Three Historians Debate The Era of Trump on Uncommon Knowledge 2025 (Transcript)

His record of failure is so overwhelming that historians may struggle to find anything worth remembering.”

Here’s the second. This is an article in American Heritage recently: “Mr. Trump may be pilloried by contemporary scholars even as he is remembered in history as perhaps the most consequential president in three quarters of a century.”

On a scale of consequentiality, Abraham Lincoln is 10. Chester Allen Arthur is 1. Give me a number, Victor.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: 7.

PETER ROBINSON: Niall.

NIALL FERGUSON: I’ll go higher. 8.

PETER ROBINSON: Really?

NIALL FERGUSON: Yes.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Steven, as of now.

PETER ROBINSON: All right.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Too early to tell.

PETER ROBINSON: Oh, but if you had to give me a number.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: You had historians on the program intentionally and now you’re going to pay the price. It’s just way too early to tell. Eighty-year-old men who are president are a small number of our presidents so far. And it’s hard to tell when we can finally get beyond the group of 80-year-olds running our politics. And what comes next. And what comes next will be as consequential or more consequential.

NIALL FERGUSON: I disagree with that. We are in the fifth year of the Trump era and I think it is not too early to tell that he is one of the most consequential presidents certainly of the postwar era. Think of the transformation he has brought about in the way politics itself functions in the United States.

Donald Trump has transformed the nature of political discourse. That alone is consequential. He broke up a postwar order, a set of assumptions, not least of which was that free trade should be the basis of US international economic policy. No, he’s a transformative figure.

And I think we can tell now, does it end in tears or in triumph? That we can’t tell. And that won’t be obvious until the end of his term. But it’s clear that he’s drastically altered the way that American politics works. And I’d go further. And he’s even more consequential internationally. He’s broken the postwar international order. He’s radically altered it, and I think irreversibly altered it. And any European will agree with that. They don’t like it, but they’ll admit everything has changed because of Donald Trump.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: So the WTO was broken before Trump was in politics, boys. The imperial presidency was written by Arthur Schlesinger in 1973. I mean, let’s be historians for a second.

NIALL FERGUSON: Let’s be historians, Steve. The average tariff rate of the United States today has not been as high as this since the 1930s.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: The US is 25% of global GDP since 1870, and that’s with tariffs and without tariffs, with income tax and without income tax.

NIALL FERGUSON: You don’t judge president’s consequences.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: The consequentiality of a president is not measured by policy changes.

PETER ROBINSON: We’re moving to a new question. We will let him say.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Could I just say one thing?

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Let him have a say. You invited him on the show.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think he did.

PETER ROBINSON: I worked hard on it. Apparently we don’t need it.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Niall has outlined the foreign policy. I think he did three things that were transformational on domestic policy, not the particular issue.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Stop.

PETER ROBINSON: We’ll get to domestic policy.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They’re not policy issues.

A Squeaker Election with Enormous Change

PETER ROBINSON: I promise I will carve out a space for you to say what you’re going to say. But first, I have another sort of preliminary question which I think is truly interesting, at least to me. And here it is.

He won a very narrow victory as a proportion of the popular vote. Donald Trump won reelection in the sixth closest presidential contest in American history. Republicans won a majority in the House of only five seats, one of the smallest majorities in all of history. They won a majority in the Senate of six seats, which is fairly sizable as Republican majorities go, but still far from overwhelming.

So we have a squeaker of an election. Nobody could argue that that was a mandate.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, I could.

PETER ROBINSON: All right, then you get the first go at this. We get a squeaker of an election and an enormous change in whatever you want to call it. The zeitgeist, the feel of the country. DEI is dismantled. The border is closed.

NIALL FERGUSON: Go.

PETER ROBINSON: How does that happen?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: He had a mandate compared to what Republicans usually do. He was the first American Republican president in, since 2004, in 20 years, to win the popular vote. Nobody else had done that. McCain didn’t do it. Romney didn’t do it. Trump didn’t do it the first time. He did that. He won the popular and the electoral ballot. He now controls, whether you like it or not or whatever margin.

PETER ROBINSON: Right.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: There is a conservative majority in the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the executive branch. That’s very rare for all branches of government to be in their hands. He radically changed the Republican Party. It’s completely different. It’s a nationalist, populist party.

And he got a record number of Hispanics, 49%. He won 55% of the Mexican American vote. He won 23% of the African American male vote. On most of the key issues on the border, illegal immigration, crime, energy, foreign policy, there were 60-40, 30-70 issues that he won on all of those issues.

He was outspent three to one in the campaign, and he still overcame that. And he was indicted 93 times.

PETER ROBINSON: Right.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And he was taken off the ballot, at least attempted, in 25 states. He had his home raided. So with all of that, and to come through and win all of the swing states and 93% of the counties in the country, maybe by small margins, but that was an amazing achievement.

PETER ROBINSON: So what I’m trying to get at is the contrast. I grant everything you’re saying, but if you look at major shifts in American politics and the zeitgeist, because it’s larger, there’s a culture, it feels as though the culture has shifted as well.

You go to the 1930s and Franklin Roosevelt wins an overwhelmingly huge landslide in ’32. Or you go to the 1980s and Reagan wins 49 out of 50 states, or you go to the 1960s, LBJ, before he enacts the New Society, again, wins a huge landslide. And this is nothing like those landslides. So are we surprised or are you with Victor? No, no, no. We all should have seen it coming.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: A transformation of the Republican Party, which could well be enduring, at least for a generation, is inarguable. That’s the point that Victor made.

PETER ROBINSON: That’s done.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: You asked about transformation of America. Yes, that’s not the Republican Party. Republicans are probably 30% or so of the country. We’re a 30-30-40 country, 30 for each party and 40 neither party.

Trump won 77 million votes, which is a big number. Harris won 75 million. 89 million did not vote of the 240 million or so who are adult voting age. So for us, the transformation of the Republican Party is a big issue for sure, especially where it was when some of us were growing up.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And the flip side is true. He destroyed the Democratic Party as we know it. It’s not the same Democratic Party.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: I think the Democrats had a bigger hand than Trump in that suicide. But I’ll give you that he contributed to their immolation, which we are still witnessing. But the issue is how enduring is this for America, for American power in the world? I think that’s not the same question as the first and second questions that you asked are not the same. But Niall wants to get in.

NIALL FERGUSON: I would simply add that compared with the 2020 election, the outcome was strikingly clear. Far, far more decisively in Trump’s favor than almost any opinion poll or pundit foresaw. And if you think back to the atmosphere when the election results were coming in, I remember calling it a vibe shift.

It was a marked shift, a marked contrast to the atmosphere four years before or four years before that. Those were close elections. I don’t think the 2024 election was close by comparison with the previous two elections.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: So, again, independents dominate the country. And Trump is underwater even on most of his signature issues.

PETER ROBINSON: With independents.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Certainly with independents. But overall, including all the various…

PETER ROBINSON: Today’s…

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Harvard Harris poll had overwhelming support for border security. And 56% were in favor of deportations despite all the…

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yes, but Trump’s methods are underwater. Even though the policy of border security and fighting crime and some of the other signature issues are clearly supported, Trump’s way of doing it is not clearly supported in the country.

But again, let’s just say that elections don’t change the nature of the country. Political figures who are transformative are not that frequent. You mentioned Roosevelt and Reagan. We could go abroad to Niall’s home country and we could find a few there. We couldn’t find a lot, but we could definitely find a few. Victor could tell you in the sweep of 2,000 years since the classical heritage, how many have been transforming it. So we just have to be careful, right?

