Transcript: Victor Davis Hanson: President Donald J. Trump and the Fate of the United States

Cut taxes like Reagan did and then say that you’re going to control spending or cut. Reagan didn’t do it. So he got deficits and so did George W. Bush. The only person that’s balanced a budget for three years since 1970-73, I think Nixon did, was Bill Clinton and he made a deal with Gingrich.

Then there’s the MAGA protocol that you don’t get involved with optional Middle East wars, so you don’t want to get involved in Ukraine and you don’t want to go in Syria. But last time he inherited sort of an uneasy world where he had to restore deterrence. This time it’s worse. So he’s inheriting a world following the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Chinese balloon, two theater wars, a weakened military. There are going to be people who test his resolve.

For example, he says if they don’t turn the hostages over, he’s going to have to unload on them. And everybody supports that. So what I’m getting at is the MAGA people are going to have to understand that to restore deterrence, so you don’t have to even think about getting involved in optional wars, you’re going to have to use force sometimes.

And you saw the issue about the H1B visas. That’s another challenge. MAGA says we’re not going to bring in foreigners to do the work Americans can do. Vivek and Elon say, but we’re going to bring in people that we need in Silicon Valley. Between those two poles, you’re going to have to find a compromise. I think the compromise is if they’re only coming in with BAs, there’s a lot of Americans who can do that. If they’re coming in with masters and PhDs, and they’re unique in their field, then of course bring them in.

These are just three examples. The cause of this is that Republicans had not won the popular vote in 20 years, since George W. Bush, who barely did it in 2004, and they had lost seven out of the last eight popular votes. So to break that legacy, they had to expand the party. It was really amazing. Trump got record numbers of youth for the Republican Party, blacks, Hispanics, and of course disaffected Democrats. He brought in the tech money. But to do that, you’re expanding the people who have a seat at the table. So there’s a lot of people who reflect views that were important for him getting elected, but they’re going to be in contradiction with the hardcore MAGA base.

Trump’s Rhetorical Strategy

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Yeah. You’ve already mentioned a number of things that I want to talk about in greater detail, especially the Cabinet, which is a huge topic of discussion right now. Then there are these theater wars. I think this problem of the extent to which Trump is beholden to these various MAGA interests is also interesting. I’d really like to start, though, with your podcast, actually.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Because it’s something that we discussed briefly before we started rolling, and it also connects to some of these geopolitical issues. And one question has to do with Trump’s rhetoric. And first of all, for our listeners who might not be familiar with this, what is the question about whether or not Canada should be made into a state, and where does that fit into Trump’s platform right now and his rhetorical strategy?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: There’s two things going on with Trump when he trolls. He looks around the spectrum of foreign policy challenges, and he has certain things he thinks need to be addressed. And he knows it’s not eccentric that other people have mentioned it.

For example, people for a long time have talked about, since World War II, that Greenland is in North America, and it’s very important. The United States needs extra rights there to base. Then he looks at Panama, and he looks back at the treaty that Carter signed in 1979, and it gave primacy for the United States to go through at a discount rate, and it was supposed to be free of foreign influence. And he sees China there.

Then he looks at Canada and he says, they’re under our nuclear umbrella. They’re not paying their fair share of the defense. The border is open, and they’ve got a radical Trudeau. Then he looks at Mexico and he says, they’ve got $63 billion in remittances coming in. It’s their largest source of foreign exchange. And yet that comes from anywhere from 12 to 20 million illegal aliens, many of them who are on public assistance, that we’re subsidizing the largest source of foreign exchange, and yet they let caravans come right through from Guatemala.

So he sees all these problems. Then he starts to bring attention to them by being “Art of the Deal” outrageous. So instead of saying, “We’re very worried” – if he was a sober and judicious politician, he’d say, “I’m very worried about China. There are some ambiguities in the treaty, and this is a concern, and I’m bringing a bipartisan commission to address it.” No, he’s going to say, “China’s taking it over. We might have to go in there. I won’t rule out force.”

Then he’ll say, “Why doesn’t Greenland just come join the United States? We’ll buy it.” Or he’ll say, “The Gulf of Mexico, why isn’t it the Gulf of America?” Or then he’ll say, “Canada, we can make it the 51st state.”

So that’s outrageous and that gets attention. And then people start to discuss the real problem because there are real problems here. And then there’s another element of trolling because the more you start to talk about it and dismiss Trump as boisterous, divisive, eccentric, you start to look at other realities.

Take the “Gulf of America.” Trump says, “It’s time for it to be Gulf of America. How you like that, Mexico?” But then you look at the coastline. The coastline of the Gulf is 1700 miles on the US side, and it’s 1700 miles on the Mexican side. It’s been Gulf of Mexico for 400 years. And the left introduced into the popular discourse the idea that there are no sacrosanct names. If you have the Woodrow Wilson Center, change it. The Hollowed Boat hall, change it. The Earl Warren center at Berkeley, change it.

In fact, right out here, maybe 200 yards from where we’re speaking were my addresses at the Hoover Tower. I come in one day and it’s the Junipero Serra Plaza. Next time I come, it’s James Stanford Plaza. So he’s saying, “Well, they change names, they do it, not me. So I’m just going to change the name. They’ve had 400 years, it will be the Gulf of America. We have the same amount of coastline, it’s fair.”

And that gets people upset. And then Mexico gets upset. And then suddenly Mexico says, “We’ll stop that caravan and let’s negotiate.”

And with Panama, he says, “You think we’re an imperial power. You’re against imperialism and Yankees. You brought in the Chinese, they’re worse imperialists than we are. You’re a colony of China.” And that gets further ire.

Then he says to the Danish, “You’re lecturing me that I’m getting in your internal affairs. You’re a little tiny country and you are a colonial power. You’ve got this big continent and you’re acting like you’re a 19th century colonizer, and this is coming from the EU. The distance from New York to Greenland is shorter than from Greenland to Copenhagen. And Greenland’s in North America. So it’s 19th century Europeans coming into North America and colonizing. And I want to let the people of Greenland decide.”

