The Charlie Kirk Show - Victor Davis Hanson Helps Make Sense of a Confusing World

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, an entire conversation with the legend, Victor Davis Hansen.

00:00:04.000 If you're a little confused with what's going on with the Trump administration, Victor Davis Hansen will make sense of it.

00:00:08.000 He's a professor, he's a classicist, he's a philosopher.

00:00:12.000 He understands these ideas and concepts and explains them so crisply.

00:00:16.000 So find something good to do, find a nice beverage of your choosing, hopefully non-alcoholic, and listen to this episode and enjoy it.

00:00:23.000 Because Victor Davis Hansen makes sense of a confusing world and helps you navigate the brilliance of the Trump administration.

00:00:29.000 Victor Davis Hanson is one of the premier, if not the most important public intellectuals of this generation.

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00:00:51.000 Here we go.

00:00:53.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:01:50.000 Joining us for the entire hour is the legend, someone that I listen to every week.

00:01:55.000 I try to read almost everything he publishes, is Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

00:02:05.000 Victor, great to see you.

00:02:05.000 Thank you for taking the time.

00:02:07.000 Thank you for having me.

00:02:08.000 So, Victor, you have had some phenomenal commentary lately on President Trump's tariff policy and how we should think about this through national security and The reindustrialization of America terms, please explain to our audience what your take is on President Trump's tariff announcement.

00:02:27.000 Well, it's very incumbent upon him and his team to talk in terms of symmetry and parody and to emphasize that his wish would be a tariff free world.

00:02:38.000 But unfortunately, that's been only half true, that the United States is the only country in the world with such low tariffs and has essentially a free market.

00:02:48.000 And that was fine during the post-war era when we were rebuilding Europe and deterring the communist world.

00:02:57.000 But 80 years later, the United States is facing $37 trillion in debt, $2-3 billion in interest per year, a $1.7 trillion budget deficit, and almost over, most years, over a billion dollars, excuse me, a trillion dollars In trade deficits.

00:03:17.000 So what we're asking for is not asymmetry, but just parity.

00:03:22.000 And that would mean we're not, I don't even think Donald Trump and his team have said we need parity right now.

00:03:28.000 Just to take one example, they would say to Mexico, you were part of a free trade North American continent.

00:03:35.000 What, what, what happened?

00:03:37.000 You're running 50 and then 80 and then a hundred, then 150.

00:03:41.000 Now you're running 177.

00:03:44.000 Billion-dollar annual trade deficit.

00:03:46.000 You're a conduit for the communist Chinese to get around tariff policies, which are asymmetrical in their favor. 0.59

00:03:53.000 And this is in addition to you have $63 billion coming to your country in remittances, most of whom are people here, are from whom people are here illegally, and they're subsidized by our own welfare system.

00:04:07.000 And then there's some $20 to $30 billion in excess That's estimated to come from smuggling in the cartel's fentanyl trade, which was killed.

00:04:17.000 That's not the behavior of a good neighbor, and we're just asking for parity.

00:04:21.000 And I think he could apply that logic and tone, vocabulary, diction to all of these...

00:04:28.000 Europe, China, maybe not China because we expect it from them, but Europe, Canada, Mexico, and not let them get away with the idea that we're waging a unilateral trade war when we're just asking for parity and reciprocity.

00:04:42.000 So, help me understand the history of tariffs.

00:04:46.000 The only history that most people can remember is, oh, tariffs caused the Great Depression, Smoot-Hawley tariff, but it's actually far more deep and complex and interesting than that.

00:04:55.000 Our government was largely funded on tariffs, as per Abraham Lincoln supported and Alexander Hamilton.

00:05:02.000 What is the history of tariffs when it comes to our country?

00:05:05.000 And let's go much deeper than the superficial analysis that, oh, it caused the Great Depression.

00:05:09.000 Well, to put it another way, We didn't have an income tax.

00:05:13.000 It was envisioned in 1913, but ratified in 1916.

00:05:17.000 So then that begs the question, where did the federal government get their money?

00:05:22.000 They had no other source of revenue other than tariffs, essentially.

00:05:27.000 And that was, it wasn't just the idea of protecting domestic industries, but it was also a revenue generating mechanism for the federal government.

00:05:39.000 And one of the reasons, to be frank, why people did not want an income tax is because they felt that government by needs would be small and manageable.