Johnson’s landslide resulted in him not running again. Nixon’s landslide resulted in him resigning. So it just doesn’t happen that frequently. And also we have to be careful with policy. We overestimate the impact of policy rather than deep… And Niall wrote a book about technology and the power of disruptive technology is clearly as big or bigger than any particular policy we might be favorably disposed to or not.

So I’m not trying to say that Trump is irrelevant when it comes to the transformation of the Republican Party. I think Victor was quite eloquent.

The Counter-Revolution

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It’s not just that he’s waging a 360-degree counter-revolution, it’s sort of like the Thermidor reaction to the Jacobins because he’s not just doing politics, he’s doing culture, sociology, economics. It’s everything from the Smithsonian to the Kennedy Gallery to architecture to DEI to transgendered sports.

He’s trying to flood the zone in every aspect of our lives and undo the progressive project single-handedly basically, at the last. No other Republican. Let me make a couple of points.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Where is the Thermidor reaction today? I mean the original Thermidor reaction, how lasting was it?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I can tell you that. No, right now as we’re talking, almost every university in the United States has reinstated the SAT and there’s no more loyalty diversity oaths they’re requiring for admission. I can tell you that all through the San Joaquin Valley every high school is not allowing transgendered females to compete in high school sports. I can tell you it’s pretty…

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Victor, the French Thermidor reaction, where is that today in France? Right. It looked like the biggest thing when it happened in real time. The Thermidor reaction, and I’m talking about the fullness of time, is the Thermidor reaction today the dominant culture, the politics of France?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: So there’s no more Jacobin. There’s no 1619 project. We’re not renaming, tearing down statues.

PETER ROBINSON: Niall makes two points. Then we go on to foreign policy.

Trump’s Transformative Impact on American Politics

NIALL FERGUSON: Have not been made. This is only the second time that the President’s won a non-consecutive second term. Only Grover Cleveland creepily did that. And that means we’ve had Trump for more than five years because he never went away, despite every effort to cancel him in 2021. He did not go away in that sense. I think he’s been the dominant figure of American politics over a decade, for over a decade. And that’s the first point I would make.

The second point I’d make goes to something you just said, Steve. Yes, there’s been a profound transformation in our life because of the technological changes associated with the Internet. Trump was the first president fully to understand how radically that altered the public sphere in the United States and to exploit that transformation. Virtually none of his rivals could match that. Hillary Clinton certainly couldn’t. Kamala Harris was a fail on social media.

But that transformation was something that Trump understood. That’s why I think when historians come long after we are gone to write about this era, they will call it the Trump era, and they will recognize that there was a profound reaction that Trump led against a whole set of liberal norms that were most firmly ensconced in the universities, as Victor just implied, but actually extended far beyond the universities into every established institution in the media and so on. And that reaction, I think, is going to be very hard to undo. That’s the sense in which he’s been transformative.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Obama was first on social media, not Trump. And secondly, they were not liberal norms. They were hard left norms.

NIALL FERGUSON: Obama was good on Google, but Obama was the Google—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Norms.

NIALL FERGUSON: Obama was the Google president, but Trump was the Twitter president. You can see that if you look at the data.

Trump’s Foreign Policy Doctrine

PETER ROBINSON: Boys, foreign policy. Two quotations. George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address, quote, “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” Here’s Walter Russell Mead writing recently in the Wall Street Journal on Donald Trump as a leader in the tradition of President Andrew Jackson, quote, “Jacksonians feel no need to spread democracy around the world, but when the US is attacked, they believe every measure is justified.” Do we have a Trump doctrine? Is the Trump doctrine that the rest of the world is on its own unless they mess with us or our allies?

NIALL FERGUSON: I don’t think that’s what it is, and I don’t think Andrew Jackson’s relevant here. The United States is in a radically different situation from the situation of the early 19th century. It is a superpower, and it can’t just stop being a superpower.

What I’m struck by is the resemblance to a more recent president, Richard Nixon. It seems to me that President Trump has many Nixonian traits. One of them is to feel that America’s allies are free riders. And his response to this has been to tell the Europeans it’s no longer possible for you to outsource your national security to the United States. So that’s a very Nixonian thing to have done, based on a sense that the US can’t do everything. But it’s not isolationism and it’s not Jacksonianism.

Look at his involvement in the Middle East. President Trump, like Nixon, wants to be remembered as a peacemaker. That was one of Nixon’s great preoccupations. Go right back to the 1969 inaugural. And this is again, I think, one of Trump’s big motives. He really genuinely wants to bring peace not just to Gaza, but to the Middle East. And if you look at that 20-point plan that only just a few days ago was published, it’s actually a rather impressive attempt to bring about a decisive change in that region.

In the case of Europe, as I’ve mentioned, he’s told the Europeans you’re on your own. The war in Ukraine is now your problem because I can’t deliver Putin and I tried. That’s an important and rather Nixonian thing. He’s not Vietnamizing, he’s Europeanizing European security.

And lastly, I think that what Trump’s doing in the international economy very closely reminds me of 1971 when, if you remember, Nixon announced not only that he was going to go to Beijing, but also that he was severing the link between the dollar and gold and imposing a 10% tariff on all American imports. So I think the real inspiration begins—

PETER ROBINSON: In the ’70s stagflation and disarray that lasted economic disarray.

NIALL FERGUSON: But if you actually ask the question, why did we end up with double-digit inflation? That was the oil price shock that came out of the ’73, ’74 Middle Eastern crisis. If you’ve got peace in the Middle East, that’s far, far less likely to happen.

Reactive Deterrence Strategy

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I would call it reactive deterrence. So he doesn’t—

PETER ROBINSON: Reactive deterrence, yes. All right, go ahead.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It’s, to paraphrase the strong man Sulla, it’s no better friend, no worse enemy. So he looks around the globe and he sees certain people, certain nations, personalities that he can work with and he likes and they have common interest. And he tells them that if he aligns with the United States, all good things can happen. And then there’s people who don’t want to do it. And it’s not really ideological. To some degree it is. And then he establishes deterrence.

But what’s weird about it is because of the MAGA base and the history of intervention on the ground in the Middle East and Vietnam and all of that, he’s the first president that has what Colin Powell called an exit strategy. So he goes in and takes out in 30 minutes the Iranian nuclear project for maybe four or five years, and then they want a performance art hit on our forces in Qatar. So he evacuates. They tell him they’re going to come. Iran hits our base with some ceremonial missiles. And then he says, “Fine, it’s over, it’s over and we’re going to make Iran great.”

He did the same thing when he killed Soleimani. He said, “They’re going to get mad, they’re going to shoot some missiles. Everybody stay in the base.” They won’t. So his idea is he wants to say, “Don’t do it, don’t do it.” But if you do it, this is what we’re going to do to you. But he has a way to stop it so we don’t have what his base calls forever wars, at least so far.

Takes the Wagner group out, takes Soleimani out, takes Baghdadi out, neutralizes Kim Jong-un for a while. And he doesn’t get bogged down. No pretensions about nation building, changing the world. Same thing with International Criminal Court, World Health Organization. Everybody knew that these groups were completely corrupt. And he comes along and says, “We’re done.” And they say, “You can’t do that. This is the UN spin-off.” He says, “We’re done.” And everybody says, “Wow, they were done, weren’t they? They were kind of corrupt.” It was like he kicked in a rotten corpse or something. And that’s what he does.

