Victor Davis Hanson: How Trump Came Back From Rock Bottom

On the premiere episode of the Daily Signal’s new weekly podcast, “Midterm Report,” Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson talks about the upcoming midterm elections, his new book “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” and the miraculous comeback of America’s 47th president. This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity.

Rob Bluey: How remarkable is it that Donald Trump was able to mount a comeback given where he was at the beginning of 2021 when he was leaving the White House?

Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t know how he did it because he was already in his seventies, and he didn’t exercise, he ate a lot. He stayed up, he didn’t sleep. No one had ever had more pressure. We were told by Kamala Harris that Jan. 6 was comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And we were told that 10 people got killed, five police officers; they committed suicide for unknown causes within the next year, but they counted them all on that day.

The only person that died violently, we think, was Ashley Babbitt, who was shot while unarmed for the crime of entering through a broken window. So there was so much mention, there was a Pulitzer Prize winner for the New York Times that said he went there and all he saw were FBI informants. So we they wouldn’t even tell us that. So it was a stupid thing to do on the part of the rioters, and it was buffoonish, but it was not an insurrection.

And it was not a revolution. But that’s what the media said. So within the next six months, Ron DeSantis had really come into his own. And in two years he would have a stunning re-election. And people looked at the polls. He was 20 points ahead in some polls. Nikki Haley was ahead. Then all these people jumped in. I mean, crazy Chris Christie said, “I’m gonna bird dog Trump everywhere.”

They all thought he was done for. And then all of a sudden, and this was the biggest untruth, the Biden said, I had nothing to do with it, but if you look at certain things, three days in 2022 in November, after Trump declared his candidacy, three days later in the White House, Jack Smith was appointed special prosecutor.

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The same day, Fani Willis’s paramour, Nathan Wade, was in the White House talking with the legal counsel. The same day, Matthew Colangelo, the third guy in the DOJ who had just come from Alvin Bragg, quit that prestigious job. Excuse me, he quit his job with Letitia James after successfully fining Trump almost a third of a billion dollars. He got this prestigious job from Merrick Garland III. He then leaves to go to work for Alvin Bragg.

And then there is some information that Letitia James for some unknown reason is checked in the same day. So it was coordinated. And when you had then things happened that no one ever, ever seen before. We thought the Steele dossier or the [Hunter Biden] laptop fraud, you know, that was pretty bad. But they tried to get him off the ballot in 22 states, and then they raided his home.

They found 102 classified files out of somewhere between 11,000 and 14,000 that they said were there. They scattered them on the floor, though they weren’t, and then they took pictures of them, and they brought in little stickies that said classified and they slapped them on. And that was all ginned up.

And then if that wasn’t enough, E. Jean Carroll came out of nowhere and they had a bill of attainder in the New York legislature that said for one year.

There’s no statute of limitations. If you can go back 30 years and say somebody harassed you. She couldn’t remember the year. She said she remembered the dress she wore, but we found out the dress wasn’t even made then. Somebody pointed out that almost all of her stories, even about the Bergdorf s department store where she said she was raped, followed the exact plot of a “Law & Order” episode.

I could go on, but it was ridiculous. And she was funded by Ried Hoffman. So that cost him almost 100 million dollars. So the idea was that they all coordinated it. Letitia James said, you overvalued Mar-a-Lago. Deutsche Bank said, “I don’t care what you say, it’s worth more than he claimed it was. We got a loan, we made a lot of money, he paid the interest, and he paid the loan off early, and we’d like to do business with him.” And that’s not admissible.

So they fined him $350 million, then it was $400 million, and then that with interest it would got up to near $500 million. Then Alvin Bragg said to the feds, why don’t you charge him for that thing with Stormy Daniels? It was actually a campaign expense. It wasn’t about saving his reputation or embarrassment. And they said, “Are you crazy? We’re not gonna, we’re not … “ They were liberals. So then he shoehorned that into this basic idea: “I’m gonna be in Manhattan and everybody hates him.” So and then he went after him.

