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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin Annalee Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hooter Institution and the Wayne A.

Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is probably known by many of you as from his appearances on Fox News and other podcasts that he has.

But this on this podcast, Victor can air his ideas to the extent he finds necessary, which he doesn't always get that opportunity on those other venues.

So welcome.

And you're going to hear a lot today from Victor.

title of this podcast is how did we get here with trump and it comes from the book that victor wrote about trump the case for trump first that tells us how he got elected and then now we're going to look at everything that's happened and Trump now in his

all the lawsuits that have been brought against him so that will be the subject for the whole podcast so stay with us and we'll be right back

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Welcome back.

Victor can be found on his website at victorhanson.com.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and we welcome everybody.

We would love to have you as paid paid subscribers so you can read the Ultra VDH Ultra material.

But you can also sign up as a free subscription just to get our newsletter so that you'll know what's on the website.

About three to four times a week, I think we send out what's currently on the website and there's always lots there.

So, well, Victor, I thought we would start with your case for Trump and or the case for Trump.

I know that you argued tooth and nail over the or a with your publisher.

And look at some of the points that you make about him that might also

resonate or be explanations

for what's going on now with Trump and all these lawsuits.

And so I thought maybe I would start by asking you, you have in your book, you state that Trump, the person,

warts and all, vulgar, uncouth, divisive, and yet often empathetic and concerned, despite or because of his storied past,

must explain much of his rise to power.

Trump, the person, then transcended his issues.

And I thought maybe you could explain a little bit about what you mean there or the role that his personality played in his rise to power and maybe

how it's playing out.

I'm not sure exactly how you want to go about talking the current events, but maybe we can explain the book first and then go on to the i think i think

you know

i read his books as i had said earlier art of the deal art of the comeback all that and i when i wrote the case for trump and remember i i i was curious how he won so i had the kind of nonchalant non-engaging title how trump won and the people at basic didn't like that and gave me this title which i think helped sell a lot of copies but it also I'm not sure it accurately described the book, which is not go out and vote for Trump necessarily, but this is how he won and why he was successful.

And

in that vein, I think people misunderstand who he is or what he was.

So he

says things and

he acts in such a way that is uncouth and crude.

And therefore, he says things and he threatens.

But if you read what he's written, that's all sort of a modus operandi.

And the actual truth is that Donald Trump compromises and he's not a vendetta.

He doesn't hold vendettas.

It was pretty clear that the Biden family was crooked in 2015 and 16.

And it was abundantly clear that when Trump made that phone call, he wasn't making that up out of thin air.

There was enough evidence that it was known to people in government that the Bidens were crooked.

He got impeached for suggesting they delay, not cancel, offensive arms, which, as I said earlier, Obama and Biden had not approved.

He approved it.

But my point is this,

he didn't go after Biden.

He didn't appoint a special prosecutor.

He was,

that's the story.

He went to the Clinton's wedding.

He was fluid.

He talked a great game, but he was not a vindictive person.

He held grudges, but if the person was nice to him, he forgot the grudges.

And that's why

Gavin Newsom can say to Shahanity the other night, he gave us everything we wanted.

Cuomo said the same thing.

You think Biden would do that with a red state?

Biden went after his political opponent.

Trump didn't go after his political appointment.

And they impeached him for doing that on the phone call.

He said, well, you're investigating your chief opponent for 2020.

We're going to impeach him.

That's exactly what Biden's doing.

Trump didn't do that.

So that's one thing to remember about him.

He's very complex.

And

the second thing, very quickly, is

I know people are getting tired of the tragic hero.

I've mentioned it in the context of Sophoclean plays and John Ford Westerns, but

Donald Trump didn't need to be president.

In fact, he was making $20 $20 or $30 million a year on The Apprentice, and he had flirted with the idea of running before.

He said that to Oprah.

And by the way,

when I wrote this book, I went back and looked at Donald Trump

in the 1990s and his interviews in the 1980s

and early 2000 when he was in his 40s and 50s.

You know who he sounded like?

Bill Gates.

Nobody's going to believe that that's listening.

He was like a wonkish person.

He was warning about China and he would rattle off trade deficit figures.

He wasn't like he was now.

He had all of the facts at his mastery.

He was like he was in the second debate against Biden, where he was very factual.

And he did not want to run for president because he had this empire and he had financial challenges, et cetera.

But he didn't want.

So when he finally did,

it was going to be, you know, bad.

And then people on the Never Trump right were forgetting, were saying that he's not a conservative.

If you go back and look at National Review

and you look at all of their articles that were being published in 2015 and 16 warning about Trump, you know what the theme was, Sammy?

This guy can't be trusted.

He's a left-winger.

He's a Manhattanite.

He changed his party affiliation.

He's for abortion on demand.

He's for open borders.

He's spent all of that stuff.

And so when he came down that escalator and

announced his agenda, it was pretty much he just looked at the scene as a businessman and said, okay,

here's the crazy lunatic left.

Here's the corporate globalists, Romney, McCain,

Mitch McConnell, right?

And there's nothing in between.

Not since Ross Perot.

And Ross Perot got 20% of the vote the first time he ran.

So I can do better than that.

So he created an entire new nationalist workers' lower

middle class workers' party, which everybody thought was done for.

Remember, it was the left that was publishing books like Demography is Destiny and the new

Democratic Majority.

And the idea was just right off the opiate-addicted white working class.

They're not having children.

They're pathological.

They're killing themselves more than any other group.

And not Trump.

So he tailored a brilliant agenda that

answered their apprehensions, and they became very loyal to him.

The other central dilemma, and I'll let you, I'll just finish, is when I said tragic hero, I meant

he was an outsider.

Every tragic hero is an outsider.

When you read Sophocles Ajax, Ajax just complains all the time that he was a superior warrior at Troy.

Achilles died, he should have got the armor by any Merocratic standard.

But Agamemnon, Menelaus, all the establishment, they were out to get him.

Nobody understood who he was.

It's not fair.

Live nobly or nobly die.

And he kills himself.

And

sort of the same thing happens in these Westerns I've mentioned, like Shane or Hainu.

And they don't kill themselves, but they understand that they're no longer needed and they don't want to be needed, but that they're eccentrics.

