'Biden most radical President in decades' Victor Davis Hanson on Trump 2024 & Georgia

they won't let anybody talk about china in the nba if you mention china and a coach has done that in texas he's reprimanded lebron james won't say a thing so how do they square that they become woke hello this is steven edgington for the sun and today i'm interviewing victor davis hanson victor davis hanson is an american historian author and commentator he is a senior fellow at the hoover institution and today we're going to be talking all about joe biden's presidency so far donald trump's legacy and the republicans future in 2024 what's your view on how the joe biden presidency is going so far well i try to just look at empirical reactions uh pole wise there's he had a honeymoon obviously after the trump final month or two but that has gone down a little bit from 55 percent to about 52 and some you know the conservative polls he's below 50 but they're probably a little bit more partisan what i'm looking at is that the expectations that some of us warned others in the middle about and some on the never trump right that joe biden was not joe biden from scranton the old moderate democrat but rather either in his older age felt that he had been the understudy of barack obama that he would be a one-term president that he was underappreciated and that the way to square all those circles was to be the most radically left vessel since fdr and that's what i think we've seen and that means the border is now open uh he's recalibrating the middle east entirely he's got the biggest array of tax increases and new regulations we've seen in a long time culturally he's weighed in on unnecessarily gratuitously so whether it's moving the all-star game to denver on specious grounds he's comment commented on voting laws that are actually more liberal than his own state and he's called him jim crow so he's waiting in as a social justice warrior even as the concerns about his cognitive abilities have increased because he was the longest he had the longest hiatus the press conferences of any president the only thing that's that's remaining the only mystery is will he do what he should have done and that is pick and choose what trump did correctly and then take credit for it and we're starting to see that a little bit on the border that he's overwhelmed he's talking about even allowing trump's wall to continue that was already paid for that he stopped uh i don't think he's quite going to go back to the appeasement of china we'll see what he does in iran but a lot of us have just said we thought if he was wise he would just do what trump had done so successfully before the the covet uh pandemic and then take credit for it as if it was the buying recovery the biden vaccine the biden boom but so far he seems that that's not the case now to give him some credit i mean in the in the press conference he referred to you know obviously he did take a long time to do that but there weren't any major gaffes as it were he hasn't committed any major problems i don't think so far um you know in terms of you know you've talked about his cognitive i think it's more the prepping that what i'm talking about yeah when you had obama and you had trump they were fair game 24 7. so when they got into a helicopter when they were in a car when they walked in where they answered almost anything any time trump to his own uh probably fault but obama did too and these are scheduled really scheduled uh press conferences and a lot of times the questions are known in advance if not scripted and even had as you know from this first press conference he had the pictures of the people who were he was going to call to the names the order etc so that's the difference and in terms of this overall idea of him being a sort of moderate versus a radical democrat i know you're sort of implying that he's being far more radical than you know than he sort of sold himself as do you think that's a reality go you know moving forward as we go into the midterms next year and you know as voters start to make their minds up about which sort of senate and uh and congress people they're going to be voting for perhaps the democrats will start to think well actually we shouldn't be so radical on these issues that you talked about whether it's on increasing taxes or climate change or i think they i yeah i think they feel that he is radical and i think his point of view is if i was joe biden and i would put words into his mouth he's the following i'm only going to be i'm not going to run for president no matter what i say at 82. i've only got four years i don't really care about the polls i don't really care about the midterms i've got 24 months to ram through an agenda that is the most progressive the most radical and will give me the most legacy or bank for the buck in the next hundred years and i'm going to do that in two fashions i'm going to do a policy and process so i can weigh in on social issues woke i can call people racist about federalizing the voting statutes of 50 states which is really unconstitutional it's only extraordinary like the 18 year old vote or women but not to micromanage voting that's not in the constitution it says that shall be left to the states and i am going to stop all new energy development that was a big plus for the u.s i'm going to wade in on transgenderism i'm going to do all of this stuff and we have a year of pit up demand trump inflated the economy with three million three trillion dollars of stimulus i came in and added another two trillion i want another true trillion we've got the debt up from when trump started about 23 trillion it's going to be 30 trillion we've got zero interest rates and we've got a year of pent-up demand and now it's on leashing because of the quote-unquote vaccination and we're going to have the biggest boom we've seen uh and we've already seen it as far as housing uh sales car sales uh unemployment dropping and so i think he feels that he's going to take credit for this natural boom and get through this legislation and that's the policy the process is to do that we've never had a president that was that ambitious and radical on either side without a super majority and that is they had a huge landslide victory like lbj did or barack obama did in the electoral college or they had a huge senate majority like obama did super majority in 2009 when he pushed through obamacare or they had a huge house more joe biden is locked 50-50 he has the smallest democratic majority in this last 50 years he won or lost the electoral college by a select 45 000 votes in different states he had no mandate and so he wants to change the process and what do i mean by that i think they're going to try to get rid of the senate filibuster if they can they would probably want to admit at least one state maybe puerto rico maybe washington dc they can get around the constitution there are ways of doing it i think it's not unconstitutional but they can get around it that would give them two more senators i think they're really seriously talking as i said about radicalizing what we've never seen before