And then Jack Smith wanted to charge him with insurrection. All of these things. And they basically planned the Mar-Lago raid. So they were all trumped up.

And when you look at Fani Willis was the most crazy because if you prosecuted all the people in the United States every year after a close election, they all …

I’ve talked to so many politicians. I said, “Have you ever called the registrar?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

And I said, “What do you say?”

“You say, ‘When are the votes gonna be counted? Where are they? I know that there’s votes there for me. Can you be sure you count all of them?”

That’s basic. He didn’t say “create.” He said, “Can you find to 10,000 votes?” And they made that into a felony. And then Nathan Wade was her boyfriend that she hired with no experience. It was just a clown show.

Then you add in that he was the only president in history on which four occasions the Secret Service returned fire at potential assassins, twice in Florida, once in Washington, D.C., and once in Pennsylvania. So we had never seen any of that hatred. And the weird thing about it was each time—I mentioned all of these episodes—his ratings either did not fall or they went up. And when they had that they thought they were really going to get him with that mugshot.

But the mugshot just reverberated among people, especially in minority communities, that said, “You know, I’ve had the same thing happen to me.”

 So the other thing that really helped him, Joe Biden was this waxen effigy, and Trump told everybody he was cognitively impaired, and that he was put up as a veneer because that primary field in 2020 of Spartacus, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, they were all so far left.

Rob Bluey: Right.

Victor Davis Hanson: And they brought in Joe Biden, who had no business running, and Jim Clyburn in South Carolina, after he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, basically said, “He’s our guy. Everybody drop out. Buttigieg, you can have a cabinet position. Bernie, you can be the elder statesman and have an appointment. Elizabeth Warren, you can get your appointees.” And they made this deal, and then for four years he had really no clear idea what was going on.

And they brought in the Obama people, and some of the neo-socialists, and we really had the most radical agenda. And I mentioned that because those two things, the complete failure of the Biden administration and the unpopularity that incurred, plus the witch hunt after Donald Trump, explained how he went from 20 points down, along with his own resilience.

I don’t know about you, but when I get attacked and I think somebody’s completely lying about me. I read something the other day that said it was easy for Victor Hanson ensconced in his Palo Alto mansion or digs. I don’t even live there. I live here. I have a little apartment I rent on campus.

But the point I’m making is that nobody that I can think of has had such vituperation. They went after his wife. They went after his kids. Even his niece was employed to say that he was crazy by the Left.

Every single person who ever worked for him.

I mean, some people I know very well. But you read what Admiral McRaven, a distinguished admiral, said. He said Trump should be removed sooner rather later in the first term. Jim Mattis said he was sort of comparable to the people on the wrong side of the D-Day beaches. I have never seen anything like it. So that was something that I thought had to be the first third to happen. How he came back.

And it was absolutely brilliant what he did.

Rob Bluey: Victor, you and I recognize the importance of having a podcast and working in media, as I have most of my life. They took away Trump’s ability to communicate directly with the American people. Facebook, Twitter before Elon Musk, they all blocked him and removed him, which made it even more remarkable.

Victor Davis Hanson: They did, they did. Yes. It was even worse. He was banned from Facebook. He was banned from the old Twitter. Amazon and Google took away his base, so you couldn’t get his app, so you couldn’t communicate.

And Morgan Stanley, I guess, I don’t know which was the first one, but he was basically debanked. So he had no checking account. Jamie Diamond’s a great guy, but he denied they did that. They did it. And I think privately, or even now he said that they did it. So all of the banks made it impossible for him to function. And he had five cases, four criminal and one civic suit. And they were all being funded either by the Biden administration or by tech lords that hated his guts.

But what I’m getting at is Trump was able to take all of those disadvantages and turn them to his advantage. It was just uncanny. Historically, the Left hated him so much they couldn’t even appreciate what he was doing.