And everybody gets very angry and says, “You can’t do that. You can’t do it.” And then all of a sudden they said he went over the Europeans at the funeral of the Pope or at the Notre Dame Cathedral. He was like Caesar said, Shakespeare said, “He doth stride over us like a colossus.” Because he goes in there and everybody wants to—he has a blue suit on. They say he can’t wear a blue suit. All of a sudden you look back, there’s three or four people wearing a blue suit.

He’s at the Notre Dame Cathedral and Macron’s like, “Let me get near him.” And what does he tell Macron? He tells them all your borders are completely open. You fell for this stupid Merkel, you left Schroeder deal with the Russians. You’re not pumping natural gas. You have no military. And they say, “Yeah, that’s right.”

And we’re going to—Neil was right about the first term. It’s not just the reaction to the election, but he looks back at his first term as incomplete. And he was naive and he played the bipartisan. He appointed a lot of people from the—Bill Barr, John Bolton. This time it’s disruptive and it’s a reaction to his first term and its reaction to the wilderness years of which he says he’s not on a revenge tour, but that’s a motivation.

The China Question

PETER ROBINSON: Stephen, watch this. This is Niall Ferguson on this program seven months ago.

NIALL FERGUSON: The window of opportunity in which he can make a move on Taiwan may close. Perhaps the Trump administration starts seriously to arm Taiwan, although that is by no means clear. Or perhaps a new president comes along who’s a lot more hawkish, conventionally hawkish, than President Trump, who since his election has spoken quite emolliently of China, who wants to go to Beijing, who invited Xi to the inauguration. So a key question for us, the big geopolitical question is, does Xi make a move on Taiwan? While the opportunity is almost irresistibly tempting, it will be, I’m absolutely sure, during this administration, during this presidential term.

PETER ROBINSON: If Xi moves on Taiwan, how will Trump respond?

STEPHEN KOTKIN: If I had any insight into how Trump thinks and responds, I wouldn’t be on this show. I’d be the richest investor in the world. So Trump will be judged on China policy because that is the only significant world historical consequential issue for foreign policy today.

There are issues that are enormous for the people involved. What’s happening in Sudan is colossal for the people in Sudan, it’s not colossal for world order. What’s happening in Gaza is of great moment for all the people who are emotionally connected there, as well as the people there, as well as the state of Israel and Israel’s supporters around the world. What happens with China or not with China is decisive for American power in—

NIALL FERGUSON: The world going forward.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: That’s where Trump will be judged. And some of these other issues which look quite significant because we’re living through them—there are issues in history that I could bring up now that you would say, “What’s that?” But at the time, they played a huge role in people’s consciousness and in public discussions and then they vanished into the ether, into the textbooks that are sitting in off-site storage. So the China one is in fact the big one. So that’s correct. What Trump will do or won’t do is anybody’s guess, including Trump’s guess.

PETER ROBINSON: Can you give us a preliminary grade?

Borders of Defeat and American Power

STEPHEN KOTKIN: He doesn’t know, but this is what’s going on. So China has announced that it is going to be able to do this if it wants, take Taiwan and not only take Taiwan, collapse American power in East Asia. So you have three borders of defeat in the world today where America is vulnerable.

With the Soviet Union, you had borders of victory. That meant that the Soviets could become a status quo power. They could do détente, they could sign the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which for us was a human rights agreement recognizing human rights. And for them was recognition of their post-World War II borders. Because remember, they had won Ukraine.

Borders of defeat for Russia, Israel, borders of defeat for Arabs in the neighborhood and for Iran, Taiwan borders of defeat for China. So there are revisionisms going on to overcome borders of defeat. That’s not something you negotiate, that’s not something you reach détente on.

China—Russia wants to roll back American power in Europe, Iran wants to roll back American power in the Middle East, and China wants to roll back American power in East Asia. And they have a kind of entente cooperation, not a formal alliance engaged in this anti-Western project.

And so the goal is not just to take Taiwan, that’s important. It’s clearly a high priority. And they’re going to do that one way or another. Either Taiwan is going to capitulate and they’re going to get it for free, like their ancient military analysts talked about how you win a war, or they’re going to fight for it if they feel that that’s necessary.

But that’s just the beginning of the story. They are then going to revenge against Japan, Japan’s atrocities against China in World War II, that’s on the agenda. And they’re going to hit Japan back for that. And so Japan’s ability to withstand China is in question.

They’re also going to evict American military bases from South Korea, from the Philippines if they can, and push America back to the second island chain, off the first island chain, as it’s known, and maybe beyond the second island chain. And remember, the appetite grows in the eating. People say, “Well, Xi Jinping only wants Taiwan.” Once you get that, if you get it, which is still a question, your appetite grows. You want the next and the next and the next.

And so if he’s successful in collapsing American power in East Asia, in evicting us from the first island chain, then maybe he wants more or maybe his successors want more. So what are we doing about China? That’s the only question in foreign policy that I think is of the greatest—more. Can I say that?

The Economic Dimension of U.S.-China Competition

NIALL FERGUSON: That’s the question that Donald Trump asked on the campaign trail in 2015-16. He was the first person to say China is posing a major economic as well as strategic challenge to the United States. He was the one who tore up the old national security strategy of successive government, saying that the rise of China was a win-win and replaced it. Our colleague H.R. McMaster did much of the work with a national security strategy that identified China, as well as to a lesser extent Russia, as strategic rivals.

Now, I think there’s an economic dimension to this, Steve, which you left out. I agree with what you say about China’s goals, but I think the key from Donald Trump’s perspective is economic more than it’s geopolitical. One of the reasons Trump got elected was he was prepared to call out the effects of free trade on the United States were to hollow out manufacturing and essentially export manufacturing jobs to China.

Trump said he was going to address that problem. One of the interesting things about Trump is that he has to some extent done that. Now, I’m not a big fan of the tariffs, but if you look at China’s share of global manufacturing value added, it’s actually declined since 2021 and America’s share has grown. So something important is happening.

I think it’s difficult, it’s really hard to re-industrialize the United States, but it is an economic competition between the United States and China. China will not be able to do the things that you’re describing if it loses the AI race. There’s a decent chance that it will. It’s certainly not caught up with the best of the large language models that the U.S. tech companies are building. So I think from Trump’s vantage point, the key issue is an economic one. Can you catch up with that extraordinary manufacturing leap forward that’s happened particularly on Xi Jinping’s watch?

PETER ROBINSON: Victor, for you. But could I also just toss one more fact onto the table, which is that remarkably enough, the Trump administration’s first defense budget is actually in real terms, a little bit smaller than Biden’s last defense budget. Over to you on foreign policy.

Fiscal Constraints and Foreign Policy

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: He inherited a $1.9 trillion annual deficit, $37 trillion national debt, $1.1 trillion trade deficit. So there’s constraints on him, but part—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Of that is his first term.

NIALL FERGUSON: Yes, but that was COVID.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: He’s not a victim. He’s also a perpetrator in fiscal incentives.

NIALL FERGUSON: So it’s been a bipartisan achievement.

PETER ROBINSON: Boys. Victor.

PETER ROBINSON: Including the Red Sea to let victory go through.

The Psychology of Deterrence

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The reason that Putin went in to Ukraine was because he thought that he could and he could. And he didn’t go in during Trump’s four years, but he did go in during George W. Bush and Georgia. He did go in during Obama to Crimea and the Donbass. And he did go in to try to take Kiev during Biden.

And so they feel—they, the foreign policy antagonist of the United States—feel that he’s unpredictable and he’s capable of doing anything at any time to anybody, anywhere, number one. And anytime that you get predictable in this world, for example, the Israelis, when I would go over to Israel and they talk about Hamas and Gaza, it was frightening the last two years before October 7th.

