Victor Davis Hanson: What the Democratic Midterm Sweep Means for 2028 (Transcript)

In this episode of American Thought Leaders, host Jan Jekielek sits down with historian Victor Davis Hanson to unpack what the 2026 Democratic midterm sweep means for Donald Trump’s final two years and the road to 2028. Hanson explains why the party in the White House almost always loses midterms, how lame-duck presidents like Clinton and Obama used executive power after losing Congress, and what the Iran war, the economy, the media, and the rising socialist wing of the Democratic Party mean for America’s future. Read the full transcript of this interview below:

The Midterm “Shellacking” in Historical Context

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:00:50 – 00:01:02): Victor Davis Hanson, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:01:03 – 00:01:03): Thank you for having me.

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:01:04 – 00:01:14): So I have to confess, I wasn’t familiar with the term shellacking until last night and today. So Victor, what happened?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:01:15 – 00:04:38): That was an Obama term that he used in 2010 when he lost 63 6— excuse me, 9— yeah, 2010, he lost 63 seats in the House and I think 9 Senate seats. Bill Clinton said “they kicked our blank” when he in ’94 lost 53 seats and I think 6 Senate seats. George Bush in 2006 used that term shellacking when he lost, I think, 30 seats.

What happened, as a historian, I just kind of go by history. So in the last— I had said this before, I didn’t want to believe it— but in the last 126 years of the modern period since 1900, the party that has the White House loses 90% in 90% of the midterms. They lose seats in the House and they 75% of the midterms they lose Senate seats. So that was predictable that they were going to lose seats, the odds being what they are.

The only time that was reduced, say, in the House was FDR in the exuberance still in 1934 of the New Deal, and then George Bush in 2002 when he was— hadn’t gone into Iraq yet and he was really uniting the country after 9/11. And then Bill Clinton picked up— he picked up 5 seats in 1998, and that was because they impeached him the month before. The Republican supermajority— I mean, they had a really big majority and they impeached him, but the economy was growing at 4% with 2% inflation, and he had balanced the budget for 2 years. And so that boomeranged. But it’s very rare otherwise for a president to pick up seats.

What is unusual is the size of the tsunami. We don’t know what— we’re speaking now the day morning, I mean the morning after here on the West Coast, and we don’t have all the returns from the western states, but it looks like somewhere around 45 seats or more. And I think the Republicans will lose 7 to 9 seats depending on the ones that are out.

So what does that mean? And why did it happen? Well, the easiest answer is, what does it mean? And that means Donald Trump, if he’s going to appoint a district circuit or Supreme Court justice or fire a cabinet member and replace him, he better do it in the next 70 days before the new Congress is sworn in in January, ’cause they’re not going to approve anything that he puts up that requires a Senate nomination to be approved by the Democrats. That’s number one.

Number two, if it’s down to 45 seats, he’s got to make sure that he rides herd on that Republican 45 Senate, because if he gets too many people like Lisa Murkowski or renegades that join the Republicans, then they will have uncertain votes, a veto-proof Congress.

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:04:39 – 00:04:40): Join the Democrats, you mean, Victor?

What Lame-Duck Presidents Do After Losing Congress

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:04:41 – 00:12:20): Yes. So if the Democrats end up with 55 or 57 seats, there are about 3 or 4 people who were not always with Trump. Some of them lost, Cornyn and Tillis, but there’s still some there, and he’s going to have to have party control. Otherwise, they will not have what he has theoretically as a veto-proof Congress.

And then history tells us, recent history, what does a president do when he’s lost the House and Senate by wide margins? And the answer is pretty much what he wants to do. Bill Clinton, he worked with Gingrich. He got 2 more balanced budgets. He decided that he wanted to remove Milosevic and he said to the Republican Congress, “I’m not even going to ask you for the authorization.” And he bombed for 77 days to furor from the Republicans. And he was successful. And he had a summit, he tried to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It didn’t work, but he was kind of a virtuoso.

And Obama got emboldened. He was the one that gave us the term phone— “I have a phone, a pen and phone, and I can do what I want to do.” He got heavily involved with the Steele dossier, and he had his intelligence heads pursuing this unicorn of Russian collusion on the domestic front. And then he got— he signed on, even though he said he was a constitutional lawyer. He said, “Well, I’m going to have the treaty with the Iran deal, I’ll have the treaty with the Paris Climate Accord, and I’m not even going to— I don’t need cons— I don’t need congressional authority. It’s not a treaty.” So he just did it, and he did it with recognizing Cuba. He said, “We’re— it’s time to make full diplomatic relations, no more sanctions.”

So what I’m getting at, a lot of the lame duck presidents feel they’re unbound and they have nothing to lose. They can no longer hurt their congressional majorities or minorities. They’re going to be out in 2 years, and they’re going to executive order and veto their way domestically.

And the imperial presidency operates as they wish.

So I think as it applies to Donald Trump, he will try to get the Iran war over as quickly as possible and denuclearize it. And part of the reasons he lost, tangentially here, is he bombed for 38 days and had almost eliminated— then they said, “Well, we have, we have 8 months, we have 7 months, we have 6 months before the midterms, we have 5 months, we have 4 months, we have 3—” and they bomb, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk with people you can’t talk to.