Gary Cooper should have left when the bad guy, the Miller gang came and Hainu.

Why did he stay?

I mean,

there was no purpose, right?

He was married.

He could ride off in his buckboard.

He said they would follow him.

I know that.

But he chooses to go back to a certain death to save the town because he's heard, he knew what they were capable of.

They were capable of nothing.

They weren't completely blowhards.

And he comes back and saves them.

Same thing with the Magnificent Seven.

When the peasants ask them, they know the peasants aren't up to it, but they have certain skills that are up up to it.

Trump thought he had certain skills that were up to it.

You know, he had been a businessman.

He'd navigated between crooked unions, crooked politicians, crooked community groups, crooked everybody.

And he was able to

cut deals, so to speak.

He had a particular R to the deal,

yell, scream, threaten, demand 90%.

Oh, that's unfair.

And then when he got his 55%, thank you.

And then he would go back and tell everybody, do not trash that person.

I got 55% of them.

I might need to get it again.

So that's how he operated.

Everybody took him at his word with his bluster, but he was not a mean spirit.

He really wasn't.

They keep saying that he destroyed democracy.

And they always talk about his rhetoric when they say that, but they can't find out particular things he did that destroyed democracy.

Surely not what Joe Biden did, taking bribes while in office as vice president, or, you know, weaponizing the DOJ to go after Catholic masses

in Latin.

And so that when he came, he had these skill sets, and the Republican Party, after Romney and McCain, and the Bushes was not going to win 50, they weren't going to win an election again.

They could not penetrate the blue wall.

Remember, the Democratic Party loved the Electoral College.

They bragged about it.

There were articles written, even if the Republicans won the popular vote, they would never win the Electoral College because they started out, first of all, with the three big

winning states, Illinois, New York, and California, that were from the moment the polls closed were blue electoral votes.

And then they had the blue wall: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio,

and Wisconsin.

They were never going to lose it.

They were union left-wing places, so they thought.

He destroyed the blue wall.

And all of a sudden, the Electoral College was satanic to the left.

So

he had those skill sets, but

he had also a manner, a gun-slinging manner, where he didn't try to hide his roughness.

If he was in a meeting and

people were talking about the Clinton corruption in Haiti or whatever, he would say, Haiti is a shithole.

He didn't care.

And he knew people would probably leak that out, which they did.

If he knew that the Bidens were corrupt and Zelensky's government was corrupt, and we were giving them millions of dollars of offensive weapons, and he was doing something Obama would not risk doing, that is pissing off Putin by sending him offensive weapons like javelins that could take out tanks, then he would just tell Zelensky on a phone call.

I mean, I'm sure there were aides saying, hey, Mr.

President, the National Security Council is listening to this call, and there are some people on there that hate you, so be careful.

But he didn't care.

He just said, look, Zelensky,

Before I'm going to okay these offensive weapons, which by the way, you wouldn't have gotten from anybody but me, I want you to assure you that when Biden's bragging that he got a prosecutor fired that may have been investigating his crooked family, that you're not going to be crooked and that this money is going to go where it should because the Bidens are crooked.

Well, you know, Venman was listening and he called up the so-called whistleblower and we're off to the races with

special counsel and then,

but more importantly, with Adam Schiff and the first impeachment.

So he didn't care.

And so that ability was a paradox.

He was able to enact change because he didn't care if you liked him or not.

But he also didn't have the apparatus.

He didn't have the mayor of the town, so to speak, of the Western, the city council, the mayor, the women's pro,

you know,

women's Christian temperament.

They were not on his side.

And he was very hard for him to find talent.

Wait a second.

They weren't on Gary Cooper's side either in high noon.

Remember, they all just kind of turn around.

No, that's exactly right.

That's exactly my point.

They were not on his side, his being the tragic hero.

They're never on their side, but they want them because they're at an impasse and they can't do things.

So they bring in somebody with a certain set of skills.

And then the tragedy of this tragic hero, as they start to enact change, i.e.

he stopped all the millers the first time.

Remember, he cleaned up the town, according to Katie Girardo.

He was a successful sheriff.

And

the Magnificent Seven stopped

Caldera,

the bandit.

And,

you know, Shane starts to stand up to the sodbusters.

At that magic point, when they feel that things are back on track, then they start doing weird stuff.

Like,

you know, Will Cain, would you please leave?

We don't want to have any more hassles.

You're kind of a controversial people.

Remember that trial?

Our Magnificent Seven?

You know, we had to go tell Caldera that you guys were bugging us.

So Caldera shows up and remember takes their guns and kicks them out.

And they come back on their own.

But the villagers got sick of them.

And the same thing with Shane when they're going to that dance and they say, Wilson's come.

That was Jack Palance.

And one of those sodbusters says, I don't like gunplay.

I'm thinking,

I don't like gunplay.

I don't approve of it.

Okay, so you're going to let Wilson kill everybody because you don't approve of it?

Is that it?

Or are you going to make fun of the guy who's going to go in that saloon all by himself and take on Wilson and the

Riker brothers himself, three of them, and you don't approve of what he's doing?

He's going to save your rear end.

And that's what happens.

And then when it's done, you know,

he's wounded.

He's going back off to, he's got his buckskin back on.

He's going back up to, what, the Grand Tetons with a wounded arm.

He's going to be wandering around.

And Joey says, I know, mom wants you.

I know they need you, dad.

And he said, tell your mother there's no more guns in the valley.

In other words, she didn't like me.

teaching you how to shoot.

She doesn't like gunplay.

The settlers don't like gunplay.

So I killed the guns and they're gone.

And I have to be gone too.

So, what with Trump, it was always the more, as soon as he started doing fighting and he got all of these things,

his magic moment was, let's face it, was December 2019.

If you had looked at that, and I went back the other day and looked at the press accounts, I just Googled dates in December of 2019, right on the eve of COVID.

We had record low on employment for peacetime, almost.

It was about 3.2, 3.3.

Black unemployment was at an all-time low.

We had almost 2% growth.

The inflation rate was about 1.5.

The interest rates were essentially zero.

He had a big deficit.

That was his Achilles heel.

And everybody gets angry about the wall.

And he was a bluster, bluster, bluster, bluster.

