Victor Davis Hanson: Joe Biden's regime is most revolutionary Left-wing since FDR

they do know that this is the most left-wing revolutionary group of people that's had power probably since 1933. Hello I'm hello and welcome to office my name is Stephen Edgington this week Joe Biden launched his 2024 presidential campaign to discuss his chances and the Fallout from Tucker Carlson leaving Fox News I'm joined by the American historian Victor Davis Hansen is Joe Biden the favorite to become president again in 2024. I don't think so if he were to be the nominee I don't think he would be a traditional candidate he would be an artifact a prop a construct they're going to have a problem because they had the veneer of covid last time that would allow him to stay in the basement and be a 19th century front porch candidate but this time they will have to have some attempt at it but I think they're going to Outsource he's just assemble a veneer as I said a scab and underneath is this wound of hard leftist and they have an agenda and they use him to moderate or give the veneer of moderation but they will Outsource the campaign as they did in 2020 to the Silicon Valley Titans they raised hundreds of millions of dollars more than Trump maybe twice as much with counting the packs should Trump be the nominee they'll tie him up with a series of Mr Bragg in New York Miss latita James in New York uh The Fanny Willis in Georgia Jack Smith and the special prosecutor in Florida so that their plan is to gainium empathy to get the nomination and then to Hemorrhage him for 18 months and then finally they just Outsource it to the media to the media you can already see what the media is doing here in this country they're running ads excuse me Biden's not running very many ads but there are narratives on them on the local news and National and state news is that Trump really wasn't that bad of a guy that he's now running to the left of DeSantis because the Santos is a hard right counter-revolutionary it's dangerous but Trump he's reasonable on abortion he's reasonable on Disney Corporation he's reasonable on Social Security and so what they want to do is what they did in 2016 and they build him up and then once he gets a nomination they flip and they use welfare money the media to destroy it let's stick with Joe Biden for now and then we'll move on to Trump and DeSantis a little bit later does Joe Biden compare to any U.S president in in history who is he most similar to it was pretty clear that the last 18 months of Woodrow Wilson's uh presidency he had a stroke and that was hidden by Edith Wilson his wife and his physician and so what they did was they got together with his advisors and sent out daily communiques of what Wilson wanted what we know for that period he was unable to communicate or think rationally later he had a semi-recovery where he could walk I think he died four or five late years later but we had for about a year and a half no president at all and uh I think we're getting to that point where Jill Dr Jill Biden serves as a conduit and a conduit to home to Bernie Sanders Wing I shouldn't say Wing that is the Orthodoxy of the democratic party Bernie Sanders people Elizabeth Warren the squad the Obamas and they tell them these are going to be the appointments federal judges these are going to be the bureaucratic appointments these are going to be the initiatives and it's basically we want this on transgendered open border uh Green New Deal new green deal all that stuff and then they hand Joe and then he he goes into his his one or two minute fits where he says you know Ultra Omega semi-fascists are stopping us we've got a great agenda we got a great record we need more time and that's how that's working but he's not I think everybody even on their side there's a lot of left-wing Riders who are basically now admitting that he's not in full control of his faculties now Biden released a campaign launch video do you think he's going to have another campaign where he's basically in the basement again he's not really going to go on the campaign Trail do speeches do rallies and he'll just be a very sort of low-key campaign from the president himself yeah I do we got to remember one thing about him he was always narcissistic when he was old Joel Biden from Scranton and he was healthy and he was one of the youngest senators in history he loved the Limelight he loved to get out in front of people and he didn't do that by choice he was not physically able to do it in 2016 when he left the vice presidency he was not in in good health and remember Biden famously was told by Obama Joe you don't have to do this meaning imagining a run for the presidency and then in 2020 I guess as early as night 2019 people on the Democratic stage were telling him Cory Booker what are you doing who is this guy I mean he was that evident uh failing and then 2020 he used covet but he didn't want to do that he had no choice or he'd stumble or he'd fall or he'd say create the Corn Pop Stories the biggest fear was that he without those uh without the cognitive control over his emotions he was saying things like the Corn Pop Saga or you ain't black or you're a junkie that were really offensive to people or he was glare young girls or he breathed on their hair or he'd say she's a good looking young teen so they didn't want him out there I don't think it was and I think he understood that now they don't have covid but they're going to keep him they have no choice they have to keep him so he had a video he didn't announce it because if he had announced it he wouldn't have been able to read the teleprompter without serious grammatical or syntactical or mispronunciation uh errors so I I think that's what he's going to do it'll just be interesting how they package the his non-presence whether he's too busy being president or he's got an agenda or he's got to worry about foreign crisis it has to be something but we've never getting back to your prior question we've never seen anything like this in our lifetimes where you know Wilson was 19 we're talking 1917 and 1918. excuse me 1918 1919. even from abroad