And the same thing with Canada. He’s saying, “Maybe you should defend yourself because we don’t want people to be our colony and we have all this one-way trade with you. I guess we’re a mercantile colonial power where the British learned that colonialism didn’t work. So either be part of us or just stop it. Just go your own way. But if you don’t and you want to have symmetrical relations, you better close the border and you better have reciprocal trade charges and you better pay up if you want to be a partner. But if you want to be a colonial subject, then keep doing what you want and we’ll treat you that way.”

So there’s irony in all of these, but the point of all of them is to bring attention in an eccentric fashion and get something done quickly.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: I hope that even our listeners who strongly dislike Trump can at least accept that he has a tremendous degree of emotional intelligence in a certain sense and certainly a tremendous rhetorical ability. I would like to keep talking about it a bit more just because I find it so fascinating. I’m a podcast host, but I don’t think I’m the most gifted rhetorician or anything like that. But what I wanted to ask about was where the Panama Canal and the Panama Treaty fits into this whole nexus of concepts.

Trump’s Foreign Policy Approach

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, China has, as you know, the Silk Road Belt and Road Initiative, and they have targeted Latin America, Central and South America, and they are trying to get around the United States symmetrical tariffs. So the United States will be telling them, you are going to pay penny for penny, dollar for dollar, what you charge us. If we have a Chevy truck going in there, the same price is going to be.

And if you look at all of the tariffs down the line, they’re all asymmetrical, they’re all ossified from a period in which the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, said we have to give them leeway. And then Bill Clinton did, and so did George W. Because they’re going to be prosperous and capitalist and they’ll turn into a democracy. It didn’t quite work out.

So Trump comes along and said that didn’t work and it’s not fair. And what they’re doing to get around these, they’re going to Latin America and Mexico and they’re giving them their raw product or their not quite assembled product, and then they’re assembling it in those countries and sending it in, under, in case of Mexico, under NAFTA or under less tariffs.

And then second of all, nothing comes free from the Chinese. So they have a strong presence in an area where, under the Monroe Doctrine, the good neighbor policy, whatever you want to call it, we’ve had interests there because if we get an existential crisis and we want six frigates from Virginia to get to San Diego, that’s the quickest way.

So we need to go. If we have a big problem on the horizon, we need to get over to Japan and we send them there. And they say, well, wait a minute, you’ve got to wait, you’ve got to get in line and you’ve got to pay. And we say, no, no, no, we cut in the head. That’s what we did when we signed a treaty. So that’s what he’s trying to do.

Trump’s Unpredictability as Strategy

And the thing about it is he reflects human nature in the raw form, and that’s why people despise him. So you take certain things that have happened so far. Why in the world would Hamas, who hates him and feels they can talk to Biden and Blinken and Sullivan, why would they be more likely to get a deal? In fear of him coming in? In other words, the reductionist answer is they know that they’re getting away with murder and he won’t let them do that.

Why all of a sudden is the Iranian prime minister on television saying there’s no—we never tried to kill the President of the United States. We never did. He had all summer to say that. And why is he saying now we have no problem with the United States and we have not enriched Iran and we seek peace. This is exactly the opposite rhetoric they have been giving.

And why all of a sudden did the rebels think that they could take out the Assad regime and that the United States apparently would be for that, or as it was ambiguous.

So he’s got this unpredictability, and people and unpredictability, according to his opponents, think that’s dangerous. But that’s not the way the real world works. When somebody is unpredictable, then you’re more careful about them.

And all of these concessions that he’s gotten before he’s entered office are not because people like him and they’re not because they were forced to do it. They were all, as he sees it, and we can either adjudicate it wrong or right, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

The Art of the Deal Approach

So he sees these problems that have been festering that are asymmetrical. Then he goes in Art of the Deal, he says it in his book, way overboard, and then he negotiates back down. And the problem then is symmetrical. And it wouldn’t be that way if there was not an asymmetry.

So why is the Danish government right now offering to give a billion dollars to Greenland and putting on the royal coat of arms of the Danish monarchy? Why are they putting Greenland imagery on? Do they think it’s, well, we were forced to do that, or do they think, well, actually, we’ve been taking advantage of these 50,000 people. They don’t have much say. They have this big, we’re not going to spend any money, and that’s just the way it is.

So that’s how he looks for people, for vulnerabilities. But he also knows that to avoid the impression that he’s an imperialist or a bully or crazy, there’s always an element there of the targeted party knowing what they’ve been doing is wrong or it’s not going to be convincing what they’re doing.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: So two things that are, two ways in which you described Trump are that he embodies raw human nature and that he’s unpredictable. And you said that a lot of people despise him for this. One of his most outspoken critics, at least in places I’m listening is Sam Harris. And Sam Harris is often talking about these things and how Trump is unstatesmanly. I mean, you can’t trust him, any of these things. And all these things preclude or should preclude his being president.

And I started out by asking whether there’s anything you’re worried about coming into his presidency, and you gave me a great list of challenges he’s going to be facing. But I’m wondering if there are any ways in which you think his embodiment of this…

The Deep State and Political Accountability

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Could I ask you a question? And as an answer, sure. So you’ve been here with your podcast for last four years. Was there anything that worried you about the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ? Did you ever have a conversation like this where you said it’s very scary if the CIA has contractors still working for them, and yet they say that they’re all 51 retired authorities?

And they get a call from Biden’s campaign aide, Anthony Blinken, who calls the former CIA director Mike Morell up. And he says, “You know what? We’ve got a debate coming out and we only got two weeks before this election and this laptop is a bombshell. There are things that are really going to hurt us. So I want you guys to say that it has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” Got to have an escape, because we know the FBI has it and the FBI’s already authenticated it. But we want you to tell the nation in a letter – all you sober and judicious, calm people – that this is Russian disinformation, but just say it has all the hallmarks because we know Leon Panetta and Brennan and Clapper and the rest of them will not be telling the truth.

And then Biden waves this thing up in the debate and says, “How dare you!” Or the FBI was working with Facebook. And as Mark Zuckerberg said, they would be hysterical. The administration would call up and say, “We don’t want you to report this.” And then the FBI would be consulting to suppress the news.

