm confused because

there are, and I try to be analytical, there are about four or five strains of attack that are thematic in those ads.

And I think she's referring to the ones that are appealing to the Fox audience.

I haven't watched Newsmaxly.

I don't know if they're there, but they're mostly in Fox and then on the web.

And they attacked him on COVID, which I don't understand because

although no one quite

was

adamantly 100% against the lockdowns from the very beginning, because they didn't know the nature of COVID, but very early on, among the first rank of the governors, DeSantis was opposed to a complete shutdown.

That's clear.

So to suggest that Florida did worse than New York because on deaths per thousand it ranks slightly more is to just completely forget the role of elderly people and that the per capita age Florida is not only older, but people who are much more vulnerable to the virus.

And then you look at the excess death rate and it starts, and then you look at the economics and it starts to show that DeSantis was right.

So I don't understand that.

I don't understand the attack on Social Security because Social Security's biggest proponents tell us it's going to be broke in, was it, 2035

at the present demographic and economic, unless we have 5% growth and people start having three children again, it's going to be broke.

So it's going to, we're going to have to do something.

And so to suggest that you're going to have to do something, I don't know what else you're supposed to say.

Everything's okay.

You're going to have to cut benefits or raise the payroll tax.

And they've already raised the lid on income susceptible to the payroll tax.

And so

I don't understand that.

He's attacking them on Disney.

I don't understand that.

Disney has an unusual, absurd concession of 40 square miles in central Florida.

Why did they get that?

This should have been redressed a long time ago.

And

Disney is on the forefront of the radical transgender transitioning movement and having that material uncensored for children.

I don't know why he's against that.

I don't know why he said something about

the budget and that almost that

if it's if as if he were more toward that.

So what I'm afraid about is that Trump's advisors are telling him to strangle the DeSantis candidacy in its infancy.

I understand the logic, but I don't think that's the right approach.

I think it's counterproductive.

It's going to get

a big response.

Anytime you attack somebody in the Republicans

from the left and your constituency is hardcore conservative MAGA people,

I don't think that was well thought out.

Then you get into the point where

what do each candidate has to do?

DeSantis has to show you that he's a national candidate.

And although people say that he's not as charismatic as Trump and all that, he still has to show people that he can take the Florida model and put it on a national scale.

So it's not just fighting Disney, but the Disney paradigm then serves as galvanizing people who go on to do Target and Bud.

And it's the reawakening.

Or it's not just that he

has no taxes and deregulates, but how he could superimpose that on the national.

I don't think he's had a sales tax in Florida that's a fair tax 23.

If he really believed that, he would have done it in Florida because he doesn't have an income tax.

So you would think that if Florida was broke, and if you really did believe that DeSantis was advocating a national fair tax or absorbing an EU type of sales tax, he would have done it in Florida because he has no other source of revenue to essentially say.

Here in California, we have a sales tax that's nominally 9 or 10, but when you add the local add-ons, it can be up to 11 or 12.

And we're paying the top rate is 13.3, and we have the highest gas taxes, and we're still $35 billion.

So something is going wrong here

when we're losing $400,000 and people are going there, including the Trump family goes there.

So I don't understand that.

And what I'm worried about is this.

That and when Trump attacked Kaylee McInhaney, I don't understand that either.

She was heroic defending him.

All she said is, I went back and looked at the clip from it.

She said that DeSantis was gaining traction

in Iowa, and she quoted a poll that Trump disagreed with.

Maybe she was factually incorrect.

I don't think she did it maliciously so,

but that's her job.

To have credibility, that's her job.

And so what I would like to see is an open primary and have all the candidates run and have them go through the yin and yang, sturm and drang, battle it out, but within certain Ronald Reagan 11th Commandment parameters, that you don't do the ad hominem.

And more importantly,

they all,

all

do what they didn't do to Donald Trump in 2016.

They pledged that they were going to support the nominee.

They didn't think Trump would be the nominee, but when he was a nominee, a lot of them said, I think Carly Fiorina was very out.

I'm not supporting the guy.

Well, you pledge you gave your word and they didn't and so i think

john kasich yeah there were a couple of others so right now

i

i hope every one of us pledges to everybody that we are going to support the republican nominee no matter how divisive because they don't have it we have no margin of error and the country will be destroyed by four more years of biden i think it would be wise just as an outside observer if

desantis you know 20 30 40 whatever Trump says that he's actually down, that he said, I'm going to support the nominee.

That would be magnanimous.

And if he should come, and I think Trump would welcome that, thinking that he will be the nominee.

But if Trump were to slide under the weight of all these sequential and pre-planned indictments by this pack of wolves that is after him, and DeSantis starts to rise, then I would expect Trump to honor that commitment just as he was angry that people didn't honor their word to him in 2016.

So that, I don't see anything wrong with the primary.

I want to see what DeSantis has to say.

I want to see how he performs.

I like what he did in Florida.

I want to make, I like what Trump did for four years.