PETER ROBINSON: When they would talk about Hamas.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes. They would say things like, “20,000 people work here and when they get injured, we take them to the ER room and look at our fence. It’s not very defensible.” It looked pathetic, but they thought that they were playing it off. They thought that they could acculturate. Same thing. So nobody ever predicted that, right? Nobody ever said—

PETER ROBINSON: Nobody ever predicted October 7th.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes. They said it was incomprehensible. They also said that Iran, you can’t attack Iran preemptively, told Israel, “Don’t do it.” And Israel said, “They’re a paper tiger” and they destroyed Hamas, they destroyed Hezbollah. But what I’m saying is the unimaginable was very imaginable. They said Putin would never try to take Kiev. So it’s very probable if any of these belligerents think they can get away with it, they’ll do it.

NIALL FERGUSON: They’ll do it.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And the reason then, how do you maintain deterrence? It’s psychological and material. So when you look at psychological, there’s no way in the world Donald Trump would have had his national security adviser and Secretary of State go to Anchorage, Alaska, and be dressed down and humiliated in the way that Blinken and Sullivan were two months into the administration.

There’s no way he would let a balloon traverse from China across half of the continental United States, as Biden did. Yes, just psychologically, he would never allow that. He would have shot it down. He would have blown it up. And I think when you look at 300,000 students from China, and I think that’s a way—they see that as a way of technological transfer, among many other ways.

PETER ROBINSON: Some 300—actually, I think it’s a little more than 300,000 Chinese nationals now.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Studying at American universities, and there’s 1.1 million foreign students in general. And Trump is using that to either increase or decrease as leverage with them. But my point is that in key areas like AI, like genetic engineering, like robotics, like cryptocurrency, it’s not clear that China’s ahead and the United States is drawing in all sorts of people now.

And I think this reform of the university to be a disinterested, open, empirical place—again, in the short term it’s going to hurt it, but in the long term it’s going to be very positive. When you look at the basics of a civilization, energy: United States is the largest natural gas producer, the largest national oil producer, and it’s fourth in coal. It’s the largest producer of atomic energy even in its nadir.

China’s Energy Advantage and the Tariff War

NIALL FERGUSON: But here’s where it gets tricky because insofar that’s all true. The problem is that China’s increased its electricity generation by an extraordinary amount, investing in solar particularly, but renewables more broadly, mostly in coal. And well, no, it’s actually done the investment heavily in renewables. It’s grown its coal. But the real miracle that we’re seeing in China’s economy is an incredible increase in the amount of electricity generated from all sources. This is going to matter in the AI race because the AI race is a very electricity-hungry one.

Can we talk about tariffs for a minute? Because one of the things that President Trump did even before April 2nd was essentially to impose a trade embargo on China. He imposed such high tariffs at one point that it amounted to a trade embargo. This failed and it revealed the strength that China has. And it failed because China retaliated, tit for tat, tariff for tariff, and then imposed restrictions on rare earth exports because China dominates the production, the refining of rare earths.

That created a huge problem, particularly for U.S. automobile manufacturers. That led to a major climb down by the Trump administration in its trade war with China. And I think what we’re seeing in China policy is a recognition that China poses a formidable threat, that a war over Taiwan would be extremely risky for the United States. And therefore I think we’re seeing President Trump moving in the direction of détente with China.

Looking back on that earlier interview we did, Peter, it wasn’t clear at the beginning of the administration which way he was going to go. There were plenty of hawkish people in the administration who wanted to take a much tougher line with China. President Trump, I think, inclines to the Nixonian trip to Beijing and “big beautiful deal.” I think that’s what he would like.

The Taiwan Question

PETER ROBINSON: Niall, do you still stand by that prediction that you made seven months ago that in one way or another that Xi is going to move on Taiwan? Now, we didn’t have time to show the whole thing, but you also said there are more ways of moving on Taiwan than simply enforcing an embargo. But one way or the other, he will move on Taiwan during this second term of President Donald Trump. Do you stand by that?

NIALL FERGUSON: Yes. There are different ways it can be done. I don’t think an invasion’s ever been very likely, nor even a blockade, but you could imagine a quarantine, a loose disruption of Taiwan’s trade, or you can imagine a diplomatic move of the sort that I think we’re already seeing, which is that President Trump says he wants a meeting with Xi Jinping. They’re probably going to meet at some point next month. Maybe President Trump goes to Beijing at some point early next year.

But the Chinese have already signaled that one of the things they want out of that is for the United States explicitly to oppose the idea of Taiwanese independence so they can achieve their objectives diplomatically. And they sense, I think, that with President Trump, the opportunity is there because we know some things about Donald Trump’s mind. It’s not completely opaque.

Remember what he told John Bolton in the first administration, when Bolton was briefly, unhappily, his national security adviser? He told him, sitting in the Oval Office, “Taiwan is a Sharpie. China is the Resolute desk. I’m not sending the U.S. Navy to fight over a Sharpie.” So the Chinese know that with Trump, Taiwan’s in play. Remember one of the things that was striking—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: I haven’t spoken in like an hour.

NIALL FERGUSON: Did you remember who’s still getting paid?

PETER ROBINSON: Hold on, Victor.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: You get paid for this show?

NIALL FERGUSON: You don’t?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What?

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Oh, my God. I need an agent.

PETER ROBINSON: Come on. I thought it was that cup of chamomile tea I bought you off.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Wait a minute. Go ahead.

PETER ROBINSON: So you were doing very well containing yourself, although I could feel the pressure building.

Kotkin’s Critique: Appeasement and Lack of Process

STEPHEN KOTKIN: This is appeasement. He failed to implement the law on TikTok now for quite some time. I don’t think—

NIALL FERGUSON: That’s not appeasement, that’s enrichment.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: So, but the law says he’s got to do things to prevent the Chinese TikTok from being the main source of news in America, and he’s not done that. And he has no constitutional authority to do that. And if there’s a deal on TikTok, it will be a smelly deal.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Sure.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: It will be a disgusting appeasement of China deal. He is not reforming universities.

NIALL FERGUSON: Hold on.

PETER ROBINSON: Universities come to—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: In a minute. We come to universities, scientific funding.

PETER ROBINSON: Let’s stick to China for now.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Some of which is wasteful. But when you cut American scientific funding, you are not engaging in China policy properly. So the problem with the Trump administration is there is no China policy. There are two thumbs and then there is waiting to see what might happen or not happen.

In the first administration, we had McMaster, we had Pompeo, we had Matt Pottinger, we had interagency process. And so we turned around this gigantic ship on China that was going the wrong way. It was a massive achievement.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: And it became a bipartisan consensus.

PETER ROBINSON: Another massive achievement.

NIALL FERGUSON: You might even say consequential.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yes. And that was because there was process, not just two thumbs. Now we have no process on purpose because Trump believes that process inhibits him from doing things. And so there are 36 positions staffed in the National Security Council. Thirty-six, that’s it. On purpose. A couple hundred out of what used to be 400. But even 250 was probably too much. But 36 is a signal that he doesn’t want anything to do with them.

So what happens is you announce things with your thumbs and then who implements? Who follows up? Who makes the phone calls? Who actually implements whatever it is that you’re thumbing out into the world? And the answer is nobody. If a bunch of—

NIALL FERGUSON: The answer is Scott Bessent.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: In the case of China, the Treasury exists.

NIALL FERGUSON: Treasury is handling much of the Chinese negotiations. So there is an answer to that question.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Lutnick is more involved than Bessent in a lot of these questions.

