The Ricochet Podcast - The Case for Trump: Victor Davis Hanson Makes The Closing Argument

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

With a little over three weeks to go before the election, we thought it would a good time to have a heart to heart discussion with our good friend Victor Davis Hanson. the Classics professor, the military historian, the farmer, the cultural observer, and the author of The Case For Trump, his best selling book that came out in 2017 and was re-issued earlier this year. It’s the most cogent case we’... Source

Peter Robinson Welcome to this special podcast from Ricochet. I'm Peter Robinson, and I'm about to have a conversation with my old friend, Victor Davis Hanson. If you think that Donald Trump only wins the support of deplorables, think again. Victor is a classicist, a military historian, and the author of more than two dozen books, including the acclaimed A War Like No Other, his account of the Peloponnesian Wars. Victor's most recent book, The Case for Trump, a new revised edition of the book appeared just this past March. Victor, welcome. Are you in Selma

today? Yes, I am in my farmhouse. So you are speaking to us from the house in which you grew up. I grew up here. This is a house of deplorables. It always was. And I'm looking out the window at a beautiful almond orchard in beautiful Selma, California, two miles away. All right. Victor, I'm going to begin by quoting from this book, and I'll do that often. The Case for Trump. Announcing his candidacy more than four years ago, Trump seemed like Caesar, crossing the forbidden Rubicon to bring an end to the old politics as usual. Julius Caesar breaking the ancient norms to march on Rome itself, ending years of civil strife and paralysis in Rome's governing institutions, and then having the city's elite turn on him,

arranging his assassination. No one is suggesting that Donald Trump will meet his end in the Senate, but things did not go well for Julius Caesar. Do you expect an unpleasant or disappointing or even tragic end to the story of Donald Trump? I said so also at the end of the book. I said that that was a motif and what john ford western whether it's in the searchers when john wayne walks out of that door to oblivion after saving natalie wood or shane goes up rides up into the grand tetons after saving um the town or g Cooper in High Noon or the or you could argue the Magnificent Seven. Since I introduced you as a classicist, shall we toss in Achilles at Ajax as well? Yes. And I talked a lot about Sophoclean tragedy, which was written between 440 and 406 BC.

The idea was that certain democratic or constitutional societies, they reach a point where either they're on the frontier or they're in periods of chaos or transition, but they cannot deal with an existential threat. And yet, they know some people who can, but the people who can will use methodologies that they find contrary to their own sensitivities. So that's the tragic hero rather than the epic hero. He comes in, he fights these demons, he keeps expecting some type of praise or acknowledgement or permanence, and then sort of like Shane, he says, I tried, you can't break the mold. That doesn't mean that Donald Trump won't get reelected. I'm just suggesting that whenever his tenure ends, he's not going to be in the pantheon of presidents that we hear on TV, on PBS specials. It's just not going to happen.

All right. Victor, let's go through the case for Trump that you lay down in this book. And this book was written early in the Trump administration. So let's do that. And then let's talk about Trump's record since most of this book was written. Again, you've written a revised edition. But first, the underlying, the basic case for Trump, which in some ways, as I read this book, Victor, it's the case for Trump, but in some ways, as I read this book, Victor, it's the case for Trump,

but in some way, it's the case for the people who voted for Trump. All right, the case for Trump. Trump's rants. You're writing here about the campaign four years ago. Trump's rants reduced lots, excuse me, reflected lots of Americans' realities far more accurately than did the equivocations of Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton. I doubt either of those grandees hears gunfire at night. Close quote. Explain that. Well, on every issue, their point of view was negotiable. Some of the most fierce critics of open borders were Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton in the 90s. And Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney and John McCain, all at critical times in their gubernatorial or their senatorial careers, made the necessary adjustments on the border. But of course, when they saw that Barack Obama won in 2008, and they thought that

there was a changing demographic in the United States, they just went over and it wasn't an issue for them. I could ditto the same thing with China. I could ditto the same thing with returning industries to America, questioning NATO participation and their obligations of our members to pay their fair share, China especially. What I'm getting at is that it's not that they have an ideology that's at odds with Trump. They have no ideology. Their ideology is, I want to offend the least number of people.

I always want to find where the David Gergen consensus is, and then I want to be right in those sidelines. And then I can move back and forth and adjust. I'll say one thing in my primary, I'll say one thing in the general election like McCain used to do. I'll rule out the Reverend Wright from the beginning of my 2008 campaign because I'd rather lose nobly than win ugly. And so that was what Trump sort of saw. And he came in and said, you know, you people want the border closed and legal only immigration. You people still can build things. Your energy's cheaper. You've got less shipping costs. Why don't we do it here? China, don't believe me, just read what China says at their party congresses. They want to destroy us as an economic rival, and we're not going to let that happen.

And then Europe, you know, they've got a larger population, the EU, than we do, and they have almost the same size of GDP, and yet we're paying for 33% of the budget. And nobody would dare say that but everybody thought it and so the trump took that tragic role by saying i'm going to say what you think and you're going to hate me for saying it and i don't care if you hate me oh he didn't care victor those are the candidates here's the electorate again the case for trump the general fault lines a mostly upscale and coastal urban professional and educated elite is politically aligned with minorities and the poor they are often opposed by suburban conservatives and almost always

by a rural and small town middle class in the nation's interior. On the top coastal elites, I raise my hand because I'm speaking to you from Palo Alto, California. On the bottom, minorities and the poor who benefit from affirmative action programs and redistribution of various kinds. And your argument is that Donald Trump stands for the American in the middle. Is that correct? Yeah. All we have to do is look at the zip codes and correlate them with two data points. One is the average per capita income of a particular congressional district or county and then see where they vote, red or blue. And overwhelmingly, the middle class votes now Republican. So the Democratic Party is a party of the very wealthy and the upper class of the