the voting systems so that it's primarily makes a relevant voting day election day an american hallmark day we we went up to 62 percent of votes cast we've never done that before the error rate or the challenge rate or the inaudible rate dropped from a normal five percent of non-election day voting down to less than one percent it's about seven or eight million votes that would have been thrown out under any other system so that is a radical thing i think we're they're discussing maybe 15 supreme court justices that's not in the constitution so they can if they get 51 senators they can do that and with camilla harris's vote if they don't have a filibuster they've talked about uh statehood for two states packing the court into the filibuster and there's something called the national voters compact to get rid of the electoral college amending the constitution requires three quarters of the states and two-thirds of the con they're not going to get that but they can go to individual states and say vote to accept the popular vote and not your own in-state tally and if you do that and we get 270 votes the majority of electoral college the electoral college exists in name but it's inert and they're almost there they've got about 85 percent so these are structural changes that they feel will make us more like an athenian democracy rather than a roman republic as envisioned by the the founders and that would mean that they could institutionalize a lot of the the things they're going to try to do in the next two years there's so much to unpack there and you know i want to really break down break down what you've just said first of all on the rhetoric i know the democrats you know have been talking about some of these things for years you know packing the courts a lot of the more radical democrats have definitely been talking about this for quite a while whether they're actually going to be able to do that or will do that is another matter i think you know you can talk about these very radical process changes you know structural changes to the system removing the filibuster another one um but whether that happens is you know another another sort of another thing and you know you can speculate about that i'm sure but another thing and i know you mentioned the debt there let me just correct you we've never had anybody who tried to do that even during they haven't quite they haven't tried to do that either yet have they though that's my point no no but we've never had a serious group of people say they were going to do that let's be clear about that every single democratic candidate who in the democratic primary when they were asked would you pack the court joe biden had a some disagreements but they all said they would and they all said every one of them said they wanted to get rid of the electoral college we never had that before we've never had any discussion serious discussion as the senate majority leader said the other day that he wanted at puerto rico and washington dc admitted so what they want to do is clear what they're going to be able to do depends on two senators and there's going to be enormous pressure you got to remember one other thing we're talking about a solely political matter but in this country right now if you look at the traditional levers of influence and power not numbers but money influence reach media they all are progressive the university hollywood celebrity culture silicon valley professional sports and entertainment except for the media i want to exercise a degree of influence it's absolutely extraordinary i do want to talk about that slightly later in the interview but for now let's let's stick on this sort of joe biden's presidency and sort of what we look forward to i know one of the things that you know you mentioned was um the debt and you know do you think it's kind of ironic or maybe even hypocritical of donald trump supporters or republicans to talk about you know joe biden's two trillion dollar infrastructure plan when donald trump added so much to the national debt in the us well yeah i i said and i i think if you go back i think i had three or four columns right in the middle one of them was called debt the father of us all one of them they were constant i think every single column that i have written about the debt has been critical of donald trump remember what happened joe george w bush a physical conservative double uh he raised the debt 75 percent in eight years from four to seven then barack obama doubled it from seven to fourteen and then trump took 14 and went up five to 21 or 22 and he said it was for he did okay even before covet it was going up and he said that he would eventually as reagan said the huge revenues that ensued and they did ensue we had more money coming than ever before but like reagan he didn't make the necessary cuts reagan didn't make them in defense he didn't make them in defense and he increased it and he didn't touch entitlements because that was a quarter ten of the mega agenda the entire social security for the middle class okay and now we're on a trajectory to trump that and like trump biden said that these are extraordinary times because of the covet but uh i think one could make the argument that by december or january after the election we were starting to come out of it and maybe the first the trump stimulus of which one trillion dollars had not been spent was necessary but the next two trillion and the next after that you're going to create enormous amounts of liquidity and we have pin up demand and with hyper regulations you're going to have a lot of dollars chasing a few goods i'm out here in the san joaquin valley it's poorer than appalachia per capita income south of fresno california there is a housing boom like you cannot believe houses have gone up 30 percent in 18 months there's a shortage of american trucks nobody can buy them they're they're they're on demand i'm talking 50 60s 70 000 new pickup so we're in a boom right now even with we're not completely out of the lockdown and gasoline has gone up a dollar ten since the election per gallon so what i'm getting at is this is a natural reaction to the covid shutdown and i just wish that trump had the last few months seen that and biden had seen it as well because we're going to get either a stagflation or a radical inflationary period let's get back to this issue of mandate and this was another point that you made you know uh the democrats have a very slim majority in both the senate and uh in congress at the same time joe biden obviously won a lot of votes in the in the sort of you know general population i think he won it was about seven million more than donald trump did you know that's a that is a significant number of more americans voting for joe biden than donald trump you know it's a and and obviously donald trump described his uh electoral college victory as a landslide joe biden got the exact same you know amount of electoral college votes that donald trump did in 2016. so there are the democrats trump yeah the baby the mandate do this stuff no he doesn't i never said that donald trump had a land he