00:00:00.000Joining us online is one of the great historians and thinkers of our time, Victor Davis Hansen.
00:00:04.000He's a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the author of the brand new book out a couple of days ago, The Counter Revolution The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.
00:00:15.000Victor, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:00:20.000So the book is really about sort of the interregnum, the period between Donald Trump's first term and his second term, and the reason why Donald Trump rose again.
00:00:28.000The main thesis, or at least one of the big pieces of your thesis, is that the left has completely lost their mind.
00:00:34.000And that pretty much they played into every narrative that Trump was spinning about the world because they've lost their mind.
00:00:45.000At each step of this intense, I don't know, pathological drive to destroy him, I should say not just politically, but actually physically, mentally, financially, existentially.
00:00:57.000And that could be defined by the Mar-a-Lago raid, the Ford lawfare criminal trials, the E. Jean Carroll suit, de balloting him.
00:01:09.000This came on top of the two impeachments, impeachments of the private, all of that.
00:01:14.000Every time that that happened, that resurrected his career, usually about two or three points in the polls, so that after January 6th, where the book starts, you had people like Mitch McConnell who said it couldn't happen to a nicer SOB, and the Republican establishment was delighted.
00:01:32.000Putative polls or surveys said Ron DeSantis was ahead by 20 points.
00:01:38.000Even his friends distanced themselves from him, and yet, and then, of course, the investigations and the acronym, and he was debanked.
00:01:47.000People deny that, but he was, and his social media accounts were canceled for the most part.
00:01:55.000His inner circle was leaking to the press that they were through with him, and then he came back.
00:02:01.000So, I tried to explain that for the first third or fourth half of the book.
00:02:05.000And the reason he came back was there were both internal and external.
00:02:11.000Internally, Even though he was a septuagenarian, he had more energy than his enemies did.
00:02:17.000And he had anger that he felt that his first term had been successful economically and military, and they had robbed him of that.
00:02:26.000Whether that's, you know, you can say robbed in many ways, but he felt they had done things that were unfair.
00:02:32.000Getting the 50, he was very bothered by the 51 intelligence experts right before the debate who said that the laptop was a product of the Russians, et cetera, et cetera.
00:02:43.000He was on, I don't know if the term was a vengeance, but he was angry and he wanted to be, he sought redemption and he was going to battle this no matter what.
00:02:53.000And more importantly, in this gestation period, before he formally declared his candidacy on November 15th of 2022, he had recalibrated in his mind what his first term was, what in it was positive and what was negative.
00:03:10.000And he felt that people that he had appointed, And he mentioned them.
00:03:14.000H.R. McMaster, a good friend of mine, I think he's a fine person, smart.
00:03:19.000Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, they weren't MAGA people.
00:03:24.000And they felt that he was inexperienced and dangerous, and it was their duty to interpret his executive orders or directives almost to the degree that Anonymous, remember the New York Times person, said that we're going to block these.
00:03:39.000And the next time he was going to get loyal people.
00:03:43.000The second thing he learned during these winter years were.
00:03:47.000It didn't do any good to wage a political revolution.
00:03:55.000It was going to entail economics, politics, military.
00:04:00.000So, if you're going to get the recruitment up, you've got to go after DEI.
00:04:03.000If you're going to worry about people being indoctrinated, go after the endowments, go after anti Semitism, go after free speech rights on the campus.
00:04:13.000If you're worried about modernist architecture, then try to restore neoclassical architecture.
00:04:19.000Try to name, if they're going to rename things, then you rename things.0.54
00:04:24.000And don't just close the border, but deport people.
00:05:05.000And sort of where does the Republican Party go from here?
00:05:08.000Because obviously, we're about to enter the post Trump era.
00:05:11.000If we lose Congress, if the Republicans lose Congress, then the next couple of years will be eaten up, presumably by widespread investigations.
00:05:18.000That will probably boost Trump politically somewhat in the same way that it has historically.
00:05:21.000But of course, he can't run for a third term.
00:05:23.000And so, once we are done with the Trump term, it's sort of over.