But

the argument that

I don't think Trump understands that the argument, and it's not coming from rhinos and globalists like he used in putting down McIntany.

I talk to a lot, I get a lot of conservative people that write me and call me.

And some of these guys are hardcore.

And they're saying, I can't go through it again.

And I questioned them.

I said, no, I want you to specify and calibrate what you said.

I can't do the put-downs anymore.

I can't,

if he wants, he doesn't like Kaylee anymore, he doesn't have to say that she's milquetoast and let the globalists have her.

That sounds like she's a sacrifice on a rock or something to a god or a monster.

And so they don't want that.

And it's unnecessary.

So all Trump has to do is not do it.

And I think when Trump was on the debate the other night

and Sean was pretty tough on Biden in a kind of a health way, Trump was magnanimous.

And he said, you know,

I don't want to go there.

I don't want to make fun of him.

He's obviously got problems.

He obviously shouldn't be present, but I'm not going to make fun of the way he stumbled.

You know, they made fun of me and I didn't stumble.

I know what it's like.

And that was perfect.

But he's got some, it reminds me of that first debate.

And we talked about that with Chris Christie.

It reminds me of something that there's some type of advisor.

I don't know if it's Roger Stone.

I don't know if it was Crudy Giuliani, but whoever gave him that advice in that first debate was wrong.

He did not win that first debate.

Whoever gave him the advice in the second debate was right.

He won that second debate because he just outpointed Biden.

He had the facts at his disposal.

He dominated, but he was not rude and disruptive.

And he didn't try to rattle Biden's cage.

And Biden rattled his own cage, but he lost the audience in the first debate.

I don't care what a person says, he did.

And then the polls show it.

The polls show he won that second debate.

And so when he does that, he's funny.

And when he mentioned, I said that he said, can you imagine if I was a drunk?

God, what would that be like?

And everybody laughed about it.

And he has a sense of humor.

And

everybody says he's, I don't think he is vindictive.

I think he can forgive people, but he doesn't,

he's been told, like he was told about the Biden evade, you go in there and just rattle the guy and he'll just collapse.

No, he won't.

The guy slept for three days and was on Adderall.

He was ready for it.

All it made you is confirm that you were a bully.

And so, you know, and so with DeSantis, all he has to do, if you're on the Trump side, I'm trying to be neutral here in this analysis so that our listeners don't think I'm a rank partisan.

But I want to reiterate that I will vote overwhelmingly and work as much as I can for the nominee.

I don't think there's one person, I'll have problems if it's Chris Christie, but I will vote for Chris Christie over Biden.

But I won't be enthusiastic about it.

But

I think everybody, and you look at DeSantis, and he hasn't replied in kind.

Let me just finish by what is the strategy as I see it.

The strategy in Trump is, as I said, to strangle the baby in the cradle so that he doesn't get a life because they feel that Donald Trump is going, when Bragg has

postponed it till March,

and then we've got Letita James and then we've got Willis and we've got Smith.

You know what they're doing.

They want to create empathy and then they want to crush Trump and bury him with lawfare.

And I think DeSantis feels that if he is magnanimous, but runs some ads, but not mean like Trump, and praises Trump's record, which is praiseworthy, and says, what would he say?

If you think about it, just off the top of my head, what would he say?

He would say, if I was him, because I just said if I was Trump, I would say, well, DeSantis is 42 or 43, and he can wait four years, and then he can...

He'd be a wonderful vice president.

He could join me on ticket or

he could take the baton.

And that's what he should be saying.

you know, he had a great record.

I'm in Florida.

Why would I attack him?

I move out.

But he didn't do that.

That would what I would have advised him.

And then I would advise, or I would advise him, said, you know what?

DeSantis is a great guy, but I'm taking the heat because they're after me.

They're after me.

I'm the shield.

They're destroying, trying to destroy me with all these losses, and I'll take it for you.

But these other people have not endured that and they couldn't endure it.

That would be a fair thing to do.

And DeSantis, DeSantis, I think, he's going to have a lot of talking points.

I think he's going to say, you know, I'm looking forward.

I'm looking to 2024.

I'm not going to replay Ad Nauseum 2020.

Or he's going to say, you know, with me, you don't get Scaramucci and you don't get

Omaroso and you don't get Anonymous.

I very carefully, I get even.

I don't get mad.

Or he's going to say,

you know,

I've got a plan that I worked in Florida and I am going to hit the ground running and I don't make bad appointments.

I do not make points.

I do not give the

Medal of Freedom to Anthony Fauci.

I fire the SOB.

And so I think it's going to be more on competence, youth, looking ahead rather than ad hominem.

And we'll see what I think it's going to be a close race.

I really do.

I don't get this, all these announcers saying it's over with.

I've never heard that before.

We're so far out.

We're, wow, we're

six, seven months out from New Hampshire, Iowa.

It's a long way.

We haven't had the debates until August.

We didn't, people at this time were talking about how great Kamala Harris and Corey Booker were.

Remember that?

