Victor Davis Hanson - Trump: Tragic Hero ... or Just Tragic?

[Music] my name is Pete Peterson and I am the very grateful Dean of Pepperdine s Graduate School of Public Policy and it's a delight to welcome you all here to the California Club for the 2019 spring Patricia taglioferro Dean's Distinguished Lecture with dr. Victor Davis Hanson this event is made possible because of the foresight and support of one dr. Gus taglio fairy who endowed this lecture series with the main theme of connecting the world's great ideas with current events over the last two years we've welcomed amazing speakers and thinkers to our Malibu campus from dr. Neil Ferguson dr. charles murray and dennis prager but tonight for the first time we are bringing this lecturer here to downtown los angeles or as someone told me in the foyer area the belly of the beast as the Dean of the School of Public Policy I see my job is not only preparing future leaders for America's government business sector and nonprofit sector but I also see that we have an extremely important role to play particularly here in Southern California with bringing speakers of the caliber of dr. Hanson to places like this place here at the California Club for too long Los Angeles in Southern California especially in the academic world have squelched off speeches and thinkers and leaders those like dr. Hanson or dr. Ferguson or dr. Murray from speaking but I really do see it as part of our mission at the school of public policy to be that beacon of light to bring what we call viewpoint diversity not only to Southern California but also to academia more broadly I thought about this most typically when I was dropping my daughter off my daughter is seven years old she sings in a choral program that meets at UCLA and in dropping her off at the Herb Alpert music hall there on the campus of UCLA I noticed that when I came back to pick her up they had a lot of video screen monitors up around in the different hallways and all the monitors were merchandising they were promoting the counseling services that are available to UCLA students and I noticed when I was looking through the different types of counseling services that they all had the same website that you could click on and go to and that website was UCLA dot edu slash coping with the election now at the School of Public Policy we don't believe we have to cope with this election we believe at the same time that the 2016 election was something that said quite a bit about America and unfortunately the perspectives that we hear so much on America's college campuses are that people like maybe some of you who have supported the president are really being made to squelch or hold your opinions there was a survey done in 2018 by a nonpartisan group researching 8,000 American voters across the political spectrum and the question they asked them was what is the greatest problem facing America's culture today and the number-one point of agreement across the political spectrum was political correctness the feeling that people had to squelch their opinions because they feared how they were going to be responded to now I believe as an academic leader that our job at Pepperdine is not so much to respond in an aggressive or at agonistic way our job is to respond in a thoughtful way and that's why this lecture series is so important so please join me in thanking the person who made it possible dr. Gus taglioferro [Applause] one of the points that we drive home to our graduate students on our campus in Malibu is that life is not simple life is not easy and for all the taglines and phrases that we hear in our political life today life is complex it is nuanced this book that dr. Hanson has written and will talk about here with you this evening though called the case for Trump makes a very nuanced argument for the importance of this president for this point in time it's important as policy schools in particular those who are sending people out into the political world that they understand that certain times call for certain kinds of people and only a world-class historian can bring that kind of perspective not an armchair pundit and certainly notes not someone who hasn't studied our history not only American history but world history and so that's why I was so excited to welcome back dr. Victor Davis Hanson to give tonight's Patricia tagliaferro lecture what he has done in this book and you will hear is to take a very important historical event that we've all lived through in this 2016 election and place it into a historical context that I will wager to say you have never heard before but one that really needs to be heard more and more that's the kind of work that we do at the Graduate policy schools we take history seriously and we take people like President Trump seriously and we take people like dr. Victor Davis Hanson seriously so without any further ado please join me in welcoming our 2019 Patricia tagliaferro Dean's Distinguished Lecture the Martin and Ellie Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution dr. Victor Davis Hanson thank you very much for that kind