So he’s going to have to denuclearize them, hit Pickaxe Mountain if he wants to eliminate that threat. No ground troops, no nation-building, but hit a lot of targets that will set them back 8 or 10 years and then leave a skeleton force, keep the strait open and tighten those sanctions and go home. And gas will go down. And there’s nothing the re— the Republicans, the Democrats can do to help or hurt him on that. They can’t. They don’t have the votes to cut off funds, and they won’t. And he can do what he wants with Xi and Putin. He can do what he wants in the Ukraine sphere. He can do almost anything he wants. And that’s just not because he’s any different. He’s just going to follow the precedent of presidents.

The Rise of the Socialist Wing

The other thing that’s very ironic is when presidents do this, their favorability doesn’t go down, it goes up, because the— these supermajorities are not like moderate gains. They bring in bomb throwers. We have about 45 socialists that are now going to be in Congress in the Democratic House, and maybe 1 or 2 socialist Islamist senators, and they will do things that are going to shock the ossified leadership.

Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and all of those kind of calcified people are not young and energetic like El-Sayed or Chevalier or any of those people. They are AOC, the Squad, and they will try to single-payer, nationalize healthcare, completely flip on foreign policy, favoring Palestine as our friend and Israel is our enemy, try to open the border. They will try to mainstream the trans, bring back the Green New Deal, defund ICE, maybe defund the police.

And these are all 30/70. They’ve all been— they were all been adjudicated in the 2024 election, and that’s why Kamala Harris lost. She was on the wrong side of all those issues until she tried to change her spots, so to speak.

So that’s— that plays into the hands of the lame duck president, and that happened with Clinton and Obama. The Tea Party got way extreme in their candidates and their ideas, and they were leaderless, and they kind of petered out with Obama. And the impeachment zealots that wanted to crucify Clinton— he lied under oath, he had sexual relations with an employee who was a young woman, power imbalance, all the— hit all the feminist buttons. And yet they did it in such a way they turned off the American people.

The 2028 Race Begins

And then the final thing very quickly is the election starts. Donald Trump declared his candidacy on November 15th, 2022. That’s 2 weeks from now, basically. So we’re going to see a lot of people jump in. In the Democratic Party, and we’re going to see a— pretty soon we’ll see whether the Vance-Rubio alliance holds up. There’ll be a lot of pressure on from people to see Rubio at the top of the ticket. Vance can’t be vice president again. That’s going to be problematic if that were to happen. DeSantis kind of withstood the blue wave. He had a Byron Donalds won, they won the Senate, and so he may be revitalized.

But what I’m getting at, all this conundrum will happen in the next 2 years and Trump will be above the fray. And that’s what happened to Obama and Clinton. Clinton just basically said, “Al Gore doesn’t want me campaigning, that’s fine.” He fought it out with Bush the last year of his tenure. And Hillary and Trump really went at it in 2015 and ’16, and Obama just kind of played golf. And the less we saw or heard of him, the more we liked him.

And the odd thing was both of them had low ratings at one point at 37 to 38%, Obama and Clinton. They left with one of the highest ratings. Clinton left with one of the highest ever. He was about 66%, and Obama was about 59% approval rating. And that was because they— the attention turned to acrimonious bomb throwers in the opposition. There was an election with contentious issues and personal invective, and the president didn’t have to worry about coddling his own party. He was unbound, and he tried to be statesmanlike above the fray, and it worked. And Trump, if he wants to follow that paradigm, it’s there for him.

The Media and the Affordability Issue

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:12:21 – 00:12:34): The one thing that’s different, I suppose, is that there’s this whole media ecosystem that’s committed to his destruction and continues to be that. That certainly wasn’t the case for the other 2 presidents you mentioned.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:12:34 – 00:17:38): No, and that’s a very good point because it really does explain in part the affordability issue. If we can go back in time to just 4 years ago, 2022, a very unpopular Joe Biden after 9.1% inflation in 2022 and the skedaddle from Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine, given he gave the wrong signals, lost deterrence. So he— we were told a red wave is going to sweep the country, and it looked like it would, and it didn’t. They only picked up 9 seats. They got the House back barely. They lost a seat in the Senate, and the red wave turned out to be a pathetic ripple.

And so what was the reason? And why did the blue wave turn out to be a tsunami? So we compare the 2 situations, and there you get to the heart of what you said about the media. In 2022, the inflation rate that year was 9.1%. This year it may go to 3.4%. It’s almost only a third. If you look at per-family income, it’s $14,000 higher now under Trump than it was under Biden at that time. If you look at GDP, we have a much bigger 3rd quarter GDP. If you look at the stock market, it’s 20,000 points higher than it was in 2022. If you look at job creation, it’s much better. If you look at the poverty rate, it’s almost 2 points lower. So the economy actually is doing much better.

But when you look— when you go back and look at the media coverage, you had Janet Yellen said, “Oh, this, this— This is not our fault. This was supply chains and pent-up consumer demands, and it’s only temporary.” Well, it was actually 5.1 average for the 4 years, but the media portrayed that as no big deal, even though Joe Biden was polling at 40%, pretty much where Trump is.

But this one, it was all of a sudden affordability and gas, and I thought, “Well, I guess gas did Trump in.” It’s now $4.32 on election— that’s $4.18 today. And then I went back and looked, it got to $5 in July of 2022, and he tried to drain the petroleum reserve. And on Election Day, it was about $4.10.

So historically, things were much worse, and Biden was in the same place of being in the end party when traditionally he loses seats, and the economy was worse, and his personal approval was as dismal as Trump, and yet he survived it and Trump got wiped out.