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Spartacus and

I was that little girl on the bus that you were.

Two glass jaws.

Yeah,

so we don't know.

And, you know, there's other candidates too, but I think who I think DeSantis is

he's

he's understanding that he's letting, he's kind of a rope-adope strategy.

He's letting Trump punch himself out.

And Trump keeps each time he tax Kaylee McEnany, his former press secretary, or each time he runs these weird bobblehead ads, he peels off.

I don't think he, he, I don't think he says,

I don't think the people listen and say, I'm going to vote for DeSantis, but I didn't know that, that he was against Social Security, so I'm not voting.

I think it's more likely is,

you know, I'm tired of this.

I'm going to vote for DeSantis.

He's losing, but I may be wrong.

And I well, that's it, you know, to the Bible.

Ecclesiastes, the polls will show.

We'll see.

Yeah.

I mean, I've said this before, a previous podcast victor, and I'm no theologian, but to every season.

And politically, what what worked

today might not work tomorrow.

And the astute politician just can't play the same

act every time.

I think that

if I was on Trump's team, I would get ready responses because

no doubt DeSantis is going to say, you know what, we would have won the Senate if Trump hadn't have gone down there and told people their vote wouldn't count.

And there's no way in the world the Republican Party should have lost two Senate seats and gave Biden the power to destroy our lives and elect socialists, not Democrats, hardcore socialists from Georgia.

And why we were, you know,

election, election, election, election, election, election, election,

you know, Dominion voting machines, cracker,

and then they were stealing us blind and the rest was history.

So that there were things, and I, you know, I was very pro-Trump, but there were things that I have forgotten that that bothered me about it, about some of the things he did.

And I didn't care because he was so much better and he did such a wonderful job.

But if you keep pushing the envelope and you keep trying to be ad hominem against a good governor that is very conservative,

Reagan was the guy.

I mean,

you look back at Reagan and Jimmy Carter was mean and he just said, there you go again.

There you go again.

He put him down.

And then George H.W.

Bush, remember he got mean

in that when he was behind Reagan and he said, you know, voodoo arcana again.

And

then when, you know, Reagan was very magnanimous and appointed him vice president candidate, money mate.

But it's better to be magnanimous, I think, than to get

the idea that you rattle the cage and you, he's not going to rattle

the census' cage.

He's not going to take him out early.

Let's have the whole thing unfold, issue for issue.

Let's see the border.

What is one candidate saying the border?

What's the other?

What about crime?

What about crime?

What about energy?

What about energy?

What about foreign policy?

What about just get the whole record out there and

let the rest of them come in on the debate stage and we'll see.

But

yeah, I don't get it.

I don't get it.

I don't get the strategy.

You don't attack a successful Republican governor that had the best record in the 2020 to midterms from the left.

And in the process of doing that, you praise Andrew Cuomo, who sent active live COVID patients into a rest home where 14,000 people died.

And he was an egomaniac and had a disastrous policy.

He was a sexual

a truly bad human being.

He throw hipers and

more importantly,

during this whole period, you talk about loyalty.

DeSantis was very loyal to Trump.

I know that Trump was helping him a lot, but he did not talk about it.

But who talked the worst about Trump?

Cuomo.

He was mean.

Trump tried to help him.

He tried to send him.

Remember the hospital ship and the Tenth City?

Right.

All the ventilators.

The Shabbat Center turned into a

de facto hospital.

Yeah, remember the ventilators?

He tried to do all he could, and all Cuomo did was go on to his brother's TV show and trash Trump because he thought he was.

He a $5 million book contract.

Yes, and he, no need to get into the bizarre financial details of that thing.

But he was convinced that the nominee Biden would pick him as vice president.

He had no idea that identity politics after George Floyd just made that impossible.

But my point is, you don't praise that guy and then attack somebody whose views are just about like your own.

I don't get it.

I do not get it.

And I have a feeling that there are people around Trump that are advising that type of strategy.

And I know that there's, he has some really brilliant people that are not, that wouldn't advise that.

And I don't know why they are not,

their voices are not being heard.

But and then somebody's going to say, I'll get a letter tomorrow because I get a lot of emails.

And so Victor, Victor, Victor, just look at the polls, smart ass.

What do you know from Selma, California?

You make fun of this, you know, take no prisoners.

Look at the polls.

He goes up.

Well, the race hasn't started yet.

Now DeSantis is a candidate.

And now we're going to be into a lawfare cycle.

So we don't know what people are going to say.

But we'll see.

I think everybody out there who's on the conservative side, just make one vow to yourself that you will support with all of your energy the candidate, the nominee.

The nominee is not going to be John McCain, ReDukes.

It's not going to be Mitt Romney, 2.0.

It's not going to be Bob Dole 3.0.

It's going to be a populist nationalist conservative.

It is.

Well, and the other side of the coin is not only voting for somebody, I'm voting against somebody.

And if that's the motivation, I do not know how any conservative could not have seen, said, holy crap, if Joe Biden's president, this place is going down the crack.