00:05:49.000 The federal government would be if it relied on tariff income rather than everybody paying, you know, a percentage of their wages.

00:05:57.000 That was never envisioned by the founders.

00:05:59.000 But tariffs were pretty much part and parcel of the American project until about 1916.

00:06:05.000 And then all of a sudden, We substituted them with this vast new influx of the IRS and income tax revenue.

00:06:15.000 And then people said, well, they're kind of obsolete now.

00:06:18.000 But they were designed both to fund the federal government, but fund a small federal government, and also to protect vulnerable industries.

00:06:28.000 But remember what the opposition is saying, Charlie, the free but not fair opposition.

00:06:35.000 They're saying, Well, we believe that free trade must be maintained at all costs, without exception.

00:06:43.000 And when you say it hurts Americans, Americans lose jobs, and American industries are offshored or outsourced, they say, no, no, it doesn't matter.

00:06:53.000 Because the subsidies of our foreign governments are not sustainable if they're dumping product here below the cost of We're good to

00:07:24.000 go. Then it's a way to put people into bankruptcy.

00:07:28.000 And I can attest for that as somebody who farmed during the Reagan period when EU agricultural produce was subsidized and dumped in this country, and we were told that that was good for us because it would make us more efficient.

00:07:43.000 And that's the third fallacy.

00:07:44.000 They say, well, if you allow foreign stuff to come in, Uh, without a tariff, even though it's being produced at below the cost of production, then you're going to have to compete with it and that'll make you lean and mean, but there's only a certain point where you can compete when you're losing money.

00:08:01.000 So it's a deliberate policy that, and I'm speaking as a conservative, but a lot of the libertarians believe that even the most abusive tariff, asymmetrical tariffs are in the interest of the target almost as if Yes, it has. And I want to really hone in on a couple things you mentioned there.

00:08:30.000 The first of which is how the libertarian free trade absolutism took over so much of our trade policy and so much of the prevailing dogma of Washington, D.C. When did that start?

00:08:46.000 And why did it largely go unchallenged or unchecked from the American right for nearly 30 or 40 years, despite the obvious consequences of deindustrialization, factory closings, and the fact that we couldn't make anything?

00:09:02.000 Walk us through kind of how that hyper libertarian view grew.

00:09:06.000 There had been a view in the 1960s and 70s and 80s as we...

00:09:16.000 Remember, in 1945, there was no China as an industrial power.

00:09:20.000 Russia was destroyed.

00:09:22.000 Europe was completely leveled, to speak, and Japan was destroyed.

00:09:26.000 So we were providing about 85% of the washers, the dryers, even the vehicles, the planes.

00:09:33.000 And that started to end as we subsidized the rebirth of these These once powerhouses by letting them send their products in here without a tariff either in the case of our allies that we owed it to them and they would get back on their feet or and they wouldn't turn communist or in the case of places like China they would be liberal the more affluent they got affluence was the twin supposedly of consensual government

00:10:03.000 which didn't turn out to be true but so we were losing the the rust belt in the 70s And then what happened was, I think part of it was during the Reagan administration and the George H.W. and the Bill Clinton, there was this idea that finance was more important than assembly, global finance.

00:10:25.000 So why this was the trade was destroying manufacturing and assembly and the middle classes.

00:10:31.000 Then the service classes, and I'm talking about insurance and law and media and academia, And all sorts of investment we were pretty good at, and now we had under globalization not a 300 million person market at the time, but 6 billion.

00:10:51.000 And so these areas, anybody who could have a product that was globalized, and that was mostly in these areas, Made out like bandits and they sold it to the middle class by saying well you have 401ks That's right Maybe you're not making what you want,

00:11:06.000 but you've got all this investment now because and this the high-tech as well You know we're selling a billion Apple Computers or iPhones and this is all good for you, but the the problem was if you had muscular labor That could be outsourced or offshored and it was then it was so they said well We're going to provide people with high-tech communication devices,

00:11:34.000 social media services, financial services, law services, academia, all that stuff.

00:11:40.000 But the muscles of the United States will be over with, and that's kind of passé.

00:11:46.000 So even in case of agriculture, millions of acres were beginning farmed in Latin America and Asia.

00:11:54.000 And industries were offshore and outsourced.