NIALL FERGUSON: Not in the key—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: And Lutnick, I’m sorry to say, is certifiable. And so, you know, there is no coordinating Trump administration. That is just an empirical fact.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We had 400 people in the National Security Council for four years under Biden. We had 400 under Obama. And what did they do? Yeah, they gave away our current foreign policy. When Trump came in in 2025, in January, there was no deterrent. Niall just said—

PETER ROBINSON: Niall just said, you have to feel Security Council. You can get the feeling in the Trump administration. I think I’m quoting you exactly. You get the feeling that in the Trump administration, Taiwan is in play, Victor.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: In play in the sense that he’s—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Going to give it away if he gets something else for it in his—

PETER ROBINSON: Mind, which is not exactly the same.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It depends on the attitude of the Taiwanese. So if you talk to those people, they’ll say to themselves, will these people fight like the Korean, South Koreans and would they fight like the Japanese? And if they won’t and they think they’re going to massage that relationship, then we’re not going to send 11 carrier groups and get them sunk.

PETER ROBINSON: What does it tell us that Israel, another small country in a difficult neighborhood, spends upwards of 5% of its GDP on defense, while Taiwan spends under 3% on defense. So why stick up for these guys?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: That’s the Trump administration. If Taiwan tomorrow would say we’re going to emulate what the Europeans claim they will, but I don’t think they will, 5%. And they’re going to do what? Japan. Japan’s got two new carriers and they’re called the same names as the ones at Pearl Harbor, Kaga and Akagi, which tells you what their mindset is. They’re not ashamed of that, but they are rearming and South Korea is rearming and Australia is rearming. But Taiwan is—

PETER ROBINSON: Want them to rearm.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes. And so I think the Trump administration says, we help those who help themselves. If Taiwan says to Trump we’re going to spend 5% and we’re going to ally ourselves with the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Australians and the Philippines and we’re going to resist this, then he’s going to be there. If they say, well, we have a lot of investment, we’re all Chinese, it’s going to be inevitable, then he’s going to say, go to it.

Taiwan and Strategic Ambiguity

NIALL FERGUSON: But it’s plausible that the outcome of these negotiations, which I expect will happen next year, is not the appeasement that you suggested. I mean, appeasement would be handing Taiwan over the way Chamberlain and Daladier—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Your house is still standing in Munich, they can meet there.

NIALL FERGUSON: But my point is you can’t assume that that’s the outcome. Surely it’s preferable to reset us to 1972 or 1979. The strategic ambiguity that served us well for half a century. We don’t want to fight a war over Taiwan. That would be a colossal war.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: We want the status quo.

NIALL FERGUSON: Let me finish. Right. Read Jim Stavridis’ book to see what that war would be like. And I think the goal of policy is not appeasement. The goal is detente to avoid that conflict. The Biden-Harris administration came very close to causing the Taiwan issue to flare up. It was extremely dangerous when Nancy Pelosi made that reckless visit to Taiwan and appeared to be encouraging those elements that favor Taiwanese independence. So I think detente is the right term, not appeasement. It’ll be appeasement if they hand Taiwan over for nothing. But I don’t think that’s the plan.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: You’ve got to ask the Chinese who run that regime what they think is going on. Not ask what the blogosphere thinks is going on here in the United States. The Chinese don’t think that this is detente. Okay. They think that this is potential capitulation. You can look at the stuff that they’re putting out and they’re really happy with the way things are going. So it’s not a defense of whoever was president before Trump. I forget their names. It’s not a defense of those people. And I never defended them when they—

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Improperly staffed institutions. They didn’t determine anything under those—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: I want an administration. I want interagency process which we do not have now deliberately because it’s perceived as restraining rather than empowering.

NIALL FERGUSON: But Steve, what if—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: And so you get a situation in which the bureaucracy doesn’t work. Jensen Huang is running China policy. Jensen Huang, one person. I don’t think that’s true. Who’s a very rich and smart guy. Yes, he’s been running—

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Steve.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: I think that’s a character. He got the chips reversal out of Trump without any process and without other people weighing in, including the Pentagon weighing in, including State Department weighing in. Nobody knows.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: A lot of people talking about China.

NIALL FERGUSON: This love of the interagency process.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Whoever came through on the phone that’s interacting with that, surely we should judge—

NIALL FERGUSON: A president by results, not whether he abides by the interagency process. Look at the results in the Middle East. Compare the Biden-Harris administration with its bureaucracy and this administration which as you describe it, has two thumbs and no process. Which was more successful in the Middle East? We had an utter disaster two years ago.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: A complete disaster by which administration is a point of comparison to judgment.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Iran deal and the Obama administration.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: The national security point of comparison to—

NIALL FERGUSON: Make the national security adviser completely missed what happened on October 7th to the point that an article appeared in Foreign Affairs celebrating the peace that the Biden administration—

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Jake Sullivan said it was the most quiet part of his—

STEPHEN KOTKIN: So in other words, this was interagency process because of Biden as the point of comparison.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Twelve years, eight years of Biden, four—

NIALL FERGUSON: Years of Biden and eight of them are terrible.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: That doesn’t make sense.

NIALL FERGUSON: By results my own show and I’m—

The Fiscal Crisis

PETER ROBINSON: Having to raise my hand. The budget and Niall Ferguson citing Ferguson’s law. Some distant ancestor of yours, Scottish. Scottish, of course, Ferguson, that any great power that spends more on debt service than it does on defense will not long remain a great power. We are now in that territory ourselves. When Ronald Reagan left office, everyone said, oh, good presidency. Happy about it. But the way he increased the deficit, which was then 30% of GDP, that debt. Debt, excuse me, sorry, the debt was 30% of GDP. And now we’re at 120% of GDP and growing. And Niall. And growing. And Niall Ferguson. And growing considerably. And Niall Ferguson says that unless we take on the entitlement spending, which now represents at least two thirds of the federal budget, unless we take that on, the United States simply cannot remain solvent. And Donald Trump replies, oh, no, no, no, no. I’ve been clear throughout my political career, I’m not touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Is this not a problem?

NIALL FERGUSON: Now we come to the shadow side of the Trump era. The shadow side is that the President has never had any intention of stabilizing our public finances. This has always been the problem for political expediency because it’s extremely hard to do these things. As Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan discovered when they tried to make it clear that there needed to be entitlement reform, they were completely trounced politically by Barack Obama. So this is the problem. Up until this point in the show, I’ve been positive about President Trump in many ways, even in ways that have surprised me. He has done better than I foresaw. He’s looking much better than he did in April. But we can’t look away from the fact that the United States is in a completely unsustainable fiscal path. This predates Trump, as we’ve already said, it can be traced right the way back to George W. Bush, but there’s no plan to do anything about it. And that’s risky because if you are spending more on debt interest and more each year relative to your defense budget, you are constrained. And that means that you can’t actually modernize your armed forces to the extent necessary to achieve deterrence.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I’m a little bit more worried because I think there is a plan. They do have a plan, and I don’t think it’s going to work. And their plan is—

PETER ROBINSON: What’s the plan? What’s the plan?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The plan is that you cannot touch entitlements because it’ll destroy a Republican administration because they’ll demagogue at the left and it’s just taboo. And it’s also the center of the new national populist party of middle class, deindustrialized America. They depend on these entitlements, at least that’s a prevailing view. So they feel there’s the administration. Yes, they feel that they’re going to get revenue, and Niall’s right, by deregulation. And that didn’t—we saw that with Reagan. Didn’t, you know, you can’t balance a budget just growing your way out because the more money. But they think, and I’m critical of this, so I’m not endorsing it. They think they’re going to get 10 to 15 trillion dollars in foreign investment. All these people come over here and they promise 5 trillion and nobody ever, ever calls them up a month later and says, where’s the—

NIALL FERGUSON: Exactly.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: You know, they just promise it in the mail. The second thing is they think they’re going to—I really like the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, but yes, he says we’re worth $200 trillion in assets of federal properties and leases and coal and natural gas and we could be doing, you know, 25 million barrels, all this. So they’re going to out-energy everybody and sell it all over the world. He’s promised so much natural gas to Japan and Europe, liquefied natural gas. People say, where’s it going to come from? But they think they’re going to literally—

PETER ROBINSON: Dig their way out of that.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes, they’re going to. And they’re going to get tariff revenue. They’re going to get a trillion dollars. Now, I think it’s down to 400 billion. They don’t talk about the depressed economies if that were to happen. But nevertheless, they think we’re going to get soon half a trillion dollars here from tariffs. We’re going to get AI and all crypto and all these new technologies. We’re going to get this $10 trillion in foreign investment. We’re going to get all this energy and we’re going to have 7, 8 billion in revenue and we’re going to cut the federal workforce, but we won’t touch entitlements. And therefore it’ll work. I don’t think it will.