didn't have a landslide he had less electoral votes than obama did he didn't have a landslide he lost the popular vote and he inherited a majority in congress he had enough to get through certain things but he didn't try to change the structures what i'm saying he did not try to strange the structure of the system for all the radical supposed mega agenda if you look at it very carefully it was a traditional republican boilerplate with four or five wrinkles we're not going to have an open border and that in 2006 they had already approved 800 miles that wasn't even controversial we're going to go back and allow a dupe process in the middle east we're going to get tough with china we're going to have no more optional wars in the middle east that don't pencil out and then we're going to be able to do that because we're going to push energy that was about all that was different and he and then style of course so as far as joe biden you can say two things i don't necessarily agree with but the constitutionalist would say there is no such thing as a popular vote it doesn't even exist in the constitution under our system each state votes and then their their tallies are individual and the way that they vote is individual the times except for the day of the actual election as far as the seven donald trump got more votes than any losing candidate in history i don't think that there was enough irregularities to even question the vote i'm not one of those people i think that joe biden won but here's the difference we have never in the history of the united states had 62 percent of the electorate not voting on election day when you have mark zuckerberg and silicon people pouring 500 million dollars into pre-selected precincts which is pretty much illegal if you read statutory laws and saying we're going to help this place in pennsylvania this place is in michigan we're going to get drop boxes we're going to get we're going to have the state higher pay the salaries and it's only going to be for one purpose to beat donald trump you've got a problem so what i'm getting at is if donald trump was right that changes an election hurt him or lost in the election it didn't happen on election day it happened from february to may of 2020 when there were literally hundreds of bureaucratic decisions at the state level executive decisions gubernatorial decisions and lawsuits to change the constitutionally mandated right of the legislature to make laws and they were all done under the pretext of oh my god we're facing covet nobody can go out of their home you can't go to the polls we've got to have drop boxes we have to have early voting we have to have all these mailing you cannot ask for an address if the signature is not there it won't matter that's what happened and the democrats were much better at it than the republicans were let's talk about another issue you mentioned earlier the culture wars and this is um sort of blown up recently to do with voter id laws in georgia the state of georgia i think the republicans there are trying to you know bring in laws to make it they would say to make the elections more valid because you have to offer your own you know identity card before you can vote and the the democrats are saying well look this is um as you as you mentioned this is joe biden's rhetoric is that this is a new jim crow law worse than jim crow this is going to restrict minorities and black people who generally vote for the democrats um to be able to vote what do you make of this this rhetoric and also can you comment on some of the companies and again you mentioned this earlier some of the companies that are beginning to boycott georgia and have sort of not been quite endorsed by the white house but not discouraged either there's two issues here has there been an effort dave facto or in as a result to suppress say black voting answers no 2008 and 2012 a higher number of african-american registered voters voted than did whites how could that happen on her system of so-called jim crow number two if you look at the days allowed to vote the hours in the aggregate that are eligible in early voting the rules that surround ids and mail-in voting and you compare let's take for example two states delaware that joe biden ran as a u.s senator basically his his machine ran delaware and colorado which these corporations and the major league baseball executive said we have to move to we have to move it from an all-black state where we had a hundred million dollars in revenue going into mostly a lilly white state because this state is just past a restrictive and you look point by point you can make the argument that the colorado voting law like the delaware is more restrictive so now we get in why is this going on and it's getting going on because uh radical people in georgia have been very successful in suggesting there's a racist climate and out of that dialogue they that frightens people especially after george floyd and so corporations who don't do anything on principle they're in there to make money they put their finger to the wind and they say am i going to get more flack from the 72 percent of democrats and republicans who say that they want an id just like you have to get on a plane or cancer check or get a vaccination or am i going to get more flack from the people who were 38 and they it's a no-brainer for them antifa blm the universities all the people we just talked about they have more ability to uh pressure us than does the so-called silent 72. so this is what we're going to do there's not going to be downside we're going to be woke we have a younger audience there's other one thing we're also forgetting and let's be frank if you look at revenues domestic revenues of major league baseball or you look at revenues of major league basketball mba they are flat flat domestically the nba squared that circle by going to china and has a five billion dollar franchising endorsement market now in china where they're training a whole generation of chinese which they will be junked as soon as the chinese master the system but for now it's very lucrative they won't let anybody talk about china in the nba if you mention china and a coach has done that in texas he's reprimanded lebron james won't say a thing so how do they square that they become woke and they're very left wing and they take a knee and they lecture and they take pictures themselves really but that's because it's an immediate exemption to justify that they're very ill liberal they are in bed with a country that destroyed tibet and destroyed democracy in hong kong has got a million people in the re-education camp major league baseball is doing the same thing their revenues are flat their audience is young the old traditional uh viewer is turned off by the politics and they made this decision that i don't need a 55 year old white guy in michigan to watch baseball i've got uh you know white people if i can use that rubric or now basically 58 percent of the of the major league baseball 70 percent of the population but under represent nba is 77 percent african-american nfl football is i think 69 that appeals to