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Hello, you've joined the Victor Davis Hanson Show, a place where we celebrate free thought, critical inquiry, and the pursuit of truth.

Victor is the namesake of this show.

He is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our Friday production, and usually we look at news of the day.

So we've got a lot on our agenda.

I would like to make sure everybody notes that we are recording on Wednesday in the afternoon.

So Wednesday, I think it is March 22nd.

And so some of this news might get, well, we might miss a few things or something new might have happened because we are going to talk about Alvin Bragg indictment of Trump.

And we'll do that when we return after these messages.

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Welcome back.

And so, Victor, we've got a lot going on for Trump.

And as we strangely start a campaign season, even though it's two years in advance, I find that funny myself.

But Trump and DeSantis seem to be marking each other out, and we'll talk a little bit about that too.

But first, I wanted to know if you had anything you wanted to say.

In addition, I know Alvin Bragg, they've been saying he's going to indict Trump and maybe there'll be a pervok.

And we haven't seen that happen.

And so I was wondering what your thoughts were on that investigation.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think everybody's made a good point that there's no basis to it because we're,

this is just old hat.

I mean, there's a statute of limitations

and it's both federal and state.

Misdemeanor and felony have expired.

So he's trying to cook up a campaign violation that he altered the books and this was a campaign contribution to, I guess, to her, so it would not hurt his chances.

But I mean, they fined Hillary Clinton for that, but what did she do?

She hired a foreign national, which is against U.S.

law, to participate in her campaign as her direct employee as hidden by, this sounds to me like it's a conspiracy to defraud or racketeering.

She put it behind the DNC paywall, the Perkins-Coey paywall, the Fusion GPS.

That's why it took Devin Nunes and his cash patel so far, you know, so long to figure out what was what, because they hid that payment and what was christopher steele doing he he he used mr dolan a hillary operative to collect dirt in moscow and then a guy at the brookings to do the same or a russian national

i thought it was against the law for nationals again to participate in campaigns and then she used her contacts in the State Department, the DOJ, to spread this dirt.

And what was the result of that, Sammy?

They just find her.

Find her.

I don't know if you say it's a campaign violation.

Why not just find it?

Or if you think it's some type of bribery,

what are we talking about?

Vernon Jordan in 1998, 99,

scouring New York, corporate world, get Revlon to give Monica Lewinsky,

I don't know, $80,000, which she scoffed at and said that wasn't enough.

I guess that was to keep her quiet so she wouldn't talk to Ken Starr.

So I don't know what this is other than Mr.

Bragg

is under a lot of criticism that he's letting out felons and New York City's crime rate is soaring and then that he hates Trump and he thinks that he will be the one person

Robert Mueller couldn't do it, James Comey couldn't do it, Adam Schiff couldn't do it, and Nancy Pelosi couldn't do it.

And he thinks, and

I don't know, Lynn Cheney couldn't do it.

And Adam Kissinger couldn't do it.

Icumb Jeffries couldn't do it.

And he thinks he's going to be the one that can do it.

That is, finally catch Wiley Coyote.

Yeah.

Do you think Costello's testimony has anything to do with the slow movement towards that actual indictment?

Well, what Bragg is doing is he's doing, New York is synonymous with Washington.

It's going to have a hard left jury, and it's going to be

quote-unquote predominantly marginalized people.

And he's going to make the argument that this is with a wink and a nod, as they did with Scooter Libby and everybody else.

This is a white, elite, privileged billionaire, and he doesn't like you, and he's, we can send a message.

And that's, it's a political trial.

It sort of reminds me of the last days of the Roman Republic when Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, it was all, there was no more the rule of law, there's no more symmetry in the law, it's not equally applied.

So everybody knows this.

And the left thinks that it's never going to boomerang.

It's never, never going to boomerang.

And they're going to abuse all these precedents.

We've talked about them before.

Let's try to get rid of the filibuster.

Let's try to get rid of the Electoral College.

Let's bring in two more states.

Da-da-da-da-da-da.

Let's disbar the or not allow the House minority leader to have any nominations on House committees.

Let's tear up the State of the Union.

They do this and they all think that they're God and they're going to be in power forever.

We're still a republic.

So I think in two years there's going to be a backlash and the Republicans are going to win the House at a greater margin than they hold now, the Senate and the presidency.

And what are they going to do?

Do the Democrats then just rely on the media and say, this is unfair?

Or do they, what will they do?

Will they bring in the, I think they're going to get a special prosecutor for the Biden family.

And this is all juxtaposed because why this is being covered, this misdemeanor, which is Trumped up to a felony, you better be very careful because remember, Donald Trump was impeached in the first impeachment in December of 2019 on the premise that he did what?

That he called Ukrainian people, i.e.

Zelensky, and he said, I have a a shipment here of offensive weapons.

It's been approved.

I'm going to send it, but I'm going to put a hold on it until you clean up your act, especially with the Hunter Biden and the Biden syndicate.

He didn't cancel it.

They sent it, and he sent more weapons than Obama ever did.