introduction and nice crowd large I felt that what same way you did about the belly of the beast as I was driving up the 99 the i-5 and from Apocalypse Now upriver I thought I'd speak for about 35 minutes then we'll have some questions if you'd like there was a lot of ways to explain the 2006 election and you had to come up with some exegesis because Trump was the first person we've ever elected or ever nominated without political or military experience and one of the things I think was strange about it is that the so called deplorable Z redeemable what Obama called the clingers John McCain called the crazies you may know them as a tea party that Reagan Democrats a silent majority the tea party people the message was originally tailored to them and then they sort of absorbed the Republican Party and all of you even if you were not of the same class when what was the message it was their message was that globalization is a great thing it's it's brought eyeglasses to the Amazon and antibiotics to the Sudan it's wonderful but it was asymmetrical in the United States if you had muscular labor or you produced real things anything that could be duplicated or xeroxed overseas it was and then people like most of us in the room who had what we do could not be Xerox we had suddenly a market or an audience of seven billion people or as a person who was laid off on the upright Harvester plant in Selma when I was growing up the canneries the trail of the fruit off trailer whatever the manufacturing or food processing was there were only four of us out of our high school rural school that went to college and then why would you when the wages are so high they thought it we were crazy when you could go right at 18 and buy a house at 22 and have three kids and you know the whole thing by the time you're 30 there was no pajama boy or life of Julia in those days because you didn't need it so as one person that upright harvester said to me well how would you like it if a guy from Korea wrote your columns and I said well they can't he said oh they can't can they what do you get for them and I explained he said well why would why can't they do it for a quarter just like this harvester plant that went overseas and what makes you exempt and what I'm getting at is a lot of people in the conservative Republican establishment accepted that argument almost as if people had taken opiates in joint driven out industry rather than industry leaving for a variety of reasons and they taking open they reversed cause and effect and the more that people started to voice those complaints about the interior of the country the more people that didn't live there started to say you know what that argument doesn't apply to me in particular but it does in the abstract because what they're saying is an elite a liberal progressive elite is have created a new party a very poor and very wealthy when they've turned their backs on the middle class and their signature ideology is we are never subject to the ramifications of our own ideology we don't like teachers we do not like charter schools we love teachers unions but our kids get to go to private school that's where the deplorable Zoar the inner-city kids we don't believe in water transfers we want to let 50 million acre-feet go out to the ocean but by god we have to have that Hetch Hetchy water for san francisco we believe in 28 cents a kilowatt so that we are very sparse in our use electricity is very expensive and we're careful in how we use it but you know we live on the coast we don't live in Fresno where it's a hundred and ten and Hispanic people are cramming into Walmart for the free air conditioning and so that was the idea and so people started to see the deplorable argument they said you know I can be a millionaire I can be but this is how they operate Mark Zuckerberg has got a big estate and he's lecturing us that has a big wall on it he's lecturing us about walls it doesn't make any sense and people got angrier and angrier they say there's not a problem with crime or homelessness but they had the estates that shielded him from the ramifications of progressive social policy I found that it was asked to speak not too long ago in Pacific Heights in San Francisco and all of a sudden one night I thought I'm gonna walk up from the Tenderloin I got an hour and I noticed as I got higher up there were fewer homeless and there were no police but there were private security people who stopped me I thought wow I'd be for homelessness too if I didn't live down on Market Street and that's sort of when you look at the New Democratic Party that's what it is it's people who who pontificate and sermonize and her self-righteous in the abstract and Trump saw that and that was the great irony wasn't it because he was a billionaire on Manhattan night and so he tailored a message that 16 brilliant candidates and they were much better than we'd seen before in a Republican primary who had much more experience a Scott Walker Marco Rubio Ted Cruz very successful CEO Carly Fiorina ben Carson every walk of life diversity everything and yet they could not come up