a younger more diverse multi-racial ethnic crowd that's our base they're much more left-wing we're going to appeal to them and we're going to get chinese money and the more left-wing we sound here in the country the more we get less flack for being right-wing overseas and that's how we're going to survive this changing rubric because they have basically lost all of their traditional viewers their viewership has gone down they're losing money and they know it and they've got this new paradigm and that means they've got a virtue signal non-stop and that's why it makes no sense as i said because the nba doesn't uh the major league baseball doesn't care about this voting law they're they're incoherent faye vinson the former commission commissioner wrote an op-ed today pointing out how silly his successor is so it's it's a business decision same thing with delta airlines how can a guy mr whatever his name is uh 17 million dollars a year so if you do it by the working days of the year you make sixty eight thousand dollars a day and he's lecture in the united states that georgia is racist for requiring an id which you have to have to get on his airplane and we're supposed to take that seriously as he has he signed a multi-billion dollar deal to open up new routes to china so it's a it's a farce but it's a clever force and it's it's it's driven and fueled by profit motives where do you think the president stands on all this do you think he is woke himself and you know i know you know you might instinctively say yes but to be fair to joe biden and some democrats they have been you know they have been a lot less um vocal on these issues and you know there has been some rhetoric about this i know you know we talked about the sort of jim crow that's what um joe biden is calling these laws and i think that's you know relatively exaggerating you could comment on that i'm sure but do you think joe biden himself is woke and do you think there is a split in the democratic party still between the more traditional democrats the people you know people like obama and these new more radical democrats aoc and others that question is a little bit more layered than you might imagine because you're asking me is he sincerely woke yeah because he surely acts like he's woke so that who was joe biden before this year joe biden was joe biden from scranton he was severely criticized for a lot of his career because he was forced uh efforts to stop school busing he was the real driver in the democratic party both for walls and border security but also for increased sentencing for african-american drug dealers he was called a racist by camilla harris in addition to that he was a great supporter of james eastland and mr t that elder talmage all of the southern racists and segregationists he was delaware he said in the 2008 primary that he got along with african-americans because delaware was a formerly slave state he had if you want to be empirical about it he had the worst record of racial gaffes in the country he said that barack obama was the first articulate black person and he was clean too he said that you couldn't go into a donut shop without seeing indian people he said during the campaign to an interview with that was african-american who questioned his cognitive efficacy he said hey how would you like it junkie if i called you a co-cat he said to another interviewer if you don't vote for me you ain't black he told people that mitt romney was going to put them in chains these were executives sophisticated error elegant completely successful uh professionals the cream of the cream of american society said if you vote for rom they're going to put you in chains as if they were children i won't even get into the corn pop so he had a record up until about three years ago actually until obama named it but even during obama's he was known as the gaff machine obama was always worried you know about what he would say so then he made this radical change and why did he do it because he was done for in february his candidacy didn't candidacy was zero he came in sixth and i think iowa and fourth in new hampshire and then we got to see pete butterjee and we got to see cory booker and carmella harris and bernie sanders and the democratic grandes silicon valley wall street corporate world i said oh my god these these guys could lose to donald trump we need joe biden and bring him out because he has this conservative kind of controversial so they brought him out he won nevada the black folk helped him in the carolinas and he was the leader and then they thought we're going to save us with mike bloomberg mike bloomberg was an utter disaster as a candidate spent a billion dollars and got nothing for so he was repackaged and here's where it gets interesting so all of the observers on both sides said well he's good old joe biden but he's old and he has cognitive he's had two serious brain aneurysms and he's old so the left is using him as an empty vessel to get him elected and all he's going to do and i think what happened was joe biden said do i really want to go up against these guys and fight them they've got control of the media they've got influence they got control of silicon valley i don't want to fight them at 78 and maybe i can trump them so when they bring this stuff i'm going to take it as my own i'm going to be bigger than barack obama they're never going to say i was an understudy and i'm going to get done what obama did and you know what if you read left-wing commentary that's exactly what they're saying now barack obama is being severely criticized for talking a good game but good old joe biden's actually getting it done through executive orders and through the bully palpa and uh he's going to be far more successful they think with a very narrow congressional majority than barack obama did with supermajority and that's in it in a huge majority in the house so that's where he's at now i don't know to what degree the obamas are guiding them but they are the most vocal ex-presidents uh first couple we've ever seen much more than george bush or laura bush uh much more even than the clintons they weigh in all the time and they're they've stalked that administration with a lot of susan rice and uh a lot of the aides are uh very prominent in the obama administration john kerry et cetera and uh jill biden is very i don't know to what degree jill biden is active but she does she seems to have a role that we have not seen in a long time much more prominent even than michelle obama and hillary clinton do you find that there's a sort of irony in the fact that joe biden um was preceded by donald trump you know this this absolute disrupter of a candidate who had come from absolutely nowhere had no background in politics and then obviously joe biden beats donald trump in the 2020 election as i say you know we've talked about the popular vote by a wide margin in at least in the popular vote um and this guy joe biden is this establishment figure who's been in politics forever what's the kind of why do you think that happened do you think the sort of american population was we'd had enough