But they said, oh, my God,

he's trying to take out of his political opponent.

Biden's the likely person.

Well, not only has Biden done that to Trump with a Mar-Lago raid, and not only did senators sit on that trial in early 2020

who were going to run against Trump, at least in the primaries, Corey Booker, Amy Kobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, but this is exactly what they're doing.

They're trying to take out somebody that they may be

perceived right now as a frontrunner.

So it's really getting scary.

And if there's communications between Bragg and the White House,

that would be very interesting because all of the federal prosecutors passed on it

in the Southern District of New York.

They didn't want anything to do with it because they knew there was nothing there.

So this guy is a state prosecutor.

But if he's communicating and Biden, anybody in the Biden administration is using him to take out Trump, then I think they're going to be in big trouble.

I think this guy is going to be in big trouble anyway, and they're going to be retaliated against.

They understand that.

They have such confidence in the media that it will not cover this big check that was just exposed of

you know million three million dollars to the biden family from a chinese consortium and that's not even being played and this is really being trumped up so we'll we'll see but i think it's going to boomerang which i guess leads sammy into your next

area yes it is

where it is yeah does it help desantis or trump or biden could i be on

a couple of questions here yeah um is james comer's house oversight and Accountability Committee?

Is that what you think they're after is trying to see if Bragg is communicating with the White House?

I think they're trying to see that, and they are trying to see

they want to get his internal communications.

Because when he was earlier before, he basically said before this all happened, he was going to go get Trump.

And that's why they, you know, everybody's quoting the Verea quote.

Yeah.

You know,

give me the man, and I'll find the crime.

It's not about the crime.

It's about Donald Trump.

And they want to get rid of him.

And as I said, Russian disinformation,

Russian collusion, Mar-Lago, Don Jr.,

tax record.

It hasn't worked.

He's been the most thoroughly dissected and autopsied candidate in history.

If any Democrat had the same commiserate scrutiny applied to them, they would be in jail.

And so we think maybe some of the Biden should be in jail.

My second question is...

Yeah.

My second question is this.

And I might, at the risk of getting some of your listeners perhaps angry, to what extent do you think the trying or the investigation, I guess I should say, or the, I think he was impeached in the House, Clinton's impeachment due to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky set a precedent for this kind kind of thing?

Or is that just something that's been going on in our republic forever?

Well, we hadn't had

an impeachment attempt.

That wasn't the one that broke the 100-year-plus hiatus of Andrew Johnson.

Remember that?

I guess that was his first term, 1869.

It was the threat of impeachment in 1974, not the actual impeachment, but they were pretty clear they were going to impeach Richard Nixon once those tapes came out, and therefore he resigned.

That lowered the bar.

And I think if you read Conrad Black and other people, they've made, I think, pretty good arguments that that was a third-rate burglary.

And,

you know, it's like if you can keep your doctor under Obamacare, presidents say stuff all the time.

So I'm not sure that that was a wise thing to do to wreck the economy and wreck Vietnam and wreck everything else.

And that's what happened.

As soon as they got rid of Nixon, Hord was emasculated, Kissinger was emasculated, and we lost the Vietnam War.

We just gave up.

They cut off all the aid when they won the midterms in

1974.

But with Clinton, that was a little bit.

That was much less trivial than the Clinton.

Clinton was, you

committed perjury.

Yeah, you committed perjury about a relationship with a woman, though.

Yes, and that was his argument that men lie all the time.

Trump is lying right now about, I think he is, about Stormy Daniels.

It seems to me that there's a good chance he had sexual relations with her.

But he's not going to admit that.

Clinton didn't want to admit, but there was a little bit difference there.

Stormy Daniels knew a lot about sex.

She was a porn star.

Monica Lewinsky was, what, a 20-something aide?

Or was she 19, 22, 23 or something 22 yeah she was working for her boss

so according to feminist doctrine there is no such thing as a symmetrical sexual relationship based on the work environment there's always a disproportionate allotment of power so he had the power and she that when was the victim i don't think she was a victim hillary kept saying that she was a seductress but the point i'm making is that that was a little bit different.

The big thing, though, is to remember that

Andrew Johnson was going to be a one-term president, but they tried to impeach him in his first term.

And if you go back to the Federalist papers, they make it very, very clear.

There was a big discussion about whether you needed a two-thirds majority in the House, as you do in the Senate, to convict somebody when you try them.

And the argument failed, but the argument was made that you have to make it more difficult to impeach a president than just an up or down vote.

Because if you don't,

the first time a president loses his majority in the House in his first term, they're going to impeach him, just like a parliamentary vote of no confidence.

So

Clinton,

and you see what I'm getting at, Sammy?

The argument of Clinton is you have no more recourse because he's he's been re-elected.

The same thing was used about Richard Nixon.

You don't have a recourse if you don't impeach him.

You see what I'm saying?

If you're in your second term, there's no, he's there.

So that was in the Federalist

back and forth in some of the documents around the criticism of the Constitution.

