Victor Davis Hanson on Tucker, Trump, and the Fracturing Right

27:50That's just one exegesis, but there soon developed a pattern. When he introduced a pastor from Bethlehem, and we all know that the Christian population of Bethlehem on the West Bank went from 80 % Christian to 10%. And that happened mostly under West Bank Palestinian authority. And where did they go? They went to Europe. They went to the United States. But about 150 ,000 went to Israel. And there's about 180 ,000 Christians. So when Tucker interviewed this person who has to say something that his Islamic-Palestinian overseers approved, Tucker just took it as gospel that the Israelis had ethnically cleansed the Christians out of Bethlehem and that the Christian Zionists should look at that.

28:46And yet these Christians were living with more freedom anywhere in the Middle East in Israel, many of them. And Israel's Christian population has steadily grown while the population of Christians in Gaza and West Bank has steadily declined. That's just one example that I don't know why. Or when he had the eulogy of Charlie Kirk, you remember Coleman, and he said something that it's sort of like a bunch of people from the Middle East, you know, in a room with eating hummus, talking about crisis. And I guess the obvious simile was that Charlie Kirk was Christ, and the Pharisee, the modern Pharisees in a room had engineered his death.

29:31And then when he had Candace on and he had Nick Fuentes on, And he had David Cullen, the revisions he had, Darrell, that became a pattern. I should say at this point, very quickly, and I'll stop. There's nothing wrong if you want to have an edgy out of the ballpark figure if you're willing to cross-examine him. William F. Buckley, his brand in those Firing Line episodes was to have people like the convicted rapist Eldridge Cleaver, like the known segregationist George Wallace with a kooky eugenicist William Shockley, to have Huey Newton. But if you look at those episodes, he cross-examined them.

30:23He tried to tell the world that these people are out of the ordinary and they're trying to persuade you, but I'm going to cross it. So if he really wanted to take the risk, and I don't think he should have because you're giving him a platform he didn't deserve like Fuentes. But Candace maybe is a different story or Marjorie Taylor Greene. If you give them a platform and their views are out of the mainstream, you have an obligation as a journalist to cross-examine them. And especially when you bring on your former close friend and colleague in the conservative movement, Ted Cruz, and you just eviscerate him in an ambush.

31:00I saw that interview. Tucker is a very bright and sophisticated interviewer. So I just said to myself, why would you, if you're a conservative and Ted's dreams and the conservative mainstream, why would you humiliate him on screen? but then you wouldn't use those same techniques when you could have done the public service with Fuentes.

31:23Coleman Hughes:No, it's a great point. I mean, like, why would he absolutely dig into Ted Cruz for not knowing off the top of his head the population of Iran, which I admit he should have known. But why would he absolutely humiliate Ted Cruz for saying that? And then when Nick Fuentes comes on and says, I love Joseph Stalin, he just says, okay, let's put a pin in that and come back to it very politely, right? So it's clear he's using one set of tactics on people that are pretty well within the American mainstream and I think broadly mean well and putting on kid gloves essentially for conspiracy theorists and crazy people.

32:07I mean, the Stalin one is, I mean, something's going on here where I remember there is a blog post,

32:14Coleman Hughes:I can't remember what it was. It was kind of a joking blog post defending the empire in Star Wars, right? And it was actually very funny. It was a funny exercise in how you could make that case. But something's going on on the internet and on social media where it just will get eyeballs and clicks to just defend all of the actual villains in history. and if more and more people believe this stuff then it just it turns out there are actually no bad people that have ever existed on earth hitler was great stalin was great uh mao was great i mean the left has been making that case for a long time actually everyone you thought was bad for history that killed and slaughtered millions of people for bad reasons they were all actually great.