of this disruptor we wanted to turn back to normality as the amer the sort of democrats would say i had a lot of talks with people from the administration and they were on the the impression that january even though the liberal polls didn't suggest so but there were enough polls i think the harris harvard poll the rasmussen poll and um some of the more outlined polls this suggests that donald trump was going to get reelected in january we had record low uh minority unemployment 5.3 for african-americans lower for hispanics the general unemployment was 3.2 we were getting close to 2.8 gdp we had record energy development everybody understood that that and this is what was coming from democrats they didn't think they could beat him and then when you looked at that field that was so hard left it was polarizing had we had an election and this can happen to any candidate if you pick an arbitrary but donald trump would have been elected so then we had the pandemic and then we had the lockdown and then we had the recession and those were brilliantly recalibrated as the trump recession the trump pandemic and the trump lockdown anybody who looked at the situation would have said this is got all the ingredients of a tragic western or a sophocline play because donald trump took a huge gamble he bet on four different companies he warps speed unlike the eu he paid whatever they wanted he helped cover their legal everything we got a vaccine in 10 months and then he only one million vaccinations a month when he left after just five weeks and then the economies nashville after this lockdown that he opposed he went with it and it started to heat up again the economy right when he left or right before the election actually and the lockdown was starting to crumble in texas and florida so we said that i said to myself to people that i talked to i said you better be very careful about this election because um all of the hard work has been done and the downside is still there and the upside is going to come in november december to january and biden's going to take credit and you're not talking about it you're not talking about your achievements energy development board what you are talking about is joe biden is senile joe biden could be non-existent he's in a basement and he's outsourced his campaign to democratic operatives the fusion media wall street corporations and silicon valley and very sophisticated changes in the voting laws and that's a very difficult so why trump was saying look at i've got 60 000 people out in pennsylvania in a cold night look at joe biden he's got 10 cars honking their approval it didn't matter this was the first virtual candidacy we'd ever seen it was a virtual campaign and it was outs outs spent donald trump two and a half to one if you look at what the schwerenstein center had been warning people they were a liberal harvard graduate program that monitors media coverage ninety percent of mainstream media coverage reuters cnn it was negative trump and so what was happening is the trump people had fooled themselves at the optics of these rallies and that trump had done all this good stuff and everybody would remember pre-covet but we were not quite out had the election been held as i said in january 2020 or right now with this stuff happening i think he would have won but it wasn't and so i i did a lot of interviews on election day and i got a lot of criticism i said i don't know who's going to win the election but i know donald trump's not going to win the popular vote i didn't think he would i said the elect the electoral college but the people who were interviewing you on talk radio or blogs or podcasts they were convinced that donald trump was going to win by a landslide especially when these last polls came in that showed him dead even ahead some of them so yeah i mean everybody was was shocked and i still don't know all of the ingredients but my suspicion is that the voting laws helped uh biden but even more importantly uh two things that had not been an issue in 2016 and they were about you know they could go either way one was the swing voter i would call them the suburban mom soccer mom or the professional white guy who makes 150 000 and was bothered by talk of socialism in 2016 or hated the clintons they were tired of the trump tweeting and the trump disruption and that you know if we if he gonna attack fauci say fouchy's incompetent but don't say he can't throw a baseball that's it's irrelevant why do that and that group turned him and the never trumpers remember that they had been written off as irrelevant because for all their animus in 2016 92 percent of the republicans voted for donald trump higher than romney or mccain and they did so again this election but what people failed to see was it didn't matter that was not enough he got 96 percent of the republicans what he needed was that swing voter and he lost two or three percent and who were those three swing voters they were moderates and former republicans in spirit not registered who did look at the lincoln project's hundred million dollars of you know some of it was not all stolen and ads they read never trump stopped they read the national review and there was about 50 to 80 to 90 000 of them that did it did make a difference so it's not quite fair to say oh the never trumpers were irrelevant they were in 2016 they were again for republicans but they were very relevant and so was a sophisticated uh democratic plan to target people who were turned off by donald trump's uh optics and communications now you you're doing a campaign you've written about history let's move on from the campaign because although that is fascinating there's so much you know more to talk about um you know you've written a lot about history written you know about greek history and things like that but from a sort of more modern perspective in terms of donald trump's legacy as a president how historic and impactful was it you know when comparing to reagan when comparing to these other you know major presidencies you know you can compare jimmy carter and ronald reagan things like that and see well look obviously ronald reagan had a much bigger impact where does donald trump fit on the list of presidents in terms of you know the historicness of his of his four years you start with the idea that it's very hard for a president uh unless you're a lincoln and you're assassinated in the middle of civil war at the end of it for a four-year legacy it just doesn't happen and so we got to remember that coolidge remember took over from harding so he had essentially six years so you don't really that's very hard but i think there's going to be two areas where he will be considered a a a very successful president number one is he recalibrated the dialogue foreign policy domestic policy and the republican party to a populist so the republican party for good or evil is not caricatured now is a bunch of old white guys on the golf course they may be but that's not their character they're now charactered as to use joe biden hillary clinton and barack obama's language it's clingers deplorables irredeemables drags