Now you can argue that the media biases a lot. You can also say that Trump inherited a 21% inflation over 4 years. So when he had a moderate 2.4% and this year a 3.5%, it came on top of 21%. And they did not articulate the difference between prices and inflation rates. So they kept saying, “Well, we halved the Biden inflation rate.” But the people were saying, “Yes, but prices are 21% higher than when you left office last time. So what are you going to do about it?”

Well, they couldn’t do anything about it unless you wanted a recession or a deflationary depression, ’cause we never go into a deflation and lose that 21%. The answer is what Trump did was to lower the inflation rate and increase the per-family median income, which he did spectacularly, but they never communicated that.

And in contrast, Biden inherited a 1.9% inflation from Trump, and it only had gone up 7% over 4 years. And so when he went up to 9%, that was only, if you think about it, it was only about a 16% increase, whereas Trump went up 3, it was 24%. And people noticed that.

And the administration didn’t really explain that when they said, “We’re going to lower the rate of inflation, we’re going to grow the economy, we’re going to increase personal and family income, and that is the way that this affordability crisis will be handled. Prices will continue to go up moderately, 1 or 2 or 3% at most, but wages will go up 3% and family income will go up 3 or 4%. And finally, that will make prices stabilize at the level when I left office in 2021 in January.” But that was never communicated.

The Iran War and Vance’s Explanation of the Loss

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:17:38 – 00:18:35): So, Victor, I’ve been looking at various takes. One of the sets of takes by people that I think had offered interesting ones, Spencer Pratt being one example, was just that the Republicans are very poor at storytelling. But also, I suppose this whole media complex thing figures into this dramatically as well. So that’s one side.

But the other side is actually the vice president. And I’ll just comment, you mentioned the war. He said the reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. But he also pointed to kind of the 4 separate things, right, that were— that the pollster— he gave validity to the pollster. He said the number one issue was ending the war. Number 2, the focus on cost of living. Number 3 is putting America first. And the 4 is changing the relationship with Israel. So these are actually quite different viewpoints of what happened. I’m kind of— where do you land here?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:18:36 – 00:27:28): Well, when he says the war, when the war broke out, he had over 50% approval, and they had a spectacular success for the first 38 days. They did the impossible, but they didn’t explain it. They didn’t say to the American people, “7 presidents said you can’t let them get a nuclear weapon. They’re closer than ever before. They have 93 million people. They have over 200,000 rockets. This is an existential threat. It is a very big danger to Europe and to us, but I’m going to denuclearize them. It’s going to be a long haul. It’s going to be dangerous, but I have 2 guidelines. There will be no ground troops, and I will not go in there and try to nation-build as we did in Afghanistan.” He pretty much, that was assumed. But he never was explicit just how difficult it was.

So then you go in there and he’s— I mean, it was tragic. We lost 23 soldiers, but compared to 7,500 in Afghanistan, Iraq, or— we’ve spent $45 billion. That’s about what we left in infrastructure, weaponry, and embassies and stuff in Afghanistan to the Taliban. But they never really accentuated that.

And then once they stopped in 38, they were not quite done yet. They hadn’t prepared for the Hormuz. They were talking about the denominator of missiles they had destroyed and drones, but not the— excuse me, the numerator, but then not the denominator was how many existed. They didn’t know. You can destroy 95% of what you think, but if you don’t know what you think it is, you don’t know. It’s— it could be 95% of what?

So there were mistakes, but the biggest problem was we had almost won. And if we had continued and done what Bill Clinton did and Barack Obama did— and let’s be honest, they hit dual targets in Serbia. Clinton did. He hit the bridges on the approaches into Belgrade. He knocked out the power grid. Obama bombed the ports of Gaddafi’s ports. He hit their TV and radio communication. And neither one of them got congressional authority.

But we said that we were on the side of the Iranian people. They came out, I think they sort of gave the impression to Trump that they were going to overthrow the government and he would do what Maduro did. He would just, it would be short, what he did with Maduro. And Iran is not Venezuela. So it was very difficult, which we weren’t apprised of, but we stopped.

And then we, this is what ha— “It’ll be over pretty soon, but we still have 8 months before the midterm. It’ll be over. We’re talking, we’re on the edge of the deal, but we have 7 months. We’re talking, we had to hit a target, but otherwise we’re talking, we’re 6 months, we’re 5 months, we’re 4 months, we’re 3 months.” And they got into a haggling with people who don’t tell the truth and have no intention to negotiate. And now they think they’re going to negotiate when these people are sky high, high-fiving themselves that they stopped Trump with the midterms. The Iranians think that, and they’re not going to negotiate.

So you’re going to have to hit them very, very hard, Pickaxe Mountain for 2 or 3 weeks. Then you’re going to have to just leave. And then you’re going to have to fund the opposition and arm them and forget what Turkey says and clamp down on these sanctions and keep it straight up open and let Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states finish their pipelines. And we’ve already got as much oil going out as we did before war and he’ll be okay, but not if he continues to negotiate ad infinitum.

So that’s the problem. It’s not the war per se. If he were successful and they are denuclearized for many years, and in a year or two this— they’re stewing in their own juice because of the sanctions, and you have a rebellion, and he flips the Middle East like he did the Western Hemisphere, where we only have 4 communist anti-American states left, then that would be something like the fall of the Berlin Wall. So it’s a lot more involved in that.