Or you might have said, “Wow, Joe Biden kept saying, why isn’t Merrick Garland prosecuting Trump? He’s told us he never talked to anybody.” And then on one day in November, I think it was 2022, in the same day Nathan Wade, the counsel of Fanny Willis is meeting with the White House counsel. The same day Jack Smith is appointed special counsel. And the same day Mr. Coangelo from the DOJ decides – he who came from Letitia James, a prosecutor, and then he went to the DOJ number three – then he decides that very same day he’s going to resign to go to work for Alvin Bragg.

So my point is this, that everybody was worried about what Donald Trump might do or he might politicize. And I was watching the confirmation hearings the other day, but it’s because of the way he presents things. But if you’re sober and judicious and you have a particular type of resume, you can be exempt. And nobody says anything, nobody’s ever said anything about Joe Biden.

I’m very worried about Joe Biden. He told the country six times he wasn’t going to pardon his son. He pardoned him with a future pardon. Anything comes up in the next 10 years. So if we find out tomorrow that Hunter Biden didn’t just not report $7 million, but he didn’t report another $10 million, it doesn’t matter.

Double Standards in Washington

I think a lot of it is the way people look at what they define in Washingtonian terms as “sober and judicious and careful” and what they don’t. And so if you’ve got the FBI director talking to the deputy attorney general about how they can wear a wire and trap the President of the United States and show that he’s cognitively challenged, as Rod Rosenstein did along with Andrew McCabe, and then you can get the 25th Amendment evoked, that is fine.

And so is the next president, who now the Wall Street Journal tells us, after talking to 50 sources, that they’ve known for four years that the President was debilitated, cognitively unfit, and yet his press secretary said he was fit as a fiddle.

So I think that’s why people, that explains the election, that we have all of these people with these titles and these resumes from these Ivy League schools and a particular comportment and vocabulary syntax. And they have done things that if they didn’t have that veneer, they would be put in jail.

So then we have another guy come along and says they’re all crooks, they’re just nuts. Fanny Willis is just nuts. They’ve never charged anybody. Everybody calls up a registrar if you’re angry about an election. Of course they do. I didn’t say invent them, I said they’re there, go find them. Everybody says that.

Or Letitia James, have you ever charged a person with overvaluing real estate and then the loan was made and you paid it off on time with interest to the delight of the Deutsche Bank? No. I could go on.

The Lawfare Against Trump

But my point is that in those lawfare cases, in every single case, three things were true:

Number one, if Donald Trump was not the target, they would have never charged him.

Number two, if he had just said in January, “I’m never going to run again, I’m done,” they would have never charged him.

And number three, they will never charge anybody, famous or not famous, with those crimes. They don’t exist.

If you have some minor little official in New York that has a tryst with some person who’s blackmailing, so he has a non-disclosure form, they’re not going to go back in there and say you didn’t report that as a campaign expense. Even the feds didn’t want to do it. They said there’s nothing there until Alvin Bragg with Mr. Coangelo’s help.

The MAGA Movement and the System

So I guess that’s where the big divide is in the country right now. As you look at all the confirmation hearings of Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and the rest of them, there was a common denominator: “Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, where’s your Harvard, Yale, Stanford degree? You don’t have any. Where’s your ‘I’m not quite recall that’ or ‘Let me think about that, it’s problematic’?”

No, it’s this blunt, brash, “We need to get warriors. We don’t need generals.” That kind of stuff. So it’s what this MAGA movement was. It was a holistic assault on a system that has become calcified and ossified, and it has no connection with reality.

California’s Leadership Problems

So when you look in California, all these sober and judicious people had this system where the mayor was in Ghana, and the deputy mayor that she appointed for safety was basically under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat to the city council.

The fire chief has been promising that there was 70% DEI hiring, and she paraded herself as the first LGBTQ person. And she said, “Well, I don’t know why there wasn’t any water in the hydrants. That’s not my fault. My job doesn’t start until the water comes out.”

And then you had the assistant fire chief making $300,000 saying, “Well, if I go into a person’s house and the male says, ‘carry me,’ I can’t carry him out.” So, Robinson, you have a heart attack in your kitchen, and the fire person says, “I’m sorry, I can’t carry you out. You’re in the wrong place.”

And then we had the public works director of water and power, Ms. Quiones, who gets – she was so valuable, they had to double her salary to $750,000. And she came from a checkered career at the PG&E. And what does she do? She has a 120 million gallon lake that could have saved Pacific Palisades, and it’s sitting there for nine months, empty, with 300 hydrants empty.

And what do they all say? “How dare you say that? This might be because we were hired for reasons other than our illustrious meritocratic record. How dare you say that? You know that I don’t have a right to go to Ghana, right when I’m warned there’s Santa Ana record winds on our horizon and it’s dry.”

Or you have a governor who says, “Yes, you voted for $7.5 billion in water bonds. And no, I’m not going to build the Sites Reservoir, the Los Banos Grande Reservoir, and the Temperance Flat Reservoir and give you people 5 million acre feet. But I am going to use that money to blow up four dams on the Klamath river and lose 80,000 homes’ power for hydroelectric irrigation, flood control and water supply.”

And that’s all just… we’re all supposed to say, “okay.” But when you object to this system and you do it in a way that’s not sober, then people get very angry.

Personal Experience vs. Identity Politics

So if I write about what I just talked about, I will get a call from somebody who says, “Are you afraid of a powerful black woman?” No, I don’t care what color she is. I said race was not on my mind. It was your assistant fire chief who said that people feel more comfortable if they see somebody who looks like them.

Well, I live in a community that is 90% Hispanic, and I had a very serious serum tryptase problem, which made me allergic to things. I didn’t quite understand it. So a year ago on my farm, I got stung by two bees and I went into…

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Anaphylactic shock.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Anaphylactic shock. My heart rate went up to 160 and my blood pressure went down by a third. I almost died. The last thing I remember before passing out was calling the local fire department. So who came and woke me up on the lawn? Three Hispanic women. And they were wonderful. Did I feel that it would have been better if three white people came? At that moment in my life, I could care less. I just wanted three competent people.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Right.

Competence Over Identity

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And they proved very competent. Within five minutes in the ambulance, I had Singulair. I had Benadryl, I had EpiPens and my face was swollen. I had welts everywhere. By the time I got to the emergency room, I was going to make it.