They said,

We

are going to have a majority vote in the House, but we'll compromise and make two-thirds of the cent so he can't be convicted easily.

We've never had anybody convicted MOOC.

It's impossible.

No party ever loses.

It's very rare to have, you know,

less than 40 votes.

But my point is this.

You can see the argument when it was made.

They said

the other side said, yeah, but.

Once a guy's re-elected,

then you don't have any recourse except impeachment.

So

we've got to make it easy.

And then the other side said, yes, but you don't want to impeach him in the first term because you have a recourse there too.

You have an election coming up.

And so one side said, let's have two-thirds, make it difficult to

impeach him.

And then you have the first.

the first term.

And then the other side said, well, make it easy because if he gets elected, then you don't have a choice.

There's nothing you can do.

And they kind of compromise, as I said.

But the point I'm making finally is there's never been an impeachment since Andrew Johnson in the president's first term.

Yes, they went after Nixon in the second term.

They went after Clinton.

So when they impeached Trump, 2019 and 20, that was at the end of his, they impeached, they started it as soon as they won the House in 2018.

And as soon as Mueller's investigation collapsed, they were right on to impeachment.

And everybody said,

you know, when

Admiral McRaven said he should be taken, sooner the better, he should be removed, all the military people were attacked.

They had an alternative.

All they had to do was not vote for him.

And they did that.

There was no reason to impeach him.

He was going to be out of office anyway.

In fact, they tried him when he was a private citizen the second time.

And so it's very difficult to impeach.

a first person, a first-term president because either he's not going to run or you can vote against him.

A second time, it's more convincing that you don't have any alternative to get rid of the SOB.

And so I don't think they're going to impeach Joe Biden.

And I don't know if they should, because it sets a terrible precedent that the Republicans, they didn't impeach him, and then the Republicans got a majority and they will impeach Joe Biden.

Do I think he deserves to be impeached?

Absolutely, for what he did on the border.

He deliberately destroyed federal immigration law and let in 7 million million people contrary to federal immigration law.

And he did it willingly, deliberately for cheap political advantage.

All right.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and listen to a few messages, and then we'll be right back to talk about the Trump-DeSantis fight.

Hang in there with us.

We'll be right back.

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We're back and this is the Victor Davis Hansen show.

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So please come join us.

Victor, so this kind of segues into our other topic.

And we see Donald Trump and

Ron DeSantis had an interview recently with Pierce Morgan.

Yes.

And he made some controversial statements about not understanding what

hush money to a porn star entails.

And

Trump replied that Ron DeSanctimonius will find, and this is my words, but we'll find out when he grows up and may face unfair attacks by a woman or maybe even a man.

And those were the last bit was dominating.

That was very Trumpian.

Yes, it sure was.

That was, I think what we're watching is

DeSantis from the midterms.

Remember, this has been going on since November of 2022.

when the media focused on the fact that he'd had spectacular results in Florida, won by a million votes, carried Dade County, and the Trump candidates supposedly did dismally, and they did.

And the Republicans were very disappointing.

So then at that point, Trump decided to go after DeSantis.

And first it was mild.

He's not loyal.

He begged me.

And then it was, he begged me to endorse him.

He barely won.

Probably true in a sense.

And then he, you know, he went after Yunkin.

He went after Mitch McConnell's wife.

We've talked about that before.

And he kept up, you know, called, I think, I don't use, what Trump does is what we call on,

we call, I mean, people call in Latin, praetio ritio.

And that is, you know, Demosthenes says about Eschines, but the fact that his mother was a prostitute in an outhouse has nothing to do with his speech, this trial.

And so what he says is, you know, I'm not going to call him mad dog or something like that, you know,

or, you know, i'm not going to get into the fact that there's a picture with him with and he was a teacher and there's girls and maybe there was a man you just draw but that's not important

so

at some point

desantis's people decided and he did that he had ignored that and been magnanimous but trump does not stop So, and what Trump we saw with the other candidates is that he he's just like a sledgehammer and he and they are kind of like a spike and he just hits you, hits you, hits you until you're down in the ground.

And so at some point,

he would say, you look weak.

And so I think that someday is now.

So people came to DeSantis and said, look at the polls.

He's just bulldozing you and it's time to strike back.

So he had a very good

rationale, strategy, tactical

plan, I think, as I can decipher it.

And that was, I'm too busy talking about the present.

I don't want to go replay the past.

I don't want to replay the 2020 election.

I have enough enemies.

Donald Trump has enough enemies on the left without me replying to him.

And I wish he would stop it because we're all conservatives, right?

But that wasn't enough for Trump because he looked at some polls.

He said, he's ahead in the polls, but there's been polls, say, in the Iowa caucuses and Vermont, excuse excuse me, New Hampshire that show DeSantis even with him.

And so at this point, he decided in this interview to suggest a couple of things where he thinks Donald Trump is weak.

One of them is he gave the, what, a presidential medal to Dr.

Fauci.