America First, Israel, and a Do-Nothing Congress

I don’t know what JD means by America First, but I think we’ve heard that nonstop, and that’s what Trump is trying to do with the massive $11 trillion foreign investment, the big Audi plant that came in. He’s trying to create jobs. The tariffs are very controversial, but they are part of the America First agenda, that anybody who wants to invest in America is tariff-free, and anybody who doesn’t gets slapped with a tariff that is at least as much as they tariff us, and sometimes even more. So I don’t quite understand that.

I don’t know what Israel has to do with it. I saw the El-Sayed commercial. Israel receives about $3 billion a year, a little over. That’s 1% of all foreign aid. It— we have a $7 trillion budget. Israel’s— the amount that we give Israel, the only democratic consensual society in the Middle East, the only Western society, the amount we give them is one-fifth of 1% of the budget.

And we were told in Michigan that the price of bananas and eggs is because we give 1/5 of 1% of our $7 trillion to this democracy that’s beleaguered and surrounded by 500 million enemies in the Middle East. And if JD believes that, I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with him.

The other thing is, so I don’t think that he’s putting into context the historicity that we usually lose. The being the in party usually loses. And they had a Congress also that didn’t do— it was a do-nothing Congress. He had the majority in the House and Senate. He had a lot of apostates. They did not pass the Voter ID SAVE America Act. They couldn’t really repeal Obamacare and come up with an— I don’t know anything they did in the first, this first 2 years, the Republican Congress. And they didn’t, they really didn’t do anything. And yet they had the majorities and they made some good nominations, but even the judicial nominations were pretty slow, the confirmations.

So they just— and then when they had— they won the House, even during the Biden administration when they won the House, all they did was fight. Remember the speakers? It went on for months. So the Democrats don’t do that. They have absolute authoritarian control and party line, as socialists do. Once they get the prime directive from on high, they all step to it. We’ll see if that goes with the Islamist socialist nexus now, but I don’t get that.

The Coming Fight Within the Republican Party

One thing I think I do get is that there’s going to be a fight in the Republican and the Democratic, but also in the Republicans. So who is the winner of this disaster? Is it the Marco Rubio people? Is it the J.D. Vance people? Is it the DeSantis people who say, “Well, Florida is the exception. We won the Senate and the governorship.” So that’s going to be looming.

I will say that the prime directive of a vice president, besides going to funerals and rhetorically battling on behalf of the president, which JD proved in the 2024 he was a master at, but it’s also to protect the president from personal invective and attack.

So when you have people on the right claiming that he’s a pedophile like Marjorie Taylor Greene did, or that he’s satanic and should be impeached and he’s a crazy nuclear bomber like Tucker Carlson did, and the vice president does not stand up and say, “Wait a minute, this is the— my president, this is the people we elected, we in the Republican Party. He’s not Satan. He’s not going to be impeached. He’s not going to bomb somebody with a nuke. What are you talking about? He didn’t do that.” For reasons unknown, especially in the Tucker case. But I think he’s going to have to at some point.

“The Counter Revolution”: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:27:29 – 00:27:52): So I want to talk about your book, The Counter Revolution, and the subtitle, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump. So we’ll have to kind of expand this a little bit. So it’s the fall and rise. Is it the fall or is it the imperial presidency? And what about how does the MAGA movement fit in too? Is it the fall and rise and fall, or is it a rise again?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:27:52 – 00:28:29): Well, the fall was that— those wilderness years after January 6th, and then the rise started during the campaign and his election. And I don’t think it’s yet a fall, as I just explained, probably ad nauseam, that presidents like Obama or Clinton or Trump can really improve their ratings and do a lot of good things or a lot of bad things. They can do— but the point is they do things. Foreign policy, they get above the fray, they get empowered, they renew their attention, they don’t have to deal with Congress, and he can do a lot of things.

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:28:30 – 00:28:44): Victor, if I may jump in, right? I think the thesis of your book, if I may, right? I think is that Trump’s approach has been to try to go after the sources of this progressive power, if you will, and so forth.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:28:44 – 00:28:45): This time around.

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:28:45 – 00:28:53): Right, right, exactly. And the question is, is he may be able to do what he wants, but can he actually do that? Right. Is that—

Going After the Sources of Progressive Power

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:28:53 – 00:33:21): Well, he can do it. Yes, he’s done it. But he didn’t do it— remember, he didn’t do it with congressional approval. He went— he defunded PBS and NPR without— it was an executive order. He got rid of USAID with executive budgetary prerogatives. He is suing the universities for antisemitism and racism and racial essentialism as his prerogative in a budgeting matter. They’re not going to get federal funds if they don’t do this. He shut the border by executive order. He built the wall by executive order, continued it. ICE is operating as part of its normal function. They all address the sources.

So he said the second time, I think during the wilderness years, he said, “I’d never been to Washington much and I had people in my cabinet the first time. They were nice people— Steve Mnuchin, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, John Kelly— but they weren’t MAGA people. So they saw their duty as to reinterpret my America First agenda, and that meant often obstructing it with bureaucrat-ese expertise.” This time loyalty was the prime directive. They’re all loyal, they’re all on the same page, and they’re addressing the symptoms.

The symptoms, as I wrote in the book, answer the question, how does the left exercise political power and influence when they do not have the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the White House, as they didn’t— as they do not as we speak? And the answer is kind of a Gramsci socialist communist directive, a march through the institutions.