But the idea that I would want somebody to look like me… I could care less if a white person came and they didn’t know what to do while those three Hispanic people did. Would I feel great because they were white when I died?

So what I’m getting at, this whole thing has been absurd. And it’s not just you and I talking about rhetorical stuff and the Trump derangement syndrome. It really affects people’s lives. We’ve never had a fire, 25,000 acres in the middle of the city, 250,000 people evacuate, 10,000 of the most beautiful homes. I was teaching at Pepperdine. I just went through that neighborhood. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth. And now it’s gone.

And the people who are suffering are asking questions now: Where was the water? How about the reservoir? Why was it empty? Why, when the mayor was gone, didn’t we get the brush off the chaparral? Why are the reservoirs in LA not being filled by the aqueduct? And the answer is, “How dare you ask that?”

Judging Actions, Not Words

So what I try to do is just look empirically at all of these and don’t worry about what people say, and then you get a very different impression. So that’s a long, windy answer. Am I worried about Donald Trump, what he said? I won’t worry until I see what he’s actually done.

And I hope he does not do what happened before. I hope he does not weaponize the IRS, which was going to give a secret sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden before a judge caught it. I hope he does not weaponize the DOJ, which we saw coordinated many of these suits. I hope he does not weaponize like James Comey did and Andrew McCabe did. And McCabe lied four times to federal investigators, or Kevin Clinesmith at the FBI – he lied under oath about forging a FISA document.

I hope that doesn’t happen. And if it does happen, I’ll be a very fierce critic of Donald Trump. But the tweets? I’ll give you an example of what he said today as we’re speaking. I was driving over here from my farm and this is why people don’t like him. He said, “I just want to warn everybody that don’t bring any appointees, nominees for appointments, from any list of people from Warmonger Liz Cheney, from Bird Brain Nikki Haley, and from War Hawk John Bolton.”

And it was like infantile, right? But the point is that you’re smiling and I’m smiling, but a sober, judicious person doesn’t do that. But if you look at all those people, what they did, you could say there’s a lot of culpability there. And does it have the effect? Yes, it brings attention to it.

So it’s a holistic idea to blow up, not just the discourse, the rhetoric. I think what the whole MAGA thing, the idea of Trump was that people use very sophisticated vocabulary and resumes to do really awful things. So you scream and yell and that tears off the veneer and then you’re left with the reality and you can judge it one way or the other.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: As always, many of the things that you just said are quite fascinating. I want to dig into one in particular because one of the neat things about speaking with you is that I’m very aware that I’m interviewing three people at one time – maybe four people. A political commentator, a military historian, a classicist and a farmer. And I think the fact that you’re a farmer is integral to this discussion because in many ways you are on both sides of this divide. You are part of Stanford and Hoover, but you’re also a farmer. And I want to talk a bit more about the fires and how you view them as a farmer, especially because we’re so close to them and also how you think maybe they should be dealt with.

The Academic Hierarchy Problem

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I’ll do that just to comment on what you said about aspects of my life. So when I came here to Hoover in 2002, I won’t mention the person’s name, I won’t give you any information that could identify him. But a high-ranking dual appointee came to me and said after I talked to him, “Well, you’re in the ‘big leagues’ right now and I’m going to have to acculturate you to the Stanford climate.” This person did not have an Ivy League degree. I didn’t care, only noticed that later.

But he said, “You’ve got to… You’re coming from Cal State and we don’t take people from Fresno State. Fresno State professors do not come to the Hoover Institution or Stanford. So it’s going to be a big shock to you.”

And so I said, “I got a PhD from Stanford. I’m the sixth person in my family to go to Stanford. My mother was one of the first women to go to Stanford Law School and she got a double BA from the University of Pacific and Stanford and then JD—LLB I think it was called in those days. She was the first superior court female in California, second in Fresno County, I think she was the second appellate court judge.” So I went on with this, and he—and then I said, “I’ve written 17 books.”

But the point was he didn’t care about that. It was the idea in his academic hierarchy and he was going to talk down to me. And so I said something to him. I said, “You know, if you ever came to Fresno County and you wanted to learn about farming, I would not assume you’re an idiot. I would ask you what you wanted to know.”

It’s not that I have this… Today I was with all these very poor people working and today I’m here, same day. But there is something wrong with the academic world and the bicoastal elite. It is really wrong.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: I agree.

The Disconnect Between Coastal Elites and Working Americans

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes, I know you do. That’s why I’m here. But they have assumptions about things. And the irony is it makes them very vulnerable to fads and trends because they’re not connected with earthy real things. They don’t know where their water comes from, their sewage goes, how the electricity works in their home, how to do plumbing. They don’t know people who work with their hands. They don’t. I’m generalizing but they don’t.

And the people on the other side, maybe they’re not intellectuals, maybe they’re not well read, maybe they don’t understand the laws of the universe, but they’re tied to the real things and they’re full of common sense.

So you know, if a Mexican American electrician—this happened not too long ago—said to me, “I’m not going to let my daughter be in that locker room with a guy when she’s 12 years old.” Makes sense to people. The people who promulgate that policy don’t understand this perspective.

California’s Water Crisis: A Case Study in Elite Mismanagement

Getting to your question about farming, it’s very simple. Two thirds of the people in California have always lived where there’s one third of the precipitation. Two thirds of the precipitation and snowmelt occur in two places: along the Sierra Nevada mountains and north of Sacramento.

So our grandfathers, my grandpa, your great-great-grandfathers, they came up with an idea they called the Federal Project, the Central Valley Project. And the state version came in later with a very good governor who happened to be Pat Brown. He sued the Sierra Club as Attorney General to get this approved.

The idea was: why don’t we take the Sacramento tributaries along the Feather, along the Kalama, around the American and build dams and then channel that water to go south as it does. But when it gets to the delta and it floods, these dams will prevent it from flooding and the flow will be measured. Then we will pump it out of the delta into the aqueduct and it will go down the western side of the San Joaquin Valley. What’s left from farming will put 5 million acres into production, and then we’ll pump it into Los Angeles, which was running out of Colorado River and Owens Valley water.