But he did rebuild about 500 miles of rickety fence.

And he had started on the wall.

And he had defeated his enemies in court.

He'd fired people in the Pentagon that did not help him.

He'd fired people in Homeland Security.

He'd threatened Mexico.

Mexico had guards and he was on the cusp of starting to build the new wall and he would have built it.

And there was no illegal immigration anyway in 2019 and December, some, but nothing like it there had been before.

He was solving that problem.

There was no crime.

The crime was way down.

And abroad, he had killed Soleimani, he had killed Baghdadi, he had bombed, like he promised, the SHIT out of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

I should say ISIS.

It was gone from Iraq.

Iraq was stabilizing.

Iran was terrified of him.

They were not ramming America, trying to ram American ships.

No, no, no, no.

And China was not buzzing American jets.

China was not sending balloons over continental United States.

China did not go to a summit in front of the cameras, tell Mike Pompeo to screw himself, basically, like they did Blinken

in Anchorage.

And there was no,

he had negotiated a solution to Afghanistan.

Maybe he was withdrawing too rapidly, but he was going to keep background.

He was a businessman, and he was going to keep about 3,500 troops on that outpost, mostly because we put so much money into it.

That's how he thought.

So the world was stable.

Everybody hated him in Europe, but everybody hated him and paid $100 million more for NATO armaments.

And that extra defense expenditure came in handy with Ukraine.

And Putin did not invade.

And I know it seems reductionist, but he invaded in 2008 when the Bush administration was crippled.

He invaded in 2014 because Obama had appeased him.

He invaded in 2021 because of Afghanistan and Biden's non-compostment status and Biden's cyber warfare.

Please, if you're going to do cyber warfare, don't attack hospitals, basically.

So everything was going good, but

the more he did well, there was less tension as far as the left had no answer to that.

And all the polls showed he was going to be re-elected.

And so COVID came along and the rest is history.

But notice that

the better he did, people were concentrating on.

tweets.

I would meet Republicans who would say, I didn't vote for him, I should have, but my wife or I, I decide I can't vote for him because of his tweets.

He, you know, he calls people names.

He, you know, he calls people names.

He's a crude, you know, and they were, they just, people forget we've never done that to a president.

He didn't say that they were suckers in Normie.

One person in a meeting said that, and that was discredited by everybody who was there.

He didn't overfeed the fish in a Japanese koi pond, as they said he did.

He didn't say drink bleach.

So it was just impossible

for the press to have a rational approach to him.

And the more that he was successful and the more that people had a margin of error that they thought things were getting back to normal, then the more they focused on his technique,

his gun slinging.

And it was pretty clear that they were getting dissatisfied, the better off they became.

And

I think he would have still won re-election if it had not been for COVID.

And I mean that in the sense of not just the hysteria and the work of the Democratic National Committee to engineer a radical transformation in how we voted.

If we had voted 70% on Election Day, as we traditionally do in most states, he would have been re-elected, even given COVID and all the duplicity on the part of Fauci and Collins and

Cuomo and all these guys.

But

he was a tragic figure.

And everybody said, and I wrote a call and said, hang up your Twitter clubs.

And people said, well, why doesn't he just be, he doesn't have to say these things.

And that's like saying,

you know, that Alan Ladd will just away his six gun and be a hired hand.

Or,

you know, it's not going to happen.

Or the Magnificent Seven can retire to the village.

and age gracefully.

It's not going to happen.

He can't.

He can't do that.

No.

Well, Victor, let's take a break here and then come back and there's a couple of more things in the book that might help us point to what's going on currently with these lawsuits.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Welcome back.

I'd like to remind everybody that we are a partner with John Solomon, who is an investigative reporter, and he has a site called Just the News.

So please go there.

He lives in DC and he does a lot of great investigative reporting.

So we welcome everybody there.

Victor, there are a couple of things that you talk about with the Republican elites and with the deep state in your book.

And I would like to read a couple of passages and then have you reflect on

what you meant when you're talking about Trump getting elected.

And maybe they seem to me to be foresight into the leading up to these court cases.

So you say about the Republican Party elite, you say the great strength of Trump was that he operated outside the Republican Party's intellectual and political apparata.

His great weakness was that when in extremis, he had no such institutional support invested in his candidacy or presidency, and thus few ancillaries to defend his agendas or explain his bad behavior as was true of past administrations.

And then of the deep state, you say at each state at each stage, the erroneous predictions of the deep state prompted ever greater animus at a target, which was Trump, that it could not quite understand, much less derail,

and so far has not been able to destroy.

So, by March 2019, the repetitive nightly predictions, bombshell, turning point, the walls are closing in, impeachment was looming on the horizon, had amounted to little more than monotonous and scripted groupthink.

And they were finally revealed as empty with the release of the Mueller report.

But I like that you show a little bit about what made the deep state so angry at Trump, as well as the challenge he had with the Republican elite.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and its role in the current.

Go ahead.

Yeah, Trump saw that half the country was angry.

They had been screwed by globalization.

They'd been screwed by the government.

And the other half of the country was angry that the half was angry.

They were angry.

Why are you angry?

And so there was that divide and he saw the Republican Party was not addressing these concerns.

So when

you look at that debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in 2012 or Romney versus Obama,

when When Romney was debating Obama, on points, he may have been winning.

But when Candy, is that Candy Crawley, the CNN debater,

when she jumped in and joined Obama and falsely corrected Romney, he just sort of,

not Trump, he would have said, what the hell are you doing?

You're the moderator.

Get back there.

You know what I mean?

That's what people wanted.

And they didn't, they understood in the abstract that capital gains cuts were important and you have to reform entitlement.

But they didn't want some wonk just parroting that and free, but not fair trade because they didn't, the Republican Party had no empathy for working people.

They did in the sense in the abstract that if you had enacted their policies, it would have made working people better off than the socialism, but they couldn't articulate that.

And they didn't swim in the same waters as East Palestine.

They were fish that swam with the elite.

And so Trump came in.

And he had no constituency other than that 30 or 40 percent base that felt that they finally had somebody that was championing a populist nationalist agenda.

What do I mean by he had no...

In the old days, if you were George Bush or

George H.W.

Bush, George W.

Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, how did the Republican Party operate with the media?

They would call in Bill Crystal from the Weekly Standard.

They would call in Mitch Lowey from National Review.

They would call in David Frum.

They would call in George Will from the Washington Post.

They would call in,

you know, some foreign political, they'd call in John Bolton, they would call in Elliott Cohen, and all of this kitchen cabinet media people would talk and get to go to the White House, and then they would write favorable stuff.

That's what the parties did.

When Trump came in, they all hated him.

They all hated him.

So there was no kitchen cabinet.

You know what I'm saying?

There was nobody out there.

And then, even worse, we forget that a lot of the levers of conservative thought that did like him abandon him.

So Rush Limbaugh died.

We forgot the consequences of that guy.

That guy was

an architect-type American genius.

There's never been anybody for three hours that can be comedian, entertainer, astute political commentator like he could.

And when you lost that voice, Trump lost a big ally.

And then you looked at the Drudge Report.

That was the aggregator for Fox News and conservative media.

They would look at the Drudge Report every day and look at these stories.

It completely, I guess, out of personal spite or pick or anger, he flipped.

He went left wing.

So they lost that second big megaphone.

Trump did.

And then there were columnists that were columnists and public intellectuals that had been, you know, pro-Trump.

Ann Coulter flipped.

Bill Barr left.

Chris Christie.

So maybe for good or maybe for bad reasons, I'm not going to adjudicate it, but I'm pointing out that he didn't have any

people who were writing consistently, not the Wall Street, nobody was.

And he didn't have a pool of people that had the expertise to help him, at least.

And the ones that could would be shocked at his

technique.

So there's a reason, isn't there?

We go back to those Westerns to go back to that theme.

Why didn't Shane just say,

look,

I need help.

There's three killers in there and they have a whole pack of killers.

So you Sodbusters,

why when he was fighting

with every, you know, when he has

Joey's dad, right?

He's fighting with him in that knockout,

you know.

knockout fight.

Why didn't he just say, come with me?

Why didn't he say to the Sodbusters, come with me?

We'll outnumber them.

Because he couldn't count on them.

They either didn't have the skills or the willingness.

And why didn't the,

you know, why didn't Will Cain, why wasn't he successful?

He tried to get people to help him.

Lloyd Bridges wanted to be sheriff.

He went to the council.

They all said, oh, we're going to, we owe you so much.

But nobody would help him because they didn't want to be associated with him.

or they were afraid that he would take on something at odd odds.

So nobody wanted to be associated with Trump.

And I don't know how many times when I wrote that book or I wrote favorable things.

In 2016,

I didn't know who, I didn't support him in the primary.

But once he was nominated, I thought everybody would fall into place.

And I talked to some of the Never Trumpers, and it was clearly that it was

personal spite.

They hated him because he destroyed.

He didn't want anything to do with them, or he didn't know who they were.

And I knew he was going to win.

I just felt it.

I could just feel the antagonism toward the Clintons in general and the Obama administration that had just was just petering out.

And so,

but I knew there would be nobody that he could, there would be no successful media consortium.

There would be no

pull of Republican experts that would join him.

And

the ones that would join him would try to, they wouldn't try to say to Donald Trump, with some exceptions,

H.R.

McMaster was an exception.

People forget that.

He was an obsession.

I know that people criticize him, but he went into that administration saying, I don't necessarily agree with the Trump foreign policy, maybe on the Iran deal initially, but whatever Mr.

Trump wants, I will translate that into the levers of the National Security Council, and I'll try to implement it.

There were other people who said, you know what?

Yes, Mr.

Trump, we'll do that.

And then they deliberately stonewalled and tried to oppose him.

You read the anonymous op-ed about how there was a widespread, what he called, conspiracy to stop him.

And so it was kind of tragic.

You could see what was going to happen.

And then Trump was,

he sounded just like Ajax and the Sophocles.

The more he was successful, the angrier people got, the more he was maltreated.

And he would say things like, well, look what I did with unemployment.

Look what I did with growth.

Look what I'm doing in the border.

Look what I did with Baghdadi.

And the more that he tried to, he was so exasperated for some favorable coverage, the more that even the people on the right that acknowledged that he had helped them couldn't stand him because of his, I don't know, his personality or his background.

Part of it was class, wasn't it?

The Queen's accent, the orange skin.

CEOs don't do that.

They look like Jamie Dimon, right?

or they look like a Disney executive.

They don't look like Donald Trump.

They just don't.

They don't go to McDonald's.

I I talk to people, go to the White House, congress people.

What did he give you?

He ordered a Big Mac and Haugendas ice cream.

You know what a Republican grandee is, a CEO or a guy in the Senate leadership.

He goes and sees Trump.

Trump

hands him a Big Mac and Haugendas and his brain goes,

trans fat, 81%, calories up to 350.

Reflux tonight, no sleep.

No, no, no, no.

Please don't, Mr.

Trump.

Trump.

Yeah.

Can I just go with your

Western examples?

Because it seems to me when you look at him, he's a fighter.

Shane was a fighter among sodbusters.

Gary Cooper was a fighter among

scared city folk or town folk.

And they weren't fighters.

So they both knew they had to take it on.

I think Trump was the same.

I mean, we always talk about him.

He's a fighter.

He was a fighter in politics.

And he was not among fighters in D.C., that D.C.

had become so complacent and everybody was

getting whatever they needed for themselves and not willing to fight for the people.

I think Trump was very distinctly different in that sense.

And I don't know if I'm wrong, but it seems to me.

Wow, he was.

A fighter among non-fighters.

Trump always looked at life as

a struggle a fight you were going to win win win win win win and that's how he he he looked at things and he understood that at this particular time people were getting people forget that we had a recession in 2000 almost a collapse in 2008 in september but obama didn't become president in september he became president in 2009, basically

at the beginning of February, end of January.

And they had September, September, October, November, December, January.

And that four and a half months, they had taken steps.

So you had the

guidelines to a recovery.

And the worse a recession,

the quicker the recovery.

And what did he do?

He basically brought in a socialist FDR, Great Society, Johnson, New Deal program, and just ossified the.

And we didn't have a recovery for six years.

And it was a disaster.

And then he changed American foreign policy.