PETER ROBINSON: That’s what they—that’s no good. Hope is not a strategy. Isn’t that the old phrase?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They have it penciled out. You talk to them?

NIALL FERGUSON: Sure.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They say, here’s this money coming in. The treasury secretary, didn’t he say we were looking at $600 billion? That’s right.

PETER ROBINSON: Of course, the tariff revenue now is much lower than expected. It’s only in the tens of billions.

NIALL FERGUSON: Probably going to come annually at close to certainly hundreds, though. The trouble is it’s likely to decay over time as the international economy adjusts.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And they think they’re going to cut not a trillion, but they say they’ve cut $150 billion in the workforce. So I mean, they have all worked out. I just don’t—big issue is growth.

NIALL FERGUSON: Scott Bessent said he was going to deliver 3% growth, a 3% of GDP deficit. And I think both of those targets are highly unlikely to be met. And I suspect he knows it. Indeed, the growth rate is trending down as we speak. The labor market is showing signs of weakening. And remember, the problem with having a very large deficit and a large debt is that long-term interest rates tend to remain high even if the Fed is cutting short-term rates. That’s bad news for people with mortgages.

PETER ROBINSON: Exactly where we are.

NIALL FERGUSON: And the housing situation, $3 billion is another cause for concern. So once again emphasizing the shadow side, there’s a sense in which this can go wrong. Not just because of the tariffs, which tend to attract most of the criticism, but because the economy’s slowing. And with that slowing, your chance of getting out of jail with 3% growth becomes ever more remote. Result, the fiscal probably gets worse.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: For this to work, they need four and a half or five. I don’t think they’re going to—

PETER ROBINSON: And nobody believes AI is going to add more than a percent, maybe in the short run.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I mean the $3 billion in interest—

PETER ROBINSON: Per day in the growth numbers.

The Fiscal Challenge and Government Shutdowns

STEPHEN KOTKIN: I got an idea. How about the big, beautiful fiscal insanity, the one piece of legislation the Trump administration has passed. You know, executive orders are not legislation, they’re not permanent. You want to talk about impact and legacy and consequence. Executive orders can be reversed. We saw the idiotic executive orders from that previous guy, whatever his name was, and where are they now? They’re in the trash heap of history.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: You mean that person said, “I have a pen and I have a phone.”

STEPHEN KOTKIN: We’re trots, right?

PETER ROBINSON: Biden just was.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: So, you know, so here we are talking initially about this consequential presidency and now all of a sudden we have one piece of legislation which was a continuation of fiscal insanity. You know, when I had to go to the voting booth in 2024, I had certain cultural issues in play that Victor has enumerated quite well. But what I had in play from a structural long term perspective was fiscal insanity or fiscal insanity. Which one did I want?

And I was going to get one from the Democratic side, which would have been a continuation of their fiscal insanity. Or I was going to get fiscal insanity from the Republican side, which was a continuation interrupted by the Democratic continuation of fiscal insanity. And so if you don’t have the political will to right the fiscal problem, if you have a kind of hail Mary 100 yard pass with time running out where nobody actually can catch the ball. That’s sort of what I heard you say the strategy was.

I don’t know how this is a consequential presidency except for taking things down in turn. You know, things die by suicide. Civilizations, as Toynbee said, don’t die from external enemies, however significant that is. And so it’s more than worrying.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: But we’re talking right now when the government of the United States has been shut down by the left because the Affordable Care Act, which they had approved earlier, is now under the Trump budget, questioning or suspending this tax incentive. And it’s a mild, mild cut. And if you look at the Affordable Act, where it was with Trump before he left office the first time, it’s about 20% more larger than it was.

We have an $8 billion Medi-Cal bill that we bailed out California. So what the Democrats, I mean, it’s just, they’re shutting the entire government over a very marginal cut. It’s not even a cut. It’s an adjustment to these entitlements. So if you said to yourself, well, we’re going to do what was Social Security? We’re going to say that people over $100,000 have to pay higher taxes on it or whatever, you would have a revolt. They would shut down the government.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Gingrich shut the government down over health care. There was a shutdown of the government, a second one over health care. This is the third of four shutdowns, significant shutdowns over health care. The fourth one was over the border wall, as you’ll recall. Yes, so the border wall was the exception, but the entitlement problem. Let’s imagine that I’m not pro Democratic Party.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I’m not talking about Democratic Party.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Since I’m not a member of that party. Let’s imagine I’m not pro Democratic Party, but let’s imagine that I’m pro America. This is the 250th anniversary of this great republic. And if I’m pro America, I’m looking for solutions, right? But I’m looking for university reform, not university punishment. I’m looking for entitlement reform, not a war on Twitter or on Blue Sky.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Proposed for them to accept.

China’s Challenges and Cold War Two

NIALL FERGUSON: The fiscal problem, as we’ve said, predates Trump, and it’s bipartisan. So clearly his consequential nature is not that he’s going to achieve root and branch fiscal reform. The question, I think is, number one, does he get the better of the axis of authoritarians, and in particular China. That we don’t know yet. It may be that he does because remember, we’ve talked about America’s problems, the fiscal problems of America. Let me tell you about China’s fiscal problems.

PETER ROBINSON: You know what?

NIALL FERGUSON: The deficit is even larger in China if you look at local government debt. The economic problems of China are compounded by far worse demographic trends, their population likely halves between now and the end of the century. So China has its own problems. Russia’s problems are even greater. Iran, the regime is on the brink of collapse. North Korea, it’s kind of a rounding error.

So the consequential nature of this presidency here, I agree with you will only be clear when we know the outcome of Cold War Two, when we know who wins. If China wins, then we’ll look back and say President Trump, for all his flair on social media, had no solution to the strategic threat that he himself identified. But if, as happened in the 1980s, a president reviled by the left who presided over a growing deficit, nevertheless emerges as the winner of the Cold War, they were a good consequential.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: He rebuilt the military started under Carter and he rebuilt. Look at the military. When you were writing those speeches, where is that on the horizon? We got nothing on the horizon except reduction of our scientific funding.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. When he came into office, we were told that we have 45,000 shortfall. It was going to be permanent because people are fat now.

PETER ROBINSON: They are 45,000 shortfall in the army.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: In the military general, we were told that there’s gangs, that they use drugs that they don’t want to fight. All of a sudden we’ve had record. Every branch of the military has met all of their quotas in nine months. It’s the first time the army has—

PETER ROBINSON: Met its quota in over a decade.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: All of a sudden we’re told, you cannot question Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop Raytheon, they’re the big suppliers. And all of a sudden it’s all this and, or all these small people with off the shelf stuff. They’re really recalibrating.