James Comey, remember, Mr.

Republican, Mr.

Rhino, Mr.

Republican establishment said today

that he would have to vote for Biden over any Republican nominee, even though he was Republican.

And he voted for Biden before.

Can you imagine that voting for Biden in 2020?

I can imagine James Comey

doing that.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then he said that he would be afraid that Trump would weaponize the government.

This is from a guy who paid Christopher Steele taxpayer money to compile a completely bogus dossier, which then

his own people went to him and said, there's not a damn thing in this thing that's true.

And we've offered him a million dollars if he can just prove one fact.

And he knew that and he took it to a federal court judge and said, well, this thing is authentic and we want to use this as the basis.

for FISA warrants to spy on people.

Even as his deputy legal mind, Kevin Klein Smith, was feloniously altering a document, even as we know there was no justification for Hurricane Crossfire, even as we know he went to the President of the United States and assured him he was not under investigation when he was, memorialized the conversation with Trump, put it on a private FBI device, and leaked it for the sole purpose of getting a special counsel who turned out to be his friend, Bob Mueller.

That's the guy who weaponized and ruined the FBI.

And I can't believe he's out there lecturing us on.

Well, it's

projection.

What they're complaining about is what they're doing.

I mean, to me, a weaponized FBI is the one that kicks in the door of Pro-Lifer who had said he would turn himself in.

I know that didn't happen while Comey

was ahead of it, but certainly the culture had been warp-speeded by him.

Well, anyway, Victor.

We have to get to another question because these are a little bit short time-wise, these special podcasts.

This is, again, this is the fourth of the four.

Victor is going to be away sailing, bounding on some seas somewhere.

And we're going to stick with, though, with the topic of presidents, since we've just talked about presidence, and we'll continue that.

And we'll do that right after

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor,

math professor Gary from Indiana, and I, you know, I do want to sing Gary Indiana from the music man, but I'm not going to do it.

He posed this, I'm assuming that with VDH, VDH's breadth of knowledge, that he could share his thoughts on various U.S.

presidents.

So, Victor, you're a historian.

I know more military historian, but you know,

you know everything about everything.

So,

let me pick a few here.

How about

presidents you believe are underrated and presidents you believe are overrated?

I bet I'm going to hear the word Obama come out in the last one, but underrated and overrated presidents, Victor.

Oh, well, we want to go down this.

The most

overrated was Barack Obama.

Barack Obama, name it.

Just name it.

We came into that presidency with people on both sides of the political aisle that were really working hard to put race behind us and make it incidental to who we are.

And all during that campaign, he

take a gun to a knife fight, get in their faces.

My grandmother was scared of black men.

threw her under the bus.

Michelle, they raised the bar on me.

Never been proud.

Damn right me.

I got so sick of it.

And then he got in there.

And it was full.

He ran about, oh, I'm to the right of Hillary.

As soon as he got in there, it was socialist medical, med care, you know, medical Obamacare, which I think the medical system was never recovered from.

And then he remanufactured the entire Middle East and

was the most anti-Israeli president we've ever had.

He alienated a lot of the Sunni monarchies.

And then he promoted Iran, Iran, Iran, and the Shia circle and triangle, whatever it is, Hezbollah, Hamas, Lebanon, Syria.

We had the bombing of Libya, where the Qaddafi epigon is that the children were going to gradually

restructure Libya.

They probably would have lost power eventually, but it was the idea you're going to go in there and bomb and just destroy that country.

Then we had the Syrian red line.

Remember that?

Bought the Soviets back into the Middle East for the first time in 40 years.

And by the way, they're still there.

Then we had the hot mic, where basically

that was the green light that got Putin into Ukraine.

When he said, give me space, Vladimir, tell Vladimir to give me space.

I'll be flexible in missile defense.

My last election, Putin gave him space.

We dismantled missile defense, which would be very valuable right now.

And Eastern Poles would have been very happy to have it.

And then he went into

Crimea and the Donbas, et cetera.

That was his foreign policy.

We had the whole Trayvon with it, looked like the child they never had.

You name it.

It was just in your face, in your face.

And suddenly everybody started to recalibrate their tribal affinities.

And then this completely nefarious, debunked charlatan, but a sinister one, not just a nonchalant charlatan.

Al Sharpkin was rehabilitated and what was in the White House every week, this

Freddie's market Crown Heights racist, he telled him Jews to come over here in their Yarmok.

We blacks were doing this when you homos, it was homophobic, it was racist, it was anti-Semitic, and all of a sudden he's central point man for Obama.

Go on and on and on.

The one thing about Obama, people don't realize is that yes, Obama won twice, and yes, he raised record amounts of money, and yes, he ran brilliant campaigns.

But over his tenure, he lost

1,400 state and local offices to Republicans.

And he came in with a super majority in the Senate and the House.

And when he left, he had lost the House and the Senate and the presidency.

That's hard to do in a country that's controlled by leftist institutions.