International perspective what what is going on with your president is utterly bizarre and unique and I think there are wider implications than just this presidential campaign where you have this President who's not really in control it seems of of his agenda and there are people behind him as you say who are sort of making the decisions for him what do you think those broader implications are I've just outlined some of them well we've seen them already and I think the impression is two thing that the commander-in-chief of the U.S military for example Joe Biden it will not react or cannot react or cannot grasp and that he's delegated authority to people of whom our foreign enemies neutrals and allies don't know really who's in charge and then second they do know that this is the most left-wing revolutionary group of people that's had power probably since 1933 they came in with FDR and how that transmits is that Iran now is going full blast with nuclear enrichment and probably already has a bomb it's has a factory in Russia making drones apparently it's going to start that China and Russia are together China and now is observed our place as a honest broker it is in with Ukraine even though it's giving no money to Ukraine no weapons Ukraine it's helping Russia and yet Ukraine is looking at it as a broker with Russia North Korea is back to its Annex about sending missiles everywhere we've got a new problem with turkey the other day it said it would send missiles into Athens one morning that the dodecanese islands are back up for negotiation even though they're on Greek sovereignty um so the I guess what I'm saying is neutrals look at this and whether it's South Korea Japan the Philippines Australia Taiwan and they say we've got to make some strategic decisions because we don't believe the United States is there and then allies like Saudi Arabia for example uh and turkey they look at this and say I think the United States is in decline in China's ascended and we don't want to be left out in the cold defending Western interests when there's not going to be any support for us are we under the nuclear umbrella would we be helped like we were in the 91 Gulf War and they've made the necessary adjustments and have distance themselves from us it's very quickly though because I mean we we went from the Abrams Accord where the entire moderate Arab world was on the verge of flipping and uniting with Israel against a common enemy and we were energy independent and didn't need couldn't be leveraged by them until being to this sad midterm spectacle of Joe Biden begging the Saudis to pump more oil while he had denigrated them and said that earlier he wouldn't meet with them so it's chaos so despite all of this it seems from my perspective that there isn't going to be a challenge to Joe Biden in terms of the democratic ticket in 2024 now there is obviously Robert Kennedy Jr who is attempting do you think there's going to be any serious challenges to Joe Biden's candidacy for that 2024 nomination not unless he has a serious health like a mini stroke or something or collapses probably not and I don't think uh there's going to be any internal I mean primary debates internal party debates so if Robert Kennedy announces his candidacy which he did and he already pulls 14 or 15 percent without doing anything then that logical question is wouldn't he have like Ted Kennedy and and Jimmy Carr wouldn't he be a serious candidate wouldn't he have debates if he had a debate with Joe Biden it would be embarrassing for bite and so I think Biden is raising money and he's sending out the message I'm not going to debate anybody I am going to be the nominee it's futile to run against me and I have given the hard left everything they want I've given the left corporate wing of the party everything they want there'd be no reason to re to replace me other than you know superficial appearances I think they have prefer this almost I think they like the idea of a virtual presidency because he's so predictable and he can't do anything unless he's spoon-fed the narrative and that that's much better than having a volatile Bill Clinton or Obama in 2020 Joe Biden beat Donald Trump despite all of the gaffes despite his clearly sort of Aging physical health and everything else do you think that that Donald Trump can beat Joe Biden in 2024 I think he can the polls suggests there about even the odd irony is that Ron DeSantis polls better uh but not nearly as good as Trump in the primary so Republican voters are kind of looking at it's very early so it's probably premature even to speculate that they are with us dilemma that the person who could clearly beat Biden clearly is not going to get the nomination they'd think and the guy who will get the nomination can't beat Biden so I think we we can see that with all as I mentioned earlier with all these prosec prosecutions the point is they want uh Donald Trump to get and that may be a mistake it surely was a mistake in 2016 when they gave him a billion dollars of remedia coverage but they want him to get the nomination and they want him to be an empathetic victim so people rally to the cause and then once they do that we'll see a succession so Alvin Bragg will draw this out uh about campaign financing or whatever that would be and then we'll have latita James on the real estate portfolio then we'll have the sexual harassment 30 40 years ago an allegation without support of sexual assault and then we will have the Georgia phone call and then we'll have Jack Smith the special prosecutor and I think they will coordinate and space this out so that once he's the nominee we're going to hear a gag order issued on trunk bombshell revelation our sources tell us the walls are closing in and they're going to try to Hemorrhage him that way has that been a period in U.S history or an example of a U.S president where he lost the election and then he went on and won another election later on just one with Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century in Cleveland may or may not it was very similar his first four years were very successful and then when he ran for