with a strategy to win the electoral college or at least in them the voters in that electoral college in the primaries and Trump took a traditional Republican message after all he was for tax cuts he was for deregulation he was for more energy development he was for strict constructionist judges he was for the restoration of deterrence abroad he was for increased defense budget but then so was Jeb Bush and so was you know Marco Rubio so he tweaked it with this theme that we talked about globalization and the asymmetrical effects on people who were really suffering in the interior and by extension how that ideology affects all of us and he said if you're gonna go overseas and you're gonna get into an optional military engagement make sure you translate tactical victory in the ground otherwise Afghanistan is not going to result in strategic resolution in a cost-benefit analysis like it or not nobody from the Council on Foreign Relations none of the neocons of which I have supported could make a counter-argument so he any being Trump being Trump he personalizes I'm not gonna send your son over to blank blank country for somebody's you know pie-in-the-sky theory and then he said you know you don't have sovereignty if you don't have a border Jeb Bush was saying illegal immigrations an act of love but Trump was saying a lot of you live in areas that are impacted when you bring millions of people and they're neither legal and that the omission is not based on Merrick Radek criteria but proximity to the borders and it's not diverse and it's not measured and you the hosts don't no longer believe in inner marriage and the Melting plot an integration assimilation you have the menu for catastrophe everybody laughed at him said he was a native was approached and of course Trump being Trump conveying that message was pretty tough in his his Naaman clay Chur and vocabulary but that was another issue that none of the Republicans wanted to touch and it resonated with the deplorable then third he said deindustrialization is not written in stone if you look at all the criteria the United States should be number one it's got the best educational higher educational system in the world it's energy natural gas especially now from fracking is cheaper than Germany or Japan centrally located there was a reason why we supplied about 80 percent of the vehicles in World War two in other countries we've supplied 95 percent of the aviation fuel the entire war we built more ships at the end of the war then all the navies put together and we haven't changed were the same people we just have policies that have been asymmetrical everybody said look and I'm as at the Hoover Institution and I thought now we're gonna this is gonna get interesting because if you're going to stop China's six hundred billion dollar trade are you gonna address the asymmetrical patterns of a seventy billion dollar trade surplus with Germany or 69 billion with Japan you're gonna have to mention the T word tariffs and if you do that you're gonna be toast in the Republican Party he did and that was the only quiver you have if you want to address that asymmetry everybody that said that he'll never get the nomination if he did and he did and then finally he had another message and that was China with China we were all told was fated to take over the world billion people their market capitalism if you're Tom Friedman you go over there and you say wow they've got high-speed rail there airports or they've hit on authoritarian capitalism that has a green tweak is wonderful and none of us believe that we all said that the history of authoritarian societies as they reach a point whether it's Mussolini's at Italy or Franco Spain they hit a point and then they become themselves over bureaucratic crony capitalism and they're not as efficient as an open transparent society and Trump said we can beat these big beat of course in trumpian vocabulary it's a binary world in his way we can beat these people if we all hang together and we may we treat them the way they treat us and the Republican Party had said almost well we're we believe in Sermon on the Mount we we turned the other cheek and Trump said no we don't they're out the cheetahs and that that was a that was a message that appealed to people in the Midwest and that's where the election was going to be decided wasn't gonna be decided here wasn't gonna be cited in Texas everybody forgot that all these people who were the losers of globalization's were the winners of the electoral college I'm talking about Wisconsin Pennsylvania Ohio Iowa Indiana Michigan North Carolina and to extent Florida nothing nothing else mattered why didn't those geniuses know that they didn't understand that and furthermore when Trump went to those rallies you could see what he was doing if you if you tuned out all the vituperative attacks on him he was basically saying to the country the people in this hallway are the four six million who didn't show up to vote for John McCain they didn't show up to vote for Mitt Romney and if they all come out we can take this blue state blue wall and we can