And they understood that if you control K through 12 in the schools of education, the universities where half the population goes, the media, the public and private media— NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, etc.— Hollywood, professional sports, the corporate boardrooms, the foundations, and of course the administrative state, then you can exercise enormous power without being elected. And so that’s what he tried to address.

For all of the controversies of overdosed. He cut 270,000 federal employees, and probably another 100,000 have left. That— nobody thought that would be possible. He defunded NPR and PBS. He stopped all immigration, and he went a step further and he said, “No more catch and release, and I’m going to deport people, and I’m going to round up 500 criminals.” And then I thought to myself, how are you going to deport people when they were let in at 10,000 a day and they scattered through 50 states among 600 sanctuary jurisdictions?

So that was an existential challenge, but again, he was addressing the symptoms. “I don’t want them. I’m going to tax 1% on remittances sent to Mexico. I’m going to tax, in some cases, 1% of the endowment of universities.” So he’s trying to tell these countries abroad and interests at home that there had been existential, if to use that word again, problems that he had only addressed the manifestations or the symptoms but not the causes. And now he’s going right after the causes.

And so how do you— why is NATO the way it is? Well, they don’t meet their 2%. Why don’t they meet their 2%? Because they’ve adopted a green agenda, shut down their fossil fuels, low fertility, open borders, illegal immigration, censorship, and they discourage entrepreneurialism. So let’s scream and yell at them and shock, shake them up, and see if we can get conservative movements all over Europe so that they can be a partner rather than a subordinate, and they cannot rearm themselves. It’s kind of like Eastern Europe or the Baltic States or Norway or something, Sweden and Denmark, Finland especially.

And he’s trying to do that across the board, and I think that explains the level of furor. Because the left has said to themselves, “This is not George W. Bush, it’s not George H.W. Bush, it’s not Bob Dole, it’s not John McCain, it’s not Mitt Romney. This is a counter-revolutionary and he wants to undo our sources of power.”

Subpoenas, Lawfare, and the Democrats’ Next Moves

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:33:23 – 00:34:06): So we have a situation, I think from what I’m seeing, that there’s a split in terms of trying to impeach him. Talking about this furor, right? In a sense, if I heard you correctly earlier, the smartest thing you think the Democrats could do is actually just have restraint and govern without giving strength to the bomb throwers, so to speak, and so forth.

And but what does governance look like with this from the perspective of Congress? There’s, I’ve seen notes about subpoenas. Get ready for the subpoenas. Apparently there’s going to be tech bros called in in significant numbers. I mean, this is, of course, I’m just reading what’s on X mostly. Right.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:34:06 – 00:39:55): So all that, if they would read the first half of The Counter Revolution, they would see that each time they entered upon a civil or criminal suit, 5 of them, E. Jean Carroll’s diabolical effort, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith. His— Trump’s polls went up and they all collapsed. Even Alvin Bragg’s will eventually collapse.

And then when they tried to get him off the ballot, 25, that was a collapse. When they raided Mar-a-Lago, they found, I guess, 101 classified documents. They said there was a whole trove out of 11,000. That was a mess. When they impeached him twice and tried to convict him as a private citizen, it only helped him. When Joe Biden said he was garbage, he got in a garbage truck, and that backfired.

So they should understand, they should go back and say, “Did the Russian collusion get Donald Trump elected? Maybe it did. Did the laptop lies that it was Russian collusion— we got Biden maybe elected by it, but did that hurt us? Yes.” And so if they want to continue to do that, they will have Trump’s mugshot everywhere and he will rebound from it.

It’s counterproductive if they go back to the 30-70 issues that put them in the wilderness and put Kamala Harris— made her inert. And we know what they are. They’re the trans issue, they’re the open border issue, the 10,000 a day illegal immigrants, they’re the defund the police, defund ICE. New Green Deal, stop fossil fuels, neutral in the world, globalism. It’s not going to work.

But what I meant, if they were sober, they would get together and say, “What is our problem right now? Can we have a nonpartisan effort with congressmen and senators from both sides to address the $3 billion a day interest on the national debt? The national debt is unsustainable. Can’t we both work at this the way Clinton and Gingrich did?” It helped both of them. That was— that would be something they can do.

Can they get together and say, “The world is changing and Ukraine is producing a million drones a year? Tiny little Ukraine. We’re only doing 300. We’re doing something wrong with these $180 million airplanes and $14 billion carriers. Can we have decentralized suppliers that can do things en masse like we did in World War II?” There’s a lot of things they could do together.

Are they going to do it? I don’t think so, because they’re ideologues and they’re socialists and they have an agenda that they feel they’re morally superior, and their ends justify any means necessary to get there. And anybody— the way that socialist revolutions work is that anybody who objects becomes a counter-revolutionary or a traitor. So they always get further and further to the left, whether in 1848 or the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks. They devour their own, they create a system, and then it implodes because it doesn’t work, but it does a lot of damage and a lot of damage until it implodes.

What 2029 Could Look Like

And they’re capable of doing a lot of damage if it’s going to— they’re not going to— the Republicans are not going to get back the House and Senate in the next election with these huge leads. It’s going to take them 2 or 3 elections. It did last time. And the next president will be, I think, from the left of the Democratic Party, their nominee.