And there was a reason why Putin, as I said, went into Crimea.

And there was a reason ISIS took over Iraq.

And there was a reason that we had a misadventure in Libya with Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice's crazy gambit.

And there was a reason.

why John Kerry invited

Putin back into the Middle East to adjudicate Syria and WMD after their hiatus of 40 years.

It was a disaster.

And so

people forget that.

And he came in and he wanted to wage war on all those fronts.

And the mystery to me is that

the never Trump on the right and the independents,

they had told us certain things that were key.

One of them was you needed strict constructionists.

But when you looked at Republicans who appointed judges, George H.W.

appointed David Souter, who turned out to be a leftist, and Earl Warren was appointed by Eisenhower.

And you look at Powell,

and you look at the first Brennan judge, or you look at John Paul Stevens, if you look at Nixon and four judicial appointments, even Reagan with Sandra Day O'Connor or Bush

with Justice Roberts.

They were not conservatives.

So here's a guy that comes along and

he turns over the selection to the Federalist Society.

And my God, they got conservatives.

So you think that they would either have supported that or at least given him credit.

They didn't.

And they had been harping on abortion and abortion and abortion on demand and partial birth abortion and murder.

And then this guy comes along and says he's going to stop it.

And he was haranguing about Will versus Wade and the whole point of those justices he appointed, they were going to turn it back to the states.

That was the classic conservative position.

And then they said they wanted to deregulate.

That's what he did.

He cut taxes.

And they said the salt tax was just a blank check to blue check for blue states to run up taxes on their population and make everybody else pay for it by write-offs.

He got rid of that.

That got a lot of people angry.

Got me angry.

I can't write off my California income tax.

But that's what he did.

That's what conservatives wanted.

And they all said that NATO was a freeloader.

But what do you do about it?

Obama said it was a freeloader.

Bush said it was a freeloader.

He did something about it.

He went out and told Germany, you know, why are you doing this pipeline with Russia when we're defending you?

And they laughed.

You look at that tape.

they were laughing at him, but he had a point.

So he was the epitome of conservative activism in a way that the other presidents had not been able to achieve.

Yes.

And yet they hated him because of his crudity.

And there was another thing that we haven't talked about.

Never in the history of American politics has somebody

been so threatened by the left.

And what do I mean by that?

you had kathy griffin holding up his head decapitated you had the royal uh the central park shakespearean society

uh with a rendition of julius caesar where trump trump a guy who looks like trump is being stabbed to death

you had snoop dog talking about shooting him

you had

When you look at all of the movie stars and celebrities and politicians, they talked about stabbing him.

They talked about burning him up.

They talked about blowing him up.

They talked about decapitating him.

They talked about shooting him.

And you had Rosa Brooks on the 11th day of his administration said, you got to get rid of this guy.

And here's your choices.

Impeachment, too long.

25th Amendment, because he's crazy.

Where is she now talking about Biden?

Oh, my God.

And then third was what?

A military coup.

So you had two colonels that wrote an op-ed

in the major media, two current retired colonels that said that Biden should basically remove him, that he should be removed.

You had

a

foremost admiral,

McRaven, and he wrote an op-ed that said the sooner the better that he leaves.

Well, he had a scheduled election coming up.

If you're a retired military officer, you don't say the sooner the better, because that implies that he should be taken out.

You had Joe Biden said that the former joint chiefs would remove him forcibly from office.

And I won't get into the names of all the four-star generals who said that he was a coward, a liar, a Mussolini, etc.

But we have never seen that level of vituperation.

And we forget that.

And so, and Trump, and then

obvious thing people said, did he ask for it?

Well, it was Trump, so he was a gunslinger, so he gave it back in kind or provoked it.

Yeah.

But

still, you think that these people hype themselves as cultured and

the elite of the elite.

And so you didn't think that they would lie and say that the walls are closing in, or Adam Schiff was a Harvard-trained lawyer.

He bragged that he was a scriptwriter.

You didn't think he would just flat out lie like he did.

Or you thought that Andrew Weissman was supposedly a career prosecutor with a great reputation.

You don't think he was trying to,

what, engineer the Mueller investigation to find something that didn't exist?

51 intelligence authorities, I thought James Clapper and John Brennan and Leon Panetta were

models of probity.

They just flat out and lied for short-term political advantage with that letter, the hallmark of Russian disinformation.

So we haven't been through that before.

I think that's what Trump's dilemma is right now,

because there's a lot of people that supported him and said everything he did was wonderful and they treated him terribly, but I'm exhausted.

I can't go through it.

And the polls don't show that yet.

No, they don't.

That's what.

Again, that is going to be the $64,000 question because they're going to put a gag order on him.

They're going to prevent him from talking to his closest aides.

They're going to do things you can't imagine to him.

And the question is: will that increase his support and anger and empathy?

Or will at some point people said, you know what?

Just

they're going to destroy the whole Republican Party because they're going after Trump.

So why doesn't he

get his six guns and get on the horse and ride up to the Grand Tetons?

And I don't know the answer to that.

I'm not suggesting I favor or disfavor either one.

I'm just trying to put out the parameters, the possible.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and talk a little bit about

is there any Trump,

anything Trump could have done to avoid this animus?

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and we're talking about Trump.

And we're really turning to the

current situation that Trump finds himself in, which is to be running for president and then have, I think, four different,

at least some of them coming, indictments against him.

And we're trying to figure out how he got there.

And I know that we looked at the people who disliked him, especially the deep state in the last segment.

And then that the fact that he didn't have as much support on his own side as he really would have needed.

So he was kind of a lone.

gunslinger in the political sphere.

So Victor, I was wondering if you could finish off, like, how do we get to all these indictments?

I guess maybe it's a little bit too obvious, but you probably have something to add to that.

Well,

before I start, when you said he had nobody supporting him.

The people, other than that.

Yes, because the left created this image of him as a

existential threat to the way of life in America.

And he should be eliminated, decapitated, as I said, burned up, shot.

That was, nobody said a word on the left when they said such things.

If you were a rodeo clown during the Obama administration and you wore an Obama mask as a joke, they banned him from life from that rodeo for making fun of Obama.

Can you imagine that?