flip it not by much but we don't need to 80,000 ninety I don't care if California votes me you know votes four million in front of Hillary Clinton I don't care if I lose the popular vote we can win with these people and so everybody said oh wow Trump's got these Neanderthal rallies same old thing marathon Stalin like speeches but he was bringing people out of the woodwork and he flipped those said I have a friend who likes to tease me and every time he sends me an email but once a month he sends me that the video download of Rachel Maddow unknown on election night and he keeps always saying tell me that you didn't download it this time and every time I get it I read it again and I forgot I mean I look at it she's in tears it's disbelief it's like the world turned upside down after the Battle of Yorktown if you're a Tory it's it's amazing so he did that and he took a traditional message and then he tweaked it as well by telling the Republican Party on not Mitt Romney I'm not going to give a pass to Candy Crowley when she hijacks the debate I'm not John McCain it's gonna rule out Reverend Wright I'm not Bob Dole I'm not George W Bush is gonna say in 2006 I got to be presidential I cannot respond to Michael Moore etc I if you want to fight and want to get down in the wrestling ring you're gonna get dirty but I've already been there in real life and World Wrestling Federation and I don't care and that message to a lot of Republicans many of us in this room maybe who otherwise were turned off by his personality thought you know what I'm so exasperated I want to cut this leash let the Pope pitbull go in the right direction and do to them what they're doing to us as I mentioned to another group he was sort of lee atwater come back alive that had saved George HW Bush's campaign against the caucus Dukakis came out of the 88 Democratic convention with an 18 point lead and when they got done with Boston Harbor Willie Harbor it was pretty tough stuff the out water apologized later but they won and after that people said we never want to win like that again and they didn't they didn't really win except for George W Bush and so that was a message that people resonated they wanted somebody to say enough is enough they wanted a Clinton version of the Trump version of the war room that Clinton had used and they didn't want you know John McCain type of let's lose nobly whether then winnowed Lee they wanted to win ugly and they did and then ii just when we thought that this was going to be a really dirty candidate and we had all of his sleeves on MSNBC and CNN about his marriages and access hollywood except except it it was not so simple because he started touring the country and he started sounding empathetic our miners our vets our farmers I never heard Romney say our once maybe it was a cheap trick but he was able to radiate empathy when he said the other night at they're all at the White House Correspondents Dinner I'd rather be with you any day of the week I mean that that was the message he gave people said Wow how can he be empathetic he's Donald Trump and then as I as I said earlier every time I hear Barack Obama speak dependent his accident depends on the audience and which he's speaking here we go south of the Mex mason-dixon line I'm so tired today Joe Biden goes to an African American on they're gonna put you in Chains and everybody got sick of that John Kerry and his camouflage Mike Dukakis in his tank even the Republican primary candidates were all wearing flannel and jeans and caterpillar caps when they went to the Indiana State Fair Trump he shows up with that ridiculous tie that ridiculous suit ridiculous shoes ridiculous tan ridiculous hair and and the Queen's accent so when I talk to people I'd always talk to people I'd say how did he what did he do when he showed up in Tulare California or Michigan when he came to Clinton they always said how the guy was the same thing he had that grading Queens voice he was completely overdressed out of you know everybody was casual he had a suit a tie on tie was too long the hair was and so what I'm getting at is he he radiated authenticity and people wanted that and the fact that he was able to do it with an empathy and let's face it he did not want to play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules and that would this tweaking of a traditional Orthodox message on four or five key issues created the Trump factor no need to recount what he's done I mean really we haven't seen an economy like this since Reagan three every time you hear of a new statistic it's always with the adjective unexpectedly unexpectedly growth went 3.2 unexpectedly record minority we unexpectedly record natural gas poor done expectedly three million barrels more of oil since he was elected unexpectedly his judicial appointments are not like David Souter or Harriet Miers nomination unexpectedly so he's been very successful and you know in your own experience in your circle of friends and associates maybe even neutrals and enemies that all of the people that said that they were not going to vote for him although they were