professional upper middle class and then the very poor. And the argument is you can't really have a constitutional republic in history when you have a small group that support a permanent bureaucracy so they can have access to power and wealth and bend the rules, whether it's superficially Nancy Pelosi going in secretly getting her hair done without a mask, or Dianne Feinstein's husband profiting as the biden family in china and then you can't have a constitutional republic when you have a large number of the underclass who need government assistance and they're not autonomous they're not they don't have uh independence economically so the idea was that the middle class it may lack the romance of the poor and it may lack the taste of the wealthy,

but they were independent and they didn't need government. So then they were more disinterested and they were the largest group. So the shrinking of the middle class under globalization and then combined with illegal immigration, we have 50 million people in the United States that were not born here, that are residing here, both as legal and illegal residents. 27% of all Californians were not born in the United States, that are residing in our state. So there were a lot of different foci at the same time that explained the unhappiness. But the middle class matters because, actually, this is somehow or other, I hadn't quite grasped

this aspect of it before. The middle class matters to the survival, to the well-being of the republic because these are people who have jobs and education and they stand on their own feet, so to speak. They are independent of the government, unlike the very rich who manipulate the government to their advantage, or the very poor who are

simply outrightly dependent on the government. That's the argument. I think so. Okay. Victor, again, the case for Trump. Trump envisioned decline as a Nietzschean matter of choice. You know, you say something straightforward, but you toss in an adjective like Nietzschean to remind me that you're extremely well read. And I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Decline is a Nietzschean matter of choice. Sinking into oblivion is not fated. For Trump, it is a simple matter of will.

Explain all that. Well, under Obama, and to be frank, under the Bushes and Clinton, we had this determinist idea that we were on this trajectory, this rendezvous with history. It was sort of an arc, as Obama framed it. And we were going to arc up to a higher moral plane. We were going to have solar panels. We were going to have permanent affirmative action, diversity instead of unity, open borders. And we were just going to give up the bad history, the colonialism, supposedly, although we were never a colonial power, the imperialism. And we were going to let China just sort of take over.

And this was the idea that we were just not up to it anymore. So in the Middle East, Iran was going to have a crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, along with Syria, Hezbollah, an alliance maybe with China, Turkey, Russia. We couldn't do much about it. And we're going to try to pressure Putin to be democratic, but we're really not going to sell Ukraine weapons or go into Syria and get in a fight with Russian mercenaries or bomb the blank out of life. There was just a sense that we had both better things to be doing

and we were going into a sort of a 1950s united kingdom artistic uh cultural importance but we were just spent and that was the idea and trump came along and said you know i don't see i don't see it and he gave a lot of speeches he said look at our he always used the word our, look at our beautiful farmers. They're the world's most efficient food producers. Look at our beautiful frackers. We're going to produce the most natural gas in the world.

We don't have to go over the Middle East and get in a war anymore. We're the biggest oil producer, the biggest natural gas producer, second biggest coal producer, most efficient food producer. And then we got the best university. And he was correct. He was correct. Yes, everyone had a flat assertion of fact. Absolutely.

He said, we got the greatest engineering. And you look at the Times Educational Supplement that came out, I think, two days ago. It's all American, the top 20 universities. Believe me, they're not basing their ratings on english departments and classics departments are baiting on computer engineering and science and the stem but it's you know caltech one mit three and then stanford's electrical engineering so he was right about that too he was right about uh our military he said we got the greatest military in the world, and we do. So what he was basically saying, I don't know if he was aware of it, but he was saying that the

traditional criteria of national strength, constitutional, stable government, fuel, food, education, freedom, innovative, ability to innovate. It was all American. And so one American right now produces twice the goods and services that his three Chinese counterparts do, and yet we're told China's going to overtake us. And so that was a very, I mean, if you go back, when I wrote that, I went back and looked at the level of discourse in 2015 and 16.

It was fatalistic. There was a few guys saying, well, you know, they're pushing Hong Kong around, and I don't like what they did to Tibet, and they got these re-education camps. There was a couple of other businessmen said, you know, they cheat, they steal my products. But there was no consensus. Right. And he did. and he was really trashed. Everybody, I would really argue your listeners to go back and read in March to August of 2016 what the people at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the ex-Obama and Bush people were saying about this idea of getting tough on China. They said it would never work, won't happen, and it shouldn't happen. And Donald Trump's whole argument can be summed up as follows. Decline?

What are you people talking about? Correct? All right. Victor, again, the case for Trump, as I read this book, again, I'll say it. The case for Trump is the case for the people who voted for Trump in many ways. And those people are your people. Again, the case for Trump. most issues and is a fifth generation farmer, have written favorably of agrarian populism. I grew up in the same house where I now live, and from which you're speaking to us right now, and in a farming Democratic household that worshipped Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and would have voted for a yellow dog on the ballot if it had been a Democrat, close quote. Donald Trump may run as a Republican, but the case for Trump is that he stands in the Democratic, he stands in the tradition of the Democratic Party as it was under FDR and Harry Truman all the way through JFK. It's the party of patriotism,

of the hardworking, common man, whether on the farm or in the factory. Is that what it comes down to? This man stands in a tradition. It is. And you can really see what I wrote, how it's applicable to say last week. So we have this narrative now that Donald Trump brought on the COVID virus upon himself. Why? Because he chose to meet people coming into the White House. They chose to crisscross the country. He met soldiers. He met kids. He spoke at events. Sometimes he spoke at a rally. In other words, he did what we voted for him. And he got the virus. Did he go and get into a fetal position? Did he do it from his basement? No. He did what we want him to do, to take calculated risks, just like Churchill

flew 25 times out of the UK at the height of the war. Just like Teddy Roosevelt got a bullet an inch from his heart and finished 90 minutes in speaking. That's what he was supposed to do. And then we have 100 million people who are crisscrossing this country, just like Trump, every day. There's a guy who comes in from Amazon, and he gives you your boutique salad that you get. The UPS drivers, the long-haul truckers, the guys who are out in the fields and the farms in Fresno. I see them right out the window. They come by with trucks with almonds. They come by with cattle. They come by with oranges and apples.