If that president should win with this Congress, then you can see what 2029 is going to be like. It’s going to be pack the court, let in new— 2 new states. The filibuster will be gone in January, I imagine. 200 years old. They’ll get rid of that. They’ll pack the court with 15 liberal judges. They’ll probably defund ICE. They’ll restore USAID on steroids and make sure it’s bulletproof this time around and giving left-wing governments abroad help, it’ll be pretty bad.

And they’ll have the power to do it unless the Republicans can get their act together and Trump can really have some big foreign policy successes and use his executive orders and veto to stymie them and work with them on bipartisan issues that Americans care about. That’s the way to handle it.

But I mean, they hadn’t even— the polls weren’t even closed and Robert Garcia was saying subpoenas and Jamie Raskin was saying lawfare and they’re already talking about bringing CEOs in and Slotkin was saying they’re going to go after young— any young person that works for Trump, and if they do that, they’re going to divide the country like you’ve never seen it.

And the country, for all of these back and forth midterms, is still 55% conservative. And you can see that even in these states that voted for to not allow biological males to go compete in women’s sports. Some of them were left-wing states. So that’s what we’re looking at, and I think history is a pretty good guide to what we can expect.

Young Voters and the Higher Education Problem

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:39:56 – 00:40:27): One thing that I noticed looking at how people voted, right, and looking at the age differentials, was that young people basically overwhelmingly voted blue. I mean, it’s— I forget the number right now, but a very significant number. You were mentioning how powerful it is when you have so much influence on the educational system, for example, and how people are taught. And so that’s not something that’s going to change election to election. At least that’s what I’m thinking when I see that.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:40:28 – 00:44:30): It’s not. And this is the first administration that realized the problem that half the country is going to college and there’s a matrix operating that ensures they’re left-wing, not just left-wing, but downwardly mobile and angry. And that is a $1.7 trillion student loan. 33% of it is in arrears, coupled with therapeutic education where these kids are not— I mean, we have a whole generation now for 4 years that went— it was admitted without an SAT score.

These students are not well prepared, they’re not well trained, they’re indoctrinated. And they leave with debt and they leave with non-marketable, in many cases, majors. A sociology degree, a psych degree, a studies degree, ethnic studies, Black studies, environmental studies, peace studies.

And then they move and gravitate as they, from these universities into urban left-wing enclaves— Boulder, Austin, Washington, New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Portland, and they’re very expensive blue cities, blue places. They don’t work. And they rub shoulders with wealthy people, Wall Street doctors, and they say, “You know what, I’ve got a BA from Williams. Oh, I’ve got a BA from Grinnell and I owe $200,000 and I’m working for an NGO, or I’m a— and I’m a beginning editor at Alfred Knopf in New York, and I’m making $60,000 and rent’s $60,000. So the whole system is rotten. Nobody appreciates my genius, my effort, my degree.” And that’s the 85% of white college degree socialists, the official membership of the DSA.

And so I think people on the right understood that, and they said, “Your universities are not going to segregate by what you call adjacent graduations or what you call theme houses. You’re not going to overcharge us 40% on federal grants. It’s going to go back to 15%. We’re looking very seriously at taxing your endowments or making your endowments guarantee the student loans so you have moral hazard. We’re thinking of getting out of the student loan business, but more importantly, we’re telling people that the college degree is no longer prestigious if it doesn’t produce the results that it had once ensured was worth the effort and expense and time.”

So half the country, we need electricians and sheetrockers and carpenters and plumbers and carpenters, all these people, and they’re noble professions. And the result of that’s been quite spectacular in its infancy even, that you look at the polls, 65% 5 years ago said they had a high reputation, they had a high regard for the reputation of higher education. That’s down to 33%. People said, “Do you think that a college degree is essential for upward mobility?” That’s down to about 45%.

So the public is starting to get the message that these universities turn out people who are not analytical, they’re not equipped orally or in writing to express themselves clearly, they have no mathematical skills, and these brands don’t mean anything. “I have a BA from Cal State Northridge. I have a degree in psychology from Stanford.” 80% of the grades at Stanford are A. There hasn’t been an SAT for 4 years until last year. 8% of— 9% of the incoming class were white males. 9% of a demographic that’s 33 to 40%, 35% of the population.

Globalization and the Lost Generation

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:44:32 – 00:45:10): And then, Victor, on the other side of that, you have what you describe to be one of the big dangers, from what I can tell, in the counterrevolution, which is this lost generation, the disillusioned young white males, so to speak. And you’re describing the scenario where you could even have further polarization. I’ve been arguing that the technology, the social media juiced up by AI, lends itself to that anyway. But now you have these political forces at play that are creating that. It just creates something very volatile that looks to me very foreboding.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:45:11 – 00:51:08): It does. The— when globalization came upon us at the millennium, there was a $6 billion, 6 billion person clientele for the first time, and there was 6 billion consumer class. And the people who could take advantage of that were largely on the West and East Coast. That’s where the banks were. That’s where the big corporate CEOs were. That’s where, for the most part, the universities were. And certain people that were in the media, in sports, entertainment, law, but especially in investment stocks, they made a killing. And I— tech, I had people that I knew very well at Stanford as students 5 years ago, and they’re making 4 or $500,000 in Silicon Valley.

And the people in the middle, the so-called irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, hobbits, crazies, garbage— these are all terms that Obama, Clinton, clingers, for Obama and Biden, used. They were outsourced or offshored, so they missed out on that. That was what the MAGA movement grew up out of. That anger. And it was very successful in addressing it for 4 years and for the first 2 years.

