The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson Unpacks Trump's Appeal

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

In an interview with The Daily Signal, renowned historian Victor Davis Hanson discusses the updated edition of his bestselling book, "The Case for Trump." Months before the 2024 presidential election, Hanson offers fresh insights into the remarkable political comeback of Donald Trump. The book's new introduction delves into the final days of Trump's presidency through late spring 2024, chronicling the unprecedented challenges Trump has faced and his resilience since leaving the White House. Hanson covers recent events—from legal battles to media controversies—and their impact on Trump's political standing. "It was really the most remarkable comeback in American political history, even more impressive than Richard Nixon's phoenix-like rise after losing the gubernatorial election to Pat Brown in 1962," Hanson says. Our conversation explores the miscalculations of Trump's opponents, his unfair treatment at the hands of rogue prosecutors, and the ever-changing dynamics shaping the presidential race. Plus, Hanson offers his perspective on how best to counter Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Listen to today's episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" or read a lightly edited transcript of our interview at DailySignal.com. Enjoy the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, August 7th. I'm Virginia Allen. The far left miscalculated when they chose to use lawfare to persecute former president Donald Trump. That's according to Victor Davis Hanson. He's a bestselling author and columnist and has recently updated his book, The Case for Trump. The Daily Signal, Rob Louis, sits down with Victor Davis Hansen today to discuss how the left went so wrong in the ways that they chose to persecute Trump. Stay tuned for their conversation after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice? These are the questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties, at

dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geinney, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains, brought to you by all. all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation. Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. The Daily Signal brings you an interview today with Victor Davis Hansen, a columnist for our outlet and a noted author historian and all around great person

who is one of the most popular people that we regularly publish. And so we're great to have you back on the show, Dr. Hansen. Thanks for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. You are out with a updated version of your fantastic book called The Case for Trump, newly updated and revised for the 2024 presidential election. Thank you for doing this. I remember when you first published, we had a conversation,

which we can link back to that original interview. But obviously, so much has changed since you first. published that book in 2019, including as you write, some remarkable things that have happened to Donald Trump, the man, and frankly are happening in real time, even as we do this interview in terms of whom he's having to face off against for this presidential election. So what was the motivation for you to update and put a new introduction on this book? Well, I was curious that people had not remarked that from Donald Trump status on January 7th of 2021 until I wrote the preface for the new book that was finished in April.

It was really the most remarkable comeback in American political history, even more impressive than Richard Nixon's Phoenix-like rise after losing the gubernatorial election to Pat Brown in 1962. So I wanted to know why that was. And part of the reason, of course, when I started the introduction, everybody was talking that Haley or DeSantis, etc. was going to easily win. They were ahead of him in the polls. And then a series of miscalculations on the part of the left, this use of law for, it started with the Mar-Lago raid, and then it accelerated

into the Fannie Willis Alvin Bragg, the Eugene Carroll, the Latita James and the Jack Smith in succession. And that was all juxtaposed to the asymmetrical treatment that was given by Robert Hur to Joe Biden for probably just as egregious, if more egregious removal of files. And all of the people who had never been tried under these statutes, whether in Georgia or Alvin, are in Manhattan. And then I tried to juxtapose that again with two impeachments never happened. Peachment and a trial of a private citizen. We never had that. 16 states tried to remove him from the ballot. And, of course, we had the collusion that continued on well after Robert Mueller, it still does.

And then we had the laptop disinformation that discredited those 51 intelligence. So I charted that step-by-step insidious attack on him and the boomerang effect that had. And then there grew up in an admiration for Trump that anything that didn't kill him, seem to be in a Nietzschean sense to make him stronger. You called it a miscalculation on the part of the left in terms of the lawfare. Why do you think that that backfired in the way that it did? I think they were too blatant. I think what really got them in trouble was, again, this asymmetrical, the people said,

well, Joe Biden for 30 years as a senator, took out files. And he never notified anybody contrary to what he claimed until he appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel. So then he got worried that somebody might investigate him. So then he kind of in a false pseudo manner came forward and said, maybe I have some. And then the more you learned about it, his ghostwriter was having had access to those classified files, which he didn't have a security clearance. And then he destroyed subpoena evidence from Robert Hurry.