You can argue that nobody really knew the depths of Fauci's duplicitus and how he was trying to undermine Trump and how bankrupt, you know, we saw this PBS clips from this PBS, supposedly laudatory documentary that's coming out, but it made him look like an idiot, Fauci, when he said, well, you get your vaccinations.

And then the African-American guy he was interviewing was so bright compared to Fauci.

Fauci said to him, Well, if you get that vaccinated, you won't even know if you get it.

You won't get it.

Everybody's listening knows that's a lie.

One out of every four of you out there was vaccinated and got a bad case of COVID.

So he just lies.

And so

Fauci now versus when Trump kept him, you know,

is different.

We've seen him.

Roman Paul's exposed him, but that's a liability for Trump.

So he went on that and said, you know, I would have got rid of Fauci for the first minute.

The second, I think, is that he's saying,

I don't have these psychodramas.

I try to get even rather than get mad.

With me, if I go after critical waste theory, I try to stop it.

If I go after, I'll go to the universities and I will try to make sure they're not ideological, Stalin, you know, controlled.

If they're going to send illegal aliens to Florida, I'm going to send them to Martha's venue.

So he's trying to find out concrete results, carry a big stick and be quiet.

But one of his arguments is that Trump is too loud.

and distracting, but when you actually look at what he's doing, he has some great ideas, but they don't get fully implemented because of these cul-de-sacs.

And that was the second argument as I looked at that interview that he was making.

And then the third is, and he can't criticize the Trump judicial appointments, but he's looking at his appointments, the people surround him.

And,

you know,

there's two types.

Trump has got some exposure there because there's two types of Trump appointments.

There are the people who are out there like Steve Bannon.

I like Steve Bannon.

I've met him.

I I know him, but he's out there.

And then the nutty ones like Scaramucci and Omaroso and people like that that are in total embarrassments.

And then there's Donald Trump the Novus coming in and the bicoastal swamp, pressuring him to appoint people that don't believe in his agenda.

So you had the Secretary of Defense did not believe in the Trump agenda.

And that was friction.

And

you had other people in homeland security that didn't agree with the genda and they undermined him and we had anonymous you know who's a low-level homeland security appointment bragging the new york times that they were there were lots of them in the in the trump white house appointments that fooled trump and got on in there so those were the the complaints and they weren't ad hominem when that thing about

Stormy Daniels, I think he was trying to send a subtext as whatever I am, you're not going to have to worry about me having sex with a porn star allegedly when my wife is pregnant.

So it's not going to happen.

And you can take that for what it's worth.

I mean, whether that's an issue that people are going to

complain about.

I think the main issue that every conservative, every Republican, it should be very, very

important.

Whatever your particular, and I'm not going to get in partisan, but whatever your your particular views are about DeSantis or Trump or Pompeo or Nikki Haley or all the rest of them, they're going to get in, you should demand that every single person

endorses the person who wins the nomination because you won't win without that.

And Donald Trump did not win the popular vote either year in

either election.

And part of that was that he had massive defections

from the Republican Party.

They've got to unite.

I'm not calling they're never Trumpers the Bullworth.

They're not Republicans anymore.

They're Biden aficionados.

They're just in the left-wing camp.

They have to be because that's where their funding comes from.

I'm talking about people who will support DeSantis, but Trump gets the nomination, or people who are Trump supporters in DeSantis.

And

Donald Trump will go down in history as a very good president, whether or not he gets this next nomination.

But the only thing that's really hurt him, as I see, is

his failure after January

1st of 2021 to go down to Georgia and win those two special elections and gave us those two socialists.

And that was a tactical error.

And it had strategic consequences when they won the Senate.

We wouldn't be in this mess if we had kept those two seats.

Wouldn't be in this mess today.

And then, of course,

he's got to endorse.

If he doesn't get the nomination, I don't know who will, but if he bolts or tries to run a third party,

it will destroy his reputation because people will be very angry because 2024 is much worse

country-wise, America-wise.

It's in much more danger than it was even in 2016 or 2020.

The woke thing has gone so

far to the extreme.

And

we have a banking crisis.

We have stagflation.

We have sky-high interest rates.

We have an open border.

We're deliberately warring on fossil fuels.

We had Afghanistan.

We've got this whole transgender bizarre issue.

We've got the Ukraine war.

And there's no margin of error for...

a traditionalist, a person who's solidly pro-American and conservative.

And if Trump were to split that,

and I just mentioned him because he's the one that is the most speculated about in the media.

So he should come out right now and say, I'm going to win the nomination.

But if something happens that I don't, I'm going to be out there working for Ron DeSantis should say the same thing.

Yeah, they really should, because otherwise it's going to be a disaster.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and then turn to the Ukrainian war or the, sorry, the war in Ukraine.

And look at, I know that we've had recent news that the Ukrainians at least have claimed that their drones have blown up some missiles that belong to Russia in the Crimea, which would mean that, according to my sources, that their drones can get much further and deeper into Russian territory than they have before.

So there might be some change in that.

But I just want to state my other impression and maybe you can deal with it.

My other impression is that really the war is going in Russia's favor.