But, and I think that’s what JD means when he says we didn’t put America first. What he’s talking about is the lost generation that you mentioned in the middle of the country or in upstate New York or the San Joaquin Valley of California or eastern Washington and Oregon. And it’s— they’ve been lost out. They grew up in an era where they were 60, 50 years from the civil rights movement. All they knew was affirmative action and racial set-asides. They had no role in Jim Crow, much less 6 generations of slavery. They didn’t really understand the civil rights movement because it was so ancient. All they knew is that when they applied to school or they went to college or they were out in the public space, they were told they had toxic masculinity by feminists, that they were racist, sexist, xenophobes, etc., etc.

And the irony was, if you look at where they ended up as per capita income and opportunities, they would be classified as underprivileged. And there was no such thing in this leftist collective as a— as whites. These people had less commonality with white elites on the coast than they did with a Mexican truck driver or a Black electrician that worked alongside them.

And that’s what Trump tried to do. I don’t know if it’s going to succeed or not. He tried to create a class solidarity rather than a racial solidarity, and it worked in 2024. It apparently fell apart in this latest election, but this class was also despised. If you want to get a left-wing DEI person or a liberal person infuriated, then mention the lower white working class. They are despised by those people. They lack the romance of the poor and the culture of the aristocracy.

So that’s what the left— that’s really the enemy. When we had that toxic plume in East Palestine, you could see that no one from the administration wanted to set foot there. Finally, Pete Buttigieg looked like he was an outer space alien when he came there. He was so out of place, and so was all of them. But these were people they had written off. If that had been any other community, it would have been on the front page of the New York Times as an environmental catastrophe aimed at a poor, underprivileged community.

And I’m kind of afraid of the midterms because I thought we were over that DEI racial essentialism. And all I heard on every station last night was “First Indian, Native American, first gay person, first woman governor, first this, first this.” Not what their ideas were or anything. They were all part of a collective, not an individual with unique characteristics.

“Winter Is Coming”: The Next Two Years for MAGA

So winter has come, or as they said, “winter is coming,” and it’s going to be a rough 2 years, but it’s survivable if the Republicans can stick together and prevent a veto— I mean, a veto-proof Congress, and Trump can keep his eye on the ball and foreign policy and follow the model of the earlier presidents that were very successful after losing the Congress.

And but there is no margin of error now. You can’t get in a spat with Bill Maher. It’s not worth it. You can’t do things like that. It’s just too many people depend on you. And we’re going to— there’s going to be a lot of fights ahead in the MAGA movement.

I think the one thing that people agree on, we’re not going to go back to “we’ve got to cut the— privatize Social Security or cut the capital gains,” the Bush, Dole, McCain, Romney agenda. I don’t think we’re going to go back to that. It’s just that the MAGA movement’s going to have to refine some of its positions, but I think it still represents the majority of middle-class conservatives.

Is There a Way Out of Polarization?

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:51:10 – 00:51:42): And so, Victor, as we finish up, right, this is the thing that I don’t know the answer to at all, or I don’t have a sense, and I want to just start that conversation maybe in a final moment here, but this, the polarization seems to be a feature of how this political system functions increasingly. And the outcome, logical outcome of that is something really bad, I think. So where is there a way out?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:51:43 – 00:59:31): There is, but it has to be kind of a moral way out. So because the country is really in danger. Everybody according to a station has to step up. I know I do 4 podcasts a week, and from the very outset I said there’s not going to be any guest or any host that says the F-word or the S-H-I-T word or go after somebody. That’s all I hear on podcasts now, and we’re not going to do that. And we’re going to treat people that we interview and disagree with with dignity.

And we’re not going to— we’re going to be tough and critical as I have been right now, but I’m not going to say that Tucker Carlson is insane and he’s a crazy race white nationalist. I don’t know that. I think he’s said and done things that are very disturbing, but I’m not going to go after him personally.

I will say though that when I look at the most egregious examples, who are the people out on the street attacking officers? Who are wearing Charlie Kirk t-shirts with blood on it? Who is giving a talk about “we’re going to celebrate the Kirkaversary”? Who is engaging in violence on campus against Jews? It’s coming from the left. And I don’t see people on the left encouraging them to stop. I don’t.

And I think a lot of people on the right have said that a Candace Owens or someone like that, or a Nick Fuentes, is over— has gone out of bound. And they have been criticized, and they’ve said, “That’s not— that’s not helpful what you’re doing, and that’s not— that’s not part of the MAGA movement,” but I don’t see that self-correction on the left.

And it— you can’t fight it by using their methods. You have to elevate it, elevate it, and not be like them to appeal to the better angels of the American people’s natures. But it doesn’t do any good either to say, “We’ve got to tone it down, we’ve got to tone it down.” Are there people on the right that are too loud and too vulgar? Yes. But is the hate, the real hate, the idolizing a murderer like Mangione or glorifying in the wound of Charlie Kirk— does that have a comparable side? Or has there been 4 assassination attempts against the majority of the Hakeem Jeffries or Kamala Harris as they’re had by Trump? I don’t think it’s symmetric. I really don’t. It doesn’t serve any purpose to pretend that it is.

And the only way that that’s going to be reflected is you have to defeat them at the polls, and you have to have better ideas and galvanize and get your— the traditional— make the argument that America was good at its founding, it got better in its maturity, and it’s got a great future, and it’s far better than the alternative. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. And then say, “We on this side have certain rules of decorum and tradition that we’re not going to violate for expedient purposes.” And then win that argument and vote them out.