And then I go to the market i go to the drugstore they're right there with like breathing your air all day long they don't have a choice to take that mask off like these basement creatures these you know who worship as i said in narco their gods are king zoom and and lordthe. And they don't have that option to rip off that mask and hang out at home and then go out and virtue signal the people who have to wear them nine days. As I said, I had a guy come in here and I said, what delivery have you done? I need this oven. We have no oven.

He said, I've done 10 of them today. And he said, I have to take off my mask. I can't breathe anymore. And I said, well, that wasn't for you. I wouldn't eat. Take it off. And the point I'm getting at is he was afraid because he'd been yelled at by people. And that muscular class is doing all of the risk.

And somehow this basement professional class that makes 10 times more money than they do, takes no risk. And then they sort of get this anal retentive. Oh, I don't like that mask. And then to add insult to injury, whether it's Dianne Feinstein walking at a private, private jet port or Nancy Pelosi going to an exclusive salon, they break their own rule. And so, yeah, I think Trump, my only criticism of him, he should be going out there these last three weeks and saying, wow, I am with you.

I'm one with you. We take risks. We're not stupid. We try to prevent getting ill. But if we get ill, that's what life's all about. Life against death. And I'm not going to apologize to it. And then the other thing that got me was, so the guy is there and he takes this Regeneron, very experimental drug, monoclonal antibodies, monoclonal antibodies.

And then on top of that, he takes it with this new experimental antiviral remesivir. I'm not pronouncing it right. And then they give steroids. They say, he's reckless. He's doing all these drugs. We don't know about the interaction. Nobody, that's half of them. The other half says, well, he's taking drugs that people don't have access to, as if he's the mayor of Fresno.

So my point is, that was a courageous thing to do for the president to say i want to get out there with the people and get this country running so you got two experimental drugs i don't care whether they have interactions give it to me you want steroid give me the steroids i'll do whatever it takes to get i've got a job to do you get me well as fast as you can is essentially his his directions when he walks into Walter Reed. And that's the juxtaposition with Joe Biden is in this basement. Victor, I want to come back to the pandemic in a moment. But Trump's record before the pandemic, you just laid out the case for Trump.

Let's quickly review main points in the record. Immigration, the case for Trump. I'm quoting you again. My home, you're talking about the record. Immigration, the case for Trump. I'm quoting you again. My home, you're talking about the San Juan King Valley, you're talking about the home you're in now, was broken into and vandalized often. After I built a six-foot-tall, 550-foot block circuit, in other words, a wall all the way around your property, all the way around your home, unlawful entries decreased by 90 percent. Throughout history, walls work.

But Trump never built the wall that he promised. We've got, of the several thousand miles on the border, we've got a couple of... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Go ahead. Correct me. I'm giving... Well, of the 2,000 miles on the border from the Gulf to San Diego, of which probably four or five hundred, they're impassable. Desert. We've got, we're going to have by December, 400 miles. And we could have had-

A two-place wall? All right. Yeah. We could have had 15 if you just build a normal wall, but the walls look like, I mean, they are impassable.'s something else so and that was after every single interest group went to court to stop it after the media went insane after the mexican government was initially against it and after our own DOD did not want to participate and shift funds around. So he had no-

And when the Republicans in the House, when Republicans still controlled the House, the Republicans in the House wanted nothing to do with that wall as well. Paul Ryan, as long as he was Speaker, he wanted nothing to do with it. So it's amazing we're going to have 400 miles. You talk to Border Patrol people, they think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread because it frees them up from that sector to double down. Victor, the economy. Again, the case for Trump. During the first three years of Trump's administration, the economic and monthly employment reports continue to set near records. Close quote. And in a couple of cases, they set actual

records. Unemployment among African Americans and Hispanics hit the lowest levels since records began to be kept. And we experienced the sharpest drop in the poverty rate in half a century. So Trump delivered? Yeah, he did. Until January, we had, you could see it. I mean, there was a voice of doom and gloom among the Democrats and the left because they said there's no way we're going to beat this guy because his economy for all of our all of a sudden, for the last five years, all we've talked about in California is the minimum wage, and it's going to be $15 an hour. It's going to break. All my friends that are employers said, oh, you've got to write about this. And now you know what happened? By January of this year, they were saying, I can't get a guy to go out and pick peaches unless I pay him $16.

I can't. And I said, now, why would that be? Well, there's nobody coming in from Mexico and I have to bid. And I said, now, what is wrong with that? Because these people now have a sense of dignity that the employer is saying to them, you're in the driver's seat and I need your labor rather than please hire me and not hire this guy from Mexico. And I'm talking largely about green card holders and Mexican American citizens. But it was phenomenal what happened. And the economy was, everybody understands that. I mean, you could argue the debt was getting bigger and we all have to worry about that. And interest rates at near zero were not sustainable. But I had some

criticisms, but by any measurement, the economy was booming. And all the people who had predicted that it would fail, Barack Obama, you need a magic wand to bring these industries back. Larry Summers, you'd have to be fantasy. It can never happen. People get paid low because they earn low wages. Our economy matches your talents with what you deserve to get. Paul Krugman, we're going to have the stock market's never going to come back. And they were all wrong. And now they're back at it. They're back at it. Let me just name regions. We're shifting out of foreign policy. And the question here is, did Trump deliver? It's as simple as that. Has Trump delivered the Middle East?