That was the idea. And they had a whole plan. This is when we had 15 million people and they forecasted each stage of how many you would have.

About 20 years ago, people from the Bay Area largely, but the coastal corridor, decided that this little smelt in the bay was disappearing. And they said it was a canary in the mine for an ecological disaster, that the rivers were not flowing into the delta and by extension the bay at the same velocity. Of course there were now 38 million people.

So they said we’re going to stop all that water. And they went to court. They didn’t get a plebiscite and they stopped a lot of it. They started to release 90% of the water that was in the delta that was fresh. They didn’t pump it into the aqueduct. So the people who were farming suddenly got 20% even in a wet year, not the hundred. And then the municipalities of course needed the water because they were running out. So San Jose started pumping out of the aqueduct, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo. So there was almost no water from what was the original intent.

When you talk to those farmers, and they were not all corporate barons, many of them were on the west side, they would say to you, “Well, they’re putting thousands of farm workers out, farm equipment people. They’re putting them out of business.” The water table on the west side is 1,500 feet. So where I live I can pump out at 80 feet with a 15 horsepower and get 1,200 gallons. They’ve got to have a 200 horsepower and they’ll get 300 gallons. And the water’s no good, it’s brackish.

So they were really in a bad spot. And they are in a bad spot. But we find out that it really wasn’t the oxygen that was smothering the delta smelt, at least not the primary cause. Or maybe it was just one of many causes. There were invasive striped bass that were gobbling them up like candy. And there were also 35 municipalities, sewage districts around the bay who were sending in their treated water into the bay, which was diminishing the oxygen and adding nitrates to it.

So it was a multifaceted problem, but they just wanted to solve it with this utopian idea.

Failed Solutions and Broken Promises

So then people got very angry about this. In the coastal areas, because they weren’t getting enough water either, they voted to have a bond in 2014, $7.5 billion. And they went back to the California Water Project and they said, “You know what? Millerton Lake on the San Joaquin, there was a plan to build a bigger reservoir right above it to enlarge the river before it got to the 5. It’s 1.4 million acre feet. And it’s going to be very easy to do. It’s not in the pristine forest. It’s kind of in the foothills.”

And there’s one on the Seitz river. And as it comes into the delta, we can put 1.6 million. And then the San Luis Reservoir had a twin that was always designed as two, like kidneys. And we never built that, but we’ll build all three of them and we’ll get almost 5 million acre feet. An acre foot is the ability to fill up at 1 foot 43,560 square feet—it’s an acre. So it’s a huge amount of water.

So they passed it. And then of course, the people who were in the Bay Area sued and they said, this is wrong. And there’s a three-spotted this and the two-winged that. And they stopped it. So they never built it—they defied the will of the people.

And then they used some of that money under Gavin Newsom to go up to the Klamath river. And they said, “You know, it’d be so nice to have a whitewater riparian ecosystem and indigenous people could go back.” There were very few indigenous people, but there were 80,000 people who depended on hydroelectric power. So they blew up this summer four dams with money that was allotted to create dams.

And there was an ecological disaster for three months—the mud and everything. And they lost the irrigation water, they lost the flood control, they lost the recreation.

And so all the farmers say, “Why don’t these people understand that when they go to Whole Foods or they go to Trader Joe’s, the food comes from somewhere?”

The Reckoning in Los Angeles

And the people of Los Angeles are then asking questions. Gavin Newsom said, “Well, the reservoirs are all full.” And what he meant was, we haven’t had snow in a month and we are in drought conditions already. But last year we had a really heavy snowmelt. And I let a lot of the water out, but it’s still not all gone. So we have 75% and it’s going down each day. But I think Folsom’s only 30%. So he basically lied to the Californians, said, “I didn’t do what I did. They’re full.” They’re not full. And the reservoirs in Los Angeles will not have enough water to be full.

So they look at all this and ask: was this ever voted on? It was voted on one time to build reservoirs. But people thought, “Well these are just stupid farmers and stupid people that want water and they don’t understand the sophisticated ecosystem that I do.”

And so when you see the Los Angeles thing, it transcends farming. It was like an electric shock to the whole green DEI mentality. And you started to learn certain things. Suddenly they were saying, “Well, there’s no police protection. My house burned down, but I had a safe and I had Cougarans and gold and all these things.”

And people were like, “Well, what did you think when you voted to decriminalize looting and theft up to $950?”

And then they said, “Well, we cleaned out all of our area around our house, but the city owned and the county owned that hill. And they said the milk vetch was a protected species of bush. So they never cleaned it off. And the fire came right up and it burned the milk vetch and then burned my house down.”

Yes, that’s what happens when some people come in and they try to sue the city and say that’s a milk vetch protected species.

And it was like, “Oh wow, the mayor doesn’t know anything about fire. We have a hundred fire vehicles that are sitting there with no money to repair them. And she says that her job starts when the water comes out the hydrant. And the deputy mayor of safety is under house supervision.”

And they think, “Well, who hired these people?” You did. Because they fit a particular ideology whose consequences you’re never subject to because your zip code, your money, your degree, your network of friends protects you from that.

The California Paradox

That was a shock. And so when you look at the whole California disaster of paying 13.3% top income tax, second highest gas tax, fourth highest sales tax, 45th in test scores, as you look at how some of the traffic magazines rate our freeways about 48th, you ask that question.

Then you start to say Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, they’re all from the same place, they’re all from the same class, they’re all very wealthy, they all have estates. I could go to Gavin’s—he’s living in a $9 million home. Jerry’s got a big Grass Valley estate. Feinstein had one of the most beautiful homes at Tahoe. Barbara Boxer’s at Rancho Mirage.

But their policies made sure that people where I live can’t buy a house because of the regulations, it’s so hard to do. Or they made sure that food is very expensive or there’s no natural gas. And because it doesn’t affect them, because they have enough money that they don’t really care about the rates, they can either get their income in capital gains or get write-offs, but they don’t really worry about it.

And then something like Los Angeles happens. And now everybody’s dumbfounded, “Oh my God, I’m not insulated from this.”