If you look at the news about the fighting on the ground, that's what it seems like.

And I'm just a novice.

But

what are your thoughts as the war is continuing?

And that's a very current topic.

Well, there's one big problem with the way that we look at the Ukrainian war.

And it's one of ignorance, I think.

The left and the never-Trump right and everybody think this is symmetrical.

So they say something like the following.

Russia is sending drones, missiles, and smart bombs and destroying Ukrainian infrastructure.

Therefore, Ukraine must do the same, the same to Russian territory.

In fact, they have been doing it stealthily.

And then they'll say,

Ukrainians are killing one Russian for every 0.6 Ukrainian.

They exaggerate, that's the accurate

ratio, but they'll say, you know, two for them for one of us.

And that there's degrees of truth in that, okay?

And they'll say,

Russia started it, so everything's off the table.

Well, that's all true in a perfect world, right?

That's what's the perfect world.

And we're giving them, and they'll say, well, we're giving them just enough so they don't lose.

We've got to give them enough so they can win.

Okay, but that's in a perfect world.

The world's not perfect, Sammy.

And here's why.

Russia

has

10 times a GDP,

three and a half times the population, 145 versus 40.

It's got 30 times the area.

So for Russia,

to continue that ratio.

They wanted those Wagner people.

They want to get rid of them.

They were all criminals.

That's the kind of

thugocracy Putin runs.

He just emptied the prisons and sent 40,000.

And he basically said, I need to get 10 or 15,000 dead Ukrainians.

And they did.

And we declared it a great victory.

We stopped the Wagner group.

Well, yeah, but he's a nihilist, Putin.

He is destroying, brick by brick, eastern Ukraine and the infrastructure and the power grid and the roads and the bridges.

And he's creating, you know, he's a refugee crisis.

Eight, nine million people have left.

They only had 40 to start with.

And more importantly, he didn't care about how many people get killed.

That's the Russian way of war.

It's a meat grinder.

It's a war of attrition.

So he's got all of the cards in his hand.

So yeah, yeah, you know, we all said, I don't want to mention any names, but I had a lot of colleagues at Hoover.

They, oh, we're winning.

This was, you know, when they stopped the Kiev Thunder Road decapitation effort.

Great, I think that's great.

But it's very difficult to beat Russia, especially when they apply the Russian way of war.

It's basically, we're going to kill people that you really care about.

But we don't care about how many people we win.

We care about winning.

So that's the first thing.

The second thing, Russia has 7,000 nuclear weapons.

They keep saying, well,

nobody's used them since he was shipped.

They just can't use them.

No, there's no rule that says that.

That's the sane world.

That's the world we live in.

That's the rules-based order.

This guy doesn't believe in that.

If he thinks he's going to lose and you be humiliated and lose power, he will let off a tactical nuke.

He will threaten England like they do almost every day.

They threaten the United Kingdom.

So it's not symmetrical.

And that means that we've got to find some type of solution because this is going to be a Verdun deathscape.

And the whole point of it will be, and we know from pretty reliable sources, we had some out at Hoover Institution, that Putin has lost between 200 and 250,000 dead.

And usually casualties are three to four times higher than fatalities.

So he's probably lost a half a million soldiers, seriously wounded or killed.

And Ukraine is probably, and they have a complete news blockout, by the way.

Their media is censored, but they have lost about 120,000 or 200,000 total casualties.

And this is just year one over.

So you can get up to, we're going to see if this, if they want to fight this to the last Ukrainian,

then we're going to see some things that we haven't seen.

I think the other thing that

that really bugs me is all of these people

who are, you know, the Russian, the Ukrainian national security advisor said this will end when our tanks are in Red Square.

And I thought, well, whose tanks are those?

It's not yours.

You're talking about German tanks or American tanks.

But my point is this,

from 2015, 2014

to 2022, I didn't hear any of these people, especially all these people on the left.

Why didn't they say we want Putin to be forced to give back the Crimea and the Donbass?

Why was that only a

repairable offense?

It can be rectified now, but it can't be rectified the last six years, seven, eight years.

Why didn't they say in the last year of the oh,

my God, we've got to get Crimea back, we've got to get Crimea back, we've got to get Donbass.

We're going to really press rather than saying, tell, you know,

tell

as Biden did, tell

Vladimir.

Well, I mean,

he said to Putin, I shouldn't say tell, he said to his face, please put these targets off the cyber warfare hit list when you're attacking us.

Do not attack hospitals.

What's the implication?

If you want to go after other stuff, go ahead.

And so, what I'm getting at is: if you are an absolutionist, absolutist, that you want to win, and winning is defined by a crushing military defeat and the destruction of the Russian military, and you want every Russian out of Ukraine,

then you better tell us why

you didn't say a thing that we lost all deterrence and started this war basically when we fled Afghanistan and Putin.

Putin thought that was a joke and that we wouldn't do anything at that.

If you don't think that was the reason why he invaded, maybe it was because, as I said earlier, Biden allowed him to do cyber warfare with some minor exception.