He wanted to get the transcripts and the tapes, and he destroyed them. He was not prosecuted. I think anybody looked at the photos of Joe Biden's garage compared to Marlaugos saw that it was far less secure. He had more multiple places to put these files. And finally, that just became overwhelming. People just said, well, if Robert Hurd thinks he's guilty, but he's cognitively unable, that was the beginning of this kind of consensus. Well, if he's cognitive unable and some things, then he's cognitively unable to be president. And that kind of trailed on all the way to the removal of him.

The same argument arose again. If he's unable to be a candidate, then he's unable to be president. And then the kind of the doctoring, these performance art, virtue signaling, the way in which they rated Marlago, the sort of sloppy rearrangement of the files, as if Donald Trump had them all scattered over the floor. It was just one thing after another, people just kind of said, these people are out of control. And then the judges especially, they were, whether it was Judge Michan or Ingaron, they were

partisans, they were democratic, their families were democratic, they had said things in the past. The Latita James and Benny Willis and Alvin Braggs boasts that they were going to get Trump, the use of that boast for campaign fundraising. I think an American people when he said this is, as Trump said, a rig series of indictment. As you mentioned, it's not that Trump didn't face opposition. There were a number of formidable Republicans, including the governor of Florida, quite popular, coming off a significant victory to earn a second term, Nikki Haley. Why do you believe that the Republican or conservative voters decided it was better to stick with Trump

than go with an alternative like one of them? Well, their argument was ostensibly logical. Their argument was, we support the MAGA agenda. but we don't have the baggage of Donald Trump, baggage which they defined as tweeting or extraneous comments or something, as he said, about Nikki Haley's racial heritage. And they would say, we won't do that, but we can enforce the border, we'll get tough on China,

et cetera, et cetera, in the magnet sense of a populist nationals party. And the more that people saw them, they concluded two things, number one, that Trump, the person, was integral to the mega, agenda just because he gave a sense that he was not a politician. He didn't care what happened to him. And he was their bulldog that they would cut the leash and point in the right direction. Or the others, although they were excellent politicians, they still did not have the ability

to shock the world. And we thought that was a positive trait, but the electorate, I think, thought it was negative. The other thing is, and I pointed this out in the end they were put in an impossible situation because as this unfair and really indiscriminate use of the legal system to punish an ex-president and leading campaign, their reaction to it was a lose-lose situation. Because if they sympathize with what Trump was going through, then they were aiding the Trump cause. If they objected to what Trump was doing, then they were seen as traitorous and siding with the lawfare. So they tried to find, both of them tried to find a middle ground where they would say something like,

this should have never happened, but it wouldn't have happened to me because I wouldn't have exposed myself to what they were trying to do to me. And that was the perfect, seemingly that was the perfect squaring the circle, but it tended to, for the electorate, think, well, you're just trying to excuse what they're doing. They would have gone after you no matter what you said. and they never could resolve that dichotomy. Does it surprise you at all that Donald Trump being this, obviously, very successful businessman from New York, somebody who doesn't necessarily seem like an everyday American, yet still has this popular appeal with so many individuals across this country? I mean, in all 50 states, obviously he's not competitive in all 50, but I mean, there are

maga movements all over this country. What is it about his character, personality, or policies that makes him so popular? Well, two things. When he came in in 2015, the Bush, McCain, Romney consensus was that the white working class, I think John McCain called them hobbits or crazies. Their view of the white working class was similar to the Hillary deplorable Klinger, Obama. of you, and they felt they were a liability. And they, remember, they had picked, I thought a completely unqualified head of the R&C,

Michael Steele, to emulate Obama. And they had this position paper that said, we're going to lose because demographics are against us, and they're bringing in people. And they were for open borders. And so the idea was, we have to play down the rule of law. We have to go with the flow. We have to out Obama, Obama. Trump came in and said, no, all you have to do is be authentic and protect the rights of people based on their class, the middle class.

And I'll try to make a radical change. I will try to substitute class for race so that somebody who lives along the border who's Mexican-American will have more in common with me than the Harvard, BA, Senate staffer who runs for his, congressional system that happens to be Hispanic. So that really helped him that he said, we're going to look at the class. And he said in particular the white working class is not spent. The reason that the Republicans have lost seven, haven't won 51% of the popular vote since the defeat of Michael the caucus was because people aren't voting. They're not getting out. They have no reason. They feel that McCain or Romney or the Bushes are the same as the, whether that's true or not. That was a perception.

And then I think the other thing was authenticity. I mentioned in the original book that he came to Tulare, California. They always have the props up there. They have hay bales. They give the guy the caterpillar hats about 20 miles from 25 miles from where I'm speaking today, my farm. And it was Devin Nunes's district. He would always remark on that that Republicans would come.