He was sitting in the meeting when John Brennan laid out the whole FBI Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and he heard what Hillary Clinton was doing.

He knew all about

his Secretary of State, excuse me, his Department of Justice Attorney General meeting with Bill Clinton during the whole Hillary thing.

You name it.

This goes all the way back to Tony Resco and what his Chicago career.

And now he has the gumption to come out every once in a while and lecture us on racial relations and stereotyping when he has what?

Not the Chicago beautiful home, not the Calarama mansion, not the 40-acre Martha's Vineyard mansion, but the Hawaii mansion.

And

he lectures us on white supremacy, white privilege, et cetera.

Remember, he hijacked the John Lewis funeral and started giving us rants about Puerto Rico and the filibuster being a racist idea?

I could not believe that.

Here you are at a funeral, and he's supposed to be giving a eulogy, and he starts ranting about getting rid of the Jim Crow area relic era filibuster at a funeral.

And I'm thinking, wait a minute, who filibustered Sam Alito?

Wasn't it you?

Wasn't it you?

You tried to stop his nomination by doing what?

Filibustering?

Don't give us this lecture.

Don't give it away.

It's so chargery.

Yeah, it was.

He always was.

Remember what the Democrats did that also at Paul Wellstone's?

They did that.

They did that.

At least that backfired.

Yeah.

And, you know, it was,

it changed the Democratic Party.

They had a party of Bill Clinton.

I know Bill Clinton was corrupt.

I know he was

untrustworthy, but he was a realist and a pragmatist.

And he and Newt Ginrich gave us four years of balanced budget.

I know taxes were too high.

I know all that, but we were not borrowing trillions of dollars.

Right.

You could work Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and two 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions.

They gave speeches about open borders as a bad thing and legal only immigration.

That was the Democratic Party.

You could at least work with it.

It wasn't a Jacobin party.

He did that.

Obama did that.

And he weighed in on, remember Professor Skip Gates and the police stereotypically, we all know that they typically do this.

No, we don't.

They don't do that.

And we had, remember then, Gates was going to donate his plastic handcuffs to the Smithsonian as a mark of racist racism in America just because he locked himself out and somebody called that a guy was breaking into a house and the police said, you know, who are you?

And Obama had to weigh in on that.

And then he had the beer summit.

Remember that?

When it backfired?

So that was a bad guy and he's overrated.

I like JFK.

I thought he was very good.

Tax cuts.

He gave us a new look, but he was a mediocre president.

Let me ask you about two presidents that's around

the Second World War.

Yes.

Obviously, that's Roosevelt and Truman.

Just let's look at the military.

We can do whatever you want, Victor.

It's your show.

But thoughts, was Franklin Roosevelt overrated?

Was Harry Truman overrated?

FDR,

let's be honest.

He

came in in 33.

We had a recession, a depression.

We had been it under hoover for three years

he had the right idea that you temporarily prime the economy at first he wanted to balance the budget but then he went so far he let his advisors or he was one himself

we went into a full the national recovery act was socialism And he was a mean SOB.

He tried to pack the court when they ruled against him.

He went to the New York Times.

If anybody opposed him, he threatened to have special IRS legislation against them.

In 44, he said, why are we fighting fascists just to come back to the United States and have Republican fascists?

He was a mean guy, and he ruined the economy in the 1938.

You go back and look at the 38, 39 continuance of the Great Depression, and it was a complete failure.

The complete failure of the New Dealer.

We were just about whack where we were with 32, say 18% unemployment, something like that.

And then the war came.

And everybody thought, you know what?

He's going to screw that up.

He's going to do to the war like he did with the New Deal.

He's going to have government this.

And he didn't.

He said, you know,

he said, doctor,

what did he say?

Dr.

New Deal has been taken over by Dr.

War production.

And what he meant was, we're going to get a lot of deficit spending, 25%.

Well, we're going to get 120% of national debt

in borrowing, but we're going to prime the economy.

But more importantly, we're going to turn it over to William Newson and the GM and Henry Kaiser, and we're going to get a war production board, and we're going to get the meanest SOP capitalists.

And if they want to build, if they need to build a Liberty ship every day or every two days, then we're going to give them a whole swath of Alameda, or we're going to give them port in Seattle, or we're going to give them Willow Run.

We're going to tell Henry Ford, we need to get a B-24

made every hour.

So what do you need?

Biggest factory in history, it's yours.

Go to, hey, we need a new Pentagon.

What do the guys tell us we need?

And he did it.

So he was a very good.

And then on strategy,

he was pretty smart.

I mean,

George Marshall was not a genius, but he was a very decent person, and he kept him.

And George Marshall had dignity and character.

And another thing that Roosevelt did, everybody thought that George Patton was an authentic military genius and we benched him for a year after the slapping incidents and

he should have been the supreme, not supreme commander.

He wasn't fit for that mentally and administratively or psychologically, but he should have been the senior American commander, not Bradley.

He should have had Bradley's job.