chumps and neanderthals and those are all pejoratives for what i would call the white working class of the middle west they can't win an election on their own but they are 30 to 40 percent of the electorate and they were neglected about eight nine or nine million did not vote in two thousand eight or six or twelve and they cost romney and mccain the election they did vote for donald trump there's sixty 64 000 question was was there ubiquitous presence enough to win him because they also turned off your romney voter who said i don't want anything to do with that guy in that monster truck with the american flag on it you know i'm more sophisticated and elegant um you know so that that's one thing he did he changed the party into a populist party and he tried to promote class rather than race so if you think about it and prune out all the left-wing right-wing propaganda he got a higher number of african-american hispanic votes than any other republican almost more hispanic i think than george w bush the first time but not enough to really make a fundamental difference but nevertheless it showed a trajectory and what his message was is hey african-americans hate hispanics hate poor whites you're all in the same boat you may hate that wealthy guy that's got the big skyscraper but if the economy goes up just look at your fuel costs your electricity costs your taxes and your unemployment rate and employers will be begging for your job and you can join a union i have no problem with unions i'm not like a traditional republican if you want to join the union great i love union people i work with them in manhattan that was a message and i'll reduce sentences for african americans i will try to campaign with african-american people i will tell hispanics that you deep down inside want that wall more than i do because when you have illegal immigrants coming into your communities they flood the schools the english uh has to be taught to them at the expense of advanced plans placement their gangs pick on your kids that don't speak spanish it's not good for that that started to resonate so that's an achievement the other thing is i think he will be considered um as a successful president and foreign policy in this sense that he really outsourced the mechanics and the nuts and bolts to a very capable very controversial secretary of state uh mike pompeo mike pompeo was the good cop and trump was the bad cop so trump railed and threatened and then pompeo quickly came in and said to nato look we're not going to end nato don't listen to that but listen here you guys did never never paid your promise two percent of gdp to defend yourself your main threat is islamic terrorism across the mediterranean and russia and you better pay the two percent because if you don't we're not an alliance and only one or two of you are britain and greece i think and maybe one of the baltic nations but it's now 100 million more and everybody believes except germany and people are not so in entrance enthralled with germany as they were in nato that you have to do that and the alliance is much stronger second in the middle east he said the obama plan was to as much as they could figure it out was to enhance iran as the persian persian shia minority marginalized forget hezbollah forget hamas forget syria and the assads just balance them off against the corrupt gulf monarchies and put pressure on the right wing in israel this is a great tension and pompeo said wait a minute this is crazy israel's a western country and there are moderates and they started getting people to recognize israel and then they said the palestinians are not the center of that problem they're holding hostage 500 million arabs for what is pretty much a corrupt government and so we cut aids of palestinians we bypass them and we started to make a deal a de facto alliance and there was stability i think biden will have trouble overturning and finally and most importantly he said you republicans and wall streeters that you think that the more uh concessions you give china patent infringement copyright theft technological appropriation dumping currency manipulation huge surpluses they become liberal and they look at that magnanimity to be reciprocated rather than to earn contempt by our weakness that's over with and we're going to be tough with china and they need us more than we need them and for all of us talk about we're done they have 1.4 billion people the united states has 330 million they've got four plus times the population guess what we still have almost twice as much conventional gdp as they do the one american worker is producing twice the goods and services as four chinese counterparts whether that's completely accurate or not but that was his message and it was one of confidence and we don't have to and tried to get the western world and of course the way trump did it was with theatrics and then pompeo came in and pompeo who was running for president i think did something else he was trying to say this foreign policy is going to be based on the domestic concerns of trade for the working class we're not going to dump chinese products we're not going to outsource we're not going to say that germany and japan just because you're a world war ii allies you can run up surpluses and so it was world war ii enemies i think to be uh well it was also what was controversial to be quite frank with you it was going back to traditional historical alliances the left said it was based on race but i don't think it was it was based on commonalities and what i mean by that was he was very very pro-australian and said australia's been a great ally we gotta protect it from china and he's was very pro-israeli and said it's western he was very pro-britain i don't think the british particularly liked trump but boy in this side of the country he talked up written written written written i think he was a little hurt probably that he didn't he exaggerated the degree to which boris johnson may have reciprocated but he felt at least that he was trying to restore traditional allies that had been shown before and he had this idea of western civilization alliance and all this stuff with eastern european countries former british commonwealth etc as a way of standing up to china i i suppose well i think the outcome happened you know i think the attitudes and talking of britain is an interesting one because the attitudes of many in the foreign policy establishment in britain towards you know not just republicans but you know very radical republicans or populist republicans like donald trump uh have you know there's been historic i think dislike and it was difficult for absolutely for that you know for there to be a proper relationship and i've i've i've done a lot of journalists and work around this um but let's let there's lots of other talking about the council on foreign relations the brookings institute the marshall fund all of those groups despised it well that's that's that i just had one thing very quickly yeah so when they despise them we have to ask them what was their contribution to american foreign policy the last 25 years