re-election there were serious questions about the Integrity of the balloting and then he came back and won again he left office the second time not very popular but now when historians look back he was the Democrat that broke up the post-civil war Republican Monopoly and and he gets he gets kudos for doing that in some reforms and so that's what Donald Trump if you actually look at some of the campaign outs that a couple of them mentioned the fact that he's at Cleveland or he's he can come back and do this again but uh that's the only time that we can we we've seen that uh so we'll see what happens now you've said that the Democrats would prefer to go up against Donald Trump than Ron DeSantis because he's easier to beat in a general election but maybe there's another reason because Donald Trump was so chaotic as president and he was perhaps he was slightly incompetent to say the least in trying to reform the Deep State and things like this perhaps they would prefer Donald Trump who's who's more focused on these crazy kind of um personal problems and the indictments and all of this stuff then Rhonda santis who might be more effective actually passing his agenda well that's certainly true of a large minority of the democratic party they feel that Trump gets mad but DeSantis gets even that he he focuses and he fixates on the problem so when you look at the Florida success he has he goes he knows how to go right after in concrete fashion he neutered Disney he got rid of critical race Theory and he he knows how to operate the levers of government is very effective and because of his uh brilliant wife and the people around him he doesn't make sloppy appointments he doesn't uh I think Donald Trump has been done a great disservice but I don't think they could be as effective trying to do to Trump what they're doing to dissent what they're doing to Trump to the Santos I don't think he would give them that exposure in his personal life and his business life so yes there's a lot of people who believe that the Democrats for all their irrational hatred of Donald Trump uh would feel that it would be chaotic and they could do what they did in the past they could have a special investigator I mean they've they've learned nothing and forgotten nothing when they did Russian collusion everybody thought they would be so humiliated and shame they never brought any shred of evidence their TV radio social media all claim they had evidence that he had colluded there was none and then what did they do they just took a deep breath they went into impeachment and after impeachment what did they do they went during the campaign they went into Russian disinformation complete fabrication that Hunter Biden's laptop was a product of Russian disinformation but they ran with it it was very successful because they squashed that story and they suppressed that that true story so yeah I think that's that's what's going to happen and they think that they can do that a lot of people think they can operate much more effectively against Trump because he's not a seasoned politician even though he's been president for four years the other 60 percent maybe of the Democrats just they don't even think about that they just hate they hate the way he looks they hate the way he talks they hate who he is they want to destroy him they hate his family they hate everything about him and they will come out of the woodwork with all the money and resources they have and if you tell if you were to tell them as some of the people that are running the Democratic party are telling them be careful because Rhonda Santos is will be much more effective and he knows how you you think and what you do and he's going to overturn everything that Biden did not going to talk about building a wall he'll quietly say he doesn't know whether he can build the wall and he will build it and so because they don't care they think I don't care I just hate that that's their attitude do you think it's wise for Donald Trump to criticize Ron DeSantis in the way he is because Donald Trump has basically said that Rhonda santis has caused many problems for his home state in Florida and this again is attacking DeSantis from the left and it's the same thing that Nikki Haley is doing recently she's attacking DeSantis over his fight with Disney and saying that Disney can come to her State um because she wouldn't be so confrontational do you think it's wise for Trump and Nikki Haley to attack DeSantis from this left-wing perspective it's a big mistake and because it's incoherent I mean Donald Trump moved to Florida for a particular reason if he doesn't if he thinks it's so ill he has the resources he can move back to New York but he doesn't and he knows that Florida is well run that he knows that DeSantis won by over a million votes he knows that he got constituencies to both form that usually don't vote for Republicans he knows that his record is Sterling and so when he attacks to Santa's a in is a mistake but B when he does it from the left and he attacks him on Social Security on Disney on abortion then he loses he he it works on the premise that while the base will never leave me so I can strangle DeSantis in the Cradle that's what we want before he even announces I'm going to strangle him but I I think it's going to get the operative idea is that Trump has the base but he always missed a three to five percent suburban swing Romney voter or independent voter and by attacking descent as he will win that but I don't think he understands there was also a large number of never Trump Doctrine there maybe three to five percent that did not vote for him uh and could vote for him but not if he starts to act like this if you tell a never Trumper that maybe sat out and you said well look what you did you gave us by and this is a disaster he would probably say you were right now and as bad as I don't like Trump I will vote for him but when Trump attacks DeSantis who was their their favorite candidate a lot of never trumpers want DeSantis to be nominated and they say they'll come back in the party not all of them but a lot because of their personal animus