Victor Davis Hanson: Arrogant Trump Impeachment Witness Vindman’s Career Upended by a Socialist

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: Victor, the midterms. Florida was the big attention, I think. And it looks like Oliver Larkin lost out to Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic representative candidate, and Oliver Larkin was the DSA candidate. So the DSA did not do well in that case.

And then the second thing is the Senate race. Angie Nixon will face off with Ashley Moody, and Angie Nixon was the DSA candidate, and I was wondering if you had thoughts.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, he [Larkin] was running against Moskowitz, who was Jewish, but he had a whole record of endorsing, at various times, the entire agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. So when they were asking him about defunding the police and the Pentagon, he would say yes. So he was way too liberal left, even for the Democrats in Florida.

And those districts had… There’s about 700,000 Jewish American voters in Florida, and they tend to be people who have left New York and the East Coast, whether just for the weather or for political conditions or for tax reasons. And they’re very–I can tell you, as someone who’s spoken to a number of Jewish groups in Palm Beach, they’re very politically aware, and they were not going to support somebody who had trashed Israel as Larkin had done.

And so I think that was a given that he was going to lose.

And the same thing, Nixon was running against Vindman, and Vindman was notorious for being the quasi-whistleblower when he was on the National Security Council. He claimed that he heard Donald Trump issuing ultimata to Zelenskyy.

Now, the problem with that is, in the years since then–and that led to the first impeachment–we have now got the whole story, and even the electorate knows a lot about it.

Number one, Vindman violated protocol by disclosing a classified phone call to someone who was not on the call. He wouldn’t answer questions about whom he talked to, but he did lie and say that he had not met with Adam Schiff. He did call Eric Ciaramella up, who was not on the call, who volunteered to be the official conduit, or whistleblower.

So when the hearings came out, we weren’t really sure of that. He just said, No, I can’t speak about that. But in the time since then, we’ve got the whole story that he called his friend Eric up and said, look, I just listened to Trump, and I can interpret that he was leveraging weapons for political harassment of the Bidens.

Because Trump said something, you should look at the Bidens. You know, I’m giving you aid, but you’re interfering in U.S. politics. That’s what he claimed.

And a lot of people since then have seen that Vindman is culpable and that he did violate the law and that he did lie and that Adam Schiff cooked up the entire impeachment writ. And Adam Schiff lied about it and said that he had not met with Vindman.

Then the other thing that came out with Vindman was that he was a Ukrainian dual citizen and he had been bragging that he had been offered the defense minister slot in Ukraine while he was involved so heavily in the United States government.

So it doesn’t look good when you’re on the National Security Council of the United States and, under testimony, you brag that the Ukrainians wanted you to be their defense minister as a dual citizen.

And then you add to that that the Ukrainian ambassador in 2016 had written an op-ed—that was really a taboo—and interfered in U.S. politics, aside from the Steele dossier, basically endorsing Hillary Clinton.

Add all of that up, and he didn’t age very well.

And then he got involved as a middleman. So he was constantly lobbying for the Ukraine war, which is fine, but he wanted more and more weapons. And then we found out that he had some kind of what he called a nonprofit or some kind of private company, but it wasn’t nonprofit, and he was refurbishing or transferring vehicles into Ukraine.

So you can’t be an advocate, a U.S. citizen advocating for your former homeland, and then be involved with your former homeland in various mechanisms, whether supplying them weapons in your private capacity or launching impeachment against the president of the United States.

So he came off, what I’m trying to say, as arrogant and shady and duplicitous.

Sami Winc: Just a quick question. Everything you say right now seems to me that he would be a shoo-in for the Democrats. Why did he lose out to Nixon?

Victor Davis Hanson: He wasn’t in a congressional district. That’s what you’ve got to remember. He was statewide, and usually that hurts the socialists. But in this particular case, he didn’t have a constituency like Moskowitz did. He didn’t have a moderate and wealthy base to work within and a large Jewish vote within that congressional district.

And he didn’t have what Debbie Wasserman Schultz had. She had been redistricted also out of her job, and she went into the 20th District. There were five African Americans there.

Elijah Manley, as I say, I’m sure I’ve been chastised by a couple of readers for getting the names wrong. But in his case, he was leading, and he made a statement that she had no business coming out of her district that no longer existed to prey on what he said were Black candidates.

So then he got the idea that the leader would consolidate the Black vote and they would have more than Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who outspent everybody because she had a lot of very wealthy donors and had a monopoly on the Jewish vote within the 20th District, like Moskowitz did.

And lo and behold, she won handily. But when you sum up all of the Black candidates, had they united and voted along racial lines, which they seem to have done, then she would have lost.

So what I’m getting at is there’s a lot of dissension. This was a microcosm of what’s going on. You have Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was a hard-left, big-DEI person, and then she loses her district in the redistricting wars between the states and jumps into a district that wasn’t a majority-Black district, but I think it was 48% or something, a plurality. And she jumps in there in a district that wasn’t her own.

But she was the one that was telling us that we need to racially gerrymander. Then she takes a seat away that would have been won by a Black candidate.

Then we have these… Nixon is a crazy socialist. She was outspent by Vindman, but I think that vote was unique statewide among the Democrats because people did not like Vindman. He comes across as arrogant. I mentioned the history that he had, and he’s not a likable person. There was a personal animosity toward him. Everybody who meets that guy is turned off.

Sami Winc: I saw Ashley Moody. So this is a senatorial race that Nixon is running in, and she’s against Ashley Moody. And I have to confess that Ashley Moody didn’t seem terribly impressive for the Republicans. So how do you think that race is going to come out?

Victor Davis Hanson: She’s going to win. She’s the incumbent. She took over Marco Rubio’s seat. She has the advantage of incumbency. She’s got DeSantis’ endorsement.

