Victor Davis Hanson: What the Democratic Midterm Sweep Means for Trump, MAGA, and 2028

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]With Democrats sweeping the House and Senate in the midterms last night, I’m sitting down with classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson to get his take on the results and what they mean for the Trump administration, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, and the 2028 elections.

Hanson is the author of multiple bestselling books, including most recently, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Victor Davis Hanson, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, I have to confess, I wasn’t familiar with the term shellacking until last night and today. So, Victor, what happened?

Mr. Hanson:

That was a term Obama used in 2010 when he lost 63 seats in the House and I think nine Senate seats. Bill Clinton said they kicked our blank when he in 1994 lost 53 seats and I think six Senate seats. George Bush in 2006 used that term shellacking when he lost I think 30 seats. What happened? As a historian, I just go by history. 

I had said this before, I didn’t want to believe it, but in the last 126 years of the modern period since 1900, the party that has the White House loses 90 per cent. In 90 per cent of the midterms, they lose seats in the House, and in 75 per cent of the midterms, they lose Senate seats. That was predictable that they were going to lose seats, the odds being what they are. The only time that was reduced, say, in the House, was FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and the exuberance still in 1934 of the New Deal, and then George Bush in 2002, when he hadn’t gone into Iraq yet, and he was really uniting the country after 9/11. 

Then Bill Clinton picked up five seats in 1998, and that was because they impeached him the month before the Republican supermajority. They had a really big majority and they impeached him, but the economy was growing at 4 per cent with 2 per cent inflation and he had balanced the budget for two years. And so, that boomeranged, but it’s very rare for a president to pick up seats. 

What is unusual is the size of the tsunami. We don’t know what we’re speaking of now, this morning. I’m in the morning after here on the West Coast, and we don’t have all the returns from the Western states. But it looks like somewhere around 45 seats or more. I think the Republicans will lose seven to nine seats, depending on the ones that are out. What does that mean and why did it happen? 

The easiest answer is what does it mean? That means Donald Trump, if he’s going to appoint a district, circuit, or Supreme Court justice, or fire a cabinet member and replace him, he better do it in the next 70 days before the new Congress is sworn in in January. Because they’re not going to approve anything that he puts up that requires a Senate nomination to be approved by the Democrats. That’s number one. 

Number two, if it’s down to 45 seats, he’s got to make sure that he rides herd on that Republican 45 Senate because if he gets too many people like Lisa Murkowski or renegades that join the Republicans, then they will have uncertain votes, a veto-proof Congress.

Mr. Jekielek:

That join the Democrats, you mean, Victor?

Mr. Hanson:

Yes. So, if the Democrats end up with 55 or 57 seats, there are about three or four people who are not always with Trump. Some of them lost, you know, Cornyn and Tillis, but there are still some there, and he’s going to have to have party control. Otherwise, they will not have what he has theoretically as a veto-proof Congress. And then recent history, what does a president do when he’s lost the House and Senate by wide margins? 

The answer is pretty much what he wants to do. Bill Clinton, he worked with Gingrich; he got two more balanced budgets. He decided that he wanted to remove Milosevic, and he said to the Republican Congress, I’m not even going to ask you for the authorization. And he bombed for 77 days to furor from the Republicans. And he was successful. 

Then he had a summit. He tried to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It didn’t work, but he was kind of a virtuoso. And Obama got emboldened. He was the one that gave us the term phone. He said, I have a phone, a pen, and a phone, and I can do what I want to do. He got heavily involved with the Steele dossier, and he had his intelligence heads pursuing this unicorn of Russian collusion on the domestic front. 

And then he signed on, even though he said he was a constitutional lawyer. He said, well, I’m going to have the treaty with the Iran deal. I’ll have the treaty with the Paris Climate Accord, and I don’t need congressional authority. It’s not a treaty. So he just did it, and he did it by recognizing Cuba. He said, It’s time to make full diplomatic relations, no more sanctions. 

So, what I’m getting at, a lot of the lame-duck presidents feel they’re unbound and they have nothing to lose. They can no longer hurt their congressional majorities or minorities. They’re going to be out in two years, and they’re going to executive order and veto their way domestically. The imperial presidency operates as it wishes. 

As it applies to Donald Trump, he will try to get the Iran war over as quickly as possible and denuclearize it. And part of the reason he lost tangentially here is he bombed for 38 days and had almost eliminated. Then they said, well, we have eight months, we have seven months, we have six months before the midterms, we have five months, we have four months, we have three. And they bombed talk, talk, with people you can’t talk to. 

So, he’s going to have to denuclearize them, hit Pickaxe Mountain if he wants to eliminate that threat. No ground troops, no nation-building, but hit a lot of targets that will set them back eight or ten years and then leave a skeleton force, keep the strait open, and tighten those sanctions and go home. Then gas will go down. And there’s nothing the Democrats can do to help or hurt him on that. They don’t have the votes to cut off funds, and they won’t. And he can do what he wants with Xi and Putin. He can do what he wants in the Ukraine sphere. He can do almost anything he wants. That’s just not because he’s any different. He’s just going to follow the precedent of presidents. 