What if he had taken a head of Obama and lifted it up?

Or what if he had said like stoop dog, he'd like to shoot him?

Or other people said they wanted to poison him.

Bourdain, Anthony Berdine or Bardone, whatever his name was, the cook, he joked about poisoning him.

So that was one thing.

It made it almost impossible.

I cannot tell you how many people came up to me after that book, or I wrote a column in 2015 and 16

laying out that he was going away.

And they said things like the following.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

I walked across the Stanford campus and somebody I very know came up to me and said, you know, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I would go among some of my Hubert colleagues.

They wouldn't even say hello.

They were so angry.

I had people in the bulwark.

You know, Gabe Schollenfeldt said I was a anti-Semite.

I spent my entire life supporting Israel.

That's one of the things I get criticized sometimes for.

And he said I was an anti-Semite.

And Trump was an anti-Semite.

The guy's...

son-in-law was Jewish.

His daughter was a Jewish convert.

He was popular.

People worked for him who were Jewish.

He was the best president that Israel ever had.

Yeah, he moved the consulate into Jerusalem.

He declared the Golan Heights were going to be Israel.

He cut off the PLO, Hamas, UN 700.

He cut it off like that.

And he was helping Netanyahu plan to deal with Iran.

He got out of the Iran.

Everything Israel could scarcely imagine he did.

And yet, to support him, I was told I was an anti-Semite.

As I said, the day that thing came out, I was speaking at the Hudson Institute on behalf of Israel.

that's the kind of Vietrooper.

I had people in my family that would not speak to me, literally.

And so that's the type of climate that people created.

And it made it very hard for people to want to take a risk to write favorably about him.

And

that was all manufactured.

And why was that?

Because it was the disinformation hoax, the Russian collusion hoax, the indictment hoax.

And your question is, could he have done anything differently?

There were key points when he did.

So

after

the election,

which I think could have been prevented, the loss, and I wrote about that in March and April, and I know a lot of other people did.

They said the DNC is insidiously got a lawfare team that are going into Pennsylvania and going into West.

They're changing the damn voting laws under the guise of COVID.

They're allowing people to mail in ballots they've never done before.

Registrars' lists don't have to be collated.

Full names don't have to be there.

Addresses can be mistaken.

They're allowing people to cure the ballot.

They call people up and say, we have ballots here, but that we can't count them unless you come in and fix them.

It was crazy.

Mark Zuckerberg, 419, and yet they did nothing.

The Trump team didn't stop that.

So that was something that could have been stopped.

And then when

you had those mysterious things on election night, you'd see, you know, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Trump way ahead.

And

I would say to people on election night, he's going to lose.

And then the mail-in ballots were coming.

Then they got into crazy territory with Sidney Powell and the Kraken.

If you're going to say the Dominion voting machines were rigged and communicating, then unleash the Kraken.

So if I went on Lou Dobbs or something,

I was astounded.

I thought, wow, Sidney Powell, that was an astounding charge to say there was a conspiracy to rig the election.

You're in Jill Stein territory, who said the same thing in 2016.

You're in,

is it Benny Thompson, the guy that was the head of the January 6th committee?

He said that in 2004.

30 Democrats said that the election was rigged in Ohio.

I thought, you're doing what the left does, but you better have proof.

And they didn't.

And then there was a special election.

And I thought to myself, you know what?

You're just so focused on Trump,

the injustice done Trump, but it was done in March and April.

But now you can still stop this socialist revolution.

You can stop it

because you can win the Senate.

You can win the Senate.

in 2020.

You've got two special elections in Georgia.

You've got a to schedule one, you've got a special one.

And Georgia is a red state turning purple.

But all you have to do, Mr.

Trump, is go down there and convince every MAGA person to get everybody out to vote.

Everybody.

And then you've got to tell the independents that, you know what, but we didn't do that.

He didn't.

He didn't.

He basically sent the message that your vote would be worthless because he was so pissed off.

And I don't blame him for being angry, but we did the impossible.

We lost Georgia to two socialists.

And that was the Senate.

And everything is history since then.

They still have it.

And that's been a disaster.

Once they got the Senate and the House, it was the House, they won the 2018 election.

And they had the House at that point, you know.

So you were trying to tell people around Trump through columns and radio and stuff, they have the House, we lost it.

And now they're going to have the Senate.

And if we,

if they've got the presidency, and we're going to have socialism like you've never seen, so don't lose those and lost them.

And then, as far as the indictments, let's see, could he have done anything differently?

Let's go through them.

Brag, no.

That was just

Stormy Daniels, non-disclosure, somebody pays, and then they transmogrify that into a campaign finance, right?

Yeah,

not recording it correctly or

campaign finance, but it was private anyway.

But

we know that after the election, the Obama campaign had solicited money from people abroad, which was a violation, and they paid a small fine.

We know that Hillary Clinton paid a small fine for campaign violations.

We know that she illegally hired a foreign national.

You can't do that, Christopher Steele, through three paywalls.

We know that

he couldn't have done much about that.

Okay, go to the next one, Letita James.

He overvalued by a lot his assets, but did he default on the loan?

So I just helped my daughter buy a house, and believe me, I had to have every asset.

Do I know what the value of an almond orchard is that is losing money, but on the edge of the city limits?

I look in the paper and they sell from $30,000 to $50,000 depending on, that's a lot of difference, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So what does Victor say the almond orchard is worth?

So as collateral, do I say it's minimum, 30, 40?

I don't know what it's worth.

Do I go appraised?

They don't know what it's worth because the price.

So the point is, I, because I feel like if you

are somewhat exposed, you should always have no deductions.

So I don't try to detect anything.

So I put the minimum amount.

I always try to do that.

But he didn't know that.

He was,

this wasn't during the campaign.

This was Donald Trump private citizen.

They never did that.

Alvin Bragg, for example, when he was elected, he promised to get Trump and he saw nothing there.

Trump hadn't announced.

Bragg thought he was a disgraced private citizen.

As soon as he said he was going to run again, Bragg all of a sudden got religion and went after him.

Same thing with Leetita James.

She went back through years as a private business person and said he had overvalued his real estate assets.

He probably did, as every other real estate mogul in New York.

And he got a loan.

And did he default?