conservative in 2016 most of them are going to vote for him in 2020 and all the people that were did vote for him in 2016 you don't find very many and said I just can't do it this time around he tweets too much no it's like well he's our sob and so we're gonna vote for him and I want to talk second part why do they hate him so much I mean you watch the bar hearings why what drives a Cory Booker a Camilla Harris or a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to hate this person so much to the point of being self-destructive you know I have a daughter who didn't vote for him the first time and she said now he's going after Elizabeth Warren and I don't like to lose it with Warren but he's calling her Foca Honus I started laughing and I I said could I make it could I try a joke with you and I said what did he say about stormy Daniels and she said I'm not gonna say it and I said go ahead because horse mouth and she started laughing so I said it's not just cruel he is cruel but it's funny and so when when he said little Marco I turned to my wife and I said I thought he was six five he's not and when he said low energy Jeff I like Jeb Bush but I thought wow he is low energy and so he had that ability to to connect with people in a very and that globe people crazy not because he was crude and calling people names and sandbox style but they were accurate and he and they stuck the other day I said to my wife I guess he was in doubt whether to say creepy or sleepy Joe Biden and she said did you see the interview with Joe Biden and his wife and I said no and so I went and got it well Joe Biden let it lets his wife answer all the questions he's very sleepy and I thought wow that who would ever think that Joe Biden is sleepy but the point I'm getting at is that he's a much more complex person than just somebody who's crass and Cowell that drives people crazy the second thing is systematically he literally doesn't sleep he's got a little acai he goes I mean he goes to bed at midnight thinking I didn't do enough to to overturn Barack Obama's agenda and he gets up four hours later and said I'm gonna do all I can to return brock obama's agenda systematically whether it's on that his attitude is for every liberal progressive judge that obama appointed for life i'm going on point to conservatives for every acre of federal lands or animal put off natural gas exploration I'm gonna put on two for every dollar in the defense budget he cut I'm gonna add to that was his attitude and where it came from was some some primordial urge out of the Manhattan real estate market obviously but he he is systematically overturning Obama and that drives people crazy because after all the night of the election the New York Times Analytics said we have one doubt affirm that said 1% for Trump success for six percent and remember Nate Silver that the Guru he said Trump has a twenty six percent chance of winning almost hard and feathered him for saying that and so they assumed sixteen years of the progressive project would have ended America as we thought it would be much more transformative than the the New Deal and yet it didn't happen so there was this furor that led to who's to blame well after about a nanosecond of blaming Hillary for the real culprit they went into Russian collusion except that's still going on that was another reason people hate him a third is though that if he succeeds what does that say about the criteria are the credentials to succeed reminds me of William Tecumseh Sherman was considered crazy during the Civil War he had a mental breakdown and he said some crazy things at the time when people were saying the Union was going to crush the Confederacy he said well we're gonna have to kill about three hundred thousand of them and it's gonna cost us about three hundred thousand should take about five years they declared him insane it was exactly what happened and we have these figures you know Curtis LeMay or George Patton and the repulsive some way and but yet there's something about them that we can't quite put away and and Trump the idea was that I think Henry Kissinger said it best every once in a while we need a disrupter so he came in and instead of the establishment you have all the credentials you went to the right schools Harvard Yale you got your law degree Council on Foreign Relations all the things that are very impressive we all respect that and yet how did North Korea get a missile with a nuclear warhead pointed at us after six-party talks agreed framework strategic patient why in the world are not these wealthy countries living up to their obligations of 2% GDP NATO's what happened Obama said they were Free Riders Trump said they were worthless and we're gonna get out of NATO and he got six of them to pay that that's the way he was looking at and he said we we all thought that our elite shouldn't have signed the Iran deal we shouldn't have got into that crazy Paris climate Accord it was past time to recognize the Golan Heights we should remove the embassy to Jerusalem he just did it and nobody else would have done it because they would have been