00:05:27.000And I'm not sure that anyone, I think there are certain people who are trying to capture the sort of air apparent energy.
00:05:31.000To Trump, I just don't believe in political heir apparence.
00:05:34.000I don't think that popularity is transferable from one politician to another or that anyone can inherit the coalition of the other guy, particularly when it's such a unique figure as President Trump.
00:05:44.000So it's sort of two questions that I'm asking.
00:05:45.000One is where do you think that we are right now in sort of the Trump story?
00:05:48.000And the second is what comes after the Trump story?
00:05:51.000Are the Republicans cruising for a bruising because the pendulum is swinging so wildly in American politics right now?
00:05:57.000Well, in the larger context, if you look at Clinton in 94, Or you look at Obama in 2010, or you look at George W. Bush in 2006, or you look at Trump in 2018, or you look at Biden in 2020.
00:06:16.000It's not that much difference, a few points.
00:06:19.000So part of it is historical that people vote for some person and they have all these expectations and they can't fulfill them and then they get disenchanted.
00:07:45.000So, people that fed into the leftist narrative that you can't afford things.
00:07:50.000If you look at things like labor participation or percentage of home ownership, they're pretty good.
00:07:57.000If you look at jobs report, they're pretty good.
00:07:59.000So, what's dragging them down are three things one, the price of gas and the Iran war, and it's up at $100 a barrel, and then the failure to lower prices rather than just lower the rate of inflation.
00:08:16.000And then the third is they are not articulating.
00:08:20.000They're talking about the socialists, which is salutary, but they should also be saying these are 10 things that we've done and they will be reversed if we are subverted or sidetracked.
00:08:34.000We close the border to zero illegal immigration.
00:08:38.000We have the lowest crime rate in 70 years.1.00
00:08:42.000We stop the Green New Deal insanity.0.98
00:08:46.000We're the largest producer of gas and oil in history.0.89
00:09:46.000So, one of the big, you know, one of the sort of big questions that I have about this is that, you know, President Trump, what makes him a unique political figure is the fact that he is not ideologically driven.
00:10:04.000And that's an interesting way to govern.
00:10:06.000It's very difficult to build a durable movement beyond just the figure that is not rooted in some sort of kind of overall overarching narrative.
00:10:14.000And President Trump's overarching narrative has historically been a sort of gut level, gut check patriotism, which is fine as far as it goes.
00:10:20.000But right now, that means that as he shuffles off the political scene in a couple of years, that can be interpreted in about eight different ways.
00:10:27.000And I think that you're seeing a lot of the fractures inside the Republican Party.
00:10:31.000Obviously, rising to the surface, ranging from conspiratorial horseshoe kind of left wing monetary and foreign policy combined with anti Semitism to more classical libertarianism to Reaganism.
00:10:43.000And they're all kind of fighting within the tent right now about what comes next.
00:10:46.000So that was sort of the other question.
00:10:47.000Where do you think this goes next in the post Trump era?
00:10:50.000Because again, he is the umbrella that covers everything.
00:10:53.000But when the umbrella goes away, the rain falls on everyone.
00:12:24.000I don't think that people are going to say, we're going to have to, and there's problems, but I don't think they're going to say, as George W. Bush did, let's privatize Social Security.
00:12:36.000So I could go on, but there's core principles that I don't think any Republican successor would want to tamper with.
00:12:45.000That said, There are very deep differences between Marco Rubio, let's say, and JD Vance, and they represent different portions of the Republican Party.
00:12:58.000It seems to me, and I'm not, I talk to people on both sides, that maybe Rubio might be able to win over more Vance supporters than Vance supporters would win over Rubio's supporters.
00:13:16.000Rubio said he's not going to run if Vance runs, but that is a transactional issue.
00:15:34.000Sounds kind of like the Democrats.0.97
00:15:36.000Democrats have a much bigger problem in some ways because these socialists are absolutely lunatic and they are not disorganized and they don't say that we should not, that algebra was created by Jews.0.96
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00:18:00.000The other thing that he has to realize if you don't say something, the people like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massey get emboldened and then they're going to try to be more and more and more provocative.