And there’s been a revolution that we forget in Florida since the days of the hanging chad in 2000. The Republicans have taken over the state, and they have about a million and a half more registered Republicans.

If you total up in these races all the Democrats who voted and all the Republicans, the Republicans have something like 400,000 more votes than the Democrats. So they’re going to turn out the vote, and they voted in much higher ratios than they had before. That kind of surprised everybody. They thought all the Republicans were mad at Trump. It’s a midterm. But they got out and voted.

So she’ll win, and Byron Donalds, now the Republican nominee for governor, I think he’ll win, too.

Sami Winc: Easily?

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, easily. Florida’s a red state now.

Sami Winc: What do you make of Jon Ossoff in Georgia, who just recently said the sailors out there, our military out there, are fighting Trump’s war, number one. So he’s accusing them. It sort of harkens back to Vietnam and blaming soldiers.

But the other thing he said that he’s getting a lot of flak for is that Trump, all he wants to do is build his ballroom and go on flights with Natalie Harp.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, that was stupid.

Sami Winc: It’s getting a lot of press out there.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it’s getting a lot of press because nobody knows who he is. So he was getting worried he had no name recognition.

Georgia is a purple state now because Atlanta has a lot of yuppies there. It’s got a huge Black population. So it’s a 50-50 state now, and you can see it’s highly weaponized. We saw that with Fulton County and Fani Willis’ lawfare that was waged against Donald Trump.

So he wants to be known. But he’s kind of like Mayor Frey, remember him from Minneapolis? He was doing a little dance the other day with a rap. It was just embarrassing. He was a nerd.

And Ossoff is the same. He’s a privileged guy. He knows he would never have won that race had it not been for the day before Jan. 6. […] And even then, Ossoff didn’t win by that much.

He was very careful about what he said because he understood he was the result of a fluke. But now, with this Democratic socialist stuff in the air, it’s gone to his head, and he’s trying to get out there and talk a little bit more abrasively. But as soon as he did, as you said, he made a fool of himself.

Natalie Harp is known to almost every conservative columnist and writer because her job is to disseminate information. She has a Rolodex of I don’t know how many hundreds or thousands on her email list, and she’ll send, like the Democrats do, tidbits. And she does it very professionally.

She is a devout Christian, and she’s a cancer survivor.

So he was trying to insinuate, because she was young and blonde and attractive, that Donald Trump is having some sort of relationship that’s extraordinary or taboo. But that was just character assassination.

Then he just cemented the idea that the Democrats are either ambiguous about who wins the war or, when they say Trump’s war and they hate Trump, they want him to lose it. Is that what they do, when we have thousands of Americans out there fighting. That was stupid.

Sami Winc: And Trump called him Pee-wee Herman, and he does kind of look like Pee-wee Herman.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, the problem with Trump’s epithets is not that he says them and they’re crude, but that they fit and people laugh. […] After the initial shock that the president of the United States or a presidential candidate is engaging in that vitriol, passes, they stick.

Sami Winc: What do you think Ossoff’s chances are, given all of that? Do you think he’ll be reelected?

Victor Davis Hanson: No, I don’t.

Sami Winc: You think he’s going to lose?

Victor Davis Hanson: It’s going to be a very close race, and he’s going to lose. Because Trump and the Republican PACs will make up whatever lead he has. And I just don’t think you’re going to get a lot of Black voters who are enthused by him on the Democratic side to come out.

When he won the first time, the other candidate was African American, remember? He was a preacher and had a lot of resonance in the Black community, and they all came out because there were two elections. But I don’t see that happening.

And I think he’s going to lose.

Sami Winc: And then finally, the Alaska ranking system is being put to the test by two candidates with exactly the same names, first and last.

That was deliberate.

Victor Davis Hanson: I believe it’s Sullivan.

Sami Winc: The Democrats did it.

Victor Davis Hanson: Sixteen candidates, you put one in with the same name, and then people get confused. And then they split the vote. I’m very confident about the Senate. I think El-Sayed is going to lose. I think Talarico is going to lose. I think Susan Collins is going to win. Jackson is going to lose. I think they’re going to keep Lindsey Graham’s seat. I think they’re going to knock off Ossoff.

So I’m cautiously optimistic they’ll hold the Senate, and they have a 40% to 50% chance of holding the House. These socialist candidates are stupid, and the Democrats are not reacting well to them.

Well, I shouldn’t say they’re not reacting. They don’t have a choice. If they attack them, they’ll stay home in the general election. If they cater to them, then they’re going to be hit by their Republican colleagues for endorsing these crazy positions.

Just take two races, El-Sayed, who won, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She’ll probably win, but I have a sneaking suspicion a lot of Black voters on the Democratic side will stay home and not vote for her.

I have a sneaking suspicion there are going to be a lot of independents, but especially Democrats, who will not vote for El-Sayed.

I have a sneaking suspicion there are some in Maine who will not vote for Jackson.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Talarico, for all of that high visibility, a lot of Black voters in Texas remember they wanted Jasmine Crockett, and they won’t come out.

So the Democratic Party either comes out with endorsements of these people, and then they lose moderates who don’t want them, or they stay silent.

And if these candidates do win, a lot of Democrats won’t come out. If they lose, then they get bitter. And don’t think the Democratic socialists won’t stay home if they lose a primary race, which they have in some cases. I don’t think they’re going to be very eager to get out and vote.

Sami Winc: Just to add to your sneaking suspicions, we have a sneaking suspicion that the polls are going to be all wrong in favor of the Democrats the whole time.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. Ten points for El-Sayed was wrong. Twenty for Hong was wrong. Ten—

Some of them were made up, admittedly so.