the brilliant afghan war the brilliant iraq war was it a brilliant chinese policy was it you tell me what worked was it the libyan war was it the syrian intervention i can't think of much that the cia or the state department had gotten right the last 20 years that's what got trump elected well there's so many more topics i want to touch on before we end so let's move on um this issue of of republicans now representing vast swathes of working-class voters is one i want to drill in more and you know on the reverse side of that the democrats are now representing you know middle class affluent young people in cities people who've gone to universities well-educated people earning higher incomes i don't know how um how how much how sort of closely you follow british politics but a very similar path has been trodden here and you know the conservatives are now way ahead of labour in terms of working-class voters and labour are now ahead of the conservatives in terms of middle-class voters why do you think this shift has happened do you think it's going to be permanent what's what's the kind of um the the why yeah why has this happened there's a number of reasons they're both real and they're they involve optics let's go to the optics first well let's go to the real questions in britain and in the united states in the last 30 years as these economies were globalized in your case integrated with the eu but also exporting to china's there were certain skill sets that allowed one to be successful because as the markets went from 60 million in britain to 7 billion on the planet obviously there was going to be a great it was kind of comparable to the british economy in the 18th century that just took off and you see these huge ancestral states all over britain that was all built during a 100 year period in many cases so the same thing happened in the united states in the united states and in britain it was the london crowd and here it was the bike coastal so we we here in california if you were in silicon valley and stanford university in usc and uc berkeley and ucla and et cetera google facebook apple you looked out toward asia and where i work at stanford university if i ask some of my colleagues or friends in silicon valley what's the best restaurant in beijing or where do you like to go in seoul they can tell me if i say 140 miles away there's a big city called bakersfield have you ever been there never been have no idea what exists and the east coast it was the eu and so the academic elite and the government elite and immediately looked out toward europe and we created an international group of people who had the skill sets insurance law media technology finance corporate and they made more money than the history of civilization but there was a downside when you offshore and outsource and you liberalize trade and you make it completely free but not fair or i should use the word symmetrical people who have muscular labor and depend on it small farmers lathe workers carp workers their their product is outsourced xerox where it's cheaper labor china what we used to be here sent out to germany and japan then was sent out to southeast asia and ja and korea then it was sent to china and so we wiped out that swath and worse yet we made a rationalization that confused cause and effect we said if you're overweight and you're no longer a 30 an hour late worker in southern michigan it's because you're just stupid you didn't learn to code you didn't get with it you didn't get your degree in public relations you didn't get your daughter to go into insurance for law and you didn't even if you're still that stupid you didn't follow the fracking rigs from doubt to texas or the dakotas so there was a contempt for that group and we made up as i mentioned these labels for these people and when you look at middle class wages in britain and especially in the united states they had been flat under george w bush and barack obama they soared on three percent in one year under donald trump or at least two years and so there was a sense that we are losing out and these elites who were globalized the davos crowd they're doing better than ever and they have nothing but content for and then to finish there was a wrinkle the more that these people became cosmopolitan and the more they had money and the more they had tasteful they were worried about granite counters and stainless steel kitchens and all of these magazines about the place to be and what kind of dress and what type of opportunities and what kind of car is it going to be lexus mercedes volvo range rover i never saw a range rover in my life until 2005. all of a sudden palo alto and silicon valley are full of them they're no different than a ford that copied them there's a ford version it looks just like it they're probably more reliable but nobody would buy that if you get a range rule okay that whole crowd by any marxist definition was parasitic that's what marx would say so they were worried about that so the democratic party started under bill clinton but especially under obama to cater to those people but to introduce them to wokeness to say that you know what you may not you you can have a if you're barbara streisand put a big wall around your house but say you're against the wall on the border i once taught at pepperdine and i had to pull over on the pch and in front of barbra streisand's house and i was almost arrested immediately by her security guard outside this huge wall the day that she had been railing about walls and if you hate you can hate teachers unions and i mean you can support teachers union you can hate anti-union efforts you can hate charter schools but it's okay to put your kid in a private academy they they popped up like rabbits all over silicon valley the most segregated elitist academy do in britain as you know those old schools are coming back and i could go down the line the point i'm making is that the left said to the wealthy and the privileged your abstract wokeness and your money and your influence is a sort of medieval indulgence repentance and that allows you in your own personal lives to uh be anybody you want to be as indulgent as selfish as narcissistic as you want and they all did this and anybody could see the emperor had no clothes that somebody was going to come along even if it was a billionaire and they didn't understand they said no billionaire could ever appeal to these poor deplorable but he wasn't a billionaire just he was orange skin comb over queen's accent he appealed to working people he hated those people these were the bankers who said trump no these were the insurance people these were the lawyers that he dealt with he despised them and so he made that argument and it caught fire in 2016. and no everybody was shocked about the resentment that people had i teach in southern michigan and i traveled the middle west during the 2016. i had no idea that people over there felt like they did in the southern san joaquin valley where i lived that they despise those people i when i go to rural fresno county i don't tell anybody i work at stanford university they'll say hey