They would put on work shirts, blue jeans, boots, and then they would They would, not twang, but they would kind of do what Hillary or Camilla Harris or Obama did. They would modulate their persona. The particular day that Trump came, and I'm just using this as an example of what he did across the country, it was about 105. He wore a black suit, the red tie, the black shoes, the grading Queen's accent. And he never changed. He was sweating. He still had his orange tan, his born here.

and people thought, whatever he is, he's authentic. And when he goes in front of the black journalists, most Republican candidates would not have replied the way he did. They would have been polite, much more polite, but they would have accepted the premise that it was kind of rigged, that Kamala Harris deliberately said she was going to go, then backed out, that he was late, there was no Zoom. And yet he authentically said,

I don't care what people say. I'm going to attack a black female journalist because what she did was misleading to me. That's what he did. So they feel that whatever audience he's confronting or addressing or whatever interview, he's always the same. And from what we just saw about Kamala Harris, when she's with an LGBT community, she sounds like she's a San Francisco politician when she addresses a black audience in the South and she starts to say you all. And just like Hillary did, you know, I came, had come too far and that kind of stuff. And people don't, I think that's, they don't like that. They don't like that modulation. I agree. I agree. And seeing how Trump reacted to that first question at the NABG conference was, was so classic Trump. I mean, he, as you said,

was not willing to accept the premise and was willing to call out the journalist for doing it. So I think that that authenticity does speak. We're talking to Victor Davis-Hanson, author of the newly updated book, The Case for Trump. Let me ask you this. You talked about and you write about in this updated version how he's overcome the adversity. And obviously, your book, you had to have this published at a certain point. So there have been a lot of developments just within the last month, the month of July. And we can start with the assassination attempt and talk about bouncing back from a traumatic experience. Tell me about your observations

about how Trump has reacted to that fateful moment. Well, I mean, that could not be scripted, and he came within a quarter inch of having his brains blown out. That's a traumatic. I was embedded twice in Iraq and on the second time coming home,

a rocket came and hit the tarmac and bounced up, or it would have got all of us that were boarding a small little light aircraft to go back to Kuwait. And I can tell you that it didn't even get near me. It was 100 yards away the shrapnel. But you think about very strange things. Why are these people trying to kill me? You know, and the point I'm making is that all was going through his head. And yet he went right

back on the campaign trail and people acted. They were making fun of them. It wasn't really a headshot. It was his ear. Maybe it was glass. Maybe it was shrapnel. I mean, it was pretty incredible how the left just went right after him, and he deserved it, et cetera. And yet he was on phase, and he got right back into the campaign. And he couldn't have scripted that. So I think it reminded people that at 78, he's still very robust. He has enormous energy. And whether you like him or not, he's not going to bend.

He's not going to feign. It was like when he got COVID right after the first debate, I guess it was, they had to take him to the hospital, and now we learned later that he was very, very ill, but he took all of these drugs they gave him, monoclonal antibodies, Pepsid, and all of a sudden he was out bragging about monoclonal antibody. I love those antibodies. You've got to all take those antibodies. Look at me, I feel strong, I'm robust.

Well, I don't care how robust he is. If you have 102 temperature and you have pneumonia starting to pneumonia, and you're in the hospital, and five, days later, you're addressing 80,000 people. You cannot feel well. And yet, no one, I don't think anybody's ever seen Trump sick or feel like he's sick, or he never says, I don't feel well today. So there's something that's almost supernatural about his ability to get very little sleep, and that radiates, especially it was vis-a-vis Biden. The remarkable thing about the assassinate, If I could just say that he's going to have a very tough race because everybody says, well, the Democrats are going to be playing catch-up because they don't have an official candidate.

They sort of coronated Kamala Harris. They removed Biden. There's all sorts of hypocrisies and line involved in that process that can come out. But everyone knows that Kamala Harris has the same cognitive inability to communicate that Joe Biden did, but for different reasons. And they have a paradigm in 2020 that overcame that. They put Biden off limits to reporters. He didn't address large crowds. He never gave a non-teleprompted speech.

They counted on this new change where 70% of the electorate and most of the swing states would not vote on election day. And the majority that did that would be Democrats and the authenticity of the ballot. The rejection rate, I should say, dived. the amount of ballots swarmed. And then finally, they repackaged Joe as old Joe Biden from Scranton. The moderate was going to unite us. They feel that that worked.