00:18:17.000They're forcing him to be in an untenable position.
00:18:21.000They're basically saying, We're going to say things that are so crazy that you're going to have to brand them as your own, or we're out of here.
00:18:33.000And they're no friends of him because they are trying to embarrass him, I think, when Tucker says certain things.
00:18:40.000I mean, when you get on your podcast, as I watched yesterday, and you have a potter who says that algebra.
00:18:48.000Was sort of implying it was a Jewish conspiracy against the GOI, and algebra is the fundamental element of all advanced mathematics and physics.
00:18:59.000We wouldn't exist with any of these appurtenances we're using without it.
00:19:04.000So he doesn't want to endorse that, so he's going to have to separate himself.
00:19:09.000And then on the message itself, I don't see any difference in foreign policy.
00:19:14.000They keep saying we're against forever wars or endless wars, but.
00:19:19.000As tragic as losing 18 people are, and we've spent about 70 billion compared to the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan 20 years, 10 years, 7,500 killed, four to five trillion.
00:19:34.000And the benefits you will accrue if there is an overthrow of that government and the whole Middle East will change.
00:19:50.000And when people had said, your midterms are coming up, you shouldn't do it.
00:19:53.000He may have been a little naive that he thought it would be like the Maduro overthrow, or he may have thought it would have been like the bombing the year before in June.
00:20:27.000All of a sudden, the people who are saying he's a warmonger or forever wars or he's inept would say he's the great liberator of our time if Iran is freed.
00:20:43.000You look at the Democratic Party, and as you say, they're spiraling off into full scale socialism, America hatred, and all the rest.
00:20:50.000With that said, if the president continues to be unpopular, that may not be wildly out of bounds with regard to the midterms, but as you lead into the next presidential election cycle, it is historically unprecedented for the vice president, let's say it's JD Vance as the nominee, for the vice president to pick up where a president with a very low approval rating left off and then win reelect on the basis of that.
00:21:14.000If the Democrats pick, I think probably anybody but AOC, where do you put the odds of a Democratic takeover of the White House in 28 if they pick, you know, Gavin Newsom or Wes Moore or some other figure who's perceived not to be as full blown psychotic as an AOC?
00:21:32.000Well, I don't see anybody who is not psychotic, to tell you the truth.
00:21:49.000Elsa, they talk in these grand illusions.0.96
00:21:52.000Their problem is that we have a mistaken belief that these crazy, downwardly mobile, 85% white urban creatures who are mad that nobody appreciates their genius and their degrees hijack the Democratic Party.0.52
00:22:07.000But the other day, I put down the DSA agenda, and then I went back and looked at what the Democrats did prior to the DSA.0.67
00:22:19.000Open borders, mass amnesties, endorse BLM, say that Antifa is not really, it's just an idea, they're not dangerous, pack the court, we're for two new states, end the filibuster, abolish the electoral college, all mail in balloting, no IDs.
00:22:44.000I can't think of what really happened was the Democratic Party.
00:22:49.000In the last years of the Obama administration, when they hijacked this waxen effigy, Biden, they were the most radical manifestation we've seen of any government in 100 years.
00:23:01.000So, what happened was that the DSA came in and said, Wow, you guys are identical to us.
00:23:44.000And so I think if they're going to have a chance to hold the house, they're going to have to talk about the economy and explain why things are going to get better and why the oil prices are temporary and explain.
00:24:10.000If people could take that message, all the cabinet, and bring it to the American people and say, we inherited a 21% aggregate inflation and 30% on staples like insurance, cars, food, housing, et cetera.
00:24:25.000And we got the rate down, but we're not finished yet.
00:24:37.000And you can't say that everything is going great.0.99
00:24:41.000You can't say about Iran, we just destroyed the military, everything's fine.0.77
00:24:47.000You have to say we destroyed almost all the military, but it's got 93 million people and it spent $30 or $40 billion for 50 years and they've hid things all over.0.74
00:24:57.000So we're going to have some rocky times as they implode and it may take two or three months or four months or five months more.
00:26:16.000Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.