If you don't believe that, maybe you could say, well,

in January, on the eve of the election, Biden was asked, he said, well, if it's a minor incursion, I don't know what we'll do.

So he gave signals that encouraged Putin.

If you don't want to believe any of that, you can go back to tell Vladimir, give me space.

It wasn't Donald Trump, it wasn't conservatives who have continually appeased Putin.

They were the ones that were fine with that asymmetrical missile deal.

They were the ones that dismantled

missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland for the cheap political gain of giving Obama space so he could be re-elected, so he would behave.

They were the ones that didn't do anything.

Tell Vladimir to knock it off.

That was Obama on cyber warfare.

And this Ford Biden, as I said, it was Vladimir, if you're going to do it, just give us a break and just attack the right targets.

And so they didn't say anything.

And now, all of a sudden, oh, you're a Russian sympathizer.

If you don't want to crush every Russian risk nuclear war, give them F-16.

Well, I can tell you, after listening for an entire day last Friday at Hoover of this group I chaired, I can tell you what the experts, military, financial, political, diplomatic, they can tell you what

Ukraine needs to win.

They need about a thousand A Ramps tanks.

They need about 50 to 100 F-16s.

They need basically the entire arsenal of U.S.

artillery shells because 155 millimeter, you look at, they're getting, I don't know, 180 to 100,000 shells

versus 20,000.

And these exchanges, when you look at particular time periods, are being out shelled enormously by Russia.

So you can do it as long as you're willing to say that that's what we're going to do.

We're going to give them everything we have.

And to win this war, they've got to sink the Black Sea fleet that supplies Crimea, etc.

We've got to sink it.

We've got to go in there and blow up all their oil depots and pipelines.

We can do that.

And you know what?

I can assure you that when we do that, it won't have any effect on the global economy.

It won't rattle markets.

It won't drive Russia closer to China and India and Turkey and North Korea and Iran and Saudi Arabia.

It won't do that.

We won't create the greatest anti-American coalition since Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.

That's where we are.

And I don't understand it.

All these people

who want the maximalist position of absolute victory and total American engagement,

they weren't anywhere around talking about that.

They just excuse all the appeasement that caused this war.

They excuse all of the Obama-Biden

basically empowerment of Putin.

They excuse the reset.

He was created by the Obama-Biden administration,

the bad Putin.

And then the final Tessera in this awful mosaic is what?

Worth 129%

of GDP in debt, $33 trillion,

$129.

When we went into the first Gulf War,

that was a hugely expensive effort in 1990, 91.

We were 40% of GDP.

We're looking at about an 8% to 9% 30-year mortgage rate coming up.

We think it's so great that we only have a little over 6% inflation.

We're getting massive layoffs.

We've had the signature bank, we've had this Silicon Valley Bank, we've had Mr.

Bankman Friedman's FTX implode.

This country is not united.

It's not united politically, it's not united socially, it's shaky economically, and it's not united racially.

And the idea that we're going to fight a proxy war on the frontiers of nuclear Russia to the very end to humiliate Russia, and they're not going to respond is crazy.

People do say, well, Victor, what do you want to do?

I want to do what we did in Korea.

Think about it.

Douglas MacArthur went all the way to Yalu.

He was pushed back.

He tried to unite North Korea and South Korea.

Matthew Ridgway took over.

He had almost nothing to work with.

They lost Seoul for the third time.

He took it back.

He killed a million of the enemy.

And then he stopped at the DMZ.

And he said, this country is not capable of going all the way up to North Korea again

unless it wants to do things that would be very dangerous.

And so they stop.

And you can argue they could have gone forward and they probably could have won, but they stopped.

and the Joint Chief stopped them and Ike stopped them.

I should say Harry Truman stopped them in 52,

but Ike didn't.

He stopped them.

He said, I'm going to go to Korea.

And he did.

And he said, better stop where you are.

He agreed.

So that's my point.

That

some kind of negotiation.

And you would leave the Donbass and the Crimea with Russia, probably, most likely.

It would be the I don't think they're ever going to get the Crimea.

And on earlier broadcast, we talked about that.

I mean,

1783, they kicked out the Ottomans.

It's over 200 years, 240 years, it's been Russian.

It's 70% Russian speaking.

He took it without even firing a shot, really.

He just went in there and took it.

And I guess people were not going to have guerrilla operations to stop him.

I don't know if that's true now.

I think a lot of Russian speakers in Crimea are appalled at what he's doing.

But

it would be hard to say.

Stephen Kotkin, our Russian historian at Hoover, has given a lot of podcasts.

He's written about it.

And he's not, I mean, he's not a politico, he's a historian.

And he pointed out that there is no way you're going to give the Crimea back to Putin.

It's too integral to the Black Sea fleet and traditional Russian security.

And there's no way to.

He can give it back to the Ukraine, right?

Yes, excuse me.

Give it back to Ukraine, and it's too much integrally a part of Russian history.

And as he pointed out in a number of publications and in podcasts,

25% and more of Western Ukraine has only been Ukrainian since 1945.

