Victor Davis Hanson | Trump: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

so victor then to come to the next few months as you've said the next hundred days will be uh of breathtaking uh uh significance uh for for america and for the world quite frankly um i think you wrote that uh it was almost uh the surprise was not that trump won it was that it took so long for something like that to happen i suppose another way of putting that is to say trump's not the problem trump was the re the product of the problem uh and uh you know that i think you also described him uniquely as perhaps chemotherapy uh you know the patient was in such a bad way we had to take on something very tough and unusual that we knew might be unpleasant how do you see it now as as you sit there i see it's saying pretty much the same way i've used the tragic hero from soviet league and tragedy analogy or the great western or john wayne and the searchers or shane or high noon that he's a person without military or political experience he's uncouth he can be very crude and his he came in with a certain set of skills or no investment in the bipartisan establishment and therefore no worry about what they thought of him and he wanted to get an agenda and yet he's now learning that even before these cri these three crises that the more he was succeeding the more people hated him and the people i talked to around him and i've talked to him too and it seems that he i think he has to be aware that when this is all over people are not going to like him and they're never going to like him and he's never going he's going to be a gunfire that people say you used a gun to clean up the town now will you leave and that's the dilemma of where he is but he can do some he can do a lot of good still and he's done a lot of good and if we had not had that type of person at this late date i don't know what we would have done and what it means in foreign policy is that he would he's talked a lot if you if you distill what he's saying is that he does he's very skeptical of europe he's almost suicidally pro australian pro uh british he wants to be pro-canadian and he really believes that the anglo-speaking world and the traditions of england especially that we all share are unique and neat and yet to say that in this climate is suicidal because it is a demagogue as being racist it's not he's trying to say that all of us of every race have a lot to learn from the british system and and so i can and he's very pro-japanese he's i guess what he's sort of like he reminds me of the uh a phrase that solo bar solo was not a good guy in roman republican history but he said no better friend no worse enemy if he thinks you're a friend of the united states i think that there's no better president to come to your aid if he feels that i think and i'll be candid i think he feels for a variety of historical and contemporary reasons that germany is now not an ally of the united states it is a a de urea ally but it's not and so i feel that that relationship on both sides is is seriously in jeopardy and i mean permanently unless something's done and i that's tragic but he feels that and and yet i feel that his relationships with our traditional allies britain especially but australia especially and he wants to be that way with canada and japan and south korea have never been taiwan have never and israel have never been better and i think when you go to these countries a lot of the times people recognize that at least privately but you know when the left the left has a minority of the demography still but it controls the foundations it controls the media the universities the popular culture of hollywood so it magnifies its importance it's got a much bigger megaphone that's certainly true in australia around a third of australians now self-identifies left-wing and that's up considerably on what it used to be but it means that two-thirds do not yet virtually all of the public commentary the people with the megaphones come from that particular perspective and have a great deal of say the future of um just to on this issue of american attitudes towards trump i recently met an american from the east coast and she started to almost froth at the mouth at the mere mention of trump's name and listed an unbelievable set of uh real and imagined uh ills she said to me then how do you feel about even as an australian and i said well one thing i will say is that he had the courage to call out the chinese we're much closer to china than you and obama did nothing about the militarization of the islands that are not in chinese territory and at that point she immediately backed off and it was quite interesting said yes i will give you that although it's a very interesting remark or insight the left is in a dilemma because some of them had been solitary voices complaining about human rights hong kong tibet wagers and obama was not interested in that at all his asian pivot was not anti-china it was pro-china and trump came along and he empowered those people so it's very funny to see people who are now coming out of the woodwork on the left and they all have to throat clear before they make their statements and they say well you know i hate donald trump and he's no good just what you're talking about but he allowed us to speak about chinese human rights violations and so that that is that's something uh it's important but what what you're also describing is in the united states a lot of us i know that i've had a lot of friends and family that don't speak to him anymore because i wrote a book on how trump won and they have created a climate that it's not socially done if i were to put on a maga hat make america great and put american sticker in my car and drive to town i'd be in trouble that being said some of the people who shout at me might in fact when they get into the ballot box vote and i think that's the big unknown how many of them in the fall i talked to a person yesterday mexican-american fellow law enforcement and i said so who are you voting for trump i said well you have you ever been contacted he said yes i said who do you say you're voting for he said biden and i said why he said because if i text if they text me a a question i'm going to be on some list and i'm going to they're going to go after me and that's not that's not crazy anymore in this climate so it's there are little telltale signs we had a congressional a special election for somebody who was removed from congress in a plus 12 democratic sea about two months ago and we had a conservative mexican-american candidate was down in the polls supposedly by eight points and he won by ten so it actually happened here last year with a re-election of scott morrison as prime minister he was given no chance uh the polls all got it wrong uh even the u.s study center no one there uh seemed to call it right in relation to trump and you've got this quite distinct reality now that a lot of people simply won't tell you what they really think that in itself is profoundly troubling we now feel obliged not only to hide what we really think but to deny it in public and so my final question you've been very generous with your time a decent middle american worried about their country just wanting a return to some degree of civility what advice would you have for them because the same will apply in my country well i i think and this is kind of contrarian or counterfactual or i don't think that appeasement and and a basement work anymore in other words i think people like yourself who said to the american well he's been pretty good on china we need to be a little bit more assertive and we we need to have people in middle america that say you know what i'm not going to defund it please i'm sorry i'm just not going to do it and you know what i'm not going to allow you to tear down father junipero sarah's statue and if they stand up they don't need to do it acrimoniously or rudely but they have to be much more forceful because you mentioned these revolutions they all had one thing in common they started out with a minority of the population the jacobins were a minority the bolsheviks were a minority the maoists were a minority and everybody said they're going to devour their own and they did and they're and they're going to dilute their message and they did and they're going to be suicidal and they were but they won at least for a time because nobody spoke out against them either in fear or because they thought they had no chance and we're going to wait and see what happens in november to finish and there's three or four things that we don't know what's going to happen here that the virus is going to wane if it wanes by november trump will be elected if the lockdown stops and the economy starts to show real signs of recovery he'll win if joe biden gets out on the trail and he seems to be cognitively this you know impaired in some degree trump will win and if if trump has a greater degree of discipline and his expressions he'll win if that does not happen he'll lose and so it's a we're all waiting to see which of those four or five factors will play out and how they will play out but they're on everybody's mind and they govern every every policy decision every editorial uh interpretation of them we we just unfortunately everything is weaponized in this country i've never seen anything like it and i grew up in the 60s and it was not even that was not like this it's scary but civilization i really believe is in is on the brink because if these forces come to full power um they're going to be taking names and they're going to they're not going to want um a a union of thought they're not going to want uh they're not going to be gracious about their victory they're not going to want unity and healing they want to hunt out and eradicate their opponents that's what cultural revolutions always do and they'll do it again thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations 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Channel: John Anderson

Views: 203,922

Rating: 4.9208093 out of 5

Keywords: Trump, Suppression, China, Biden

Id: A9nXxKt4F_4

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020