But Bradley and Eisenhower didn't like him.

Ike said he saved him maybe what, but they didn't like him.

But you know who saved him?

Was FDR.

he told marshall i want that man and marshall communicated that to eisenhower then eisenhower wrote and as if he saved him but it was it was fdr

and so fdr

there was a reason why we had brilliant commanders in world war ii nimetz was absolutely stunning he was wonderful and leMay was wonderful and hap arnold was okay

and Marshall was good.

Bradley was mediocre, but those other commanders were great.

And it was Roosevelt via Marshall that allowed that to happen.

He outsourced, is what I'm trying to say.

Truman

was a feisty guy that came out of a corrupt Kansas City mob.

I mean, he was.

He was corrupt.

But he did a pretty good job as senator on the war

audits of all the corruption and what some of the damage had done to our troops with inferior equipment.

Truman was scared stiff.

Everybody, excuse me, everybody thought Roosevelt was going to die, and he did.

Died, what, April 1st?

And everybody knew that he was going to be dead in 1945.

And then Henry Wallace, his running mate, was an absolute commie,

hardcore soul.

Nice guy.

He was a wonderful farmer.

Was he a farmer?

Wasn't he?

Absolutely.

He made a fortune in seed companies.

And later he kind of, you know what?

If you look what he said in the 50s, he renounced his communism.

He did.

Yeah.

He did.

He became a Republican.

He did.

He was a wonderful guy, but and he had a tragic death.

He had Lou Gehrig's disease.

But you know what?

If he had been president at that stage in his life, it would have been a disaster.

So they needed somebody who was obscure.

And given the ego of Roosevelt, Roosevelt thought he was going to live forever.

And he thought that I'll get an obscure senator to shut his mouth.

They won't tell him anything about the war.

I won't tell him anything about the bomb.

He'll just be there.

That's what the bosses want.

That's what the bosses get.

These southern races will get this guy.

He's from Missouri.

And he turned out he integrated the troops in Korea.

He drafted the Cold War.

He listened to George Keenan, and we had this containment policy.

He said to Stalin, they said, you have to be nice.

All the Roosevelt guys said, you got to be nice to Stalin.

He's, that son of a bitch lied to me.

He said.

And, you know, he was kind of...

a showboat with MacArthur.

It didn't have to get to the point that it did.

He shouldn't have relieved MacArthur the way he did, but MacArthur was out of hand, but he could have handled it better.

And he was kind of a demagogue.

He called people names.

But the point is, at that particular time in the war, he did a wonderful job and he was a decent person.

So they were both, in their own flawed ways, good presidents.

I think Andrew Jackson was a great, good, everybody thinks he's a terrible president.

He recreated the idea of the American president as a man of the people.

Let's face it.

He was not a

Virginian aristocrat.

And he brought earthiness and commonality, and he created Jacksonian deterrence.

That a Jacksonian is a person that's domestically and foreign says, no better friend, no worse enemy.

And that was his attitude.

And it really is kind of the basis of Trump's foreign policy that, as it was articulated in 2000, it was Jacksonian.

Walter Russell Mead wrote a series of really brilliant articles about that, using that term Jacksonian.

he was a good president polk was a good president i know that he was called an imperialist but he understood certain realities about the southern border and manifest destiny and he was

he was not shy about that uh

everybody makes fun on the republican side of teddy roosevelt because of his socialist progressive streaks but

he he was a good president he was a renaissance renaissance i mean not a great president but he was a renaissance person is what i'm trying to he was very smart

he was a harmful ex-president though.

Yeah, he was a harmful.

He elected Woodrow Wilson, put it that way.

That was a disaster.

But he did create a strong Navy and he was for military power and stuff.

He was a great naval historian, wasn't he?

Yes, he was.

He was a great historian about a lot of things.

And he overcame a lot of physical disabilities.

I wanted to ask you about.

Yeah, go ahead.

You, as honorary, was, I know that the left loves, all of a a sudden the left loves Grant because of the race issue, but Grant was a good president.

He was, I don't think he was corrupt.

He was just completely blind to the excesses of his friends, but he understood that

you had to have Union troops in the South to reconstruct the South.

And if you didn't,

a Republican judge or a Reconstruction effort, they were going to be dead.

And he broke them.

And it worked for, it worked.

I think it got excesses because it was going to create so many resentment when people couldn't vote because they had served in the Confederacy and you had only black elected officers.

But that was in transition.

I don't think we would have, what I'm trying to say is, I don't think that

had he been around,

we would have had the crooked bargain or all of that of third term or whatever.

I don't think he had enough personal prestige and magnetism to wind down slowly Reconstruction rather than just abruptly pull out and project weaknesses.

I have

a final question here,

and we only have a few minutes left, Victor, and it's based on Roosevelt and

your assessment of him during World War II.

But I'm curious your take on

Roosevelt's, well, our position with France.

And,

you know, we were

not allies, that's the wrong word, still supporting also the wrong word, but the Vichy government, anti-de Gaulle.