It was Poland.

And basically, Stalin started World War II with Hitler.

under the

under the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of August 23rd, 23rd, 1939.

And what did they do?

They both invaded Germany from the east, the north and the south, and Russia from the east.

And the deal was that Stalin got to take the eastern part of Poland.

And that's now the western part of Ukraine.

And

then he was pushed back, and the Germans occupied.

And then he came back and took it.

And then when the war ended, Stalin, that famous quote that we all know about, when he was told that the Pope would not like the idea

that he would retain Polish territory inside Soviet Ukraine,

because these were Roman Catholic Poles, not Ukrainian Orthodox, and it had been their

Western Christendom.

It had been their property.

It was part of Western Christendom and Polish-speaking idea of Poland, not necessarily a nation.

He said, How many divisions does the Pope have?

How many divisions does he have?

Tell me.

And the point was, I'm taking it and it's there.

So

if you want to put the whole map down and say, look,

for the last 80 years,

there's been so many variables.

There was Russia under the Soviets, and they stole from Poland a fourth of Poland, and then they gave it to Ukraine, which is now the most stable and the least contested.

But

in 1995, with the fall, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an independent Crimean Republic for a year, and then it joined Ukraine, but the Russians contested it.

It's just a mess.

So, I, yes, I don't believe anybody should go into a border and try to change it.

But these borders are, gosh, I mean, they're not like our southern border.

It's been there, you know what I'm saying, for a long, long time, maybe 18 Fort Gadson purchase.

And yet, this administration has no worries at all about the southern border.

When Mr.

Obadar says,

it's so wonderful, we've got 40 million of our citizens in the United States, and then a week later says, you know, I'm telling them all to vote Democrat because the Republicans are talking about closing the border and going after the cartels.

And

that seems to me a much more existential threat, the United States.

And then the other threat, of course, is the China, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Turkey.

All I can say is this.

If you ask

an American diplomat prior to February 24th,

and the American aid to Ukraine, which I have no problem giving them defensive weapons.

But if you would ask him, is Saudi Arabia closer to the United States or Iran?

They would say, are you crazy?

They're our strongest ally other than Israel in the Middle East.

They hate Iran.

If you'd said, is Turkey friendlier to Iran, Russia, and China than it is, Turkey's a NATO power, Victor?

Where have you been?

If you ask China,

are you closer to Russia and China?

They'd say, I hate you both.

If you ask Putin, Are you closer to China or Russia?

He said, I hate you both.

If you ask,

I I don't know.

So my point is they're all India.

They'd say, are you crazy?

We're the largest democracy.

We're pro-American.

We have a huge expatriate.

We're with you.

No, you're not.

You're buying Russian oil and you're buying Russian arms.

So we've created something that's very uniquely dangerous, this new coalition.

the axis, I guess they call it the axis of autocracy, but whatever it is, it's dangerous.

And so I'm suggesting that we can get a third party in there, maybe the United States.

I know China thinks it can do it, doesn't it?

Isn't this wonderful?

This criminal state that has a million people in concentration camps is now acting as if they're Gandhi or somebody, and they're going to come in as disinterested third-party adjudicators, and they have a peace plan.

And everybody said, well, it's just a joke.

Hey, well, Ukrainians won't go for that.

I haven't heard the Ukrainians reject it yet.

But the point is, this is pathetic that this communist, murderous dictatorship is now prominent on the world stage, acting as a benevolent third-party guarantor to stop the killing.

Why can't we do that?

We can't do it.

I don't know.

We have these zealots who it's on to the Red Square.

And I have a feeling, just to finish,

I've said it before, but there is something here we're all missing about the left.

The left attacked the Iraq war.

They attacked the Afghanistan war,

Vietnam, et cetera.

They have been all in on this from the first mention.

And why was that?

Because in some weird way,

they thought after the collapse of their own policy, appeasement reset Hillary,

and they thought they had Putin and they had Trump with the Russian collusion hoax.

22 months and $40 million, the Mueller investigation collapsed, basically.

Then they had Putin with the Russian disinformation laptop.

Then they had him with the bots and

infiltrating Twitter and a campaign, and that was kind of went away.

And this is their surrogate.

This is as if they're going to finally say, look, Putin was really evil.

He went into Ukraine.

We told you that.

He's colluding now with Trump.

Trump said he would settle in 24 hours.

We finally got them.

We're going to destroy Putin and we'll show everybody that these right-wingers are pro-Putin.

So if you get, if you're Tucker Carlson and you go on TV and say, where's the end of this?

Or you're David Goldman and you say,

I don't want to subsidize a meat grinder.

I don't want to get 500,000 Ukrainians killed.

Oh, you're pro-Russian.

You're pro-Russian.

You're traitors.

You're treated.

That's how they do it.

I've never seen anything like the left just adopt a war as a surrogate to prove a point.

And that's what they're doing.

Yeah, they are.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and come right back to talk a little bit more about this war.

I do have a question for you.

So we'll be right back.