33:06Coleman Hughes:And there's, you know, when someone comes in and gives that take, it shocks the senses in a way. It's like adding hot sauce to your podcast. And it gets eyeballs. It gets a lot more eyeballs than a boring recitation of the facts we know are true about history. And it's worrisome for our information landscape that that's what's going on right now. It is. And I think there's another

33:37catalyst. It's not the main one. What you said about clicks and a way of getting attention by being controversial or even beyond controversial is I think when you interview Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens, you know that if you criticize them, they're going to go right out and start a jihad against you, if I could use that term. But when you tear apart Ted Cruz, he's in the mainstream, he's a senator, he has certain standards of behavior, he's not going to go out. Like Nick Fuentes had attacked Tucker all the time. He called him a sellout, a fed, a traitor. He'd attack Trump. So I think there's a tendency when you get these extremists, Even though when I look back at some of the interviews that Buckley did with Eldridge Cleaver versus other controversial people like Saul Alinsky, he was a little bit more careful because he thought Eldridge Cleaver, and same thing with George Wallace.

34:44He thought, you know what, these people are a little out there, and you never know what they're going to say or do or get obsessed with me. So I think that's one of the causes. The dark cause is that somehow he feels that he was done a disservice at Fox, that there were certain cosmic forces in the Dominion suit, that he was the scapegoat, that he was sort of a paleocon. Neocon, and there's two groups that he, on the air in the last days, as you remember, Colin, that he had a fixation on and felt that they were, in fact, he said, one group, I hate them more than any other people in the world. And they were Christian Zionists, he said, and neoconservatives.

35:37Both of those are synonyms for Jewish interests, whether we like it or not. and he was always saying the neocons got us into the war they've got it they all and why would do we get in Iraq and we got in Iraq for Israel and then he would say you can be against which is true you can be against the Israeli government and not Jews but when you keep talking about Israel in a conspiratorial fashion and why we're supporting them why is that and ultimately the subtext is there's powerful Jewish forces, and then the neoconservatives fit that bill. So those are the two groups that he is angriest at because he felt that they put us in a multi-trillion dollar war as if there was no, you know, Don Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice or Dick Cheney, as if they are not free thinkers and they're subject to Jewish influence like a Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Pearl.

36:37It didn't really make sense, and the same thing was true about Christian Zionists, and he mentioned John Bolton. I don't really consider him a staunch Christian, but Mike Huckabee, as if Mike Huckabee, who is very religious and very pro-Israel, but I don't think he has a lot of influence with Marco Rubio, for example, or others in the Trump Trump administration.

37:05Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I mean, I just, I think I told you this when we were at a conference recently, but I had Dave Smith on my podcast for three and a half hours. And I think we spent like a good hour just on this topic of who are the neoconservatives? Did they in fact get us into Iraq? Hint, they, well, they were into Iraq, but not for any reason having to do with Israel, right? So he believes Israel got us into Iraq, which is actually the opposite of the truth. the Prime Minister of Israel told us not to go into Iraq, that it was a stupid idea. Not only that, the more the neoconservatives, these supposedly evil people, come out and talk in public, the more it's just clear that they're American patriots that had foreign policy, legitimate foreign policy-based reasons to have their opinions.

37:54Coleman Hughes:Like David Wormser, for example, who is the author of the now infamous Clean Break Memo. he came out on a podcast recently I think this was after my Dave Smith episode so I hadn't seen it but he came out and sort of explained not only himself but also the clean break memo he served in the Navy for like 10 years he's an American patriot his mother, this was an astonishing fact David Wormser's mother was apparently the head of the underground resistance to communism in the Czech Republic and fled to America, escaping the Soviets after World War II. And she had also fought the Nazis. So he grew up in a context where America was the haven for freedom and under a mother that deeply hated communism.