against Trump then they get turned off they said like if he does this especially when Trump says things like he will never win the Mega vote are these veiled threats that if DeSantis were to get the nomination Trump would walk that's absolutely suicidal given the Republicans and conservatives have no margin of error that that really turns people off and then out of the blue I think Trump gets the message once in a while so the last two days he's issued just for one example a campaign ad about foreign policy and it's one of the most effective devastating ads I've ever seen it's it's got us a pulp career of what's happening around the world nuclear threats by Putin with a bomb going off and then Joe Biden stumbling on Air Force One and then lunatic things so the Iranians and all of his things and then Joe Biden in a press conference bewildered and but it's on issue oriented and it doesn't mention the sand much more effective but he's listening to he's a combative guy but he's listening to the wrong people and so far DeSantis uh I think the strategy and I'm not you know I'm not in the inner councils of either one of these candidates but I think the DeSantis strategy is something like the following that after all is in these indictments were announced by Bragg and their others were going to follow that natural outpouring of empathy for Trump shot him up in the polls combined with the fact that DeSantis had not announced which was okay but under this circumstance he got pressures from his donors and said you're playing Rudy Giuliani of 2012 you think you're so good that you you can come in Johnny come lately and you're going to be strangled and extinguished before you're viable so those two narratives dominated the media and he started to sink but I think the DeSantis idea was just whole steady don't panic don't just get elected governor of Florida then go all over the country and be criticized for abandoning your your constitutional responsibilities but announced in late mayor June and by that time Trump people will start to see that the empathy is going to a wear off from Trump and become more generic that people in the Republican conservatives I said look what they're doing to Trump they hate us they do this to all of us and it won't be uniquely beneficial to Trump and then a lot of people will say I think this is what the census is thinking they're going to say well I like Trump he did a great thing but my God I'm not up to psychodramas melodramas for the next I just don't want to hear that there's a gag order today or Trump is in court tomorrow or lakita James is talking about all these things or is this rape trial where she's bringing up all of this gross stuff or the the legacy of stormy or Jack Smith down there in morlago or the Georgia phone call just stop it I can't take it anymore that's kind of what DeSantis thinks is going to happen and there's I think there's some reason to believe he may be right do you think that Trump is inherently non-ideological and it's raw there's this phrase that there's something called Trump Inc which is all about making money I mean for example Trump has been pushing these nfts and things like this which don't actually go to his campaign but go to his own kind of pocket do you think that that is a problem where he's not really a sort of ideological Republican it's more about kind of his own personality well that was the narrative about the Trump family that Ivanka or Jared they all came from you have you have to do what you do to do business in Manhattan you deal with the environmental groups you deal with unions you feel the marginalized Community groups you do and you just say and do what you have to do and he did it better than anybody so he survived in the real estate Jungle of New York so therefore and you look at this political history of endorsing Democratic candidates of being good friends with the clintons at their wedding or Chuck Schumer I think all of that is true but I do think that he had a natural empathy in 2015 and 16 for working people because he was a builder and he had a record of talking to workers of Hard Hats of showing real empathy with the middle class and he was a nationalist so he was very angry about China that's all he talked about before he announced his candidate what China is doing to America not just to his businesses but to America and so and then when you add as a candidate after the honeymoon where they wanted him to get the nomination and they were giving him free coverage at CNN and msnc then when they started this abuse of him I think it just radicalized it so I think now you could say that he is a hardcore anti-leftist I don't know whether you can say he's a Doctrine or conservative because on issues like as I said gun control or abortion he's not as conservative as most Republicans and and that's but but on other things like the border and China he's pretty conservative I I think he's a realist a pragmatist his idea is that a conservative approach to everything within limits works so if you're a traditionalistic conservatives and you don't have statues falling down you don't have names you come to work that that the street corner is not renamed you come to work there's not a bunch of people defecating on the sidewalk you come to work and there's not a lot of people uh injecting or fornicating and for him that's stability and they represent instability and now you can put instability versus stability into Political terms conservative Democratic but he's not a person who says to himself I am a small government uh low taxes deregulating person ideologically he he's a pragmatist and right now it's very pragmatic to stop the woke Revolution I suppose the reason I ask is because if Trump doesn't endorse DeSantis if DeSantis wins the nomination then that seems to me to not be very smart from a conservative political perspective you know you you would want to get rid of Joe Biden it's not about yourself it's about you know putting a republican in power but just moving maybe you can comment on that very briefly but just one quick question about DeSantis does the scientist remind you of anyone