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.
Victor Davis Hanson: I think Donald Trump has got, as I said earlier, an anaconda Civil War strategy of the North. He’s gonna squeeze them as much as he can, and as they start to pop, they will send off missiles or drones from their vestigial fleet, and he’ll hit them hard. And he hopes that will continue, that containment will continue to the midterms.
I would expect an October surprise by the Iranians to try something to get in the headlines and lose Trump the election. And then after the election, I would think that the Israelis and the Americans would hit them very hard at the slightest provocation, and that would be pretty, pretty devastating.
Meanwhile, there’s the wild card no one talks about, and that’s what are the Iranian people going to do when they can’t even afford fruit, they can’t afford milk, they can’t afford electricity, they can’t afford gas, they can’t afford diesel, they can’t afford kerosene or natural gas? It’s all scarce.
So they’re either going to retaliate against the regime, and there’ll be more massacres, or they will just keep quiet, but they’re not going to be active economically and fully generating wealth. They can’t do it anymore given what we’ve done to them.
Is that victory? I don’t know. But I think, in our time for this particular mission, the mission was they’re very close to getting a bomb, stop them, and stop them in a cost-benefit analysis.
TRENDING ARTICLES
Tragic we lost 17 dead, but the bigger picture, to attack a country with 93 million people that was the bully of the entire Middle East and to defang it with losing three or four planes, 17 tragic, tragically soldiers, but about $55 billion. But I don’t think anybody thought you could—take that versus a trillion dollars in Iraq and probably $2 trillion in Afghanistan over 20 years.
Jack Fowler: Victor, I have a bunch of questions from Barry McDonald, but I’m gonna leave his entrée to them, and I’ll ask some of his other questions later. But here’s one that’s kind of related, ’cause you’re just giving your counsel in a way. But how would you—how would Victor advise President Trump?
And I don’t think that necessarily is advising him related to Iran, and we know, Victor, that you are not pro-advising the president of the United States. But pick. If there was an issue or a topic that you could give some counsel on, what would it be?
Victor Davis Hanson: He doesn’t need my counsel, I’ll say that first.
And I’m not a politico that’s lives in Washington, and I don’t know the scuttlebutt, and I don’t know the personalities involved. But just as an outside observer, maybe from a historical point of view, he has… His trademark is that he addresses things that no one wanted to address.
Government, the size of government with DOGE. And for all the DOGE controversies, government has shrunk dramatically by about 400,000 jobs. Nobody thought you could close the border. They didn’t wanna get near it. The wall was inert after Biden [was elected]. He stopped that, and he took a big hit with ICE because it’s one thing…
It’s easy to let in 12 million people, 10 million scattered all over the United States, 500. It’s very hard to find them and coerce them to go back, because they had broken the U.S. law, and he did that.
And everybody talked about getting rid of the nuclear program or not allowing them to have a bomb, and none of the prior seven presidents did it.
Okay, so in that context, I think he needs to talk about the last two years, something that is not popular, but he’s not gonna be running again, and that is we are on an unsustainable spending spree. We have $31 trillion. It’s going to be geometric now. People are talking about $40 trillion in two or three years.
We’re spending a billion dollars a day in interest, and it’s gonna be almost impossible to pay that sum back if we don’t do things. And what we have to do, we’re going to have to take a hard look at Medicare and Social Security, which are death—that is, that’s political kryptonite. But you’re gonna have to talk about it.
And the Left will not… All the Left will do is demagogue it. But for the sake of the country, you’re going to have to look… And I think they can—All of this fraud we’re seeing in California, Minnesota, Chicago is reminding people that the entitlement state is way out of control. So I think they’re going to have to just…
I think if they could just say, “We’re gonna have a hiring freeze and a budget freeze, and we’re not gonna spend any more than we did the year before and let inflation be the actual cut,” I think that would be something that has to be addressed. The other thing is there isn’t a multiracial democracy of our size that works under tribalism.