And you can already see that in the 13 days that she's been annoyed it, and Biden withdrew from the race, she hasn't given an interview. She hasn't spoken to a crowd that's unscripted. When she was at the tarmac with the hostages, she just had one minute to explain. And in that one minute, she confirmed every, that she cannot speak. She just said, this is the art of diplomacy, and diplomacy

and I really support diplomacy. And even Joe Biden in his challenged state looked at her like he was, what is she saying? I can't fathom them. So they're going to keep her off the campaign trail. They're going to rely on early in mail balloting. And as we also see, they're going to say there is no such thing as Kamala Harris prior to July 21st. This is the a new, new Camilla Harris. That's right. They,

they will. And unfortunately, many people in the legacy and establishment media will go along with that, as we've already seen

in the time since she's been introduced. And remember, we don't have two years to refute that. They only have 90 days, some 90 days. So that was my

original point, that Trump has an enormous obstacle, that given the time that will be eaten up by the Olympics or the Democratic Convention or the debates. He doesn't have a lot of time to redefine her.

And I know that everybody on the conservative side wants to point out that she did adopt a different identity per the audience she was speaking to. She had an amorous relationship with Willie Brown that really jumpstarted her. She had an undistinguished career as. a prosecutor both in San Francisco and statewide as Attorney General. But unfortunately for them, they don't have time to do that. I don't see that to get into that stuff. All they have time to do is to say, this is what she was for.

Show the clips. This is the most radical presidential candidate, far more radical than Jimmy Carter or Mike Dukakis or George McGovern. This is what she did as vice president, and this is what she will do if she's, and if they can just hammer that, in the way that the late Lee Outwater did on Michael DeCoccus. It was very similar.

He came off as he kept saying, I've been looking at that campaign. He kept saying, I'm not ideological. I'm not a liberal. I'm a competent governor. It's about competence. It's about technocracy. I engineered the Massachusetts miracle. This is not about George Bush, the conservative, or me, the Massachusetts liberal.

Then Lee Outwater stepped up and said, yes, it is. Here's the Willie Horton ad. Here's the Tank Ad. Here's the Boston Harbor ad. And when I got done, he said, I'm going to take the bark off you. And the reason I'm mentioning this is New Caucus on August 1st was 17 points ahead in the poll. And when they got done with him, he lost almost by eight points. It's the same time frame that Trump has to work in.

But the difference was Lee Outwater sort of hijacked the Bush, Elder Bush aristocratic campaign. And once he was successful, if you remember, he died shortly of a brain. tumor, he was asked to apologize to Dukakis. Everybody said, we're never going to do that again. Basically, the Republican establishment said, we would rather lose nobly than win ugly. And they never did quite that again against Obama or Bill Clinton. And the result is they've lost seven out of the last eight popular votes and they've never won 51 percent since.

So Donald Trump, if he wants to win, is going to have to be, doesn't have to be ad hominum. In fact, he shouldn't, but he has to show everybody who she is and why she won't run on her record and why she won't tell us that she's still proud of being a radical. And if he does that, he will win in the way that Bush did. If he doesn't, he will lose. We are talking to Victor Davis-Hanson, author of an updated book just in time for the 2024 presidential election called The Case for Trump. You are a Californian, a native Californian. You obviously saw Kamala Harris up close in her variety of roles that she held in the Bay Area and then as a U.S. Senator from California.

So you describe her as the most radical candidate, progressive Democratic candidate who's ever run for president. Are there specific policy issues that stand out in your mind that you think would resonate with voters if Trump were to focus on them? Yeah, I do. On the vocabulary issue, she was the one that told us in California that you cannot use a word. illegal alien, even though we had the large, we had more illegal aliens at the time than all the other states put together. And we were running massive deficits. We still are. We have a $50 billion deficit. We have the fourth largest reserves of natural gas and oil in the country. And yet we're the biggest consumer of oil. And we're not using it. We're importing $25 billion of energy from

places like Kuwait and before the probably again Iran all these illiberal regimes and she was the one who banned as attorney general she just toured the state no fracking no more offshore drilling no horizontal drilling and so we have all of this energy that just sits there where we pay the highest prices of gas in the country she was the one who was spearheading as a tenant attorney general this disastrous initiative And she assured everybody, if you decriminalized theft, and that means that anything under $950 would be a misdemeanor, then you will have less crime and you won't have crowded prisons. And everybody said, well, the criminals are not stupid. They're going to know what $950 is and they're going to steal $800 so they don't commit a felony.