Was that Roosevelt's doing?

Yeah, Roosevelt hated de Gaulle.

You know who really didn't hate de Gaulle but knew all of his flaws was Churchill.

Churchill, right.

Yeah, it was very strong.

You'd think he'd hate him, but Churchill understood

a great truth about France, and that was

that the entire aristocratic corporate right had sold out to Vichy and were appeasing Hitler.

And you couldn't count on them.

And they were in charge of the army and the munitions.

And

the Mdominal wall of the West, the French army that had bent but not broken

at Verdun, was a hollow shell because of the French appeasement.

And that appeasement came a lot from the right.

And then he also knew that the left was totally communist.

It was.

And so he was looking for somebody that was not a Vichy right appeaser or sympathetic or in cahoots with

Bataan and the collaborationists and was not a communist.

And here was this one-star brigadier general who had been an army commander and written about infantry armor tactics, had done very well in the fall of France.

He actually had a minor little counter-affrance, but more importantly, he was so audacious.

You got to remember, de Gaulle was a nobody.

It would be as if today the United States had been defeated, and we had some one-star guy who was ahead of the 101st who just said, you know what, I am the voice of America.

America will come back.

America is not defeated.

America is occupied but not vanquished.

And then goes to

Britain and makes an ass of himself and demands all of these resources and radio

privileges and then snubs and attacks the United and says, well, France was a great country.

We saved it.

And he was just an obnoxious SOB, but it was necessary to have somebody like that.

And only Churchill had the temperament and the confidence in his own powers to try to tell Roosevelt, look, I know he's a mean SOB.

I know he's an egomaniac.

I know he reflects the worst traits of ingratitude of the French.

I know he thinks we're back in the Napoleonic era, but you know what?

He's all we got, and we need that landing base.

And when we go in there, we're going to need a sympathetic French.

We're going to end up bombing.

We killed more people through bombing France than the Germans did during occupation.

Far more.

60,000, 70,000 people died from Allied weapons.

And the Nazis probably executed about 20,000.

These were just collateral damage.

And Churchill knew that.

And he said, look,

we went in, Churchill went in to the ports in North Africa and bombed the French fleet.

Because right after the fall of France, I mean, they had

the Jean-Barre.

France had the best destroyers in the world.

They had three great battleships.

And that fleet was all there.

And Hitler needed it.

And he just said, you know what?

Those vichies will take over North African provinces, colonies.

Don't believe them.

They're not free free French.

We've got to go destroy the French fleet.

And he killed, I don't know, hundreds of Frenchmen.

And he made that decision.

But he understood France and he understood what they needed.

And Roosevelt didn't.

Roosevelt was very naive about foreign affairs.

He understood what the United States needed and he put trust in good people during the war, but he had de Gaulle wrong.

De Gaulle, Nixon had de Gaulle right.

Nixon really admired de Gaulle.

And, you know, when Kennedy

during the Cuban missile crisis, and when Kennedy's people went over to, I think he said to de Gaulle, this is where we are with the Soviet Union.

We want to know about the force to FRAP, you know, their independent nuclear.

And

de Gaulle, I think, said, we don't have to be told,

we don't have to have.

data when an American president looks me out and gives his word.

What American president says.

Yeah, he's like, you don't have to show me the pictures something like that yeah about the cuban cuban yeah he he said don't show it to me i accept your word and france is with you right and you know he was he could be an sob after 67 when it was pretty clear that nasser and everybody was going to attack israel first if israel didn't preempt and israel went over to de Gaulle and said, look, we need some Mirage jets and we need parts and you're the only people that will sell us.

And that's our main fighter.

We weren't giving him anything and de Gaulle said you're a sad i'm quoting by memory you're a sad people with a sad history i'm sorry oh wow so well very complex guy but

uh roosevelt uh reagan was a great president i

i

as i get older and i think i go back and look at tapes and i mean he was After he got shot, he obviously declined his last two years.

He had problems, but he was able to convince people to go down a path that was just simply unimaginable.

The idea that you would cut taxes to 28% or you would take a Jimmy Carter morbund economy and get 7% GDP growth in 1984 is amazing.

It is.

And he wasn't malicious, and

he was funny.

And so I liked Reagan.

And

Jimmy Carter was a miserable, mean SOB.

Another thing that remember about certain Democratic presidents that we've created this artifice, that Jimmy Carter was a saint.

No, he wasn't.

He was really mean.

And so was Joe Biden.

They have a mean streak in both of them.

They're vindictive.

They're angry.

And they were not good presidents.

They were both, I think that Carter and Biden were the two worst presidents in my lifetime by

any measure.

Lincoln is, I think we kind of look at Lincoln and we don't look at Washington, but we were very lucky to have Washington.

Almost any other human being in that position would have grabbed the power and found ways to allow himself to be permanently the head of the United States.

But the idea that you do all of that, you sacrifice your health, your wealth, and you beat the British, you free a country, you served her two terms, and that's it.