00:11:59.000 And the idea was that the middle class and you could see it when Hillary Clinton went to West Virginia and she said, we're going to get you guys out of business.

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00:13:21.000 Okay, everybody, welcome back.

00:13:22.000 Victor Davis Hanson's with us.

00:13:24.000 Sorry to cut you off.

00:13:25.000 Please continue.

00:13:26.000 I love this idea that you were getting into, that it became almost...

00:13:32.000 I like the word passé, but it was just not acceptable or desirable to work with one's hands.

00:13:39.000 That upper-middle-class society, no one wanted the children... 0.80

00:13:43.000 No one in suburban society wanted their kids to go work construction.

00:13:47.000 The idea was you're gonna go work on a laptop, you're gonna go work as an accountant or an engineer.

00:13:51.000 Upper middle class dogma became that if you had to sweat to make a living to be a plumber, a welder, electrician, there's something wrong with you, go get a four-year degree.

00:14:01.000 Please continue on that, Victor.

00:14:03.000 Well, it was the idea that we were gonna be the brain of the world and the world would be the body and the body was inferior in that We were going to make so much money that it would trickle down to everybody in their 401ks and everything.

00:14:16.000 And you saw that the vocabulary adjusted.

00:14:20.000 Joe Biden said that people had to learn to code if they were minors or something.

00:14:24.000 Hillary said something the same thing in West Virginia.

00:14:28.000 We had this kind of thinly veiled class disparagement vocabulary. 0.99

00:14:34.000 Irredeemables, you know, clingers, chumps, dregs. 1.00

00:14:41.000 So there was a kind of a demonization as if they were the losers of globalization, and there was a geographical element to it. 0.98

00:14:47.000 It was in the interior of the United States.

00:14:50.000 It's a red star.

00:14:51.000 And then the two blue coasts were going to be where all Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, federal government, big banks, corporate headquarters, Silicon Valley.

00:15:01.000 These were going to be leading the United States, and we were going to kind of be the tail or the drag, you know, farming, mining, Getting your hands dirty, extraction, production, assembly, manufacturing.

00:15:14.000 It wasn't really necessary.

00:15:15.000 And then, of course, we started to notice things, Charlie, that we were producing one warship a year, and China was producing...

00:15:21.000 a month, and they were producing over 200.

00:15:25.000 And we, during COVID, we looked for our pharmaceuticals, masks, all these things we thought were mundane and trivial.

00:15:32.000 And suddenly, these countries were saying, well, we don't know if we're going to...

00:15:36.000 Ship it to you this week or not. 0.59

00:15:38.000 And so we realized that our grandfathers were not stupid, that they wanted to be self-sufficient and the stuff of civilization, food, energy, housing, materials, ships, military equipment.

00:15:54.000 And so I think we're kind of, we're questioning in that, that we thought we were so wealthy that the financial sectors and the globalization was going to carry us and now suddenly So, I couldn't agree with that more, and what President Trump is trying to course-correct it.

00:16:23.000 I suppose I'm going to ask you a speculative question.

00:16:25.000 Can we become a body, not just a brain economy?

00:16:28.000 Is it possible?

00:16:33.000 It's not just a bunch of people mindlessly on an assembly line putting widgets together.

00:16:38.000 It requires the most sophisticated robotics, artificial intelligence, and those are areas that we excel in.

00:16:46.000 So when you start to see these people building these huge power plants, mostly by natural gas, and AI plants.

00:16:55.000 That technology can be married with assembly.

00:16:59.000 So even though we have a fossilized 1.6 fertility rate, you can get an American and marry him with machines in assembly in manufacturing. 0.89

00:17:09.000 Even in things like housing now, where you see entire walls made in factories, you know, the studs and everything, and then brought to the site and they're pre-assembled.

00:17:19.000 And so we're very innovative and it's time that we We could do both very well, and it's kind of interesting what Trump is doing.

00:17:29.000 He's kind of emulating very quickly the War Production Board.

00:17:33.000 You know, we were the 17th largest army in the world.

00:17:36.000 At the end of 1945, we had 12 million people, almost the size of the Soviet Union's army, and we had the largest navy in the world, but it was the largest navy In the sense of greater than all the Navy's put together.

00:17:49.000 We built 140 aircraft carriers of various classifications.