I'm systematic about it. I look at the Middle East when he came in and I asked myself, is ISIS beheading people? Do they own two thirds of Iraq and Syria? The answer is no. They're in flight. They were bombed. Okay. Is Iran, that had the Iran deal and had an infusion of over $140, $400 million and probably

billions of dollars in added revenue and the prices were good, is it in great position now? It's not only been wiped out by its patron China with COVID, but the oil embargo, the sanctions, and the crashed oil prices have made it impoverished. And when you took out Soleimani, it suffered a collective loss of face in the Middle East. So it's much, much weaker. Israel was alienated, ostracized by the United States under obama now israel has created this alliance and i do give obama credit for it but because by empowering the persian shia crescent in this insane idea he he brought the enemies of their enemies together again the arab world and israel he didn't mean to but he did that's what happened. Now we have these landmark new real politics between the Gulf monarchies and Israel.

Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, I think John Kerry said all hell will break loose, nothing. Defunding the Palestinians because the money was going to people like hamas gone they're not uh recognizing the obvious this golden heights are not going to go back to syria so yeah the middle east is in a lot better shape iran is not on the cusp of getting a bomb and the arab world and israel are form forging economic ties that make the whole Palestinian question of 75 years sort of irrelevant. The Palestinian question is about as relevant as saying that East Prussians got to get their land back in Poland, you know. Right, right. They were both the same time.

China. Again, did Trump deliver? Yeah, he did. He delivered, especially psychologically, because no one says now that we shouldn't make things in the United States. Even Joe Biden has suddenly got religion. He's talking about buy American, make American. And even the critics of Trump are saying that reeducation camps, bad, Hong Kong, bad, Tibet, bad. I mean, they were mousy about it, but now they sound like lions. And so everybody is recalibrating their views of China. It's going to be very difficult because we're going to learn just how embedded and just how far along China

had been able to progress in compromising our elites. I'm talking about government, corporation, cultural, universities that were dependent on Chinese cash. We saw that with the NBA. But it's happening, and nobody thought it could. So, Victor, pre-pandemic, Trump's record. He's built substantial sections of the wall he said he would build. Illegal immigration has fallen by some 90%, is the figure I found. Iran is on the defensive. Israel's been able to achieve a new and dramatically better relations with its Arab neighbors. There's a new bipartisan consensus on China, bipartisan, just as you said. Even if Trump loses, Joe Biden recognizes that he's going to have to stand up to

China, at least rhetorically. And for the first three years of the administration, the economy was such that millions of Americans, but especially working Americans and underprivileged Americans enjoyed economic growth and an increase in real wages. So tens of millions of Americans began leading better lives. Now, a lot of our listeners will think that was the wrong way to go about the economy. I'm not sure whether you agree with Trump or not, that was a wreck. He said he'd do things. He did them. Where would he, absent the pandemic, what's your guess about where he would be in the polls right now? Well, I think he would be 52 or 53 percent popularity, and I think rather than 44 or 45, and I think on ahead with Biden, he'd be at least two points ahead, which

given the nature of the polls, probably be five ahead. He'd probably have a landslide victory in the electoral college. And it's not what you or I say, Peter. The latest Gallup poll said 56% of people thought this is in the middle of COVID, quarantine, race, riots, anarchy, looting, and a recession, they still think they were better off than they were four years ago. And remember, what we're talking about... I just want to pin that down. Gallup asked, I think this was just a week ago, so this is after months of the lockdown, and as you said, the protests and riots. Gallup asked, are you better off than you were four years ago? And 56% said yes. All right.

And the other two other very quick points is that all of this took place when we did not have a normal election transition and presidency. What I mean by that is we know now that Hillary Clinton hired through three firewalls a steel dossier that drew on a Russian activist, spy, whatever you want to call it, and in the Brookings Institution, created this false thing. The Obama administration knew about it. They seeded it. They were told by John Brennan that this is Hillary's way of deflecting attention toward the emails. They didn't do anything about it. They destroyed Mike Flynn. They falsified they being the Obama CIA, DOJ, and FBI. They continued during the transition into the presidency. They falsified a document for the FISA.

They mislaid the FISA courts. They surveilled American citizens very high in the FISA. They mislaid the FISA courts. They surveilled American citizens, very high in the Trump administration and some in the campaign. They unmasked their names. They leaked them. They lied under oath. No doubt we're going to learn to congressional committees. And then we had these series of psychodramas. It was the moment he got elected, it was, oh, we better sue for those three states have false voting machines. Oh, we're going to get the electors to flip. And they ran ads that the elector said, I can't do my constitutional duty. Oh, he's now been inaugurated. 61 Democrats

are going to vote to impeach him. Oh, we have the celebrities out there saying he should be beheaded, blown up, let on fire, stabbed, shot, tortured, put in a cage. And then we went into the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Actax because this is a guy that came in. He raised the sanctions on Russian oligarchs. He killed 200 mercenaries in Syria. He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia that Obama would never have done. He crashed the price of oil, which was Russia's chief source of foreign revenue. He jawboned Merkel without mercy about her pipeline deal with Putin. He sold lethal weapons to Ukraine that Obama would never contemplate, and yet he was Putin's poodle, we're told. So we had 22 months of that, and then we had the impeachment, and then we went right into Trump as Typhoid Mary, who started COVID. Trump as Herbert Hoover, who started the recession.