And you institutionalize that idea, that was very important at the time he did it.

Yeah.

I think he's very underrated as a as a writer, by the way.

I do too.

I do, too.

It's like the letter

to the Jewish congregation in

Newport has some of the most beautiful prose about living together under the tree of happiness, big tree, something to that effect, but just so

I think powerful.

Lincoln was a great man.

He has a tragic sense about everything, his marriage and everything that had happened in his life.

And

he was completely unshakable.

McClellan lost his head after Antietam.

Hey, General McClellan, if you're not going to use the Army, can I borrow it from you?

He kept us cool the whole time.

And when they came to him, Halleck, and everybody said Grant was drunk at Shiloh and he didn't know what he was doing.

He said,

I can't afford to lose this many fights.

And there were other suggestions.

I don't think he said it, but, you know,

whatever he's drinking, give it to us.

And then, you know, nobody was going to back Sherman.

The guy was brilliant at Bull Run, and then he kind of lost his, he didn't lose his mind.

He said the truth.

He said that it's going to cost us 400,000 men to win this war, and we have to kill off the whole cavalier class of the South.

It may be 250,000 of these rich, slave-owning plantationists, but they got to go.

Oh, that's terrible.

This is great.

And then he had a mental breakdown, sort of.

And they rehabilitated Tatum in Shiloh.

And then all of a sudden,

he's one of your heroes.

He was one of my heroes.

And the marches seized.

Yeah, they went to Lincoln.

Sherman didn't.

He just cut his supply lines.

He's cut his supply lines.

He's left Atlanta.

He has no support.

He has no rail.

Lincoln said, well, he's kind of like a gopher.

He went down one hole and I propose it or suppose or I think he'll pop up in another hole.

Maybe it'll be all the way to Savannah.

He had absolute confidence in Sherman's ability.

And that won the Civil War.

When you turn the war over to those two men, Grant and Sherman, with help from

Thomas and Sheridan, then the war was won.

They were authentic military geniuses, and they were far better commanders.

I hate to say it than Robert E.

Lee.

Robert Lee was brilliant on the defense of Richmond, but he was not, he didn't have the imagination that a Sherman or Grant did.

Well, I'm speaking to you from a little hotel in Gettysburg where I happened to meet today.

So I'm not too far from

the scene of Lee's great

Alan Guelzo.

I reviewed that.

He wrote a brilliant biography of Robert E.

Lee.

He was harsh on Robert E.

Lee, but he was fair.

And, you you know, he was captive of his time.

He didn't transcend it in the way Lincoln did.

But

I don't know.

I look back at Grant

and

Sherman was a, Sherman was just an amazing person.

I mean, when they said to him after that brilliant, absolutely brilliant Atlanta campaign, where he, you know, he left Tennessee and he outfoxed.

John Bell Hood, he outfoxed Joe Jack Johnson.

He took Atlanta.

He cut it off the supply rails from the South, and then everybody said he had to occupy it for the rest of the, you know, the world, sit there and do nothing.

And he cut loose with 60,000 troops and went all, you know, cut Georgia in half, humiliated the plantation plant.

And everybody said, it's Sherman, it's Sherman, it's Sherman.

And Grant was tied down in that bloody summer of...

fall of 1864, 100,000 callish at least.

Mary Lincoln said he's a butcher.

He's a butcher husband.

He's a butcher.

Get rid of him.

And they went to Sherman every day, the reporters.

He put someone in a little temporary jail, you know, because he was so sick of them.

And they said,

you know, and he said, you know what?

I told Grant that when I was crazy, he supported me.

And now when they say he's drunk, I support him.

And he said, you don't understand what's going on.

Grant's got him by the collar and holding him tight.

And now I'm going around the back and kicking him in the rear.

Or then he said, you know what?

There's a fire in the kitchen.

Grant's in there with a fire and I'm going around and stealing the house.

And he understood they were complementary strategies, is what I'm trying to say.

And they were enhanced.

And he could have easily been an egomaniac, said, I'm better than Grant, and I should be president.

Instead, he said, you know, if nominated, I will not serve.

If elected,

I will not take the nomination.

if elected.

I will not serve.

He was a great man.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, my friend, we have come to the end of this particular podcast.

So

again, this was the fourth of four that we have

recorded for when you're off on, I'll call it the good ship lollipop.

I hope when it happens, you'll be having.

Wish me luck.

I'm going to fly on a 16-hour flight from San Francisco to Istanbul on Turkish Airline.

Well,

that's a bit of a, I hope you're not back in row 57 in the middle.

Okay.

Don't tell us your first-class troubles.

Victor, thanks so much for all the wisdom that you shared.

And thanks to our listeners for listening and for supporting the show and for subscribing to Victor Hanson at VictorHanson.com.

And those who subscribe to Civil Thoughts at civilthoughts.com, the the thing I write, appreciate it very much.

And we will be back soon, believe it or not, with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks and bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.