00:17:53.000 And what I'm getting at is what Roosevelt did, the socialist, he said, I'm not going to be a socialist anymore during the war.

00:17:59.000 You, Henry Ford, You, Henry Kaiser, you, William Knudsen, you go out and make bombers and liberty ships and make a profit, but you've got to have the United States' interest.

00:18:11.000 And I think that's what Trump's doing with Andreessen and David Sachs and even to a degree Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

00:18:19.000 He says, I will protect you when the Europeans go after you or the Chinese cheat on you. 0.99

00:18:23.000 But I want you to invest here, and I want your abilities to be in service of America, and I want your rockets, and your Facebook, and your investments, and anything you make, create jobs here first.

00:18:39.000 And it's kind of an appeal to a nationalist, patriotic element.

00:18:45.000 I think a lot of the billionaire entrepreneurs are starting to react to it.

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00:19:48.000 Shouldn't you be looking into doing that too?

00:19:52.000 Victor, do you want to comment on a second, for a second, on Hillsdale College?

00:19:56.000 I know we both Share an admiration of them.

00:19:59.000 You're a visiting lecturer there, are you not?

00:20:01.000 Yeah, I've been there for 21 years in the fall, and I'm going to give the graduation speech in May, May 10th.

00:20:06.000 So I'm looking forward to it.

00:20:07.000 It's a wonderful place.

00:20:09.000 First day I got there, I noticed two things that nobody locked their bike up.

00:20:12.000 And there wasn't one book in the bookstore that had a dash studies, no environmental studies, gender studies, race studies.

00:20:19.000 It was all regular courses of the old style, math, science, literature, history, philosophy.

00:20:26.000 And if I remember correctly, I could be wrong, but I'm drawing from memory of one of your lectures or articles that you might have been at Hillsdale or in Michigan riding your bike or something, and you saw Trump flags in 2016, and you saw some indicator.

00:20:40.000 Is that, am I remembering correctly?

00:20:42.000 Yeah. I came back and wrote a column saying I think he's going to win.

00:20:46.000 That's right.

00:20:47.000 I remember this.

00:20:48.000 I saw them everywhere.

00:20:49.000 And I saw a guy painting the side of his barn.

00:20:51.000 I got off and I thought somebody was vandalizing it.

00:20:54.000 I didn't see the Trump, just part of the T. I ran over there and he was very nice.

00:20:59.000 He just said, I can do whatever I want to my blank, blank barn.

00:21:02.000 And I said, well, what are you doing?

00:21:03.000 I'm curious.

00:21:04.000 He said, I'm training the word Trump.

00:21:07.000 So that was, that was, I thought he had a chance.

00:21:11.000 I really did.

00:21:11.000 And I wrote that because I saw, and here where I live in the San Joaquin Valley, a lot of Hispanic males, especially even as early as 2016, I was just stunned that so many of them in building, construction, agriculture were going to vote Trump.

00:21:26.000 For a variety of reasons.

00:21:27.000 That's a good segue to something you mentioned previously.

00:21:30.000 You're different than most intellectuals, philosophers, and historians and professors.

00:21:34.000 You work with your hands.

00:21:36.000 You are a farmer.

00:21:37.000 It's not just some hobby.

00:21:38.000 It's not something you do for social media.

00:21:40.000 You don't run a TikTok account where you do it for likes.

00:21:43.000 You enjoy being in contact with the earth.

00:21:45.000 You have been your entire life.

00:21:47.000 There is a fair amount of angst and anxiety in the farmer community right now about these tariffs.

00:21:52.000 I know you touched on this previously.

00:21:54.000 I was at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, a couple days ago, and a couple farmers came up, and they were all Trump guys wearing Trump gear, and they were very worried.

00:22:03.000 They said that these tariffs very well might raise the price of equipment coming in, that they might not be able to export their goods.

00:22:10.000 Please, as a farmer, give us your take on Trump's tariff announcement.

00:22:14.000 How should we think about this?

00:22:16.000 Well, I think the way to look at it is long-term and short-term.

00:22:19.000 Almost every country that we export with, we're running a deficit with, I mean, in terms of now as a farmer and, say, almonds with India.

00:22:32.000 And they have tariffs, and they're very tough people.

00:22:36.000 So if they retaliate, the easiest thing they're going to do is say, we're not going to allow almonds in without a 40%.