Indonesia doesn’t work to the extent that it’s really a democracy. India I don’t think works very well. If it worked, we wouldn’t have hundreds of thousands of Indians waiting to come into this country. And I don’t think Brazil works very well. And they all have caste systems and tribal systems and a multiplicity of languages and religion and everything.
And so what I would suggest is then that he really—he’s done a great job with DEI, but I would suggest what he does is to say, “We’re all one, one people. Americanism, being an American is essential, not incidental, and we’re not going to talk about tribalism or race anymore.” And we’re gonna codify that and try to get legislation if he survives in midterms or through executive orders to expand on what he’s done because that’ll kill a society, this sectionalism—fractionalism, sectarianism, tribalism.
Yeah. And it’s gotta stop. And these democratic socialists have substituted race for class, and all they talk about is race, and it’s gonna destroy the country. So that’s another thing that I would advise him. As far as his methodology and technique, I go back and forth.
Of course, all of us say, “Why does he have to tweet at 2 in the morning?” Or, “Why does he have to make fun of Rob Reiner after he was killed?” Or, “Why does he have to do this or that?” And it doesn’t do any good to say, “They’re worse. They tried to kill him. They didn’t just talk about being insensitive or use crude language.”
The people who tried to kill him were all imbued with leftist ideology. And then the movie stars and the media had a rivalry about how best to imagine his death, and they do it all the time. So he’s in the big leagues. It’s not, it’s not beanball. So, but that said, I think I would be a little quieter and don’t say much about Iran.
Just say, “This is what we’re doing today.” But when I say I’m ambiguous about that is because that he says things like—I’ll give you two examples. Oman basically crossed him on the Strait of Hormuz and other issues. He said, if they’re gonna do that and they’re in our way, we’ll bomb Oman.”
We’re not gonna bomb Oman. It’s an ally. I don’t know what—
Jack Fowler: He used more colorful language than that.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. Yes, bomb the blank. And then he—South Korea, he had called up and said, “For the strait and other things, we’re thinking of internationalizing, and you’re a big importer of foreign crude oil and natural gas. Would you want to participate in Iran?”
Meaning, I think he was trying to imply you have ships, you could help keep up open the strait. He wasn’t asking for ground troops. I don’t even think he was asking for air. They said no. So then he said, “North Korea has been very nice to me lately, and I’m gonna pull out some troops from South Korea.”
You remember when he came in the first time, he said, “We’ve had 39,000 troops there for how long?” We had a lot more, so he’s basically saying, “75 years we’ve protected you from this lunatic, your lunatic brethren country in the north, and all we ask of—and we’ve lost 35,000 dead doing it in the Korean War, so all we ask of you is to participate, not in a dangerous, combative way, but just join a Western effort to keep the strait open so it would free our ships so we can concentrate on the problem of Iran.”
And they said no. And under [Joe] Biden, remember, he said, “We’re not gonna charge you anything.” Trump was charging him $3 billion a year for our troops to be there and talked about going up to $10 billion. But the way he said it, the way it was portrayed, “Trump is crazy. One day he’s saying he’s going to attack Oman. The next thing, he’s pulling troops out of South Korea ’cause they weren’t nice to him.”
You see what I mean? And I think people are gonna say, “Victor, we’re over that. That’s so then. That’s so history. So what? We don’t care anymore what the Left said.” I know that, but the key, his agenda depends on the independents.
So when I get calls and stuff, it doesn’t bother me, to tell you the truth, not at all. But I get calls from family members, friends, and they’ll say, “You know what? If I look at what Trump actually did in foreign policy or domestic—it’s great, but why does he do this?” And then they go on a rant, right? So those are…
It’s a hard call, but is—does that mean that tough, crude, often profane language shocks people and it’s an intensifier or a catalyst for his policy, or does it—does it turn off people? I don’t have that answer, but I think he might experiment by toning it down a little bit.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE
Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.
The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.
You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.
TRENDING ARTICLES
The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you.
RELATED ARTICLES
Don’t miss the
Don’t miss the signal