Trump as Bull Connor, who started the race riots. And Trump as some type of oligarch who locked us down and yet through all of that until recently we had all this good news and i just it's like nothing i've ever seen it was a slow motion coup i shouldn't say the word coup because it's not my own i mean we had people in the white house that were deeply embedded within the White House in the prior administration, people that were circulating with them that were talking about a coup. Whether it was Anonymous, who wrote on September 5th of 2018, a sort of manifesto where obstructing the Trump or Rosa Brooks, who was on it. She was recently gaming of what would happen if trump didn't um depart power she wrote an essay 11 days after he was elected in foreign policy of all places contemplating well we can impeach him unlikely we can call him crazy

probably wouldn't work with a 23rd amendment, or we can have a military coup. Let's think about that. So we're in areas that we've never been before in my lifetime. The resistance, all the things you talked about was not met with acclaim and gratitude and thank you. It was met with, we're going to destroy this man, we're going to destroy everybody who's with him, and we cannot stand, we loathe the people who voted for him. Victor, the pandemic, let's, the pandemic with, what, three weeks to the election, the pandemic is emerging as emerging. The pandemic is maybe, it may be the dominant issue at this point. COVID-19, the economy collapses, second quarter of this year, we get a quarter and quarter collapse in the GDP of more than 30%. That's the sharpest drop since the Great

Depression. Senator Kamala Harris, this is during the vice presidential debate of just over a week ago, quote, here are the facts. 210,000 people dead, one in five businesses closed, over 30 million people who filed for unemployment insurance the american people have witnessed the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country close quote victor how do you respond to that a lot of ways first of all, well, what should he have done differently? And then she mentioned things and Biden did later. And what were they? We need more ventilators. We need more protective equipment. We need a better partnership with private enterprise.

We all need to meet mass. We had a record time. We've never had antiviral drugs come on the market like we're having this vaccination will mark if the vaccination comes in january or february it'll mark the fastest most rapid time that's ever happened the the economy really didn't go into a depression it went into a recession that is starting to look like a v yes v-shaped recovery the stock market has actually more than recovered all its losses by now gdp looks like it might go into a record in the third quarter 34 growth we don't know that's some of the projections so my point is that we went into a first self-induced the recession in our history the first first national quarantine. And we did that on the advice of experts. Donald Trump fought that advice and then he caved into it. Now he's being accused of not

just not reacting to the virus, but on one side of a person's mouth, on the other, but he reacted too strongly. He put us in a quarantine. He caused a recession. They can't decide whether he's typhoid Mary or he's Herbert Hoover or both, but they're mutually contradictory. But more important, just very quickly then. Yes, of course. When she said that, she said all of these things that were just absolutely fantasy. We've got the worst record in the world.

No, we don't. If you look at the only reliable, and it's not even reliable, deaths per million population due to COVID, we're doing better than Italy, Spain. We're about where the UK, not quite. We were above France, much better than Belgium. So major Western countries that are industrialized, United States that has a lot more challenges than they do, has suffered about the same with a couple of other caveats. One of them being is we have the most liberal definition of how a person dies from COVID. We count 96% of people who are said to have died of COVID have comorbidities. And then the second thing to remember is we wouldn't have 210,000. We would probably have about 150,000 or 60,000,

which is tragic in itself. If four states comprising 11% of the population, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and york did not embrace a disastrous policy to send people into rest homes because 11 of our population accounted for about 34 percent of the dead and that was a tragedy that was done that was done at the state level and finally we don't know anything about the fatality rate. Everybody keeps reminding us because if I have a headache tomorrow or if you have a sore throat, you're going to be likely to go get tested. So the people who go get tested are self-selected anyway. And yet the infection rate of them is about 3 to 5 percent. But you have to remember that most of the epidemiologists say that there's another 10 to 12 people, mostly young up to the age of 30, that have no symptoms.

They do have antibodies. So when the antibodies are tested in groups, just blanket testing through preselected groups, we come up with these figures that it might be 10 times more than the people who test positive. So when you say that this many people died per this many tests of positives, no. This many people died per number of positives and number of people who have antibodies. And that might mean we don't have 6 million people who were infected, we have maybe 60 million people who were infected. have maybe 60 million people who are infected right and that makes a big difference and finally we don't have any idea nor does camilla harris and notice joe biden what china's figures are we have no idea what india's figures are we have no idea what

russia's figures are india is just incapable of getting accurate data, and Russia and China wouldn't give us accurate data if they had it. So... Victor, the politics, again, we've got three weeks to go. As you and I record this conversation, we've got about three weeks until Election Day. What do you make of the... We started by talking about the coastal elites. By and large, they've been doing fine during this pandemic. Lawyers, academic, journalists, these are all people who can work from home. It's the people in the middle, shops, restaurants, the guy who delivered your new oven the other day, who have been hurt. Item one of two. Here's the second. Among the most powerful entities in the nation today are the big tech companies. Their profits have soared during this pandemic. Absolutely. What does that suggest to you about the underlying politics of this lockdown,

of the pandemic? The underlying politics is that all of these governors have dropped their traditional democratic suspicions of concentrated wealth and they welcome them and in their own lives and gavin newsom is a good example they have the same values and they swim in the same they're fish that swim in the same water as the very high higher income and multi and billionaire class and you you can really see it in my hometown. I'll give you an example. If I want to go get, during this lockdown, if I wanted to get flowers, the local florist shop was shut down.

If I wanted to go get shoes, the shoe store was broke and shut down. If I wanted to go into a plumbing supply and get some little quarter-inch galvanized elbow shut down. Well, I go over to Walmart. It's a superstore about two miles from here, and it's all there. And I'm thinking, there's 1,000 people in here. This is a COVID incubator. But I go get my pipe stuff.

I go get my flowers. I go get my pipe stuff. I go get my flowers. I go get my shoes. And they can say that they're essential because I guess they sell food. But in fact, they were given a huge boost. And then I noticed something that I never really used Amazon. I got a little thing in the mail saying, you're one of our Amazon's premier customers because you just go online and they send it to you.