The other thing that’s very ironic is when presidents do this, their favorability doesn’t go down; it goes up. Because these supermajorities are not like moderate gains. They bring in bomb-throwers. We have about 45 socialists that are now going to be in Congress in the Democratic House, and maybe one or two socialist Islamist senators. 

They will do things that are going to shock the ossified leadership. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, and all of those calcified people are not young and energetic like El-Sayed or Chevalier or any of those people. They are AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the Squad, and they will try to single-payer nationalized healthcare, completely flip on foreign policy, favoring Palestine as our friend and Israel as our enemy, and try to open the border. They will try to mainstream the trans, bring back the Green New Deal, defund ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], maybe defund the police. 

And these are all 30/70. They’ve all been adjudicated in the 2024 election, and that’s why Kamala Harris lost. She was on the wrong side of all those issues until she tried to change her spots, so to speak. 

So, that plays into the hands of the lame-duck president. That happened with Clinton and Obama. The Tea Party got way extreme in their candidates and their ideas. They were leaderless, and they kind of petered out with Obama. 

The impeachment zealots that wanted to crucify Clinton, he lied under oath. He had sexual relations with an employee who was a young woman, power imbalance, hit all the feminist buttons. And yet, they did it in such a way they turned off the American people. Then the final thing, very quickly, is the election starts. Donald Trump declared his candidacy on November 15th, 2022. That’s two weeks from now, basically. 

So, we’re going to see a lot of people jump in the Democratic Party, and we’re going to see pretty soon, we’ll see whether the Vance-Rubio alliance holds up. There’ll be a lot of pressure from people to see Rubio at the top of the ticket. Vance can’t be vice president again. That’s going to be problematic if that were to happen. DeSantis withstood the blue wave. Byron Donalds won, they won the Senate, and so he may be revitalized.

All this conundrum will happen in the next two years, and Trump will be above the fray. And that’s what happened to Obama and Clinton. Clinton just basically said, Al Gore doesn’t want me campaigning, that’s fine. He fought it out with Bush the last year of his tenure. Hillary and Trump really went at it in 2015 and 2016, and Obama just kind of played golf. The less we saw or heard of them, the more we liked them. 

The odd thing was, both of them had low ratings at one point at 37 to 38 per cent, Obama and Clinton. They left with one of the highest ratings. Clinton left with one of the highest ever. He was about 66 per cent, and Obama was about 59 per cent approval rating. That was because the attention turned to acrimonious bomb-throwers in the opposition. 

There was an election with contentious issues and personal invective, and the president didn’t have to worry about coddling his own party. He was unbound. He tried to be statesmanlike above the fray, and it worked. Trump, if he wants to follow that paradigm, it’s there for him.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, the one thing that’s different, I suppose, is that there’s this whole media ecosystem that’s committed to his destruction and continues to be so. That certainly wasn’t the case for the other two presidents you mentioned.

Mr. Hanson:

No, and that’s a very good point, because it really does explain in part the affordability issue. If we can go back in time to just four years ago, 2022, a very unpopular Joe Biden after 9.1 per cent inflation in 2022, and the skedaddle from Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine, given he gave the wrong signals, lost deterrence. 

So, we were told a red wave was going to sweep the country, and it looked like it would, and it didn’t. They only picked up nine seats. They barely got the House back. They lost a seat in the Senate, and the red wave turned out to be a pathetic ripple. What was the reason? Why did the blue wave turn out to be a tsunami? 

So, we compare the two situations, and there you get to the heart of what you said about the media. In 2022, the inflation rate that year was 9.1 per cent. This year it may go to 3.4 per cent. It’s almost only a third. If you look at per family income, it’s $14,000 higher now under Trump than it was under Biden at that time. If you look at GDP [Gross Domestic Product], we have a much bigger third-quarter GDP. 

If you look at the stock market, it’s 20,000 points higher than it was in 2022. If you look at job creation, it’s much better. If you look at the poverty rate, it’s almost two points lower. So the economy actually is doing much better. But when you go back and look at the media coverage, you had Janet Yellen say, this is not our fault. This was supply chains and pent-up consumer demands, and it’s only temporary. 

Well, it was actually 5.1 average for the four years. But the media portrayed that as no big deal, even though Joe Biden was polling at 40 per cent, pretty much where Trump is. But it was all of a sudden affordability in gas. 

And I thought, well, I guess gas did Trump in. It’s now $4.32 on Election Day. It’s $4.18 today. Then I went back and looked, it got to $5 in July of 2022. And he tried to drain the petroleum reserve. On Election Day, it was about $4.10. 

Historically, things were much worse, and Biden was in the same place as being in the end party when traditionally he loses seats, and the economy was worse, and his personal approval was as dismal as Trump, and yet, he survived it, but Trump got wiped out. 