No, you’re not. Because you, meaning the people of Los Angeles, you voted for a city council that has 14 people out of 15 in the same party. You voted for a state governance. Forget about whether Democrats or Republicans, but everybody knows under our system you want 50-50 or 40-60 or some kind of diversity of thought, but we have no statewide attorney general, controller, lieutenant governor—all one party. Super majorities in the legislature, one party. Nine out of 52 congressional seats are Republicans. Fourteen out of 15 people on the city council, same party. I could go on.

But when you have that monolithic monopoly of thought and you can get away with it because the state is so wealthy and you’ve got all these tech companies—$9 trillion here in market capitalization—you’ve got this inherited wonderful UC system, state college system, water project system from a very different type of generation which you now denigrate as “the old nutty Republicans” or “that was a Ronald Reagan or Pete Wilson project.”

So this is where we are on a state level and a national level. There’s a complete re-examination right now of what we’ve seen. And it’s not a political thing. It’s more of a cultural social counter-revolution. Now I think it can be boiled down as: these people are not capable people. They’re very dangerous people. And the fact of where they went to college or what color their skin is or what sexual orientation they are, we don’t care, we don’t care what their resumes say. We just want to judge people on what they do and they’re found wanting. And that was what the election, I think, was about. It wasn’t so much about Donald Trump, it was about this stuff that I’m talking about.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Yeah. How do you see that divide again? It is nice to make it very concrete what you see the two sides of this divide as being. And then the last time we spoke was just a few days before the election. How explicitly do you see this divide being reflected in the outcome?

Trump’s Expanded Coalition and the 2024 Election

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, this was an election about two things. It was the Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that had expanded its resonance because it brought in people who had not been in the party. And he deliberately tried to do that. So the garbage truck stops, the McDonald’s runs, the Madison Square Garden rally.

He comes into Madison Square Garden. Nobody in their right mind had ever seen that menagerie in one place. RFK Jr., Dana White, Hulk Hogan, Speaker Johnson, Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, all in one place. Hulk Hogan cannot be forgotten. They were all there and they represented folk heroes, left wing, right wing, rich, poor, crazy, normal, everything. So it was that ecumenical effort.

And then the second thing was people in 2020 thought Donald Trump was too chaotic and sober. Judicious old Joe from Scranton was going to bring us stability. As I went back and looked at his speeches in the primary when he ran, it was unity, unity, unity. And although he catered to the hard left, after South Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, excuse me, Nevada, he lost the first three and he was going nowhere. And he was cognitively impaired, people had said that, not me. Cory Booker said that in a debate.

So then the powers that be said, these people in our party are not electable. Barack Obama was electable because he was a brilliant rhetorician and charismatic. These people aren’t – Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie – they’re not going to win. But we can get old Joe Biden and put him as a veneer and then we’ll run the country. And that’s what they did.

What had happened? It wasn’t that we had a porous border. We had no border. It wasn’t that we decided gradually to get out of Afghanistan. We just left and left $50 billion of equipment to terrorists. It wasn’t that we let China do a little bit. We let them have a Chinese spy balloon go across the United States with impunity. We had our two diplomats in March dressed down and insulted in Anchorage by China.

It wasn’t that we said we’re going to ease up on crime. We redefined crime basically with critical legal theory where we didn’t even arrest violent offenders under these George Soros-financed DAs – 15 or 16 of them, like Chesa Boudin or George Gascon. They were letting people out who committed real crimes.

So it was a revolutionary moment. Partly it was the COVID lockdown, partly it was Trump, partly it was George Floyd. But whatever it was, people didn’t like it. So they said in 2024, I’m tired of hyperinflation. I’m tired of being humiliated abroad. I’m tired of crime. I’m tired of the president mumbling and stumbling.

Some of it was that they didn’t like Trump, but they voted against Biden, and some thought Trump was an antidote to this. But he was the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote. He won the House, he won the Senate, he’s got the Supreme Court. He’s got a sort of mandate. We’ll see if he can govern with it.

Trump’s Cabinet Picks and Their Qualifications

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Now, on the one hand, we have the, quote unquote, intellectual elites who are purportedly not actually competent, and then we have the people without these prestigious degrees but have a tie to some skill and value competence. Something that I find quite interesting here in this dichotomy is that one of the main topics of discussion in the media right now is Trump’s Cabinet picks. And the allegations from the left are unilaterally that these nominees are unqualified. They don’t have these prestigious degrees. They don’t have the requisite experience. They in many ways are probably brash or unpredictable.

And since you’ve mentioned some of these names already, like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr., I’m wondering, because these are very important issues, if we could talk about them one by one, maybe, because I’d like to hear your thoughts on. Well, one, what are the allegations against them and do they hold any merit, hold any weight?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Okay, there’s three things that they all have in common. We don’t have to go through all 13 of them, but they’re similar.

Number one, they’re a reaction to 2017-21. So he was in there the first time and all of a sudden he didn’t know anybody. And they all came to him and said, we’re going to help. So it turned out that Rex Tillerson almost immediately said that he was an idiot and that he knew better about foreign policy. I know Jim Mattis, I like him. But his idea was that Donald Trump didn’t understand NATO and all these things. There was “Anonymous” in Homeland Security writing all this stuff about how he was going to internally block Trump. I am a great friend of H.R. McMaster, so I don’t include him, but his replacement John Bolton basically said Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing.

So he said, this time I’m not going to have all this internal dissension, number one.

Number two, I want to look at the people who had all the resumes. So you have Lloyd Austin, he came out of Raytheon and he’s going to go back to Raytheon. He had a prostate problem. He was gone for seven days and never told anybody. He was completely AWOL on the job. He was the person, along with General Milley, who told us that the Afghan army was viable. It collapsed and he didn’t. So he has all the resumes.

Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State. He has all the resumes. As soon as they came in, they did about five things. They restored oil sales to Iran. They begged them to get back on the Iran deal. They suspended, by the way, offensive arms approved by Trump to Ukraine, and they started pressuring Israel. I could go on a long exegesis, but I think that attitude had a lot to do with Afghanistan, that end of deterrence with what happened with Putin going into Ukraine. And by the way, of the last four administrations, Putin went in during three of them, but not one. And there was a reason for that.