else throughout American history is he Barry Goldwater is he Ronald Reagan you know are there any other sort of conservative presidential candidates at this point in the cycle that he reminds you of well he doesn't have Reagan's care Charisma but who does and he he's he he's building himself is a traditionalist can-do competent person he's sort of going back in the tradition of the white Eisenhower I was a general I know how things work people forget they say well Ike was very liberal he was pretty conservative I mean when the the Korean War heated up I gave a message to Stalin he was willing to use nuclear weapons if it was necessary to stop more Chinese coming across the yellow and he did a lot of stuff that everybody forgets about and he had it was a very conservative position actually to take on the military industrial complex and this idea that we were going to be interventionists all over the world and and take over the world the responsibilities the duties of the British Empire that was a very controversial idea and he was pretty conservative he was a Kansas guy so when we I think that DeSantis is kind of like that he's very suspicious of nation building he's very suspicious of Corporations and so and yet like Ike he's not a flamboyant or charismatic candidate he he's running on his resume and his um his experience and so I think I think he's more in that mold uh but you're not going to have a an exciting electric populist candidate come out Trump was more like that and uh he was but uh no I don't I think I don't think we're going to see descent he's more like an Eisenhower character and that's good for him I think people after all of the psychodramas and traumas they want a return to normality kind of a oh somebody like um Harding or Coolidge Coolidge is a good example he said after World War One and the whole Progressive Movement and the whole problems with Wilson he just the U.N I mean in League of Nations and all that he just said let's just returned to back to where it was and he was a very effective president but he wasn't a guy who was spellbounding on the pulpit from a British perspective I hope Rhonda santis isn't like Eisenhower because we had some issues there with Suez but uh yeah exactly yeah well a lot of Americans think that was a critical mistake I'm not sure that uh Ike was the point man on that decision that people around him were but uh there I mean if you have an ally and the Ally does things that you might not do but the Ally is in danger after they've started and it doesn't look as good then what you do is you double down in Sephora the alloy that's what we should have done and when you don't do that you'll collapse a British government that was problem area so it was a big mistake and it led to potentially communism in Egypt but anyway Andrew Santos's um foreign policy on Rondo Santa's foreign policy we know that he's he's been a bit sort of cautious he's he said that the Ukraine conflict was a regional conflict but then he sort of rode back on that a little bit with Piers Morgan what do you where do you think Ronda Santos stands in terms of his foreign policy he he's not that different than Donald Trump he's a Jacksonian if I could use that term I don't tread on me conservative no better friend a quote swetonius on on the dictator so no better friend No Worse Enemy and his idea is that you build up a huge military and you hone it and you use it at Choice locations both for symbolic effect but also in defense of your interests and your allies interests and Trump did that pretty well so everybody said well he was an isolationist but he killed uh solomonie he took out uh baghdadi he neutralized Isis he told North Korea if you keep doing it you're going to be in trouble he did he was the only president during the Bush Administration during the Obama Administration during the Biden Administration they all have one thing in common Russia crossed its borders into assatia into Ukraine into Crimea they didn't under so I think DeSantis is more or less the same thing give ukrainians the wherewithole to defend their own territory but do not give them the wherewithal to conduct preemptive or offensive operations on the Black Sea are inside Russia that will be against U.S interests and then he's also I think the geostrategist whatever the particular politics of Ukraine are you have to be aware that there's Cosmic forces that are going on that do not favor the Western Alliance and that is the drawing to into Partnership of China and Russia and the rehabilitation of Iran and the defection of turkey really from the NATO alliance it's now gravitating toward China and Russia the idea that allies like India keep buying weapons from Russia keeps buying Russian oil it's unraveling both our allies and our neutrals and it's creating new alliances over this and we can't I mean when you you've you've gambled Geo strategically on Ukraine and you've given them 140 billion and then China steps in and says they'd like to negotiate after not spending one penny and the Ukrainian president welcomes that and says it's a good development I don't think you want to mortgage your entire foreign policy and the stability of the world on that government or that that particular country especially given its historical relationships with Russia I mean Crimea has been Russia and since 1780 and one-third of Western Ukraine was polish until 1939 and it was reified by Style on his Ukrainian Dash Soviet 1945 and that prompted the famous quip by Stalin how many divisions does the pope have when people at Potsdam said well you can't just give rewards stolen and Hitler by you know you got to get this back to Poland and cholin says well they may be Roman Catholic but how many Pope divisions of Pope were and they just Annex it so we're in this orwellian situation where we're saying that the Crimea that had been Russia since 1781 we've got to go to the brink of nuclear war to restore but we have one third of Western Ukraine was polish for a thousand year fully speaking for a thousand years only since 1946-5-6 has it been Ukrainian that's just an example of the Myriad of issues