No, he paid back the loan.

So what was the crime?

Yeah, that's just.

And so that's just, and that is based on jury nullification that Bragg and Letita James know as African-American prosecutors that they're going to get a jury selected that will be left-wing and probably probably a lot of minorities, and they'll say that Donald Trump is a racist, and they'll convict him,

and that will tie him up.

And then we've got Fannie Willis and George over the phone call.

Trump supposedly said, I need to find 10,000 votes that I know exist.

And did he say to

the Attorney General?

Go get them right now.

I want every single one of them.

No.

You can say, you know, he did a Thomas of Beckett murder in the cathedral.

Will somebody not relieve me of this man it's happened to beckett but henry ii you know but

uh i don't think that is a impeachable or a felony or anything it's just kind of blowing off steam and it didn't amount to anything did it did they and that there was a lot of questions about george's protocols and the same thing in arizona So those three things I think are bogus.

Now we get to the presidential records very quickly.

And

why did he take all of these records?

First of all, they all do it.

And they get into a fight with the archivists.

So Bill Clinton, for example, in 1999 had Taylor Branch come in and show us the real Bill Clinton, right?

So he taped him over a long, many months.

So Clinton got comfortable with him.

Didn't even know he's in the room.

So he would be answering questions on a day in the life of Bill Clinton, and somebody would call overseas, right?

And that would be part of the tape.

So when he was all done,

he had all of these tapes.

And of course, it was Bill Clinton and the Raw.

So his presidency over, he just took the tapes with him.

Well, that wasn't, they weren't his.

They were done in the White House.

So they should have been at least looked at the yard.

He put them in a drawer, his sock drawer.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody said a word.

And nobody has ever asked Joe Biden until now.

Everybody's got the Biden thing wrong.

Biden took him out as a senator, as a vice president, and then used them as a personal

private citizen.

Then, as president, he didn't say a word.

So, why did

you really believe that all of a sudden, at the time of the Mar-a-Lago raid, that Joe Biden's lawyers accidentally stumbled on the truth that he had thousands of documents for almost 20 years?

I don't.

I think they were perfectly happy that he had thousands of classified documents.

They didn't care.

The only reason they notified the archivist and the FBI or the DOJ was because they wanted to indict Trump for that.

And they thought, wow, somebody's going to leak that Joe can trump Trump on as far as classified documents.

So then they staged that little cycle drama where they went to the FBI so they could say, as they do now, unlike Donald Trump, who resisted and fought back Joe Biden's lawyers, voluntarily cooperated.

No, you didn't.

You didn't do it for 20 years.

You put him in a garage where every time he backed out, you could see where the documents were.

So

that's, and then the question is, why did he take the documents?

Why did Mike Pence take them?

I think Mike Pence just didn't even watch it, right?

I'm not even sure he knew he had them.

So he looked and thought, uh-oh, I'm doing what Trump is.

I've criticized Trump.

Okay.

So why did did Biden take them out?

I think Biden took them out.

To be frank, and this is just an opinion.

He took them out because he thought that they were repositories of

foreign policy CIA analyses.

And that since the time he was a vice president and as a private citizen, he was monetizing.

the Biden name and that depended on expertise and he's an airhead and his son is a crackhead.

And so Hunter

and the people have suggested that when you look at those emails that Hunter was transmitting, they have kind of bureaucratic language that is not characteristic of Hunter Biden's knowledge.

So I think that there was a whole trove of them and the Biden family had access to them, but I can't prove that.

But I think that's the reason he brought them out.

Why did Trump bring them out?

They said he wanted to sell them.

Then they said, no, he didn't want to sell them.

I think there were a lot of stuff that, first of all, that weren't classified that he had a right to do.

But why did he fight so much?

It's either one or two, or I think, or both.

One,

he

wanted to magnify his achievements for posterity.

He thought that the archives would not, he'd either lose them or he didn't trust them.

He had reasons to be suspicious of the federal government.

So he wanted to make sure that he could frame a letter from Kim Jong-un, right?

Hanging in Mar-Lago, or he could show you that he had an actual personal note from Putin, something like that.

Or, and, or, dash, and

he felt in that trove of classified information, there were indications

that

people had warned

or had in writing

illegal or improper activity directed at himself.

And he thought that if they went to the archives, they disappear.

I don't know if that's true or not, but I think he thought that there was a lot of stuff that he wanted access to so he could get his side of the story out, given his distrust of government.

So that was adjudicated.

I'm not defending what he did.

He would have been much better if people had said to him, and they may have said to him, hey, look, Trump, these people hate your guts.

They impeached you twice.

They tried you as a private citizen.

They spent $40 million on a wild goose chase to destroy you.

They got CIA.

They will do anything.

And so you better give back all of them because you're going to run for president again.

Don't give them any chance.

And he probably said it doesn't matter.

They'll find something.

They'll hate me.

They'll do it to anybody.

So why give them the pleasure?

Well, that was the wrong attitude, apparently.

I don't know if it was wrong.

We'll see.

It's not over yet.

Yeah, it sure isn't.

Well, do you think that this ordinary person, since Trump did cultivate the popular, is still hoping for a tragic hero to save them or what is what is the popular his populism doing right now

well the polls show that he's 30 points ahead of ron desantis at this point

and of all the candidates that we're looking at

there's only one maga candidate and that's desantis uh chris christie is not a maga candidate nikki haley is a neoconservative

Mike Pence

is kind of a MAGA candidate, kind of evangelical.

His campaign will be sort of, I will bring a moral element

to what Donald Trump crafted, which was successful, but I will avoid the

excesses.

So that's what his campaign message will be.

And Christie's will be, I'm a human torpedo that for the benefit of my candidates and my own career trajectory of getting a cabinet appointment, I will blow him up as a torpedo.

I'll get on the the stage and just go nuts and rattle his cage.

That's what he thinks he's going to do.

And

Tim Scott, I think is

these are mostly white guys, and the Republican Party has a larger constituency and it will not win unless it appeals to Hispanics and Asians and blacks.

And I'm a conservative that, unlike Obama, was not prepped and Ivy Schooled, and I made it.

Obama attacked him the other day.

