The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Sends So-Called ‘Expert’ Reeling After Historic First 6 Months

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Nothing could have prepared our so-called “experts” for the growing success of the Trump administration. They insist they alone could only predict the outcome of numerous policies. And yet, time after time, they continue to get it all wrong. Look no further than President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. Trump’s tariffs did not send the U.S. into a recession, as some of the so-called “experts” believed would happen. Instead, they’ve generated over $100 billion in revenue so far this year, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.  An outcome some experts thought would be impossible. These miscalculations not only apply to the economy, but also on issues such as immigration, military recruitment, and foreign investment, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words:” 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1  👉If you can’t get enough of Victor Davis Hanson from The Daily Signal, subscribe to his official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273  👉He’s also the host of “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” available wherever you prefer to watch or listen. Links to the show and exclusive content are available on his website: https://victorhanson.com  The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: https://secured.dailysignal.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk. Business. In this first six months of the Trump administration, we've entered unknown territory. I guess the best way to determine is there are a lot of known unknowns. We're doing things we've never done before, and the conventional wisdom about tariffs, about foreign investment, about our assets that are unrealized, about military recruitment, about illegal immigration, they've all gone with a win. We're in new territory. All the perceived wisdom as ignorance, our experts think they can predict it,

but they've been wrong and nobody knows what is what, except we're in a very exciting period. And when you add in robotics and AI and the efficiency in government regulation due to these cuts and fast-tracking permits, we don't know where we are, but we might be on the verge of an economic boom. Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. In this first six months of the Trump administration, we've entered unknown territory. I guess the best way to determine is there are a lot of known unknowns. We're doing things we've never done before, and our experts think they can predict it, but they've been wrong. Let's take some examples.

Usually tariffs are not a source of revenue, because traditional economic orthodoxy says that whatever revenue they generate, they decrease GDP by inflicting a tax on goods. But yet, we don't know what the profit margin is in these countries. And perhaps the tariffs are not resulting in rising prices. At least they haven't in May and June, which suggests, again, that the Germans or the South Koreans or the Chinese were making so much money by exporting to the United States while protecting their own industry and piling up surpluses that they could pay tariffs and still remain in our market at a cost competitive profit. The result is that we're getting up $26 billion a month on higher. No one anticipated that. Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary said in theory the

year could end with a third of a trillion dollars, $330 billion. That's almost 5% of our revenue is coming from tariffs which we thought would be impossible. Another impossibility is usually we're running a $2 trillion debt. That's what we were usually told by people. But in the month of May, there were more federal revenues than there were debits. And that was a result of the doge cuts and the tariffs and the seasonal increase in federal revenues that come through taxation and other charges against the private sector. Everybody said, well, this is always, May is always a good month.

It's the one good month of the year, but we haven't had a surplus since 2017 in any month, which is kind of strange if we're going to run this huge $2 trillion budget deficit, and while we're discussing it, more money is coming in than going out, and we have this known unknown about tariffs, then something's up. And that something's up is amplified. When we look at the foreign investment, we were told $4 trillion, $6 trillion, $8 trillion. That's a phenomenal number. Nobody has ever had $8 trillion of foreign investment in the United States in one year.

The Secretary of Energy, Doug Bergam, says to us now that the actual revenue, or I shouldn't say revenue, but the actual income or amount or capital investment from foreign sources of various statuses could be $15 trillion. 15 trillion. Economists have ratios for each billion dollars in foreign investment, depending on the nature of the foreign investment, the jobs created. If this were true, it's a phenomenal number. He also said something that was quite striking that the value of U.S. assets that have been

on tap, natural gas, coal, oil, timber, Earth minerals is somewhere between $100 trillion and $200 trillion. Now, we don't want to exploit and plunder our countryside, but it's something to think about that if we were not buying rare earth minerals from China, and we probably may not be, or we had a mechanism to tap our coal and use it cleanly to help generate the electricity for AI, this is unusual. This is crazy. $15 trillion of foreign investment, $200 trillion of unrealized assets.

And remember that the $15 trillion is coming from people who were not willing to do that prior to Donald Trump. They're doing it in fear of tariffs. There's a couple of other things, and that is the military was short anywhere, depending on who you talk to, 45,000 recruits. They could only get 50% of their benchmarks. A year ago at this time, about 50%, about only about half of the people were in. enlisting. But when they changed the ad campaigns and they said they were no longer going to prejudice recruits for tenure, promotion, enlistment, advancement, etc. by their race or gender,

and they were going to stress battle efficacy, all of a sudden recruitment soared. Nobody thought you could do it in six months. But in less than six months, the military went from, we're short 50% we don't know what to do maybe it's gangs maybe it's tattoos maybe it's drug use maybe it's obesity maybe we're competing to i don't know what happened but all these people have enlisted and we all know what happened they stress what the military is for in their ads and communications and they got what they wanted and there's one other final thing that's inexplicable we were letting in up to 10,000 illegal immigrants a day for over a four years period. It's controversial how many in total came, but it could be from 8 to 12 million.

So when Donald Trump said he was going to offer a self-deportation, you get $1,000, you get your way paid for, and you can apply for legal immigration at some future date. If you don't do this, you're disqualified for 10 years. And then he was, the big beautiful bill will continue the wall. He put pressure on Mexico to enforce its own borders to stop this trek northward. We could go through all the things he's done, but we all thought that maybe he could reduce it from 10,000 to 2,000, maybe to 1,000. I thought maybe, wow, if he does all this and he actually forces people and he creates a new deterrence, he might get only 500.

Some months there's nobody, 126 people, I think it was in May. This is phenomenal. There is no illegal immigration right now as we speak. That frees the Border Patrol and the new agents that will come online and the new big, beautiful bill to round up the 10 million, starting with the 500,000 criminals that Joe Biden let in, added all up. And the orthodoxy, the conventional wisdom, wisdom about tariffs, about foreign investment, about our assets that are unrealized, about military recruitment, about illegal immigration, they've all gone with a win. We're in new territory. All the

perceived wisdom as ignorance, and nobody knows what is what. Except, we're in a very exciting period. If $9 trillion represents the market capitalization of all of Silicon Valley, you can imagine what 10 to 15 million would do to this country. It's like bringing a new Silicon Valley in total, one and a half of them, and plopping them down. And when you add in robotics and AI and the efficiency in government regulation due to these cuts, and fast-tracking permits, we don't know where we are, but we might be on the verge of an economic boom.

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansan.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.