Victor Davis Hanson: Republicans Can’t Just Trash the Left—They Need a Plan to Win

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

The anticipation of the November midterms is mounting every day, and the polls show that, typically, in midterm elections, the in-party in the White House, i.e., the Republicans and Donald Trump, are going to lose seats. 

And because the House is so close anyway, with a five- or six-seat Republican margin, it might be even easier. And so the Democrats are ecstatic. They look at the statistics and historical context and say 39 out of the last 41 midterm elections, the in-party lost seats in the midterms.  

And this will be no exception because Donald Trump is polling around 40%, and the Democratic generic poll is 5% to 6% ahead of the Republicans. 

The Republicans counter, “Well, maybe it’ll be different. Who can predict what Donald Trump will do or say? Who can predict what’ll happen in Iran in the next 60 days? There might be a revolution. Gas prices could drop.” 

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There are seats that will accrue to the Republicans because of the Supreme Court ruling on racial gerrymandering and the preponderance of red states. Maybe five or six more red states will gerrymander than blue states.  

And, of course, the Republicans were given a gift by this radical Democratic Socialists of America takeover of the Democratic Party and the crazy things that these candidates up for election in the midterms have said in their past. 

And then finally, the Republicans say, “Well, we have more money, at least in the PACs and the Trump funds.” 

But I think they’re missing something because we haven’t heard from the Republicans any strategy, and the time is getting close. 

What do I mean by that? 

It seems to me that it doesn’t work just to trash the socialists. They should be trashed, but there has to be more than that.  

So I would start first with a Contract With America and say, “We are going to do this, accomplish this in the White House and in the Congress over the next two years.” 

And I would say: 

We are going to complete the work at the border, and we’re going to continue to deport people who are not here legally, especially criminals. And then we are going to hold the bureaucracy and the university accountable for the racial prejudice and bias that’s intrinsic to DEI. 

We’ve already said to countries that receive massive U.S. remittances, sent from people here often illegally and subsidized by the federal government, that they will have a tax on them. We’ve started with 1%, and that may climb. 

We’re now pumping the most natural gas and oil in the history of any nation since the onset of fossil fuels. We’re going to continue and increase that. 

One thing we are going to do that no one has really done for the last 30 years, we are going to address the debt. We are going to put a hold on federal spending, and we’re going to take a look at entitlements because we are now not just $31 trillion to $32 trillion in debt, but the debt is increasing geometrically, not arithmetically. And we can envision that if something is not done, it will be up to $40 trillion. Already, the interest is over $1 billion a day, and it’s larger per annum than the defense budget. 

A second thing that we’re going to do, it’s not just that we’re going to have a Contract With America, we’re going to tell you what we’ve done. 

And first of all, crime has dropped 70%. It is at a historic low. Washington, D.C., the political capital of the world, was not safe. Its monuments were decrepit. The streets were dirty. We sent in federal troops working with local police, and we can say now that Washington, believe it or not, is one of the safest large cities in America, given crime statistics. And its monuments are in the process of being refurbished, cleansed, and are sparkling. And we have even bigger projects at the White House and the Reflecting Pool to make people proud of their national capital. 

We all talk about affordability, but we forget something. Even with the war in Iran, and even with a temporary spike in oil prices, this administration has an annual inflation rate during its first term of 1.9%. It’s about 2.5%, and it may climb to 3%. But we are still way below the average 5% to 5.1% each year on average of the prior administration. 

We talk about affordability in terms of housing. Typically in America, 62% to 67% of the population owns their own home. It’s 65% right now. The problem is not that people cannot buy homes. The problem is they can’t buy homes in blue states and urban environments. We’re going to work on that, but let’s be clear. There has not been a sudden drop in homeownership. 

The border is closed. It’s not just closed. Illegal immigration has ceased to exist. Ninety-nine percent of the border crossings are legal. There is no illegal immigration. We are controversially but lawfully and humanely sending back people from that influx, 10 million to 12 million, that came in under Joe Biden without any audit, without vaccinations, and without any knowledge of who they were, at a time when we would never allow American citizens to do so. 

We were, after all, expelling 8,500 service members, some of them combat veterans, from our military by the Biden decrees that they had to have a COVID-19 vaccination and mRNA experimental vaccinations, where we didn’t even require that of the people who fled from countries across the border into the United States. 

We should also say that South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean are not going communist. There’s not a pink tide. During the Obama administration, about 75% of those countries were heading left. John Kerry, the secretary of state under Barack Obama, said that there is no more Monroe Doctrine.  

There is a Monroe Doctrine now, and almost all of South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean is pro-American and conservative except three or four countries. 

And the Chinese are not controlling the entries and exits of the Panama Canal, and there’s not a communist client state doing the work of China and also Russia in Venezuela, exporting terror and drugs to North America. 

Finally, they need to say something about the dangers of socialism. It’s not just that we have a Contract With America of what we’re going to do that brings normality back to the country, and it’s not just that we can tell you what we have done that has improved lives.  

We’re also going to tell you about this socialism. 

Start off  with the idea that there really isn’t a socialist system that is democratic and liberal. The USSR during the Cold War was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Nazi Germany, the Nazi term was an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. So socialism is a euphemism for totalitarianism. 

Every time a socialist is elected, the first thing that happens is they bump into resistance, and when they bump into resistance, they become authoritarian. 

One last thing to remember about our opponents: They are not the party of workers. They’re the party of the downwardly mobile, college-educated, formerly upper-middle class, and a new phenomenon of first- and second-generation immigrants coming from failed states, mostly because of socialism, that upon arrival are attacking the United States. 

And finally, Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Dr. El-Sayed in Michigan, they’re not poor, they’re not middle class. They’re very, very wealthy, just like all socialist architects throughout history.  

Mamdani comes from the 1% in Uganda as an immigrant.  

Hasan Piker is a multimillionaire who drives a Porsche. Ro Khanna’s children have trust funds with ownership of golf courses in their names. 

They drive a $200,000 Range Rover. Ilhan Omar says she’s worth $30 million. 

This is an elite group of people who are using us as their lab rats. 

Again, if the Republicans can talk about what they did, what they plan to do, and what the alternatives are, they can still win. 

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