Defense Technology and Silicon Valley

NIALL FERGUSON: And ask the people who are at the cutting edge of defense technology, who did they want to be President? Kamala Harris, Donald Trump? That is a short conversation. In fact, one of the major reasons, and you know, Steve, that people in this part of the world, in Silicon Valley switched from Democrat to Republican, was because they saw where the Biden administration was going with AI regulation and they realized it was a disaster waiting to happen. So I think you can’t do this.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Every time where Trump is not doing well. But hey, look what Biden did. Well, look what Obama did. That was the choice, not a choice. That means you have to say that we are on a better trajectory just because the other side, let’s be clear.

NIALL FERGUSON: We are clearly on a better trajectory. Kamala Harris had somehow won the 2024 election. Just if you need viewers just to kind of get a reality check, just run the counterfactual in your mind. How would the United States be doing today if Kamala Harris were commander in chief, President of the United States?

She’s obliged us by publishing absolutely atrocious memoir to remind us of her many defects as a human being. So let’s just be relieved. You can criticize Trump and I have on this show, he has not addressed the fiscal problem. There are ways in which the administration is poorly run. But when the choice was between that and Kamala Harris, I don’t think the United States didn’t have a choice. There was no alternative.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: You had to have history, consequences. The way trends are going globally, America’s 250th America, you’re talking about an election I’ve lived through. I don’t know how many elections in this country, just about as many as Victor has. Although maybe he’s got me on one.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think so.

NIALL FERGUSON: I don’t think people will look back.

The Crisis in American Universities

PETER ROBINSON: I cannot have the three of you here and not at least go one round on universities. Two quotations. Christopher Eisgruber, president of Princeton, the Trump administrator, your old friend, the Trump administration is creating, quote, “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, noting that the federal government subsidizes universities through student loans, research funding and tax exemptions. Quote, “American universities have become a self-governing cartel. They do exactly what cartels do. They’re stagnating and going crazy in spectacular ways.” Close quote. Victor, go first.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: All Mr. Eisgruber had to do and these elite college presidents is say the following, go to the faculty Senate and say, you know what? We have the lowest popularity in history. 26% of the public have confidence in higher education. It’s true. And we have 70 to 80% A’s now. And people in Silicon Valley question among other employers whether the graduates say from Stanford are better than Georgia Tech or Southern. They’re not in certain areas.

So he goes to the faculty senate. The college president says, you know what, we’ve been kind of gouging the federal government. Let’s just say we’re going to live within 15 to 20% overhead. And, you know, the Supreme Court, 40, 50, 60. Yes. The Supreme Court said, you know, in 2023, we can’t use race. And we’ve been breaking that law. We have racial graduations. We have, we call them theme houses, but they’re segregated dorms, and we’re breaking that. So we’re not going to do that.

And here at Stanford, we chased out a federal judge and hijacked his lecturer, and we can’t do that. And we had people out here that were supposed to have one night protesting for Hamas, and they were there for four months and they trashed the. So we can’t. We have to have freedom of speech. And he went down almost everything in that. And then he said this.

NIALL FERGUSON: And I—

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Have to do all this because this awful Trump is making me do it. But really he’s saying, take Trump out of the question. And these things are the only things that are going to restore. So it’s not what has to be done, it’s who’s making the people do it.

If it came organically from these presidents and said Stanford and Yale has no reputation, 80%, you know, we dropped the SAT for four years. We’re these gut studies courses. We have no freedom of speech. We’re gouging the federal government. The tuition goes up higher than the rate of inflation. We’ve got $1.7 trillion in federal debt.

If they just said that, and I’m going to do the following with your help, faculty, and then he just took the Trump blueprint, you’d have no thing. So the issue is really Trump interfering and saying, if you take a federal dollar, unlike Hillsdale College, then I can tell you how to spend it. If you want to tell me f you, then go do what Hillsdale does. And they say, we can’t. We can’t do what Hillsdale does. We’re a major global university. So that’s what it is.

PETER ROBINSON: Stephen. And then Niall go.

The Threat to American Universities

STEPHEN KOTKIN: The threat to American universities is leadership at American universities. Victor is 100% correct. That doesn’t justify Trump’s approach of extortion, blackmail, misuse of federal power. He’s very good at identifying problems, but I need solutions. The problems are real, but where are the solutions?

So Victor is right. They have to come from the universities themselves. Absolutely. And they haven’t come from the universities themselves. And so Trump is identifying a very real problem that universities must address because Trump, again, doesn’t intend to fix these things and is not going to fix them. He’s just having a blast.

But at the same time, America’s universities are some of our absolute biggest assets. Why are 300,000 Chinese here? Because American universities are a waste of time? Why are there 1.1 million foreign students here? Because American universities are a waste of time? No, because they’re some of the biggest assets that any power has ever seen in history.

I want reform, not destruction. I want better leadership. I want just mediocre leadership. I don’t even need to have outstanding generational talent in leadership. We have had a turnaround here at Stanford. I’m impressed with the direction of the current leadership here and I think John Levin, our President Levin, is doing the right thing.

I spent 33 years at Princeton University, a life of Jesus. And I understand that leadership well. And I support Victor’s critique. Of course I did. 33 years, life of Jesus. I did leave just before crucifixion and the reason was I was very doubtful about resurrection on the third day once I was crucified. And I luckily landed here on my feet and now I have these amazing colleagues here.

But what’s the solution? Where are solutions? I don’t want to hear about the problems only. I don’t want to hear Trump applying greater pressure, more pressure. This pressure. They make concessions. He doesn’t believe the concessions are real. They get in this tit for tat escalation. I want to have us get to a better place.

If they’re violating the law, they need to be punished for that. If they’re admitting on the basis of race, that needs to be punished. If there’s some fat in the science labs that needs to be cut out. But fundamental science is very, very expensive and that expense does not come from private sector alone and it doesn’t come from tuition money. If Hillsdale had 15 three hundred million dollar science labs, it would not be able to self fund. And so you want to do big science because you want to be a serious country and anywhere you have to compete, not just with China, you need to have big money in science run properly. I need that. Where is that coming from?

PETER ROBINSON: I make one observation and flip it to Niall. I observe that although we could use reform in the universities and the leadership has to come, it is only now—

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Happening because of one reason.

PETER ROBINSON: Trump has been crude and blunderbuss and—

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Now we get a gun.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: The Harvard alumni, they’re also an important pressure.

PETER ROBINSON: Yes, but only now. The Dallas—

The Reality of Institutional Change

NIALL FERGUSON: All you’re saying, Steve, is that this could magically have happened by itself. But the reality is that if Kamala Harris had been elected, none of this would be happening. On the contrary, you got a problem.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: With Kamala Harris here.

NIALL FERGUSON: There was a problem, and I didn’t vote for her. She was a terrible candidate. But my point is that none of this would be happening, not here, not at Harvard, if it weren’t for the pressure that President Trump has exerted on these institutions. Now, what offends you is the disruptive way that President Trump behaves. But if an institution is effectively a wholly owned affiliate of the Democratic Party, what else is he going to do?

STEPHEN KOTKIN: The deep state itself.

NIALL FERGUSON: Go to Washington. How many people in Washington, D.C. voted for Donald Trump? Hardly any. Like Harvard, the federal government is a wholly owned affiliate of the Democratic Party. Look at the opinion surveys at an institution like Stanford or Harvard, the tiny number of professors who are Republicans, the overwhelming support for Democratic or progressive policies.