When Obama attacked him, I said, I don't know what house he talked him from, Martha's Vineyard, Hawaii, or Calorama, one of his mansions.

He must have recorded that.

Life's been very nice to Barack from the days of his prep school in Honolulu to Occidental to Columbia to Harvard.

I don't think he's suffered because of his race, as he implies.

But nevertheless,

that will probably be the

DeSantis's.

I think his argument will be, I fix Florida.

I not only fixed it, I won by a million votes, but more importantly, I persuaded people.

I turned it from a purple state to a 1 million plus red state.

And I can do that for the United States.

I can get even rather than just get mad.

So they each have agendas.

And Trump's agenda was,

what's Trump's message?

I'm smarter now.

I was screwed over.

I had no help.

I went into the swamp talking loudly about draining it and they drowned me.

And they tied me up with Mueller and they tied me up with impeachments and they tied me up with disinformation, but not now.

I'm onto them and I'm going to get a hardcore group.

And what do you say?

I'm your retaliation.

I'm your retribution.

So that's his argument.

We'll see.

We'll see.

He's still very popular.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, he's popular.

I think the problem that he has is

he's popular.

within the Republican Party, but 56% of the country just in a recent poll don't want him to run again.

And that reflects, that reflects independence that he needs.

Almost all the Republicans, you're right.

He's got 75% of the report of support.

But that should be 90%.

And

if it's just Republicans.

But that translates into about 44% of the electorate.

He's ahead of Biden in some polls.

And it varies each week.

But for him to win so they can't cheat, and I mean cheat by changing voting laws and all this, he needs needs to be 51%.

And to get that level, he's got to go beyond MAGA and he's got to get all of the independents and he's got to get record numbers.

He's got to get 40% of the Hispanic vote and 15 to 20% of the black vote.

And he's got to win against Asian.

So they're 51%.

And to do that, he has to

do certain things that he's not going to do.

He's got to tone down his rhetoric.

He's not going to do that.

It's not what Shane does.

You know, that's not what

he can't do that.

And then he's not Trump.

So

it's a dilemma.

And

so what the other candidates are running on is popular vote.

We didn't win the popular vote in 2016.

We lost the popular vote in 2018.

We lost the popular vote in 2020.

We lost the popular vote in 2022.

Even though in aggregate terms, more people voted for Republican candidates in the whole than they did Democrat, but they failed to take back the Senate and they were underwhelmed.

They squeaked by in the House, but they should have blasted by.

So that's going to be the criticism of him, that he can't get the necessary percentage because people have an irrational hatred of him.

And they're not going to attack Trump, I don't think, except for Christie.

They're just going to say he can't get that vote.

And then Trump is going to say, if I can't can't get the vote why am i ahead of biden right now yeah and then the ant they'll say well you're ahead of biden right now because they haven't unleashed the mark zuckerberg

uh jeff bezos um google

treasure trove and media complex against you but they will and so

Well, Victor, we're at the end here, and you have certainly torn apart what's currently happening to Donald Trump, and we'll look look to the future.

It's hard to predict.

I have a comment on a recent column, but he's commenting on the analogies made to movies.

And he said, there's one little problem with the scenarios as described since we talked about them in this.

in this podcast.

He says, in all the movie analogies, the bad guys were gone when the tragic hero left.

The tragic hero was deemed not needed because the bad guys were gone.

Shameful behavior, perhaps, but explainable, as VDH points out.

Does anyone believe the bad guys are gone from Washington, D.C.?

In my humble opinion, I think not.

I think they believe they.

I was talking about his program,

but there's a second act because

I guess that's a better, that's a very good point because you could say that he

was no longer needed because he got us, he did what he said he was going to do.

And then people benefited from it.

As I said, they had the margin of attacking him.

But then he rode off into the Tetons, or he went off with Grace Kelly and the Bach Beck,

the buckboard, and then they took over again.

The Miller kids came back in the center.

Or, you know, it's like the second, the Magnificent Seven rodeo and they said, uh-oh, they're back.

We give us our guns.

We'll go back in and kill them.

So I think that's a good point that he feels that the left was defeated.

He defeated them and he got his, he had the

House and the Senate in 2017, and he pushed through his, a lot of his, not all, but a lot of his program.

And then they came back.

It was only momentary.

The guy finishes, he says, I think they believe, meaning the Democrats, I think they believe they drove the tragic hero from the field.

I think they believe they won, right?

Not quite the same ending

uh i don't think they think they look at trump as a vampire and they put a stake in his heart but they're afraid that that stake could come out anytime yeah that he's undying and they're afraid of him they are terrified of you know why they're terrified of him because they think he's smarter this time and he has just cause to really get angry because of what they did to him and they know what they did to him they can write all of the atlantic monthly and they can write all the New Yorker clever, glib little essays about Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, or they can write all their little molly ball time essays, how clever and brilliant they were with their cabals and their conspiracies to get rid of him.

But deep down inside,

they know that if the right ever did that to Barack Obama or Joe Biden, And they had grounds to, they could have put Eric Holder in jail just like they did Steve Bannon for refusing a congressional subpoena.

They could have really made something out of the fact that Barack Obama had a hot mic

expose where he told the president of Russia, you tell Vladimir that I will be flexible on missile defense.

That's the security of the United States of America

if he

gives

me space in my last election.

And Putin did do that.

That's an impeachable offense if a phone call to Ukraine is.

So they understand that, that the right could have done that to them.

And they understand now the right probably will do that to them for their own survival.

And they are scared.

They're saying if this, if any of the, those guys,

if a mega candidate wins and they win the House and the Senate, we're cooked.

Because they're going to get special prosecutors and they're going to go after the Biden family like they've never gone after anybody.

And they're going to find stuff because we know Joe is crooked.

Because we've already found stuff.

Yes.

And then they're going to go after Mary Garland.

And they're going to go after Mayorkas.

And they're not going to stop.

And

that's why they're scared.

And they're going to do any, everybody thinks that the danger passed, they got what they wanted.

No, no, no, no, no.

Mark Zuckerberg's $419.

$419 million, that was just the beginning.

You're never going to see anything like what they're going to do in 2024.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, thank you very much.

This has been very enlightening and a little bit ominous as well, too, but we like that in our podcast.

So thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

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