don't you work over there in the coast yeah once in a while when i'm in palo alto they think you you'd be you should be dead and buried if you have to live in fresno county so this red blue divide it's everywhere in the west and it's a pro it's a product you can you can adjudicate it or find the metrics by zip code look at the zip code and compare income with political affiliation you can look at the mayors of cities you can do it by polling income who they prefer the republican party under trump but i think even without him it would have been that way as the upper middle class and the all the way down to the lower middle class and the democratic party is the upper upper middle class the very wealthy and the very subsidized poor and that's the way it is it's funny because you know you mentioned donald trump being a billionaire and winning over these working-class voters so you know in the uk you've got boris johnson and this guy who went to eaton as in sort of the heart of the establishment managed to win over again so many working-class people and i think a lot of labour politicians were very scratching their heads at this thinking how could this really posh guy who doesn't hide the fact that he's really posh win over all these working-class voters i want to ask two quick questions how do you think he does don't you think it's partly because unlike justin trudeau he looks like a slob and sometimes he says things i think he's authentic i think that's what that's what wins people over and donald trump was was the same in a way you know it doesn't really matter what your background is as long as you're sort of true to yourself i think that's that's really powerful to voters two quick questions before we end though um one on on sort of the upcoming elections in the us uh 2022 midterms got the 2024 presidency obviously what are your thoughts on that in terms of the republicans chances are there any front runners in terms of people who should run for the presidency i know it's a long time away but these things you know i know american elections last a very long time one of the one of the one of the candidates people are talking about is ron desantis and then on the sort of more establishment side there's nikki haley have you got any thoughts on on those elections very quickly in the 2022 i'm not as optimistic as most republicans uh they feel because of the outrage at the border and the activism on the biden social and cultural questions he's alienating he is but most voters on the midterm elections vote on their pocketbook and whether it's fair or not the president that's in power will get credit if you look at the trajectories in the united states we're some days we are vaccinating three and a half to four million people if you look at the trajectory somewhere around june 1st we're essentially going to have uh 10 to 15 million excuse me 30 have coveted have had it another 60 to 90 have antibodies we have 170 vaccinated we're going to be up to 250 we've got at 40 million that are below the age of 12. we're going to have immunity very quickly and that whether who's who gets credit joe biden will get credit we're going to have no lockdowns they can say all they want about the lockdowns but when you get down to here in california with 40 million people and we were getting down to someday 60 or 70 dead or i'm in a 1.4 million person county that had 180 dying a day or 200 and now zero deaths for four days biden will get credit and then when you look at the gdp figures and unemployment by next i think we're going to have a crash but it won't come so i think that it's going to be very closely fought i'm not sure at all republicans unless biden does something even crazier so that's up in the air as far as the republicans it's i think it's just gospel now that whatever person runs will run on a mega agenda that is we will not have any jeb bushes saying that illegal immigration is an act of love you will not have any free market milton friedman people said oh you know what just the market will level it out don't worry about unfair trade you will not have anybody saying you know what we've got to go nation build in syria or something it's not going to happen so then the question is what is going to happen and that we had nikki haley who was probably of all the candidates the most charismatic and canny but she thought she could very early cut the umbilical cord with trump and that failed she had to kind of grovel and then she made it worse when he said no i don't want to talk to you so i think that established the idea that all of these candidates are going to run they're very good candidates they're better than i think we've ever had them some like the santas have actually run something like a state but you know pompeo and tom cotton and christie you know they're all good candidates but they have to they have a revenue a rendezvous with donald trump and donald trump i think at this point he's recovered from his year of january 6 but i don't think people in the party believe he can get 50 51 of the popular vote so they're thinking if we get everybody united we'll get 46 percent of the popular vote against 47. so is there any way that we can tell donald trump it's 78 that you saw joe biden at 78 you're going to be that age why don't you be a senior statesman and help unite the party and go behind somebody who's and i think that's what they're secretly thinking now you know it doesn't take you don't have to be an american to see whether that's going to work or not because donald trump is an enigma and he could be so successful he could be way in the he could have a candidate he could say you got to go out and vote for desantis and i like christie known that what an ideal ticket and he could look at those polls and see them 10 points ahead of binaural harris whoever it is and then all of a sudden he said oh my god if they're that head i could be 20 points and jump in so to sum up uh 50 50 on the 2022 election as it is now with a qualifier that a lot of things will change it's so early but on the 24 election somebody has to make everybody has to make their peace with donald trump donald trump has to play a role but i think people in the party are trying to explain to him it's better for his legacy and himself at 78 if he helps a successor rather than he jumps in himself given all the things we discussed today thank you so much victor for your time uh and i hope to you know have you on again and stay in touch

Channel: The Sun

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Keywords: The Sun, news, breaking news, joe biden, victor davis hanson, donald trump 2024, donald trump, kamala harris, president joe biden, biden, president, trump, politics, fox news, cable news, vdh, dr. victor davis hanson, hoover institution, covid-19, the case for trump, freedom, woke companies, woke companies pretend to care about police brutality, woke companies today, woke, social justice, wokeness, georgia, georgia voting law, georgia voting laws, new georgia voting law, us news

Id: MF1BHYDhVWs

Length: 61min 20sec (3680 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021