saying on the one hand on the other hand you can't do this I'm not arguing for recklessness or even ignorant of our institutions but at certain times as Kissinger said you do need somebody like that 2004 Apple commercial where the female athlete runs in they're all looking at Big Brother on the screen and she throws that hammer and shatters it that was what Apple was trying to say it was doing I guess to Microsoft or something but that's what he did and finally let's be honest there was a class element to it that he didn't sound like he was from Manhattan or even the Bronx or Brooklyn he sounded like he was from Queens because he was and he didn't dress right and he had a whole array of people that were kind of creepy whether it was scare Moochie or Omarosa you know I had known Steve ban and I really liked him but I remember he used to come up and he did these documentaries and I was at all he had a lot of talking heads and everyone swear l he'd come to the Hoover Institution go up at the top of the tower at my office and I can remember you had to sign in and a woman called me very sweet woman at the desk and said Victor there's a guy from a motorcycle gang and he's out here with a leather jacket and he hasn't shaved in a week and he smelled he has long oily hair and he's got his whole biker gang with him and they've got cameras and what's happening I said that's Steve Bannon and his crew let him up so and there was something about that that just that drove people crazy you know it was not the the Bush coterie and and there was a class element that people thought you know what he's on the DRF list on party list he just we don't want him around so I think all of those explained why people hated him I'd like to finish though a couple of observations about 2020 and as I said earlier to a group we as historians we have to look like what other candidates have done what usually sinks a candidate either denies him reelection like George HW Bush or Jimmy Carter or destroys his second term like LBJ or George W Bush is you know what they are they're a sudden economic downturn I don't think that we'll see a severe recession before the 2020 every time we're told that the recession is looming the job figures are better and he's even doing more deregulation more energy development and I was in Houston this weekend speaking to a group and I couldn't believe what they were telling me about Euston being the world's energy exporter it's just incredible the amount of activity that's happened just the last two years or there's an unpopular war a Vietnam that sunk LBJ or Iraq that left or a Korea that left Truman and George W Bush going out very unpopular or there's a scandal something like the collusion and there was no collusion so I don't see any of those three happening so then you look at traditional criteria howdy-doo in his first midterms he did better than Obama and Clinton they recently lost Clinton lost 53 seats Obama 62 Clinton 8 Senate seats Obama 6 in 2012 Trump lost 39 and maybe 40 House seats and he picked up two Senate seats he's polling in the fifth month of his presidency exactly where Obama was about one point less than Clinton Clinton demolished Bob Dole in the electoral college as you remember in 96 and Obama did the same to Mitt Romney as you remember in 2012 so it it looks like it's his election to win or lose then you don't really run in a vacuum we don't vote on whether we like a president or not we vote whether he's better than the alternative sometimes we have maybe we have I hope we've had good and better president candidates but usually we have bad ones and worse ones and so we're going to vote for Trump compared to what exactly and this is not the Democratic Party of my parents I grew up on a democratic household it's not the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton it's not even the Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton this is a radical progressive socialist party and any candidate to get through it and by that I mean enter the primaries do the debates and survive the Democratic convention is going to have a lot of smelly albatrosses around their neck and they consist of but are not limited to abolishing student debt so a guy in a forklift who went to work in a muscular job at 18 is supposed to pay for some hipster that takes three units in Manhattan or San Francisco every once in a while and runs up $200,000 in debt I don't think that's going to be a winning message or Medicare for everybody so a lot of you you wait your own tire life until you turn 62 or 65 or whatever it is and then you think you get a coverage and then you discover it goes for everybody you can just fly in the United States you can be a resident and you get the same thing that's not gonna go over abolishing ice we're gonna have the mother of all caravans this summer is not a winning issue abolishing the electoral college is not a winning issue abolishing all student debt is not a winning issue either is I I guess we would call it reparations how are you going to take money from somebody who works at 7-eleven and give it to jay-z and