38:49Coleman Hughes:That was his DNA going into being Dick Cheney's advisor. Nothing to do with Israel. Nothing to do even with Judaism. And remember, there was a group, remember, I think it was formed in 98 because they felt that Bill Clinton had been lax on enforcing the no-fly zones from the 91 war. The project for a new American century. Yeah, it was Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. But there were a lot of people in there. Francis Fukuyama, I think, was in it. Don Rumsfeld was in it. Dick Cheney was in it. and they had advocated a preemptory strike on iraq but there was no support for it in the clinton administration there was no support for it um before 9-11 in the bush administration george w bush ran i went back and looked at that because i had remembered and i wasn't i thought it was a fantasy of my imagination but he had said repeatedly he didn't believe in nation building that Bill Clinton was too involved in the Balkans.

39:52And we're not going to go in there and solve the problems of the Balkans. The military is there. And Colin Powell had already said it's a pottery bond theory. If you go in and break something, you own it. So you've got to be careful. So what I'm getting at is whatever neoconservative influence there was, it was pretty inert until 9-11. And after 9-11, people said, we've tried to deal with Saddam. He breaks all the rules. The Taliban have been out of control. All of these people represent a general coalition of radical Islamists. And then, you know, nobody, they always talk about WMD, but if you look at the United Nations resolutions, I think there was 21 of them authorizing, excuse me, the U.S.

40:43Congress. and then later the United Nations for Afghanistan. But in the case of Iraq, the U.S. Congress, 21 of them, and I looked at them the other day, and I remember them very clearly. We've got to save the Marsh Arabs. The architects of the 91st World Trade Center bombing, Nadal was there. Abu Nadbal was being in sanctuary from Saddam Hussein. they have violated the no-fly zones they have liquidated the Kurds and tried to exterminate them they had a lot of reasons other than just WMD which I think were only three so I think it may have been wrong or right but the idea that David Fum and Max Boot and Richard Perl and Bill Kristol all conspired, Elliot Cohen, to get us into a war against our interests.

41:43I just, and you're right, Israel strongly disapproved. They thought it was a misdirection of Western resources. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

42:19Coleman Hughes:And we're live from the living room as Doug eyes up the matchday spread. He's reaching for the Buffalo wing. Perfect. Hang on, what's this? Oh, he's going for a can of Pepsi too. Incredible. What a finish. Sensational combination. Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a pack of Pepsi Zero Sugar for today's match. It's poetry in motion. I want to get into Trump because, in my view, you've been one of the most intelligent defenders of Donald Trump, pretty much right from his first term. When did you write your book in support of Trump?

43:07I wrote it the first year in 2016-17. I think it came out in 2018. But I was writing two columns a week for National Review. And at first, I didn't really talk about it. I think I wrote a critical one that they didn't have good candidates. But the more that I started talking to people in my area, farmers and other people, I started to sense that this was not Ron Paul. This was not Pat Buchanan. And then this was not just some, it wasn't going to, it was going to be a lot more serious. And then he had something about him that was, you know, it was off-putting and crude, but he was authentic. He didn't change his accent.

43:54He didn't change the type of dress he wore. And people were, and then he was talking about class more than he was race. he had weird eccentric views that i found to be quite logical that the hispanic community would come around to closing the border because they were the people who suffered the most from illegal aggression in their schools and the emergency room so there was all these contrary to fact things that the establishment was was saying and it was very hard for me because i was writing at National Review. And as you know, they had a whole issue on Never Trump. And each week there would be, you know, Jonah Goldberg, David French, Ramos Pomeru, Kevin Williamson, just this guy is Satan incarnate.

44:45And this was the genesis of the Never Trump movement. And I was the columnist writing, you know, he's better than the alternative of Hurley. It's always that type of choice. He's a tragic hero. He has certain skills. You know, he's kind of like a chain or Clint Eastwood in these movies that comes in, solves a problem, then repulses us that we had to call on such an outsider. But it finally led, by 2020, I had to leave National Review after 20 years. And I'm at Hoover, and I think I was very unpopular there in 2016, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. And maybe there's some more, but the Republican establishment was very critical, as you know, in the mainstream Bush.