So there's been a fundamental shift in people who had an economy at scale and who were vertically integrated. They had enormous advantages throughout this lockdown. One of the reasons I was for flattening the curve for three or four weeks, but I think most people... That was a month ago now. Yeah. I think most people were willing to say, you know what, unless you're 70, you've got about a 99% plus chance of surviving the virus if you catch it. And it's getting better every month with better knowledge of how to care for it and drugs. And we could spend this money much better focusing on older people

who are vulnerable and not let young people near them. And then more importantly, we would be able to go back to screen for cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, do surgeries, no more abuse, no more increased drug and alcohol abuse. So I think that we haven't seen when Kamala Harris said that, I thought, wow, you have any idea what the butcher's bill is going to be in about six months when this is over and we can see all the things that happen when people are confined to their homes? And she doesn't. And yet she wants to lock down more. Joe Biden said he'd shut the country down in a second

again. Victor, Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, this is a few days ago, Dan is discussing the Great Barrington Declaration, Great Barrington, a town in Massachusetts where there was a conference. Thousands of public health scientists have now signed this declaration that calls for permitting, and now I'm quoting Dan, those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally while better protecting those who are at risk. And then Dan Haninger writes, quote, Donald Trump and most Republican governors would sign that declaration. Joe Biden and the Democrats would not ever, close quote. Three weeks to go to election day. Is it going to be as simple as that? One party wants to continue the lockdown. One party is the party of the lockdown, and the other is the party of opening up.

Yeah, the problem is that the facts are on the Great Barrington Letter, and so much so that the World Health Organization, this last 48 hours flip now, and now it's... And now the World Health Organization is opposed to lockdowns. Now suddenly the World Health Organization says, you know what? The lockdowns are not the best way or the primary way to handle the virus. And all of those people who signed that letter, and you as another Stanford colleague, understand all of the abuse that Stanford doctors have taken, among them our colleague Scott Atlas, Dr. Yanidis, Michael

LeVette, and they should be proud that we have these pioneers at Stanford Medical School, but they weren't. So yeah, I mean, everybody, all you have to do is look at the data and just look at the deaths per million and look at Massachusetts and Connecticut and New Jersey and New York and compare them to all the so-called reckless, deplorable states like Texas or Florida. And you'll find very quickly that it's three to four times more lethal to have been a resident of New York in terms of getting COVID and dying from it than Texas or Florida. Victor, a word or two about Donald Trump's enemies. Democratic Party, of course, partisan opposition, that's not a surprise. Journalism in these last three and a half or four years, every large media organization, it's easier to name the media organizations that haven't become hard over against Donald Trump than it is to list all those that have. So you've got,

of course, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. You've got the news pages of the Wall Street Journal are still reporting the facts in a straightforward reporting. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, even originally literary magazines such as The Atlantic, with a tradition that goes back a century, The New Yorker magazine, all hard over, hard over against Trump. That's fair, don't you? A fair characterization, don't you think? Well, I think you understated it a little bit. All right. So why?

What on earth? We could also add conservative areas like the Bill Kristol bulwark or the Jonah Goldberg dispatch. The Drudge Report has completely flipped. It's completely now a left-wing megaphone that detests Trump. Why has this happened? A couple of reasons. One is cultural, and that is that there are certain mannerisms, appearances, intonations, vocabulary, reckless in speech and comportment

that these people in this class find offensive. And they have a very selective morality. They don't find certain things offensive, but they surely do Donald Trump's method of presentation. The second thing is that they understood that republicans were noble the romney bush temperament was to lose nobly was always preferable to win ugly the last time they won ugly was they got crazy leot water out of the closet and they turned him loose when they were 17 points behind in 1988 when he got done with mike dakakis he said i took the bark off him, you know, the Willie Horton ad, the tank ad, the Boston Harbor ad. And they said to themselves, I'm glad we won, but we're never

going to do that again. And so they felt that Trump gave them a patina of crudity and they resented that about him very much. The second thing was they felt the media people that were conservative and the media people that were liberal felt that they could discuss things together and they knew best for each of their own parties. And the suspicion was on the left media that the right or conservative media was really in sympathy with them. And they were scared of the Reagan Democrat, the parole voter, the Tea Party person, the Trump deplorable. They were more scared of them than they were of the left. And so this guy comes along and he empowers all these people

that are not intermarried and interconnected. They don't have an Ivy League Stanford degree. And all of a sudden everybody says wow and it's primary cultural because i say that because if you're a conservative and you hate trump and you're never trumper we had to put up with you for 20 years where you beat the you beat a dead horse with oh we i i'm for legal immigration immigration, but illegal kind of hurts legal immigration. And wow, I really think that somebody's got to stand up and just say the embassy should go from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And oh, my gosh, that Iran deal was bad.

And that Paris peace climate accord, accord that was just that was unnecessary and gee whiz i think identity politics is just getting out of hand and you know what i i don't like what uh title nine and the doj is doing and they're taking civil liberties and we've got too many liberal justices and so this guy comes along right he's a sausage seller right out of Aristophanes' comedies, you know, the crude guy who screams and yells. And he gives them on a platter everything that they've wanted. And they say, you know what? His scent is on that. His scent is on that.

And it's so redolent and odorous. I don't like those issues anymore. They're contaminated from now on. And that's where we are. Victor, all right, you talked about the, well, you alluded to crudity, vulgarity. That first presidential debate, it may turn out to be, as we record this, it may turn out to be the only presidential debate, but that first presidential debate, he goes into it, he has to know that one of his, if not the primary political problem he faces, Donald Trump faces in the bid for re-election,

is that something like 55% of the American people just don't like him. That because he's crude and he's loud and he's vulgar, and he spends 96 minutes during that debate proving them right. How many minutes? I believe the debate lasted 96 minutes, and he's, for all 96 minutes, by the way, he did not take your advice. You were on Fox News before the debate saying he should talk about unifying the country. He didn't even take your advice. All right. So the question is simple, and you know what the question is.