Oprah it's not gonna work or why would you say why would you say to Camilla Harris well your family were slave owners in the Caribbean and we're gonna give you money because we feel really bad about it that's not gonna happen there's no way it's gonna happen Joe Biden told us out remember when he he dismissed in his earlier incarnation reparations in the 70s and I don't think that whatever your views are on abortion I don't I think you're queasy about partial-birth abortion and you realize that when the baby leaves the birth canal and there's about 7,000 I'm told a year that that happens they are individuals with protection under the US Constitution they're not we're not going to tolerate infanticide the United States [Applause] another key issue is whether the Democratic when I grew up jew-hatred was confined at Klansmen and Nazis over the last 40 years anti-semitism is the property of the left on campus partly because of changing demography partly because of the so-called Palestinian issue whatever the reason is if you look at all of the major figures that are in the Progressive Party whether it's representative Omar who basically said Jews have ignored it and fenced the tube in Germans or you have representative too late who said that we should cut off all aid to Israel because they don't represent the only democracy in the Middle East they don't represent our values or a Ossie who defended both of them or everybody kissing the ring at Al Sharpton it said if the Jews want a war on your alma you put on this or that but their garb and come over to my house and let's get it on or Jesse Jackson who weighed in who said hi me town or Reverend Wright who said dim Jews don't let me talk to Obama anymore or the New York Times that ran an article right out of der stürmer mr. strikers Nazi memory we have we hang that guy after the Nuremberg trials who printed those cartoons that Nazi apologist and so the New York Public Times publishes that and then it explains how it publishes it without an apology then it apologized then it does another one Netanyahu with a selfie as if he's blind and so that's that party and that's going to be what Trump is gonna run against and so people are going to say well I like the economy I like the restoration of deterrence there's no finer foreign policy team than John Bolton and Mike Pompeo Betsy DeVos is we story in the first fourth and fifth amendment to campus this is great and but the tweets bother me but not as much as representative Omar and not as much as I'll Sharpton and not as much as Bernie Sanders socialist agenda for me and I think that's going to be determinative if you try to sum up Trump a historical figure and in the book I said he was a tragic hero and people got kind of angry at that especially that never trumpets but tragic heroes are not necessarily as I said they're not Christian like figures they're not magnanimous necessarily if you read Sophocles play the Ajax it's right I wish you would read it it's just don't it's a story about Donald Trump he he says I'm the best fighter at Troy after Achilles was killed and I did everything for you and they give me no credit this is terrible why don't they give me credit and then you want to say because you're ajax and you're crude and you're ungainly and and he says well the deep state Menelaus and and Odysseus and and Agamemnon they they rig everything it's not fair to me and then the that's the entire play sort of what Trump doesn't get it that he keeps saying you know if I was JFK Melania would be treated by Jackie and you want to say yeah but not JFK and he's he rages all day long about the unfairness he said the other day if Obama had 3% GDP you would all be worshiping and then he said and Larry Summers said you did you would never have three percent and quitman said that the stock market would crash and Obama said you need a magic wand and why don't they give you no they don't give any credit well they're never gonna give him credit that's the role of a tragic hero in classical tragedy but you know him I hope you know him because I know the young generation doesn't watch westerns anymore but you all remember Shane come back Shane and Shane comes into the community and the poor sodbusters talk a great game about the cattle Baron's or they're gonna someday do something to them and then they see this guy Shane and they start to think wow he made he might be somebody we could use temporarily and then one of them says well Shane how do you know the jack palance figure how do you know him I don't like that about you and then you change the sort of look so I'm thinking in his head you don't like that about me but not enough to not use me when you need it in extremis so then when he kills the bad people people are shocked that they had to have a gun all right and he says you can't break the mold and he takes off and the same theme is in every John Ford Western remember The Searchers Ethan Allen John Wayne my gosh nobody can find Natalie Wood but John Wayne we think might kill her when he finds her he didn't but then he walks out the door and we say well it's been