45:33The Bob Dole candidacy, the John McCain, the Mitt Romney, the two Bushes, that was sort of where most people were. And I would have voted for any of them over a liberal, but they were not willing to do the opposite. That's what I found kind of disturbing.

45:52Coleman Hughes:Okay, so what do you do with what seemed to me the most legitimate arguments against Trump the person and Trump the president. So one line of evidence would just be everything that's going on around his instinct for vindictiveness and revenge against anyone he believes is his political enemy. And so I guess you can make some case that, you know, as you quoted earlier, if you send a wind out there and a whirlwind comes back, that's sort of the way of things. So if Letitia James tried to bankrupt him on a kind of BS lawsuit, well, now he's doing the exact same thing to her. And neither one of them was good for the Republic.

46:42Coleman Hughes:Neither one of them was justified, but it sort of is a slingshot. But then what do you do with the fact that he seems to just be vindictive towards everyone regardless of whether they've done anything specific against him? I mean, he, you know, passes executive orders banning law firms from entering federal buildings, which is really just meant to bankrupt them. And I didn't even, it wasn't even something I knew was possible to file a lawsuit against the pollster for releasing a poll he doesn't like, even though he won the election in question. Like this, it's behavior that I can't actually put myself in the shoes in.

47:22Yeah.

47:23Coleman Hughes:And so that's like one line. And then the – well, I'll get to the second line. Why don't you just address that first? I understand, but I separate rhetoric and intent from actuality. So Donald Trump rages and screams, and then we look at what actually happens. Now, think about the law firms. I'll give you an example. Where did that come from? That came from after January 6th. Fannie Willis on the direction, after all, Nathan Wade met on November 18th with White House counsel the same day Jack Smith was appointed special counsel, the same day that Michael Colangelo stepped down from the third spot at the DOJ after coming in from Latita James' prosecution to go back to Alvin Bragg's.

48:15all three days after Donald Trump on November 15th of 2022 announced his re-election campaign. So there was a coordination there, but what did they do? I mean, they went after almost every lawyer that had anything to do with Donald Trump. So there was a colleague of mine, just to take one example, on the Bradley board, Cleta Mitchell, conservative, well-known lawyer, big law firm, very well compensated, very effective. Her expertise was not in politics. It was on 4013Cs. What happens? She's down in Georgia. Donald Trump calls. He did not say to the registrar of Georgia, get me votes. He said, I know they're out there.

49:01Find them. 10 ,000. Well, I've talked to a lot of candidates, and I said, when you have a close race, do you ever call up? Yeah, we call up all the time. We say, you're not counting this district. Can you recount? Everybody does it. Anybody who was on that phone call, they hounded. They either tried to indict them or, more importantly, they pressured their law firm. So she came back, and the first thing she knew, she was fired from her law firm. They didn't do it crudely like Donald Trump did. They did it much from—they used a stiletto, not an axe. And then more importantly, then, of course, the January 6th Congressional Committee met, and you knew what that was going to be like.

49:43They were going to subpoena these people. And when it was all said and done, she was unemployed at 73 years old, and she owed a quarter of a million dollars. And that was repeated again and again. And that was sort of a simile for what happened. So you can look at this in two different directions. The way I interpreted it, Donald Trump came along and they felt that he was an existential threat to the bipartisan, not in a conspiratorial fashion, but to the bipartisan post-war consensus domestically. And they felt that he was also crude enough that he would be buffoonish if they went after him. So what did that happen?

50:23From the very get-go, Hillary Clinton broke the law by hiring a foreign national in a federal campaign. She hid it through the DNC, the Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS. And then he concocted this silly dossier that was completely bankrupt. James Comey hired him as a contractor, and we're off to the races. Barack Obama says, I want this even after the election to be used. They say there's nothing there. Our subordinates can't find it. Go ahead and do it, blah, blah, blah. Carter Page, FISA. And you get into this surreal situation where finally, you know, Rob Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe are wearing a wire to try to entrap Donald Trump.