So Trump has to do something, because the instinctive tendency within these institutions is not to change, is to carry on engaging in racial discrimination in admission, is to trash meritocracy. That’s the reality. So you may not like the methods, but I’m struggling to imagine what else would get through to a place like Harvard.

I taught at Harvard for 12 years. No, let me finish. You had your say. I watched a great university destroy itself by trashing meritocracy, by adopting instead the whole plethora of discrimination that they called diversity, equity, and inclusion. I saw the corruption in their admission system, and I watched the standards slide. I watched the politicization of the humanities departments, a relentless politicization, which you also observed, because it happened at Princeton, too, and it happened here.

Now, what was going to stop that? Were the professors going to wake up one day and say, “Oh, we’ve been so wicked, we haven’t stayed true to the principles of a university”? No, that was never going to happen. Something had to shock this country’s universities into returning to the fundamental principles of how the university should be running, in the same way that you have to shock the federal bureaucracy into changing its ways because it had inhaled the DEI doctrine just as much.

So when President Trump is being disruptive, you know, polite, professorial types say, “How shocking.” But what else would have worked? What else would really change these institutions?

STEPHEN KOTKIN: And disruptive is quite the euphemism. Let me tell you this.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Can I say one last thing very quickly?

STEPHEN KOTKIN: Go ahead.

The Decline of Academic Standards

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What I was saying was not abstract. I taught in the California State University system, Cal State Fresno, for many years.

PETER ROBINSON: Yes. The populist middle rung, not UC.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And I taught 21 years. When I came in, ’84, I had 10 authors in Introduction to Western Humanities assigned. In 2004, I was down to two. Two meaning? Meaning I couldn’t assign three because they couldn’t finish the work. And I was told that I was giving too many—I was giving too many Cs. They should have been Ds and Fs.

PETER ROBINSON: You were asking too much of your students.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes, and my grades had inflated. And then when I would give particular students an F, I would get a call from a person. I won’t mention the name, but they came from a Center For or a Program For. And you named DEI. It was a prototype. Saying to me, “This person was a very nice person. This person is the first person in their family. This person.” And if you do this, you’ll ruin a life. Exactly.

And I said, “I’ve got about 15 calls from you.” And it wasn’t the football coach. They did that a little bit. But my point I’m getting at is when you talk about the excellence of the university, it’s not static. It started here, and it goes here.

When I say one last thing: in an esoteric field like Classics, I would hire—I hired nine classics professors over 21 years. I finally asked them, “Could you please, when you come, translate a page from Caesar and a page from Lysias, which are the easiest Greek and Latin?” These were from the elite universities. And the final candidate that put me over the edge says, “If you ask me to do that, I’m going to complain to the American Philological Association that you’re harassing me.” And they could not read it. They could not read.

PETER ROBINSON: They couldn’t read Caesar?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: No. And if you look at most of Classics departments today in the United States—not most, but they—what they’re turning out and they’re not even requiring, at some of the best universities, Greek as a required language in Classics. So when you say that we have these great—we do. And we started up here, and we’re down to here, and everybody’s down here below us. And you’re right, but we’re on a trajectory, as Niall is afraid of, that we’re going to be right at their level.

The Need for Solutions

STEPHEN KOTKIN: It’s all diagnosis and not enough solutions for me. So let me tell you a story.

PETER ROBINSON: Stephen, we got five. Please.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: No, no, no. I had cancer.

PETER ROBINSON: Yeah.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: And I had three different cancers. And I’m alive today. Why? Because my doctors had MDs from Trump University or because my doctors had MDs from Harvard all during the DEI era? Those Federalist Society members are conservative attorneys, judges, professors of law. Do they have JDs from Trump University or do they have JDs from Harvard University? They have them from Harvard University.

NIALL FERGUSON: But Steve, nobody’s arguing that Harvard should be abolished.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: And so you’re giving me stories about nonsense that I’ve spent 40 years fighting and I’m asking for solutions because we have the greatest biomedical establishment in the history of the universe and I don’t want them to be attacked because of the very diagnosis that I share with you and which I’ve experienced firsthand. You don’t have to tell me about culture wars and the hard left at universities and imposing orthodoxy. I mean, I’ve spent 40 years studying communism, so I know the subject. I’m asking for: How do we get to a better place with these institutions?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We just said, we just said some outside inanimate force, like Shane the gunslinger came in and he said, “I have a certain methodology that’s abhorrent to you, but it will be a catalyst.” And then he rode off and there was change. If the university presidents had just swallowed their pride and ego and narcissism and said, “These were my ideas and I opposed Donald Trump” and then just quietly implemented it, we would have—

Is America in Decline or Poised for Renewal?

PETER ROBINSON: Last question. 1979, we go from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to 1989, the Berlin Wall falls. And in that decade in between, just one decade, we undergo a renewal in this country.

Take that. Then we have this from Charles Murray: “America in 1789 was unique geographically in the characteristics of its self-selected population and position at the apogee of Scottish Enlightenment. The creation of a limited government was a one-time event, never to be repeated. What we have seen over the last 60 years is not a setback from which the American experiment can recover, but a downward spiral that was inevitable.”

And I close with this, Cynthia Ozick, the 97-year-old novelist. This is a woman who lived through the Depression, the Second World War, who saw the horrors of the Holocaust as the newsreels came in. And here she says, this is a recent interview: “This is a good country, it’s a great country. And now it’s disintegrating.”

Next July we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Is this project winding down or is there scope for renewal? Brief answers.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think we’re in the nadir and we’re climbing out of it. We’ve had this in 1861, we had it in 1932, we had it in 1939. I mean, when the war started, we had the 17th largest military army. Portugal was larger than ours. And when we finished five years later, we had a larger navy and air force than every belligerent put together and a GDP that was bigger than all of theirs. So we can recover. And I see signs that we’re on the upward.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: I sign on to what Victor just said and I’m proud to be his colleague. And I think that America has more than enough potential for renewal. But renewal is not an automatic thing that’s going to happen. It’s a matter of citizenship. As Victor has written very eloquently, we are America, so it renews either because we help renew it or we watch it go down because we don’t understand and appreciate our own citizenship and agency.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: That’s true, sir.

PETER ROBINSON: Niall Ferguson receives the final word.

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I’m the only person at this table who volunteered to be an American. Yes. And so in a sense, the stakes are higher for me. My concern is not the quality of the cancer treatment that you received, it’s the quality of the cancer treatment 40 years from now. And that seems to me to be the argument for disruptive challenges to a status quo that was rotten.

If Americans stop worrying about their republic, if they become complacent, then I’m worried. The great thing about this country is for 249 years people have been worrying that the Republic can’t hold, that we’re Rome and that’s the right worry to have. As long as we have that worry and keep asking ourselves, “Can we keep the Republic?” And as long as the Constitution continues to function with its separation of power as the stroke of genius at the heart of its success, we’ll be fine. On this, I think the three of us agree.

STEPHEN KOTKIN: God bless America.

PETER ROBINSON: Stephen Kotkin, Victor Davis Hanson and Niall Ferguson, thank you.

Related Posts

• Transcript: Vice President JD Vance Remarks At TPUSA’s AmericaFest 2025
• AmericaFest 2025: Tucker Carlson on America First Movement (Transcript)
• Prof. John Mearsheimer: Unintended Consequences of a Meaningless War (Transcript)
• “It’s Really Not About Drugs” – Max Blumenthal on Mario Nawfal Podcast (Transcript)
• Erika Kirk’s Interview on Honestly with Bari Weiss (Transcript)