There are set-aside-the-never Trumpers who have this complicated, they're inside Washington, and he ignores them. And that's hard for them. That's a small group. There are millions of Americans who just say, I want it to stop. I want it to stop. I want the vulgar, I want this man gone. I want the whole temperature of the American discourse dialed down. If he's gone, maybe all of this violence in Portland and other cities will, I just want it to stop. And you know, I think that's an understandable human reaction, I think. What do you say to them? Well, I don't want to be macabre, but I've had so many people in my family that had cancer, and they all said that they wanted the chemotherapy to go away because it was making them as sick as the cancer and it was

and i have been very critical of donald trump but to correct the record a little bit i watched the first four minutes when his opening statement the person who actually started the interrupting was joe biden that's true biden interrupted first and retaliated. The second thing he understood very quickly was this was not going to be a symmetrical debate with Chris Wallace. It was going to be, are you going to, Donald Trump, after he misrepresents the Charlottesville quote and doesn't point the qualifier that Trump said about he deplored white racists and Ku Klux Klan. Are you going to now

discipline? Same question he asked in 2016. He learned nothing. He forgot nothing. Wallace. My point is that they were always, when did you stop beating your wife? Have you stopped beating your wife? And then he would turn to Biden. And I thought, well, we're on race now. So he's going to ask Biden, what was this? You ain't black. And you called a journalist a junkie and a cokehead. And what was this corn pop? Nothing.

And then it was the tax returns. Mr. Trump, $750. I thought, OK, we're now into finance. So he's going to turn to Biden and say, what's this about Hunter Biden? Gosh, all these millions of dollars given by the mayor of Moscow's wife? What's going on here? Nothing. And so Trump, he made a decision that he wasn't going to let that go. Okay. The other thing is, and this was where I disagreed with him, but I didn't criticize him. I don't criticize him because I get attacked a lot. And what I suffer in emails or people coming up to me is one

billionth, billionth of what he has to put up with. So I'm very sympathetic to that. But we know something about Joe Biden. After about 30 seconds, he loses his train of thought. He has a mental lapse. He confuses words. He mispronounces them. He forgets what he's going to say. So they put him out on the trail on Friday. He said, we want you all to be the breast for best. And then when he gets into how many people have died of covid it's 200 million people have died and then he said no it's 200 and he gets confused that's my point so when he when he's and how does the media handle that they handle by a giving him questions ahead of time b having a teleprompter to the side of a Zoom screen, just as if you were

talking to me and somebody over there who knows more than I do was typing into a tele, and I would say, yes, Peter, this is my point one and two. Here's the deal. Okay, that's what he does. And when he loses a train of thought, the media interrupts him and then the effect is well joe wasn't really that bad i just wanted to get another question in and so okay but victor all this i know why would trump play that role and keep interrupting him and give him these little disjointed sound bites when it's like give him the whole rope and he'll hang himself but don't cut the rope when he's swinging so trump kept interrupting the tactical error i thought it was a tactical error absolutely right but but victor if i may i just want to return now i'm playing chris wallace i

want to return you to this question what do you say to ordinary americans and there are lots of them and some of them are in your family, and many of them are my neighbors. We know people because there are millions of them. I say all of them are my family. But they just say, look, look, look, okay, all those arguments you make, I understand all of that, but this guy's just not fit to be president. I close my eyes, and when I see a president, I see John Kennedy, or I see a president, I see John Kennedy or I see Ronald Reagan. Or I hear FDR. And this guy's just an 18-year-old intern on the presidential

bed, took her down to the swimming pool and asked her to commit a sex act? Come on. So your answer is fundamentally, in this moment in American history, some vulgarity and some rudeness and a manner that rubs a lot of people the wrong way is the price we have to pay for what? For someone to say there is a lot of refined crudity. Joe Biden and his son profited at the expense of United States national interest, not just with Ukraine, but with China. And that's a fact. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's chief intelligence and law officials tried to destroy a campaign to warp a transition and to destroy a presidency. It's the greatest scandal in our history. And they broke the law. James Comey broke the law. Andrew McKay broke the law. And I think John Brennan broke the law. And I don't know if they're ever going to pay.

But my point is they did that in sober and judicious fashion. So people out in Michigan or Kern County, California, they saw all this. They've seen it again and judicious fashion. So people out in Michigan or Kern County, California, they saw all this. They've seen it again and again and again, whether it's Solyndra back in the Obama administration, or whether it's sending pallets of cash to the Iranian terrorists, or whatever it was. And so they were tired of it. They were tired of Barack Obama on a hot mic saying, you tell Vladimir that if he'll just ease up during my campaign, then I'll address missile defense. Translated, he didn't go into Crimea. He didn't go into eastern Ukraine until Obama was elected, reelected,

and then reset was still, remember reset, it was still viable. And then we dismantled all this missile defense projects that were ongoing with Eastern Europeans. So that was pretty crude and amoral and unethical. But he did it as Obama did it. So I wish that Donald Trump was mellifluous like Obama, or he bit his lip like Bill Clinton, or he sounded like an aristocrat, but you don't get what you want. And you're absolutely right. This election is going to hinge on exactly what you said. There are about 20% of the people who understand that Donald Trump's record

is better than what Joe Biden could possibly do. But they have their hands over their ears. They're in a fetal position and they're going, make it all go away. I can't take this riot. I can't take the quarter. I can't take his tweeting. I can't take his ragadaccio. Just make it all go away. And they think, or they want to delude themselves, that if Joe Biden were to be president, that Antifa would disappear and BLM would disappear. If that were to be true, it would only be true because they would say to themselves, we got our agenda through Kamala Harris, so why protest? But they're in for quite an agenda because I think there's going to be a systematic effort. Get rid of the Senate filibuster after 180 years.