51:10Or you have this Yale psychiatrist, Bandy Lee, who says that she thinks he's a 25th Amendment idiot and the Congress is listening to him and they want to, you know, see if he can be removed. And then we – this just never stopped. stopped. And let's just take people who are in the news today, just randomly. James Comey, 245 times he said he couldn't remember under oath. If you or I did that, we'd be in jail. John Bolton, he's angry because Donald Trump doesn't like his interventionist policy, fires him. He wants to write a tell-all book, allegedly takes notes, sends it to his wife and daughter, and the book is going to be time for what purposes to come out during the campaign.

51:58A federal judge on an injunction says, I can't stop it. It's too late. But you are sacrificing national security, and you're going to be exposed to civil and criminal liability at some point if you keep doing this. It doesn't matter. Andrew McKay lies four times an oath, interim FBI, Nothing. Just like Bolton, Biden administration, nothing. And then we get Comey, nothing. John Brennan lies twice under oath to a congressional committee, nothing. James Clapper lies under oath, nothing. him. You have all of that. So then your question is, when he comes in and we see what Letita James and Alvin Bragg, and there was E.

52:42Jean Carroll and Jack Smith who surveilled, all of this stuff was coordinated. Well, then what is the real transgression that you know that these prior people had committed perjury, allegedly, or they had broken the law in a variety of ways and you just let it go? And which is the greater transgression, trying to enforce the law retroactively with a political purpose as an addition or using a political purpose not to enforce the law? Because if Biden had not been president, I think these people would have all been charged with perjury. And they weren't. And so now some of them, and when you start looking at the judges and the juries and where they were charged, where they are indicted.

53:30There's another factor. For Donald Trump, I think you're right, he wants retribution and revenge. But for him to reify that, it's very different than the people who went after him. He's going to have to work in the Washington, New York corridor. And he's already got, I don't know how he did, get a grand jury of disinterested citizen to indict Bolton. I don't know how they did it, and to indict Comey. But he's going to have to do that with all of them. And then he's going to have to go before a Judge Marchand, a Judge Ngoron, a Judge Kaplan. And they're going to be mostly East Coast liberal judges.

54:09So the bar for him to do anything is going to be much higher than to get him on 91 indictments. because they knew that they were going to be operating in atmospheres where there were liberal juries, liberal judges, liberal prosecutors, and liberal media. And so I think you're right that that worries, I would have just dropped it, but there's part of me that also says, and you drop it, and then James Comey and Clapper and McCabe and Brennan and Bolton think they can break the law with impunity because of a higher moral standard to get Donald Trump. And then that's the legal thing. And then you have on the periphery, did Donald Trump ever order anybody to go after Barack Obama when he had a kind of a minor disagreement with the archives?

55:00Did he ever go after Hillary Clinton when she was clearly guilty of a felony by using an unsecure server to transmit, I think, 35 classified files? No. Did he go after Joe Biden? No. They went after him. They not only went after him, they took 14 ,000 files out of his home, and they found, what, 102 classified? They tried to take him off the ballot of 25 states. That didn't succeed either. 91 indictments. So what I'm getting at is in the great cycle of things, what they did to him was overwhelming. And what he crudely and against this whole liberal juror is going to try to do to him, I'm not talking about his intent.

55:51I agree with you. He's furious at what they did to him. But that doesn't mean that these people weren't culpable. And it doesn't mean they were given exemptions and impunities because of their ideology and their devil's bargain with the Biden and Obama people that they were going to go after Trump. And therefore, they needed space to operate in. And so, yeah, I wish he wouldn't do it, but I also know another thing that he's transparent about it. Transparent in a counterproductive fashion. When they say, what do you think about John Bolton? And Obama or Clinton or Biden would have done, even Biden would have said, no comment.