that we in America don't understand when we get riled up and say you know on to Moscow it's crazy and I don't think Mr blanken or Mr Sullivan or Mr Biden or any of these people have any idea of the complexities of that situation and the degree to which withdrawing from Afghanistan are saying that you know it's just a minor incursion or winking at Putin when he was conducting cyber war against us uh destroyed our sense of deterrence and then we overreacted I think by suggesting that we were going to get back every inch of Ukraine one way or the other and that's not going to happen there's no way in the world that Ukraine has the wherewithal to take back all of the Crimea or all the Borderland it's just not going to happen I mean obviously that could be a negotiating tactic and everything else but so I know that you're a um an ancient historian and this may be a bit of a silly question because this is thousands of years ago but do you have any ancient wisdom that you can partake and give to Ronda santis and Donald Trump what his only lessons from the ancient world that they should be uh thinking about when you have these great leaders of the ancient world whether it's Pericles or pamanagas or Caesar they all have one thing in common and they don't have a concept like we do of populism but they had saw the same schizophrenia that when people would brag that they would we say we went to Harvard or we went to Yale and the people accept that as not being aristocratic or snobbish but a sign of of self-mates they had the same idea that my parents were this or my parents were that I come from this particular branch of uh Hall an aristocratic family but the most important thing was her personal comportment so payment on is the theben that destroyed Spartan hegemony dressed very simply and he ate with his men and Caesar was known to sleep on the battlefield with his men and Pericles even though he was supposedly Olympian he had a personal touch he had empathy for people and so I think that was the success of Donald Trump to the degree that the other day he went into a pizza parlor and bought people Pizza whenever a republican can do that because they start out with The fossilizer ossified Stereotype that they're the golf course arist aristocrit Aristocrat when we know that the Democrats now are the party of the very wealthy but still that that stereotype lingers and Trump understood that and he was trying constantly to eat McDonald's eat ice you know just Gorge food and his accent was it was a queen's accent that bothered a lot of manhattanites and I think DeSantis is the same thing that they understand that this new Republican is not going to fall into the fallacy of Mitt Romney having to defend himself from having an elevator or five cars or equestrianism or John McCain can't remember which of 11 houses he supposedly had or the bushes they went after the bushes the same way he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and all that stuff but uh silver foot in his mouth I think and Richard said of George H.W senior so I think this new Republican party has deliberately tried to become both symbolically and politically in real concrete terms the party of East Palestine Ohio that's that's their constituency and and it the irony is that the scientists actually grew up in that area of East Palace in Ohio Pennsylvania Borderlands and he is more of a a middle class person but Trump has a natural affinity for working-class people I think he understood that he couldn't run a real estate business without having some connection with the people that worked for him in the most physical and muscular sense so that's that's my and that all that's always what great leaders with I mean Alexander the Great was an aristocrat but he fought white side by side with his men when he went across the gadrosian desert he blew it and he let them all out into a wild goose chase they were they were dehydrated and then they gave him water and he poured it on the ground in front of everybody and said not one drop very different than Napoleon you know in the Russian or the Gaza campaign said as he left his men in the field die and he said there my men would not want the emperor of France to perish in this fashion and he left but uh so that was one idea that you're one with your people to be fair to Napoleon I think he did try and look after his men um whereas Wellington perhaps was uh more sort of derided his man a little bit more he said they scared them more he was more scared of his own men than the enemy someone else who understands the um the American conservative movement the new Republican party is Tucker Carlson and he obviously has left his position at Fox news earlier this week what do you think will be the impact of Tucker Carlson leaving that show that massively popular show that he had every 8 P.M on Fox News well I think everybody is mystified because ostensibly the reason was that they had settled for 757 million with a dominion and nobody can understand that either because that was greater than the market capitalization how can you be damaged more than the net value of your entire product and then more importantly by suddenly they set the Precedence Fox did that a Network that has hundreds of guests every month can't be responsible for what some Looney guest or what some Wayward speaker is any more than MSNBC or CNN or ABC could be sued because they had people ranting every single day that Hunter's laptop was authentic and that did a lot of damage I mean it damaged the the Warped the race so I think they shouldn't have settle and then after the discovery process of that and two other lawsuits there were internal messages and apparently the narrative is that Tucker I think you or I if somebody got all of our internal emails and look what we sometimes say in a heat of passion we wouldn't want them released but so what I'm getting at I don't think that there's a Syria there was a serious cause of fire em other than an emotional one because if you look at all the hosts and all the guests who may have contributed to the settlement to Dominion he was one of the few who said I'm