And she thought that was absurd. And that's exactly what happened. She was the one that said that we don't want to criminalize homelessness. San Francisco has got the largest homeless population per capita in the country. She was the one that really was in, we in California are not in a permanent drought. As people say, three years ago, we had the wettest year in history. But during her tenure as Attorney General, we had some wet years, but there was a policy developed, by the Brown and Newsom administrations in which we let 90% of the stored water out to the ocean.

And we put thousands, if not a million acres of agricultural land that had contractual water agreements, both for the state water project and the federal government. And we didn't give them any water. She was a principal on that movement as well. And then, of course, the craziest thing is San Francisco is 800 million, dollars in debt right as we speak, and the state is $50 billion in debt, and she was the one that pushed reparations. And she was asked specifically, are you for reparations? And she said, yes, without even noting that California had always been a free state, that the black population

was only about 2 and a half, 3%, and more importantly, that 27% of the people who live in California were not born in the United States. So the idea that they're culpable for something that happened, you know, 170 years ago in the Civil War, it was just mind boggled. So she always promotes these ideas to particular receptive audiences. And this gives a great advantage to the Trump administration because she's never spoken in California. There is no such thing as an adversive or opponent audience. And she didn't do that in her misadventure as a primary candidate. So she has never spoken in her entire life to a hostile crowd. And she can't do it. And what that does to her, she doesn't just say that she's on the left. She says, I'm a radical. Or she doesn't just say,

I'm for reparation. She says, let me be clear about it. She doesn't just say, we should have no private health care. She let's just get done with it and start over. So she emphatically doubles down, and that gives people an advantage to say, look, she was emphatic. And the other thing, is, which is I'll finish, is that she's the first presidential candidate, I think, in modern history that has never entered a primary, much less won a primary, and got the nomination. She's never, she's never entered a primary. And I don't know, I don't know how that can happen, but what it shows you is that she's never, ever gone before a mixed audience and tried to make the case for her views. She's always assumed that everybody in the audience and all the reporters

agree with her. So to ingratiate herself, she has been more left than they are. Let me ask you this one final question. As I listen to you go through those different issues, I recalled seeing recently Scott Rasmussen's poll from RMG research, which showed that Donald Trump holds a double-digit advantage on so many of those issues, whether it be economy, inflation, immigration border, crime, you go down the list. I mean, he held this. He held this double-digit advantage, by the way, over Biden. And now he also holds it over Harris. Yet at the same time, you look at a lot of these battleground states and the race is tightening

up. And so you have said that in your updated book that Donald Trump has overcome this adversity before, obviously we've seen in the last couple of years what he's had to endure. Do you remain an optimist today about his chances or are you pessimistic about this here in the beginning of August? Well, I think he has a lot better team that he has in 2020. and I've looked at some of the early commercials, and they do reflect that theme of trying to remind everybody who she is.

And so again, because every single issue that Harris has embraced is unpopular and doesn't poll anywhere near 50 percent, and she was not only for it for 30 years, but she helped implement it as vice president, all Donald Trump has to do is translate the opposition to those issues to her, And the two obstacles that he has is she won't be anywhere around. She's hiding. And she's outsourced her defense to the media and journalist and the big money from

Tech and Wall Street for ads. And two, to the degree that she does give scripted interviews, they're going to phrase the questions or she's going to have an audience in such a way that she's going to say, Donald Trump was for open borders. I've never been for open borders. I want all sorts of energy. I don't want to hurt. And that's going to be very hard to penetrate in 90 days.

But again, Lee Atwater did it in 90 days. And Michael Dukakis, to tell you the truth, had actually been a governor. And he was a far better spoken candidate. He was a much kinder person. And yet they were able to reveal that he was disingenuous. So they can do it. But if they get into Colossacks about, let's talk about her, what percentage she's black or Indian or her cackling. That's all known to the electorate. They don't

have to be reminded. All it is is fodder for the journalist when he does that. But they do not want to talk about who she is and what she's been for and what she will do. Well, that's sage advice. As always, from Victor Davis Hansen, author of the newly updated book, The Case for Trump. Thank you so much, sir, for all of the things that you do, your contributions to the Daily Signal, your column, as I mentioned earlier, one of the most popular things that we publish every week. And so we appreciate you spending time with us today. Well, thank you for having me again. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode.

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