56:35I cannot talk about this. And then he would have said to his aide, how are we doing to get in this son of a bitch? How are we doing? What does Trump do? He goes, oh, he's a bad man. He's a bad man. And then headlines. Trump prejudices the indictment, already convicts. So, yeah, he shouldn't do that. But what he is is sort of an anecdote. And that's why people, you know, when you look at, you know, the thing about the, just I'll finish, when you look at the classified documents. So they go after Trump. They had debanked him earlier, and they go into Baron and First Lady's underwear drawer. They come there.

57:23They're so intent to find something, they bring little stickers classified. They go through the 14 ,000 documents. They take them out. They spread them on the ground, which they weren't spread. They put little stickers on them and take pictures that this was the sloppy way it was all set up. And then you look at the media and that says, unlike Joe Biden, who notified authorities on his own volition, no, he didn't. He only notified Merrick Garland that he had culpability because somebody said to him, my God, you picked a special counsel to go after Trump. Have you had any exposure? He said, yeah.

58:02For 30 years, I took out classified documents, and it wasn't one place. I had them in four places, and they were a hell of a lot less secure than Mar-a-Lago. And then he was advised, well, you better come forward, and then the media will go from there. So he went forward, and they said, Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, volunteer. He didn't. He was smart. And then he tells Robert Herr. Robert Herr goes through all the evidence, and he says, this man is culpable. And then he comes up with this ridiculous exegesis. exegesis, he says, but he's so non-compos mentes that no jury would convict him. They'd feel empathy for him.

58:38And you think, so he's not fit to stand trial, but he's fit to run the United States? And then finally, the desert of the whole thing is he talks to his speechwriter who has no classified clearance, and he admits that he has been talking and using these files to transmit classified information, and the speechwriter knows it, and then they subpoena the tapes, and he destroys them. And he says, oh, I destroyed them under subpoena because I felt somebody might hack them. You know, they were downloaded. And then Robert Hurst says, okay, you didn't charge him with anything. So there was an asymmetry with two different things were going on, And that really bothered me.

59:24And believe me, I can tell you that I've had this conversation with people at Stanford Law School, people at the Hoover Institution, people on interviews. And they can see Donald Trump's crudeness, but they cannot see how subtle and sophisticated an establishment were the efforts to sort of make him into a buffoon. But you know who did see it were the underclass. So when I was listening to all these people at Stanford give me all these legal analytics about what Trump was prejudicing a jury by talking about it, then I'd go to dinner with a Hispanic highway patrolman and a sheriff. And they said, you know, Victor, they just don't like the SLB.

1:00:13That's all it is. I can tell. I see it all the time. They're just going to quite a railroad. And that was what was so ironic. Like every time they thought they were going to, they didn't needlessly try to humiliate him, like the mugshot. The next thing I knew, everybody said in Fresno County, that looks like my son-in-law. He has the same expression. They did the same thing to him. He had one container. That's all. They let all the guys that are wealthy off. So they didn't know. It's like the garbage stunt in the McDonald's. Anyway, that's a long rant.

1:00:46Coleman Hughes:No, I don't disagree with you, Victor. I mean, you could have added more to that story. I mean, you're just actually trying to explain what he did wrong in the state-level prosecutions in plain English without any legalese. So you're saying he paid a porn star that was extorting him for a relationship they had over a decade ago. He paid her with his own money. And he kept the part of the bargain and she didn't. Right. So you're going to find a novel legal theory that you cannot find any precedent for on the internet or in the archives and somehow connect a federal election law to a local law and charge each piece of paper as a separate felony.

1:01:31Coleman Hughes:Again, if you boil this down to plain English, it's very hard to see how that could possibly be a felony-worthy crime. And they fined Barack Obama$300 ,000, The greatest fine in history for campaign violations in 2008. And they fined Hillary over$30 ,000 for the Christopher Steele dossier and paying for that money and not reporting that as a campaign expense because she had those three paywalls. So, yeah, that was it. And then the Ingorand was even, I mean, the Leticia James was even more egregious. Basically, the Deutsche Bank said, you don't know what you're talking about. We know this is what we do.