not putting Sidney Powell on here anymore I don't want to hear anything unless you can back it up with data within 48 Hours he had dropped any notion that the rumors about inaccuracies or misinformation on these voting machines was viable so it wasn't that but it was criticism of the corporate Elite and I think at the very top of the Murdoch family they had just settled they didn't want to go all the way down to Delaware uh they they saw this they felt that it was a betrayal and then In the Heat of passion over the weekend they fired him and I think before they fired them they thought Fox is bigger than any one anchor we fired Bill O'Reilly and guess what Tucker showed up and he has the same size audience or bigger and then we we let Megan Kelly go to NBC and we brought in Laura Ingram and we restored we stopped that bleeding and we can do that because people tune in to us because the brand I don't think they understand that it's it's not quite like that it's cumulative it's like a cut a cut a cut and each one magnifies the prior one so when you get rid of Bill O'Reilly and you get rid of Megyn Kelly and you call Georgia too early I mean Arizona too early and you go up and down and Newsmax and competitors creep in and grab your audience they've lost over 800 million dollars in stock Newsmax has doubled its audience that eight to nine key eastern time slot has lost about a million viewers like that and Brian kilmate who's taking his place a pretty good newscaster so I'm not sure there they can find somebody like that to come in a that is funny and affable and knowledgeable but B and more importantly Paul Ryan is on the border on the board of News Corp and news Corps owns The Wall Street Journal so it is the epitome of Doctrine conservatism but Doctrine air conservatism is is not what conservative is now the romneyites and so they needed Tucker Carlson to appeal to the new Republican party and so what what do I mean by that he was all talking about the absurdity of woke and I don't know where you find somebody like that who has the ability to articulate those positions but is not crazy especially Tucker is one came from one of the wealthiest families in California he was an aristocrat his grandfather and family were Miller Lux which is the biggest landowner in California in the 19th century on his mother's side he was Swanson food company he went to prep school so for him brought up like that as an aristocrat to become a populist and yet know how the aristocratic mind works is very unusual and Bill O'Reilly had certain gifts because he came out of kind of a tabloid journalism background and he understood the earthiness of the news and the audience that taught Fox one and so what I'm getting at is that Tucker was able to stop the hemorrhaging from one America news or Newsmax or all of the other right Rivals he they said why go to those guys when you have somebody who's more responsible and learn it but still can appeal in the same topics and so I don't know where they get that person and I think that in the immediate week it shows but just to sum up Fox was trying to tell everybody and they let Don want Dan bongino go there's rumors and maybe judge Jean judge Dean or maybe Maria barceloma all of these people are telling them You're vulnerable there's nobody bigger than the murdochs and news Corps if you go on the news and you say things and it puts us in legal Jeopardy or you talk about us personally we're going to fire you and we fired the the unfireable Tucker Carlson if you think you're better than couple Carlson try it and so that's that's the message I think and I don't know what is in store for talking but all of that said when you look at someone like Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro or what Megan Kelly's done with her streaming all of these people have divorced themselves from they don't go on Fox they don't go on television and yet in terms of reach and profit they're far more successful so I think even though Tucker was supposedly getting two more years at 20 million dollars a year given his appeal and talents he could probably make more than that with his own venue now that wasn't true 20 years ago 10 it wasn't true five years ago but we've so fragmented the media business you and I are talking right now we don't have to go on television to do that you don't have to be with a BBC and I think that's the one of the messages the murdochs are not quite they're not quite understanding that when you take away somebody who had a greater potential elsewhere and was a precious asset that anchored your whole evening lineup and you fired him in a fit a pick or anger without thinking it through you've got to be very careful because you're not going to be able to replace the guy like that that's the impact on Fox news but just very briefly can you describe the impact on the wider conservative movement because as you said Tucker Carlson was able to push certain boundaries of acceptability um and he's and he's no longer able to do that on such a wide mainstream platform yeah he might get a podcast or he may set up his own thing but I'm guessing that that will have less impact on the ordinary non-political apolitical American voter who might have just switched into Fox News at 8pm on a you know on a weekday then the more active Republicans who are going to go out and search for Tucker on YouTube anyway if you see what I mean well certainly the left would agree with what you're saying they're in celebration now AOC and people are saying things like we don't believe in Council culture but we got in Council that's what they're saying they think they took him down they criticized him every day they said he was a racist they said he was a transferable homophobe and they think that eventually they got for that slot should have been making hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising but they were able to cut his revenues by 30 or 40 percent by boycotts pressuring corporations that they were going to boycott them if they bought time and they feel that that's a paradigm that now is successful and they're going to use it but I don't