The Daily Signal - Winning the War, Fighting the Swamp: Trump’s Toughest Battle Isn’t Iran | Victor Davis Hanson

Starting point is 00:00:00 Amazon presents Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal.

Starting point is 00:00:44 We are now entering the 50th, the 52nd day, somewhere in that period of the ongoing war with Iran. We're in the middle of negotiations. We have a blockade on Iranian shipping going in and out, Iranian bound shipping going in or out of Iran, of Iran as well as the Iranians are claiming that they too are trying to stop shipping that is pro-Western or related to the United States. We don't really know who we are dealing with. We don't know whether the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Army or the elected what's left of the elected government or the theocrats themselves. They're all vying for power. They're all arguing with each other.

Starting point is 00:01:31 So it's a very complicated situation in Iran, even though they're a prostrate. They don't have any military or economic capability left, and yet they remain defiant. Now, why do they remain defiant when the next cycle of this war could knock out their bridges, their electrical power, and destroy what's left of their military? And we could do it very easily. They believe that Donald Trump is on a tightrope, that he has certain constraints, prohibitions that are self-imposed upon him through political calculus, or there are outside criteria that will force him to stop his neutering of Iran and will allow them at some point

Starting point is 00:02:16 to rearm? What are those? Well, first of all, they are watching the midterm elections very carefully, and they're looking at the polls, and they feel that the Democratic Party is a great ally, the leftist, especially in it, the hard left. They look at Tim Waltz, the former failed presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. He was in Spain this week at an international socialist conference. Spain, remember, was very anti-American, has refused American use of its NATO base and airspace. And what did he say? He said that our war effort, now he's talking about our soldiers at war against Iran during periods of intense combat. he is saying that they were fascist, that the whole idea was fascist.

Starting point is 00:03:02 And when Iran hears that, they think, well, if a former vice president nominee of the United States is siding with us, then maybe Trump will relent. There's also edgy Republicans. They want to, of course, they have to be reelected to carry out the MAGA agenda. Some of them are looking at their internal polls and saying the price of gas is hurting us. We're not paying attention to the economy. We have under seven months before the midterms. At some point, Mr. President, you've got to pivot. Then there's the Democrats.

Starting point is 00:03:31 They've threatened the War Powers Act. We're at day 50, and day 60 to 90, they can cut off funds. Now, they don't have the votes in the House to do that, or the Senate, but they feel there's enough renegade Republicans worried about their own seats that they might get some defections, something to worry about. By the way, Barack Obama didn't work. about it all. He bombed Libya for seven months without even consulting Congress. He had a Democratic Congress, and he thought that whatever he did would be rubber-stamped, and he was absolutely correct.

Starting point is 00:04:05 The Europeans, they're kind of like a carrion force. They look at this. They didn't do anything to help. They did a lot of things to hamper our efforts on Iran. But they feel that the heavy lifting is over, and they might just sort of creep back with an armada, one or two ships per country, 20 or 30 countries, and then they can say they open the straight, get back in the good graces of the United States, and patrol this crucial conduit that they export into and import oil out of. So they're trying to tell Trump, stop the kinetic action, let us in, please, please. At home, he's got, in addition to the Republicans who were worried about their, and with good reason, and their careers, he's got the fanatic. left. He's also got a kind of a fanatic right. This week, Tucker had a guest on, and they were quoting the book of Daniel from the Bible about the Antichrist, and the argument, thinly

Starting point is 00:05:06 veiled was that Donald Trump and the Iranian War fit the prophecies and the narrative of Daniel, who was talking about a king, i.e. the Antichrist, who would have success in the Middle East, but then, of course, fail and meet his fate. It was almost a wish as much as a prophecy. Marjorie Taylor Green, once a fanatic Trump supporter, without power now. She's out of Congress. But she's now peddling the conspiracy theory that Trump really wasn't the target of a real assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania, that he may have had helped staging the incident.

Starting point is 00:05:45 That's really loony. Of course, Candace Owens is now regretting her, not just regretting her vote for Trump, but arguing that he's a very perminious, almost a satanic figure. This is really unusual that somebody who was fanatically pro-Trump, as these three were and were habituaries at Marlago, all of a sudden would not just say, well, I agree with him with 80% of his agenda, but the 20% I can't go along with,

Starting point is 00:06:13 but they've turned not just against him, but many of their positions and much of their rhetoric is not that much different than the hard. left today. We don't know where they're going to end up, but they're on a trajectory to join the never-trumper's at the bulwark, perhaps. And then there's also worry about the weapons shortage. We had not invested heavily enough in quantity. We have good quality of weapons, the best in the world, but we don't have enough Tomahawk missiles. We don't have enough Patriot missiles. And we need to have our stocks replenished and have them replenish quickly. And if this war

Starting point is 00:06:52 were to go on another three or four weeks, we would not be able to achieve the level of competency that we had in the first four weeks simply because we would be hoarding and worrying about weapons that would be short. Put this all together and explains a couple of things that are otherwise inexplicable. Why, after Iran has been militarily destroyed, it has a restive population that at almost any minute that it feels they can survive, they will rebel. And economically, it was already in a period of depression, and now it's losing all of its revenue, and it's just about ready to implode. Why, with all this, does Iran keep saying that it's winning, and why do people put pressure on

Starting point is 00:07:38 Donald Trump as if he's losing? And the answer is, the war is not necessarily about just military affairs alone. It's politics. and Trump's enemies at home and abroad feel that if they can drag it out, and if Donald Trump, for a variety of reasons, can't turn the tactical victory to long-term strategic success, he will be vulnerable. And all of his economic progress that he's made so far, which is pretty impressive, the idea that he ended illegal immigration, the ability to flip Venezuela from an

Starting point is 00:08:17 arch enemy into a successful state without any losses, all of that will be endangered and he will be neutered in the midterm elections. And so therefore, Donald Trump is winning on the battlefield, but he has to keep going somehow and nullify all of these centrifugal forces around him that are hoping for his defeat. And yet, in the end, only he can win the war. If he continues a little bit longer, a week or two, Iran will be bankrupt. And when it's bankrupt, it will not have enough food, not have enough fuel, not have enough key consumer commodities, and the people will be very restive. But the question now that we're looking at, will the pressures that surround him in a 360-degree fashion force Trump to relent when he's inside of a spectacular and

Starting point is 00:09:09 spectacular and historic victory. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hansen 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 victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.

The Daily Signal - Winning the War, Fighting the Swamp: Trump’s Toughest Battle Isn’t Iran | Victor Davis Hanson

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