1:02:14That Mar-a-Lago is worth a lot more than$17 million. We know Trump. Trump probably deliberately got it down valued for tax purposes or something. But we know that thing is worth a fortune. So we loaned him all of this money. He paid us back. He paid the interest on time. He paid it off in full, and we want to loan to him. And most of that testimony by experts was not allowed. And so then he gets$500 billion in the first fine before it's reduced,$500 million for the bank. There was no victim. And Fannie Wills was, you know, that was kind of a circus. And then E. Jean Carroll, oh my gosh, this is a woman who can't remember what happened 30 years ago and says that I can remember only the dress that I wore.

1:03:06And then people point out the dress didn't exist when you said this happened. And then she says it happens in a bathroom where he forcibly sexually assaulted me. But, yes, it's exactly the same as a 2012 Law & Order episode that I happened to watch. I might have been influenced where a person who's very funny, very famous, goes into a bathroom in the same department store and sexually assaults. And that's the storyline. Oh, by the way, since then, I've talked about rape being a fantasy. I made an app, How to Break Up a Game. I put it on my phone, tried to sell it. How do you break up a marriage by falsely accusing someone of adultery?

1:03:51It goes on and on and on. And then you find out, well, wasn't this the statute of limitations? Oh, well, the state legislature of New York passed a special law that said for one year only, anybody charged with sexual assault, there will be no statute of limitations. That's outlawed in the Constitution. It's a bill of attainder. So each of these, and then you get into Jack Smith and, you know, insurrection. Nobody had ever been charged with that. Please, you know, that's like saying he says all these crazy things, and at one point he says, please assemble peacefully and patriotically at the Capitol.

1:04:26And then Kamala Harris in June, right in the height of the riot, looting, says, this is not going to stop. It should not stop. This is going to go on. And everybody says, oh, she didn't mean violence. So all of these things were very dangerous. I thought they were lawfare and they were a manipulation of the legal system. And I think everybody knew it. Robert Mueller testified he didn't know what the dossier was and he didn't know what Fusion GPS. Those were the two catalysts that made him appointed. I have no idea what it is. So I hope they all are held culpable for what they did. And I agree with you.

1:05:10I think Donald Trump, if somebody could just say, Donald, don't comment on any of these things. But on the other hand, every time he's been outrageous and everything, it brings people's attention to it. So that's his strategy.

1:05:25Coleman Hughes:Okay, final question. Do you think that after this Trump term, American politics will revert back to the relative normalcy that we remember where people aren't getting, public figures aren't getting prosecuted every two months? and there's, you know, when you hear of a husband and wife that are Democrat and Republican, you don't, the first comment isn't, oh my God, how does their marriage work? It's, yeah, sure, that's normal. Happens all the time. I mean, is there any prospect of a return to the normalcy, the pre, say, 2012 normalcy that those of us my age and older would remember? I hope so.

1:06:11But the reason that we're having this chaotic period is really, if you think about it, the Republicans had lost six out of the last seven elections. They hadn't won the popular vote since 2004. I don't think they'd won 51 percent. Not that Donald Trump almost did, but they hadn't won 51 percent going all the way back to Mike Dukakis. So there was a sense that they needed to appeal to the people that were not interested in them. There were people in the United States that didn't care about capital gains. They didn't want to privatize Social Security. They were worried about China. They didn't think China was going to democratize if you gave them more stuff.

1:06:56So they wanted a closed border. They thought it lowered their wages. So this guy comes along. He could have been a Democrat or Republican. Trump had been both. and he says this stuff and the aristocratic wing of the republican party is just shocked by him and then they started looking at him and he said this guy wants to entirely overthrow the post-war order and foreign policy not not that he really did but he he'd use a certain technique to make NATO pay, or he wanted to shock us about China, et cetera, et cetera. And then people started looking domestically. He speaks nice of the teamster. And what they were basically saying is that this guy has changed the Republican Party into a workers' nationalist populist party, and people, the white working class, black working class, Hispanic working class, are going to have more in common with each other than each does with their own elites.