So all of the people that these controversial nominees are replacing had what they didn’t – they had acceptability in terms of degrees and experience, and yet they all have been wanting in their jobs.

Merrick Garland weaponized the DOJ. FBI Director Robert Mueller said under oath when he was the special counsel that he had no idea what the Steele dossier was, didn’t know if it was the catalyst for his appointment. His successor, James Comey, said 245 times, “I don’t know, I forgot” under oath. His successor, Andrew McCabe, lied four times to a federal investigator. Bill Barr should have charged him, but he said, “You know, what good would that do?” And then we had Christopher Wray, whose FBI spied on parents at school board meetings.

The second thing was that Trump was saying, these people with all these sober and judicious credentials, they’re politicized, they’re weaponized, they’re incompetent and they’re dangerous. So I’m going to get people who are loyal. We’re not going to have the mess of the first term, just like Obama did. He fired almost everybody. I can tell you, I was on the American Battlefield Monuments Commission, an apolitical position. As soon as Obama came in, he fired me and he fired every Republican on that commission. And that’s what Obama did. And I don’t blame him. That was what he wanted, people on the same team. But Trump didn’t do that initially.

So he’s going to do what most people do, get a team in there, and he’s going to get people who don’t fit that background of Merrick Garland, Lloyd Austin, Blinken, Sullivan, Alejandro Mayorkas. Mayorkas destroyed the border. He was the Secretary of Homeland Insecurity.

And then the third thing, and this gets back to the point about irony. So he said, to make sure that these people understand what I’m dealing with, I’m going to pick people who have been targeted by these people.

Let’s see. National Institute of Health. That is the most important of all the organizations. And under Francis Collins, they targeted people. In fact, they targeted Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford. They went after him. I’ll make him the head of it.

FBI. They targeted people. They put surveillance on Kash Patel when he was in Congress. I’m going to make him the head of the FBI.

Secretary of Defense? Pete Hegseth wrote a book chronicling all the problems with the revolving door. I’m going to make him the head of the Defense Department.

Director of National Intelligence? Tulsi Gabbard. She was on a terrorist watch list. She will be the head of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Confirmation Hearings and Elite Hypocrisy

So it was an effort to get people on the same page like most presidents had done, which he had not done in 2017. It was to get people who were not part of the establishment, and it was to get people who had been aggrieved by the very system that they were now in charge of.

I watched the confirmations and I was really struck. There wasn’t one question like, “Mr. Hegseth, is the nuclear triad still valuable? Do we have the submarine Polaris? Do we have the land-based missiles? And do we have the bombing element of nuclear deterrence?” Not one question. It was all about personal matters.

Chuck Schumer was talking a lot about the Supreme Court. And I thought, okay, you got a mob outside the Supreme Court at the doors of the Supreme Court. And you yelled, “Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, you’ve sowed the wind, you’re going to reap the whirlwind, you won’t know what’s going to hit you” to Supreme Court judges.

And almost each person that was talking – I thought Tim Kaine was the funniest because he said that Pete Hegseth was an adulterer and that disqualified him. He is an adulterer, but he’s a confessed adulterer. But Kaine was one of the biggest supporters of Kamala Harris’s husband who impregnated a nanny and forced her to get an abortion. Did he ever say, as a matter of principle, anything about that? He didn’t say anything about Bill Clinton either. He said he did once and he felt regretful that he’d ever brought that up.

So what was it all about then? If it wasn’t about what the actual job was going to be? For Pam Bondi, why not ask: “How many terrorists do you think are in the United States? What do you think is the greatest threat?” No, it was all about personal matters.

If you’re going to go down that route, you’ve got to make sure that the people asking the questions have some level of moral integrity and superiority to the people they’re condemning as their inferiors. And they didn’t. And that came off as elitist. It resonated that these people were elitist.

Elizabeth Warren was going on and on. She said, “Well, you said that you shouldn’t have revolving generals. Now you’re a hypocrite because you won’t say that you won’t work in defense.” He said, “I’m not a general.” And so she was talking and you think, wait a minute, I remember you. You were in the catalog of the Harvard Law School as the first Native American professor with 0.000001% DNA. And you used that lie to parlay a professorship from Oakland to Texas to Harvard. Elizabeth, does anybody ever think you would have been hired based on what you actually did as a Harvard Law professor? Unless they could say that you were their first Native American law professor. So now you’re talking about Pete Hegseth not being candid?

The Competence of Ordinary Americans

The American people look at all this and they’re not dumb. Everybody thinks they’re dumb on the bicoastal elite. Yesterday I was watching that confirmation and I had a guy in the field who was spraying a pre-emergent herbicide and a knockdown, it’s not easy stuff. And the pump went out and so he was on his belly underneath the spray rig, and he had to keep it agitating so it didn’t settle, trying to fix a leak. And I was talking to him. He knew where the leak was. He knew the danger involved. He had protective equipment. And within 30 minutes, he was back on the job. And I asked, “How long have you been doing this?” because I used to do the same thing. And I was curious because he did a lot better job than I used to do. And he did it just like that.

So what I’m getting at is that there’s a lot of very competent people that make the country run. And I don’t think people appreciate it. And there’s a lot of incompetent people who have mastered certain requirements to succeed. I’m not a revolutionary saying this is unfair. That’s just the way it is. But don’t tell me, because that’s the way it is, that it represents reality or it’s legitimate.

And that’s what this counter-revolution is about. It’s really counterintuitive. Donald Trump is “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.” And then he gets the highest number of Latino and black votes of any Republican, maybe since George Bush with Latinos.

Maybe he’s trying to tell people that the black truck driver and the Hispanic electrician and the white plumber all have more in common with each other than the white guy does with a Stanford professor. Than the Hispanic electrician does with the “Latinx” anchor woman. And maybe the black plumber or carpenter has more in common with these guys than he does with Joy Reid.

That was what the election was about. It was about class. And it was kind of remarkable. It really was. Whether it’s going to be sustainable, I don’t know, because populist movements can be very erratic and unsustainable. He’s got a huge coalition and they’ve all got different agendas.