Immigration, Tribalism, and the Asymmetry of Political Hate

And it can happen, but we’re seeing something that is historical. We have never seen this before, this radicalism. And I think part of it is we have 55 million people who were not born in the United States, which can be very good talent and diversity. I am all for it. And 17% of the population. But if you have a salad bowl environment, or you say the melting pot is passé, or you don’t really think that everybody should be essentially their ethnic tribe and not American, which the left says, and you’re going to be DEI, DEI, DEI, and you’re going to bring back a pre-civilizational tribalism and fragment this, then it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. You’re going to have too many people who are not on the same page.

And when you have people at Columbia and they’re waving Hezbollah flags and they’re saying to Jewish students, “Go back to Poland,” which they mean Treblinka, the German camps that were stationed in Poland during World War II, then— and nobody’s speaking about it, and the college president’s terrified of her own students, as we see in Columbia and Harvard— then it’s not symmetrical. But it doesn’t mean that you have to adopt those tactics. You have to be better than they are in your discourse and your analysis.

And I understand sometimes Trump can be crude, and I, in the book, I said things like not saying, speaking ill of Rob Reiner’s death, who was kind of obnoxious at times and personally unfair to Trump and called him names. But nevertheless, you don’t attack somebody who’s just dead, just died tragically by his own son’s hand.

So I think everybody’s got it. I think people on the right are seeing that much more, and they’re— they are policing the people who are conspiracy theorists and really out there much better than the left is. The left is being carried along by those people.

And we saw that in the campaign when Mamdani says, “I’m going to go after richer, whiter neighborhoods.” What did that mean? Was that empirical? The most affluent ethnic minority in the United States are Indian American immigrants. He’s an Indian American immigrant. Did he say, “I’m going to go after Indian American immigrant communities because they’re the wealthiest”? No, he said, “I’m going to go after richer and whiter.” Does that mean some plumber that works in the Bronx? I don’t know.

But, and when you have a synagogue attack by a brother, a terrorist whose 2 brothers were in Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization in Michigan, and you have the next senator saying, “Hurt people hurt people,” justifying that. Who hurt that man? He came from Lebanon. We gave him the most magnanimous reception. He became a US citizen with all the bounty and privileges of being American, and he repays back us, the host, by driving a car and trying to kill innocent Jews.

And then the next U.S. senator says, “Hurt people hurt people.” Hurt people meaning he had 2 brothers that were working for Hezbollah on a high level organizing rocket attacks at civilians, and the Israelis retaliated and killed them. Therefore, he has legitimate hurts because his brothers were in a war, were warriors in a war and lost, and therefore he has a right to go in there and kill Jews. That’s what it boils down to. Nobody said a word about it much.

So I think it’s coming from the left. I agree people have to be more considerate, and it won’t do any good to tell the left to be more considerate because they won’t. You have to be considerate on our side and temperate in what we say and do, and then you have to win a decisive vote to show the country that that model is not acceptable. That’s how our system works.

Doubling Down on America: Reasons for Optimism

JAN JEKIELEK: (00:59:33 – 00:59:36): I mean, essentially you’re doubling down on America. That’s what I’m hearing.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (00:59:36 – 01:02:16): I am. I— Ronald Reagan was written off when I was in California as a young man here at this house as a complete nut. They made fun of him at Woodstock and everything. And when he ran for president, they said he was an extremist. But he was smiling, he was kind to people, he reached out to Tip O’Neill, and he basically stopped the ’60s, ’70s cultural revolution. Himself for 15, 20 years. He did that. And Donald Trump had a very different approach. It was much more confrontational. But this— he did stop what would have been, I think, 8 more years of that. And that— I don’t know what we would have done.

And I’m very optimistic because I’ll just finish by saying, when I look at— I don’t listen to people, I just ask myself, what is the inflation rate? What is the GDP? What is the foreign investment? What’s the poverty rate? What is the median income? What’s the stock market? What’s the job growth? Unemployment? Labor? It’s all good. It’s getting really good. Gas is the only real— that’s the tessera that’s missing out of this mosaic.

And I think there’s a really good chance with this record foreign investment and the new technologies like AI and stuff, you’re going to have a real boom in the first and second quarter next year. And as I think we’re almost on the verge of it now, and that’s going to really change things. I think it’ll give people a lot more economic opportunity. And if the president can work with the Congress about affordability of housing, maybe gets rid of some of the regulations and zoning restrictions and let people build homes for— that are affordable. I think it could really work out well.

So I’m optimistic, but I’m also worried that this is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. This is not Mark Penn and Doug Schoen writing the Democratic convention agenda for 1992 and ’96. I went and read it the other day. It sounded like a fossil. “We’re going to balance the budget. We’re going to try violent offenders who are 17 as adults. We’re going to close the border. We’re going to deport people that are here illegally and taking advantage of our system. We’re going to put 100,000 cops on the beat.” That’s what it was. And the right thought that was left-wing. Today the left-wing would say that was right-wing. Don’t you think?

JAN JEKIELEK: (01:02:17 – 01:02:23): Yeah. Well, Victor Davis Hanson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: (01:02:24 – 01:02:26): Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

JAN JEKIELEK: (01:02:27 – 01:02:32): Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hanson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.