00:22:43.000 And they already have tariffs, but not that high.

00:22:46.000 But long term, if you were able to achieve parity, And we took a short-term hit, and you were able to tell India and China and the Europeans, we're not going to let in this, this, this, unless you let our soybeans or our almonds or our cheese in at the same rate that we let yours in.

00:23:07.000 It would be kind of fantastic.

00:23:10.000 It really would.

00:23:11.000 And then I don't know to the degree to which he is going to retaliate by putting tariffs on Imported foodstuffs the United States is the law it's not the largest producer of export food in volume But it is in value.

00:23:26.000 That's pretty amazing when you think we only have three hundred and thirty five million forty million and China's got 1.4 billion But so what I'm getting at is half of everything we produce we sell abroad and it's very pricey it's things like high-volume pistachios that are worth a lot of money or walnuts or Processed cheese, things like that.

00:23:50.000 It's not just grain, which is essential, corn or sorghum, but we have a lot of really specialty crops that the world likes.

00:23:57.000 And people are paranoid about that, especially because you can live without almonds and you can live without pistachios.

00:24:05.000 So if they think that they're going to hurt a particular sector of the American, and that's what they do.

00:24:10.000 When they negotiate with Trump, they look at particular red state or areas that are his His supporters and they want to target that type of commodity for these small towns and rural areas.

00:24:25.000 The the farmer base overwhelmingly supported President Trump.

00:24:29.000 And I believe long term it is going to they're going to have incredible prosperity.

00:24:34.000 They also get heavy machinery discounts.

00:24:36.000 I know that the president is looking at that in the upcoming tax bill.

00:24:40.000 Victory, also you mentioned something a little while ago, just previously, you said that you were stunned by how many Hispanics and men were going in President Trump's direction.

00:24:50.000 We are seeing a realignment of political parties.

00:24:53.000 I know you've written extensively about this, where no longer are we divided as much on race, but we are divided instead really on male, female, and on class.

00:25:04.000 How should we think about the current political divides and how our political parties are realigning?

00:25:11.000 Well, Trump got 26 percent, I think, of the black vote and about 55 percent of the Hispanic male, maybe 48 in general.

00:25:20.000 So there is a part of that was cultural.

00:25:23.000 In other words, they like a strong leader.

00:25:26.000 and physical feebleness bothered them, of course.

00:25:31.000 But they're also on cultural issues.

00:25:34.000 They don't like the idea of biological males, crime, open borders, especially here, people didn't like.

00:25:41.000 But there was also something about, I don't wanna say macho, but there was the idea that you want a strong representative of the United States that embodies our confidence.

00:25:49.000 And so if somebody, That type of foreign policy appeals a lot to males.

00:26:05.000 But class-wise, the idea of bringing jobs back in the United States and having, say, a worker and a half for every job, I mean, two jobs for every worker rather than, you know, two workers for every job is what They want, because it makes them more valuable and prized and appreciated.

00:26:25.000 So this idea when Trump says, I brought in $3 trillion worth of foreign investment and in three years, you know, most economists say for every $10 billion, some say $20, you get a million jobs.

00:26:39.000 So if what he says is correct, you could see 30 or 40, 50 million jobs in the next decade.

00:26:46.000 And that appeals to people.

00:26:48.000 They'll say, you know what?

00:26:49.000 I can be a machine operator and I'll have three or four offers rather than have to go beg and humiliate myself to work at minimum wage part-time.

00:26:58.000 So, it's kind of like a can-do.

00:27:01.000 We want to get the country moving.

00:27:03.000 We want to be preeminent in every field.

00:27:05.000 Military, food, oil, gas, everything.

00:27:09.000 And that appeals to, I think, men in a strange way.

00:27:13.000 So, as a historian, How would you judge President Trump's — we're almost at 100 days — his first 100 days versus Obama and that of the 20th century?

00:27:25.000 He has accomplished quite a lot, signed a ton of executive orders.

00:27:29.000 How would you look at what President Trump has been able to do in such a short period of time?

00:27:34.000 Well, he's a counter-revolutionary, so he's mapped out his counter-revolution.

00:27:39.000 And he's got, as you know, more lower district court injunctions in the first two months than any president, I mean, than Biden had in four years or any other president.

00:27:50.000 So they are trying to do everything they can to stop him.