China’s Perception of the United States

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Well, just to make sure that we run the gamut in this time we have, I want to get back to some of the challenges that you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation. And you mentioned theater wars. I’m going to add in potential theater wars. We also spoke a bit about the Panama Canal, and China came up in that context. So first off, how in general do you see our relationship with China right now and to what extent does Trump face a challenge here?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, China says it’s looked at the COVID lockdown. It looked at the George Floyd aftermath. It looked at the Biden administration. It looks at the woke revolution, it looks at the green revolution and it understands us. So it can build two coal plants a month and then attack us for global warming. It can have a million Uyghurs in camps and have signs during COVID that Africans can’t go into McDonald’s and will call us a history of racism and the yellow peril and racism against Chinese.

So it has our number and it thinks that we’re in decline. It’s got 1.4 billion people and our GDP is still higher, not a lot, but still higher and we only have 330 million. So they say, I don’t know what this country is doing, it looks decadent to me. But one American produces more goods and services than four Chinese and our system doesn’t work.

So we’re going to appropriate all their technology and we’re going to send 300,000 people over here to be taught there and we’re going to bring it all back and we’re going to have this communist, monolithic, authoritarian system. We won’t get into all this messy democracy and we’re going to beat them and we’re going to become a hegemon.

And that’s what they think. And they get frustrated because they think they have the population, they think they have the discipline, they think they have better craftsmanship as far as stealing our ideas. And yet they think they’re not there yet. And they keep thinking, what’s the next thing? Belt and Road? Oh my God, we owe all these countries and they’re angry. It’s not, oh, we’ll have a huge middle class like United States. Oh, we have a real estate bubble.

So when you have an authoritarian system like they do, it’s very efficient in the short term, but in the long term it’s not. So they are very frustrated and their whole point is to dethrone the United States and to create a post-war world with them as the adjudicator.

The Existential Threat from China

And we’ve seen what they do to people when you’re in their orbit. And they’re very resentful of Australia and Japan and South Korea and Taiwan and they think this is our orbit and there are free democracies and they like the United States and they look at the EU and they say that’s where the United States is going. Disarmed, 1.45 fertility rate, socialist. And we want the United States to be just like that. And we’re not yet.

So it’s an existential threat that has to be managed. They’re on a breakneck pace. They’re building more ships, they’re building more nuclear weapons per month than we are – everything. But we have a big head start.

Joe Biden said they were not a rival. He said that literally. They are a rival. The key with China is if we did to China what they’re doing to us, they would go to war with us. So if we sent 300,000 Americans over there and they were systematically bringing technology back, or we sent a balloon across China, or we started to do things about their espionage, cyber attacks, they would go crazy. So it’s all predicated on the United States doesn’t do what we do, and the world, the United States doesn’t do what we do. They create it. So it’s very dangerous. And that’s an existential threat. There’s no doubt about it.

The Middle East Situation

And if you look at the Middle East, that’s the most chaotic and optimistic that I’ve seen in my lifetime, really, because we pressured and pressured and pressured Israel and tried to keep distance from it. Biden at times couldn’t do that because he had people within the Democratic Party and the opposition that wouldn’t let him do it. But he wanted to continue the Obama strategic tension, you know, empower the Shia, the Persian, and then play them off against Israel and have tension.

But if we had this conversation a year ago and I said to you, Iran’s going to send 500 projectiles into Israel. Only about 1% are going to do any damage. And in retaliation, Israel is going to send 300 planes and destroy entirely all of their air defenses, leaving it completely naked and can be destroyed anything, anytime they want. Then they’re going to go into Hezbollah and they’re going to target with pagers and walkie-talkies and blow up 4,000 explosions. And then they’re going to go into no man’s land, the graveyard of empires, into Lebanon, and they’re going to destroy the whole apparatus of Hezbollah and then they’re going to go into Gaza after October 7th and destroy this terrorist Hamas, and then they’re going to finally retaliate to the Houthi and destroy their port facilities and their power grid.

They’ve done some of that. And oh, by the way, they’re going to so weaken Iran and so weaken Hezbollah that the Syrian Assad, arch enemy of the United States, is going to fall and it’s going to be chaos. No one would believe you. And that’s where we are now.

So there’s chaos, and there’s a lot of opportunity for the United States and the West and moderate Arabs to come in. But it wasn’t because of Anthony Blinken. And so when I listened to that lecture from Biden two days ago to the State Department about all this, what I just entailed that he did, it was all despite him, not because of him.

It was because of this person they consider a monster, Benjamin Netanyahu, who they thought would be out, and they wanted him out. And so he had this amazing comeback, and he basically destroyed the ability of enemies of a half century to harm Israel and harm the West.

It’s kind of what we talk about with Donald Trump. He’s a tragic hero because he did more to curb terrorism and to stop radical Islamic people injuring the West than anybody has. And the West hated him for it.

But they didn’t hate him enough to say, wait a minute, don’t destroy Hezbollah. Or, well, you went into Gaza, you shouldn’t have. But we’re not criticizing you. You did that to Hamas. And please don’t start a war. But it’s kind of good what you did to Iran. But we don’t like people who do what you did, but we’ll take the benefits from it. And that’s the essence of a Sophoclean Hero.

Looking Forward to Trump’s Presidency

ROBINSON ERHARDT: Well, Victor, I always, always love these conversations. I think this is the fifth time you’ve been on the show and you’ve become a friend and one of my favorite guests that I have, and I’m looking forward to continuing this in a couple of months when we see what the first couple of months of Trump’s presidency will be.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It’ll be very interesting. There’s a window that he can do pretty much anything, they can get an agenda through. But then Obama started off that way. He won the House and Senate, and then he had the tea party two years later and he lost 62, 63 seats. Same thing can happen to any president.

But we’ll see. The key is whether the person is the movement or the movement is the person. And this time around, it’s not just Donald Trump. He’s created a movement, and it’s ecumenical and it’s diverse, but it transcends race. And that’s very good. And it’s a middle class movement. And that’s the largest class in the United States, so I never thought I’d see Elon Musk on the same page with the Longshoreman Union.

ROBINSON ERHARDT: All right, well, thanks again, and we will talk again soon.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you.

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