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This is the Victor Davis-Hanson show, and we're talking about the Ukraine war.

And what I was wondering is, kind of along the lines that you're talking, the left seemed to be so optimistic, and then so the presses that something's being accomplished by the Ukraine right now.

But on the other hand, we hear, well, Russia is posing for its spring invasion, right?

And so I feel like, well, how can you be so optimistic that the war is going well if the other team is on the offensive and getting ready for for an invasion, right?

It seems very strange to me.

Well, Ukraine can have an invasion if they can last to 24.

That's a year from now.

What do I mean by that?

That means that they can scround together all these advanced MiGs.

They're not so advanced, but the Eastern Europeans are willing to give them.

a lot of MiGs in exchange for upgraded F-16s that they get.

So, and that's going to take a long time to get the pilots acquainted with them and get them all assembled.

And then if they can get Challenger tanks and Leclerc tanks and Leopard tanks and Abrams tanks and this motley group and get up to four or five hundred of them, I don't think that's going to happen.

But that would take a year.

And then they can stockpile.

They're short shells.

They don't have the shells.

And they don't have enough Patriots.

They don't have enough of these Amar.

These are our best weaponry.

They're very expensive.

But if they can hoard them and hoard them and withstand this, and then they can have an offensive, they can't conduct one now that will push back the russia

yes but the the but the the

sort of news out there is that the russians are probably going to have an offensive in the springtime yes and that's why they're going to do it sammy because they know that that time is not maybe

entirely on their side.

I think it is because they have the manpower advantage.

But their point is we got to hit them right now before all these Western weapons come in.

The next generation of Western weapons that are offensive weapons.

And as I said earlier,

I listened to a Ukrainian expert who just got back from Ukraine not long ago, and somebody asked him about all the wonderful, trained NATO Ukrainian soldiers that had been for years

the bulwark.

I mean, there were 50,000, 60,000 of them that were talking about lieutenant, our version of a lieutenant, colonel, a colonel, a captain, major.

And these were people who fought so well in the first.

And he just very sadly said, they're dead.

They're all dead.

They're dead.

These are part of the 120,000 that were dead.

This is a second generation army of replacements.

And so nobody ever talks about that.

Nobody, when Joe Biden and

Anthony, now they have, they want to put Putin, they're going to, you know, the International Criminal Court, which we've never signed on to for obvious reasons,

but they're they have indicted Putin and Blinken said the other day that he should be, I guess he's got a bounty, I guess.

He said he should be, face the consequences.

So a bunch of Europeans and a hag are going to say that this president is an outlaw.

And then what does that mean?

All it does is get him angry.

It's like yelling with a twig.

You'd be much better to defeat him on the battlefield and praise him and not aggravate him.

But what this administration does, Biden, you know, he called him a thug.

He called him a murderer.

He said that he wanted regime change.

Remember that?

And that was at the very beginning.

I mean, yeah, I'd like to see Putin go, but I'm not sure the replacement would be any better, and it could be a lot worse.

Mr.

Medev Eded

keeps sounding off like he wants to be crazier than Putin.

And I don't get this

messianic, I mean, I supported the Iraq war, but that messianic strain has really increased.

We saw what it happen in Afghanistan, where it led to.

You know, it led to pride flags and gender studies.

And then we bombed, what was the point of bombing Libya?

Well, and what is Libya now?

And why are we doing this?

Why do we think it's our, and then Austin says our purpose is to make, to so weaken Russia.

Well, yeah, they're the aggressor and they have to pay a penalty and they probably they're going to, when this thing is even a negotiated center, we're going to lose a half a million dead.

And we have all these news articles coming out.

They're everywhere that the Russian people are to blame.

Or there is no more, there's no such thing as Russian culture anymore.

The Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is dead.

They're just drunks or thugs.

So we're back to demonizing every single Russian.

And I don't get it.

Historically, they're very valuable to Czech whom?

China.

And that's, I went and read Henry Kissinger's memoirs the other day again.

And he keeps making that point that you don't want to drive these two.

I've seen people, I'm not going to mention names because I respect them, but in print, and in podcasts, they've said the following, Sammy.

It's good, it's good, it's good to to drive Russia and China together.

Then they're transparently enemies, and we can identify them as such.

And

it wasn't good in World War II when this murderous Soviet regime that's killed so many more people than Putin under Stalin, he killed 20 million of his own people in the Great Famine.

He murdered in the show trials and the military trials another 200,000.

But it wasn't in our interest that they had the non-aggression pact and they just dissected Poland and they were going to be, you know, share the world.

It was in our interest when they fell apart after January 22nd of 1941.

That was in our interest.

It's not in our interest to have these big major party powers back joined at the hip.

And I don't know why people can't see that.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I think we're at the end of the show.

So thank you very much for all of the analysis of the Ukrainian,

I would keep calling it the Ukrainian War, the war in Ukraine, and also of DeSantis and Trump.

And it was a very fascinating hour here.

So thank you very much.

Thank you, everybody, and thank you again for listening.

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

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