00:27:54.000 And we're right at the abyss.

00:27:56.000 But if he should do just four or five things, achieve a peace in Ukraine, a peace in the Middle East and make Iran inert in nuclear terms, get somewhat symmetry or parity in trade.

00:28:12.000 And if he can cut...

00:28:14.000 Even a half a billion dollars, a half a trillion, and get on a trajectory within three years, we're going to have a balanced budget.

00:28:20.000 Just those things alone would make him more successful than any president in the last half century, at least.

00:28:28.000 No other Republican has ever tried that.

00:28:30.000 Reagan, George H.W., George W., they all said the same thing.

00:28:34.000 You know, we're going to slow down the cultural revolution.

00:28:37.000 We're not going to stop it.

00:28:38.000 We're going to slow the growth of government.

00:28:41.000 We're not going to cut it.

00:28:42.000 We're going to look at deregulation and taxes, but we're going to not talk about trade.

00:28:47.000 So they knew that if they were to do, they wanted probably some of them to do what Trump did, but if they did do what Trump, they would meet a level of resistance that they thought would be incompatible, either socially or culturally.

00:29:00.000 They just didn't want to handle that.

00:29:02.000 And they got a lot of resistance as it was.

00:29:04.000 But I think something about Trump's temperament or background or attitude or outlook makes him, Invulnerable or oblivious or protected from social opprobrium.

00:29:15.000 He didn't care.

00:29:17.000 It really is.

00:29:18.000 He's a political marvel.

00:29:20.000 Victor, you wrote extensively for the last couple of years when Biden was president on the mass chaos on the southern border.

00:29:27.000 Can we just comment for a couple of minutes on how quickly President Trump has been able to seal the southern border?

00:29:34.000 We have grown accustomed to crises go on for 5, 10, 15 years.

00:29:38.000 Think about it.

00:29:38.000 COVID and the lockdowns and the 2008 financial crisis and our national debt and Nixon had a war on drugs.

00:29:45.000 Never before in my lifetime have I seen something go from crisis to non-issue in under a hundred days.

00:29:51.000 Yeah, I mean, they told us that you had to have comprehensive immigration reform, which was basically amnesty in their view.

00:29:58.000 And if you didn't, you couldn't close the border.

00:30:00.000 And he understood that the border was open because they wanted the border open, and they wanted 12 million people in here, both for cheap labor and for future political constituents, and for larger federal programs, greater taxes, more redistribution.

00:30:16.000 And he just simply said, if you obey the law, And that means you fortify the border, and you secure it, and you turn people back, and there's no catch-and-release and no refugee status once you're here, but you have to do it. 0.56

00:30:29.000 You could stop it and create, more importantly, a psychological sense of deterrence.

00:30:34.000 And when he started to say things like, I have an executive order that if you come across the border illegally, you can't come back for 10 years.

00:30:42.000 That was very brilliant because it told people, uh-oh, I'm here, and these people are serious.

00:30:48.000 They might catch me, and then I can't come back legally.

00:30:51.000 So you're actually seeing a little bit of reverse immigration.

00:30:55.000 I think they really need to enhance that, because it's something people had talked about in the past, but they thought no president would ever dare do it.

00:31:02.000 Victor Davis Hanson, stay there.

00:31:03.000 Can you remind people it's victorhanson.com, is that correct?

00:31:06.000 And people can...

00:31:07.000 Yes. I'm a paid subscriber.

00:31:09.000 Tell our audience very quickly, about 30 seconds about that.

00:31:12.000 I have a website victorhansen.com for $5 a month.

00:31:16.000 You can get my usual stuff.

00:31:19.000 It's two columns a week.

00:31:20.000 I do 11 videos of various statuses there.

00:31:23.000 But I also have about 2,000 words only for subscribers and a video only for subscribers.

00:31:30.000 And it's fresh.

00:31:31.000 I've done it for four years.

00:31:32.000 I haven't missed a week yet.

00:31:33.000 So every week, two long essays and a 10-minute video in addition to all the other stuff at the website.

00:31:42.000 Charlie Kirk here.

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00:32:45.000 So Victor, I have a difficult question.

00:32:47.000 One that I have not heard you answer.

00:32:49.000 What do you think that the Trump administration could be doing better right now?

00:32:54.000 I think they can...

00:32:55.000 The messaging, I think, could be improved.