nice knowing you take care of it just don't come back same thing with the Magnificent Seven at the end of that great movie you remember the village elder says if if they knew how to they would thank you because they really are happy you're here in Steve McQueen's well they're happy we're leaving too and then you're Brenner says we lose we always lose we you get the theme and the tragic Carol's point is that from time to time in a society and I mentioned Sherman and I mentioned Patton and I mentioned Curtis LeMay I mentioned Matthew Ridgway we have these figures that in Orthodox times we would not turn to but we reach a period of status where conventional means I'm not talking about authoritarian dictators or communism or Nazis I'm talking about people who work within the Democratic parameters but they're eccentric or they're unorthodox we want them to come in and address things that we want to do because we feel that they're not invested in the system and they're they're not afraid to be pilloried or caricature or they may not like it but they're not afraid they keep getting up every morning I don't know how Trump at 72 with that diet and that physique and that lack of exercise I I always say to my wife when I get up I said is he still alive this morning because I have a good congressman friend and I said to him I said so you saw Donald Trump the other day and he said yes they did and I said so those are all lies about his diet he said no he gave us a hamburger and then he offered as the haagen-dazs and he took two and I got one and then I left at 11:30 and I got a tweet on my phone at 4:00 a.m. so I worry about I think everybody is these supernatural energy and we don't know how long that's sustainable but the point is that as this tragic aerial becomes more successful and in our terms of the presidency whether the more successful the economy is the more stable overseas the more that our allies start to address some imbalances then the more we have the luxury or the margin of error to say you know what I just don't like that tweet so what I'm getting at is I think Trump will be elected re-elected I think he has the ability to make a lot of overdue changes that he's already done but I don't think he's going to be going to funerals with ex presidents and I don't think the next presents gonna call up Donald Trump for advice and that's to our advantage in a weird way that they won't thank you very much well it's an odd thing when you plan an event and you get to the event and you hope people don't show up because we way over registered for this but I think what it tells me is we need to be doing more of these anybody [Applause] before we conclude and we've got some coffee and refreshments just outside the door here I want to recognize a few people first again the person who made this all possible someone who is a mentor to me and friend and someone who is just such a great encouragement dr. gust a Glee fairy please join me in thanking him also I want to thank the Cal Club member and the president of our Board of Advisors who made this event here possible tonight Joe Chizik [Applause] so again from our little outpost overlooking the Pacific it's important for us at the School of Public Policy not just to be preparing the next generation of public leaders but to be doing events like this because nobody else is going to at least not in Los Angeles and so we are going to continue to be that beacon to support and bring speakers like dr. Victor Davis Hanson to tell inconvenient truths about where we are as a state and as a nation but always grounded in an intellectual foundation founding principles free markets and religious liberty because that's what we do at Pepperdine and that's what we do at the School of Public Policy so if you would like to be a part of that I want our Matt Cutler to stand up is Matt Matt is waving in the back if you would like to be on our email list if you would like to speak with anybody about how you might support this rather unique graduate school if you have a graduating senior in undergraduate school and you're like boy you know after four years at Cal I think they could use 20 months in Malibu you know maybe a little deprogramming might be an order please let me know again I want to thank you all for coming out tonight this has been such a great evening the first time that we've taken this lecture from our Malibu campus here to downtown Los Angeles I look forward to being with you again at another night in a bigger room here in Los Angeles please travel home safely god bless you all and good night [Applause] you

Channel: Pepperdine School of Public Policy

Views: 302,176

Rating: 4.7541528 out of 5

Keywords: Victor Davis Hanson, The Case for Trump, vdh, Tragic Hero, Donald Trump, Tragic, Trump, Victor Hanson, Patricia Taglaiferri, Dean Lecture, Pepperdine, School of public policy, MPP, Master of Public Policy, Malibu, California Club, Author, Politics, Historian, Classicist, World war ii, VDH, SPP, donald trump, 2019, Tragedy

Id: XpKboaGPVo4

Length: 46min 49sec (2809 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019