think it's going to restrict uh what we're talking about is on a good night Tucker got three and a half million viewers and that's pretty good that was almost like a free uh you can go on network news for free and get about 4 million on one of the Nightly News and some nights he had four and five million and so he was basically telling America you're going to pay a lot of money on a cable subscription and yet more of you are going to watch me than what's free on NBC or CBS that was an unusual development but that said when you look at that audience it's not that big and uh and so there are all of these other venues are those venues affected by this I think that's your question does does Joe Rogan say oh my God I got to be careful or does Dinesh D'Souza or Ben Shapiro say we can't do that there's the daily wire The Daily Caller do they say that this the people on sub stack they say we better pull no not at all in fact I think they're going to be just the opposite they feel wow there's a big vacuum now there's a three and a half person million audience and we're going to go after it I think that's the point Newsmax and Glenn back newsmat they're all trying to say ah we're the place where we don't censor you but I don't think there's anybody in the conservative movement that's saying maybe the never trumpers but well I'm glad he got what he Howard Stern you know I'm glad he got what he could want but nobody else a lot of people are very angry about it what can the Republicans learn from the 2022 midterm elections and are you concerned about the influence of big Tech AI these new developments in technology influencing 2024 and how can we Pro how can we make sure the election is free and fair 2022 told us that there is no margin of error I think it told us that on the issues the country is with the Republicans on closing the board the and put he put all the Republicans who ran on 2022 in every race and all the Democrats the Republicans had three and a half million more people vote for their candidates so on the border on crime on energy on foreign policy on inflation on interest everybody's with you but that doesn't matter because they should have wiped them out and they didn't and the answer was that first of all you've got to get you don't have any margin of error on the candidates you've got to get I like Dr Oz in Pennsylvania but if they had about nominated the other guy you would have won and I liked a lot of some of the candidates but the guy in Pent the governor in Pennsylvania had no chance at all so that's very important that you have to be viable the other thing is the Democrats now have given up trying to persuade 51 percent of the people that the that the open border is good or that the DA's in New York or Baltimore or Minneapolis are doing what we need by releasing criminals or we really do need to cut back on oil and gas or inflation it's not that bad they've given up they don't even try to defend it they never mention anything in detail except they'll say the border is secure or something like that but they use the word secure because they know they can't say I'm so happy the border is wide open so what does that mean that means they're turning to process they want to make sure that on Election Day in 2024 70 to 75 percent of the people depending on the particular state do not vote on Election Day did not vote on Election Day they do not want somebody to show up on his own volition with an ID like he's casting a check and vote they feel that they will lose every time they want people to mail on the ballots and number two they feel that with nine trillion dollars in market capitalization in Silicon Valley that a Mark Zuckerberg can write a check for 419 million dollars and absorb the work of the registrars and keep precincts and basically take them over and it works and so I think the Republicans are if they go into this presidential election saying the polls show that all the issues are on our side the polls show that Wanda Santos or Donald Trump is ahead of Joe Biden by two or three points they're in deep trouble because they will use welfare they will have certain protocols about balloting and they will bring in so much money you have 50 Intelligence Officers that come out on the prompt of Anthony blinken on the Biden campaign and they swear that this is Russian dis looks like Russian disinformation the quash a story we should assume that they're not stupid so they're going to look back at 2020 and they're going to say wow we had a dysfunctional candidate and we have an incumbent with a very successful record and we destroyed him by these institutional processes and that was we changed suddenly America we went from 30 percent voting absentee to 30 percent voting in person and they that was by their own volition and deliberate policy they wanted that so I don't know how you combat that Republicans they get all excited and they say you know what we've got the Grassroots we're ahead in the polls now the issues favor us but that won't work they're going to have to get some very Savvy very skillful people that understand the ballot process and and and they need a whole team of lawyers they these are things we've never experienced before we've always said they were third world we're the third world country the United States has no moral authority to lecture anybody about ballot Integrity we are we're at third world stabbers thank you so much Victor for joining us I always appreciate your time okay well thank you for having me

Channel: The Telegraph

Views: 1,077,943

Keywords: Telegraph, News, victor davis hanson, victor davis hanson fox news, vdh, hoover institution, victor davis hanson joe biden, woke, biden, freedom, joe biden, ukraine, interview, hoover institute, victor hanson, trump, president trump, politics, immigration, democrats, immigrants, free speech, tucker carlson, tucker carlson tonight, putin, war, donald trump, hanson, us politics, fox news, president biden, president joe biden, white house, joe biden radical, victor davis hanson new

Id: y3DYd7m2DYA

Length: 54min 24sec (3264 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023