00:32:57.000 I would get a little bit more tragic than Ragadaccio.

00:33:01.000 In other words, I wouldn't have a chainsaw when I'm cutting.

00:33:04.000 I would say something along the following.

00:33:06.000 I don't like laying people off.

00:33:09.000 I don't like the idea of getting in arguments with Canada.

00:33:13.000 And I'm willing to hear things, but I didn't start this.

00:33:17.000 I didn't open the border.

00:33:19.000 I didn't let in 12 million people.

00:33:21.000 I didn't run up $37 trillion.

00:33:24.000 I didn't get us into $3 billion in interest a year.

00:33:28.000 I don't like any of that.

00:33:29.000 But I'm the one that's tasked with fixing all this.

00:33:31.000 And that sometimes is a rough thing to do, because in this transition, people are going to have to change their methods.

00:33:39.000 They're going to lose jobs.

00:33:40.000 And I'm going to try to get as much federal investment as I can.

00:33:44.000 $3 trillion worth.

00:33:45.000 And for every person that we have to eliminate their job, we're going to try to get them something better in the private sector.

00:33:52.000 I think a little bit more of that tone that, we didn't ask for this, but if we don't do it, nobody else is going to do it.

00:33:59.000 And they left it, they being the whole progressive agenda and project, and we have to do this, and there's no, we ran out of time.

00:34:07.000 It was on our watch, our station, our time, this task fell to us.

00:34:11.000 We didn't ask for it, but we're going to complete it.

00:34:13.000 That kind of attitude, I think, would be a little bit better, or at least explain in detail.

00:34:19.000 But if you just say, you know, we're going to invade Panama or we're going to take, uh, you know, Canada should be our 54. I understand the art of the deal, but you've got to, you, we got a, about a 10% independent conservative democratic constituency that we've got to reassure that things are going to get better.

00:34:39.000 And we're doing this radical things.

00:34:41.000 Because they were the radicals.

00:34:43.000 We weren't the radicals.

00:34:44.000 We're the counter-revolutionaries.

00:34:45.000 They were the revolutionaries.

00:34:47.000 We're bringing things back to the normal.

00:34:48.000 They were the ones that took it off the spectrum.

00:34:50.000 That kind of explication very quickly, each time they have an important announcement, I think would help.

00:34:56.000 The Russian-Ukrainian conflict, it's proving to be even more difficult than we could have imagined to bring this thing to peace.

00:35:02.000 What is your expert analysis of where things stand?

00:35:06.000 And do you think we're going to enter another summer of killing?

00:35:08.000 I hope not.

00:35:09.000 It's worse than Stalingrad.

00:35:11.000 I think everybody understands, I don't want to admit, they all understand the contours of a peace.

00:35:15.000 They're not going to get the Donbass and Crimea back, Ukraine. 0.88

00:35:19.000 No president ever advocated it.

00:35:21.000 They're not going to be in NATO.

00:35:22.000 But on the other hand, they've got the biggest army of any NATO country, and they're well armed to the teeth, and they've killed or wounded, tragically, a million Russians.

00:35:33.000 And so Russia, the only thing, the only Point in contention is how far west does Putin think he can get?

00:35:42.000 In other words, how far can you push him back east from his embarkation point?

00:35:45.000 That's negotiable.

00:35:47.000 So if you give them guarantees that they can defend themselves, then I think we see the The peace, all we're doing now is that every time we criticize Putin, Zelensky gets on his hind legs and says, I want to be back in NATO, I want more money.

00:36:00.000 And every time we criticize him, Putin says this.

00:36:03.000 But that's normal.

00:36:04.000 That's the yin and yang of a peace negotiation.

00:36:06.000 So the difficult part's been done.

00:36:08.000 We all know the contours of the peace.

00:36:11.000 It's just convincing both of them they're both better off now than later.

00:36:15.000 We don't need to have another 500,000 people maimed or killed to do what we could do right now.

00:36:20.000 Victor Davis Hanson, check out victorhanson.com and become a paid member.

00:36:25.000 Thank you so much for your time.

00:36:27.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:36:28.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:36:30.000 He is one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, if not the most important public intellectual of our time.

00:36:38.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:39.000 Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:36:42.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 03, 2025

Victor Davis Hanson Helps Make Sense of a Confusing World

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