1:08:01And that was kind of a frightening thing to the establishment. And you can see why they walked. But I started to see it when you saw that 26%, I think, of black males voted for them, 55 % of Hispanic males. Oh, I think it was 60 % of white males, 62%. It kind of worked. And I could see where it was going because when I go to the university and I listen to black intellectuals or black politicians or Hispanic population elites, they have nothing in common with people I see out here. No more in common than farmers have with professors or intellectuals. So he saw that and he forged a new way of politics.

1:08:51and he had certain mannerisms. I'm not trying to deprecate or be condescending to the middle class, the working class, but what intellectuals found off-putting, they found authentic. And so he revolutionized party and that caused a lot. The never-Trumpers really went, if you look at the rhetoric, I mean, Bill Kristol just said he was going to, he would vote for Mondami if he was in New York. So he really made their head explode and people who had told us they were conservative of their whole life suddenly said, I renounce everything I've done because of him. And then it had even a greater effect on the Democratic Party.

1:09:28They basically said, this guy came in, and he robbed us of the middle class. And he's exposed us of a party of technocrats, big donors, financial people, global people that were making a ton of money on the two coasts, and the subsidized poor. So that were the catalyst that stopped this. So to finish, I think we're going to be in, let's hope that we don't have this furor in terms of personality and comportment. I agree with you, but I think whether it's Marco Ruby or J.D. Vance or someone over, they will not be able to return to Doleism, Bushism, McCainism, Romneyism, because this was working for them.

1:10:17And I think people want them. And I think the Democratic Party, Trump's legacy, I think his main legacy will be he destroyed the Democratic Party as we knew it. He really did. And he made them take positions that are so unpopular and so extreme based on they had to be opposite of what he was for. And so we're kind of like, we had the French Revolution, we got rid of the Bourbons, and we had the constitutional monarchy, and that didn't work, and Danton, all those people were out, and then we had the Robespierre brothers, and then we had the Thermidor reaction. Let's hope we don't have Napoleon on a directory, but I think we're coming out, this is the counter-revolutionary phase, the Obama-Biden years with a revolutionary phase, change the country.

1:11:08This is the counter-revolutionary phase. And I hope we can get back to a normality without authoritarianism. But it's more than just people being mean to each other. And, of course, you pointed out, and you're right, there are other outside catalysts and factors like the Internet now and instant expression on social media that can fire people up being anonymous is something that's terrible. Somebody, you know, 3 ,000 miles away, I pick up my email and he said, yeah, I get an email, I'd like to kill you, Victor, for your credit. I never heard of that before. So there's certain extraneous trends that we have no control over.

1:11:51But I agree with you that it would be nice to be able— I have a twin brother who hasn't spoken to me in five years. I have an older brother who won't speak to me. and I have two first cousins that were adopted as my sister and brother. They haven't spoken. They all grew up in a— That's a shame. Yeah, we all grew up in a Democratic family. And they—as long as I was, you know, I was an independent, but as long as I voted or I said I disagreed with them, I voted for Bush or somebody like that, they were fine with that. But when Trump came along, it was, how dare you do that? So they haven't spoken to me.

1:12:32And they won't as long as Trump is around. And I don't know how you get over that.

1:12:37Coleman Hughes:Yeah. Okay, Victor Davis Hanson, thank you so much for coming on my show. I highly recommend your podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show. If there's anything else you want to plug, now's a good time. Yeah, we went to a new platform, everybody. It's The Daily Signal changed the title. We had to leave our prior one. So it's Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. you can find it at victorhenson.com or at xvdhenson or at the daily signal. All right. Thank you, Victor. Thank you, Coleman.

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