Pack the court after 150 years to 13 or 15 judges. Destroy the Electoral College, which, by the way, can be done without a constitutional amendment by having state legislatures swear that they will pledge their electors to the national winner. And that's already got 75% of the necessary electoral votes are already there. So we're going to get rid of the electoral college. And that's the beginning. If you start to read and think and and tabulate what they're saying i could sum up this way we're not going to lose to the deplorables again it's just not going to happen right but we're going to have either change the demography or mail-in ballot balloting or maybe we'll address two senators in every state or whatever we're going to do but

we're not going to lose to these guys because every state or whatever we're going to do, but we're not going to lose to these guys because they- We'll change whatever rules we need to change so that we don't lose again. Correct? Yeah. So the person in a fetal position's got to say, when you see people in Portland, Washington destroying property, that's step one. Step two is if they are arrested and they're not usually, but they're just let property goes because it's just brick and mortar. It's property. Property doesn't matter. That was somebody's exploitation over somebody else. Then they're arrested and then probably a George Soros funded local attorney will not press charges and that person will be out again and that is that's going to happen

more and more because the law is going to be in service of ideology once you get a true social activist who believes that their noble ends justify any means necessary to carry them out it's pretty scary victor the case for trump I have no interest in proving Trump either a demon or a deity, in contrast to whether he is unique and of the moment or a precursor to something that will endure. Close quote. We can ask this question again a year from now after the election has taken place. What you're thinking right now, what of these four years is enduring? Well, what's enduring is that there's always going to be an advocate for middle class values. And they're going to be people who really have an empathy, a psychological, philosophical, personal connection with people, regardless of their background. And the Democratic Party decided sometime around the new millennium that there was so much money coming into Wall Street, Hollywood, sports, university endowments,

and especially big tech, that this changed the game. And so they decided to worship mammon, the golden calf, which they used to always derive. It became a party of the highly educated and very wealthy and with windows on Europe and windows on Asia. And then to virtue signal that privilege and that privilege consisted of, I'm not going to put my child in the public schools. I'm not going to experiment with my child's Harvard trajectory. Then they were against charter schools and they were all for academies, but they didn't want anybody else to put their kids into a charter or private school. Then they said, you know, I, I just have to have a nice wall around my estate, but I don't want,

I want any wall on the border. I just want to live on the coast where it's 70 degrees. But you know what? I don't care what the price of kilowatt hours are for those stupid idiots down there in Bakersfield. And you know what? I love this high-speed rail. But, you know, I really don't want to start it here in Palo Alto. Let's just try it down on the yokels that need the money. And on and on and on.

That's what took over the Democratic Party. Party of the very poor and the very wealthy. And there's always going to be a middle class. And what got me about the Republicans, it was always, it was forming up during the Bush years, the McCain campaign and the Romney. And what were they talking about? They were talking about capital gains cuts, privatizing Social Security. I supported them. Sounded rational to me, but everybody I talked to couldn't care less about that. They were worried about losing their job to China.

They were losing, in my community, guys from Mexico were coming, and illegally their kids were in gang, and they were beating up Mexican-American kids because they didn't speak Spanish. They called them gringos. And they were getting hit by people from Mexico, and they were leaving the scene of the accident. So there were all these pressing problems, and the Republican Party was, you know, creative destruction. You'd go to, I won't mention names, but you'd talk to a prominent Republican,

and you'd say, we just wiped out Youngstown or Flint. And they say, well, you know, it's good because it makes us more competitive. We have to work harder. And, you know, then they said, and we get cheaper stuff. So even if you lose a job, you got Walmart or it's not sustainable. Don't worry. China can't keep it up. And you're thinking, well, actually they have been keeping it up. And they think it's better to have surpluses than deficits. But we think it's better to have deficits. Maybe they're crazy. But my point is, again, that somebody will always try to champion the middle class, whether it's Democrats or Republicans. And right now, the most unlikely advocate you can imagine, a Wheeler dealer recantor from Manhattan

who was all over the political map, finally decided that he was going to be that person. And if he should win or lose, whether he's president in four years or he's president just five months or more. Four more months, five months, it's not going to change. It's not going to change. If the never Trumpers think they're going to come back and they're going to play Phoenix rising out of the ashes of the Trump Republican Party, and

suddenly we're going to say, you know what, please, David Frum and Bill Kristol and George Will and Jonah Goldberg, we miss your wisdom. You connected us so much with the working classes. We did so well with McCain campaign. We did so well with the Romney campaign. You just got to come back and rebuild. That's not going to happen. Last question. Last question.

Claire Booth Luce used to say that history would give even the greatest figure just one sentence. Lincoln freed the slaves. Churchill saved England. What sentence, what one sentence will history give to Donald Trump? I think this will be very clear. Donald Trump prevented China from assuming not just control over our economic and cultural and social and political destinies, but he stopped them from becoming the world's hegemon. And I don't think anyone had thought of the idea and had they thought of it, they wouldn't have been able to carry it out and he more importantly said this is now going to transcend me because i hit upon the truth so you may hate me but you're

gonna i hit upon the truth and i resonated and that's what we're going to do we're going to stop china from doing what communist parties always do when they take control of governments and that is they press their own and they try to destroy others. Victor Davis Hanson, the author of many books, but most recently, The Case for Trump. Thank you. Thank you. And all the best in Selma. Thank you. I'm Peter Robinson for Ricochet.com. Ricochet. Join the conversation.