Now, you can argue that the media bias is a lot. You can also say that Trump inherited a 21 per cent inflation over four years. So when he had a moderate 2.4 per cent and this year a 3.5 per cent, it came on top of 21 per cent. They did not articulate the difference between prices and inflation rate. 

So, they kept saying, well, we have the Biden inflation rate. But the people were saying, yes, but prices are 21 per cent higher than when you left office last time. So, what are you going to do about it? Well, they couldn’t do anything about it unless you wanted a recession or a deflationary depression, because we never go into a deflation and lose that 21 per cent. 

The answer is what Trump did was to lower the inflation rate and increase the per-family median income, which he did spectacularly. But they never communicated that. In contrast, Biden inherited a 1.9 per cent inflation from Trump, and it had only gone up 7 per cent over four years. And so when it went up to 9 per cent. If you think about it, it was only about a 16 per cent increase, whereas, Trump went up three per cent, and people noticed that. 

The administration didn’t really explain that when they said, we’re going to lower the rate of inflation, we’re going to grow the economy, we’re going to increase personal and family income, and that is the way that this affordability crisis will be handled. Prices will continue to go up moderately, one or two or three percent at most, but wages will go up three percent and family income will go up three or four, and finally, that will make prices stabilize at the level when I leave office in 2021 in January. But that was never communicated.

Mr. Jekielek:

Victor, I’ve been looking at various takes. One of the sets of takes by people that I think offered an interesting one, Spencer Pratt being one example, was just that the Republicans are very poor at storytelling. But also, I suppose this whole media complex thing figures into this dramatically as well. So that’s one side. But the other side is actually the vice president. And I’ll just comment. You mentioned the war. He said the reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. 

But he also pointed to kind of the four separate things, right, that were, that the pollster, he gave validity to the pollster. And he said the number one issue was ending the war. Number two, the focus on cost of living. Number three is putting America first. And the fourth is changing the relationship with Israel. So these are actually quite different viewpoints of what happened. I’m kind of, where do you land here?

Mr. Hanson:

When he refers to the war, when the war broke out, he had over 50 per cent approval. They had spectacular success for the first 38 days. They did the impossible, but they didn’t explain it. They didn’t say to the American people, seven presidents said you can’t let them get a nuclear weapon. 

They’re closer than ever before. They have 93 million people. They have over 200,000 rockets. This is an existential threat. It is a very big danger to Europe and to us. But I’m going to denuclearize them. It’s going to be a long haul, it’s going to be dangerous. 

But I have two guidelines. There will be no ground troops, and I will not go in there and try to nation-build as we did in Afghanistan. That was assumed, but he never was explicit about just how difficult it was. So then you go in there, and it was tragic. We lost 23 soldiers, but compared to 7,500 in Afghanistan and Iraq, we’ve spent 45. That’s about what we left in infrastructure, weaponry, and embassies and stuff in Afghanistan to the Taliban. But they never really accentuated that. 

And then once they stopped, they were not quite done yet. They hadn’t prepared for the Hormuz. They were talking about the denominator of missiles they had destroyed and drones, but not the numerator, but then not the denominator, was how many existed. They didn’t know. You can destroy 95 per cent of what you think, but if you don’t know what you think it is, you don’t know. It could be 95 per cent of what? 

So there were mistakes, but the biggest problem was we had almost won, and if we had continued and done what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did—and let’s be honest, Clinton hit dual targets in Serbia. He hit the bridges on the approaches into Belgrade; he knocked out the power grid. Obama bombed Gaddafi’s ports. He hit their TV and radio communication. Neither one of them got congressional authority. 

But we would say, we’re on the side of the Iranian people. I think they sort of gave the impression to Trump that they were going to overthrow the government, and he would do what Maduro did. It would be short, what he did with Maduro. And Iran is not Venezuela. So it was very difficult when we weren’t. 

But we stopped, and then this is what happened. It’ll be over pretty soon, but we still have eight months before the midterms. It’ll be over. We’re talking, we’re on the edge of the deal, but we have seven months. We’re talking, we had to hit a target, but otherwise, we’re talking, We’re six months. We’re five months. We’re four months. We’re three months. 

And they got into a haggling with people who don’t tell the truth and have no intention to negotiate. And now they think they’re going to negotiate when these people are sky-high, high-fiving themselves that they stopped Trump with the midterms. The Iranians think that, and they’re not going to negotiate. So, you’re going to have to hit them very, very hard, Pickaxe Mountain for two or three weeks. Then you’re going to have to just leave. 

And then you’re going to have to fund the opposition and arm them and forget what Turkey says and clamp down on these sanctions and keep it straight up; it’s open. And let Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states finish their pipelines. And we’ve already got as much oil going out as we did before the war, and he’ll be okay. But not if he continues to negotiate ad infinitum. 

So that’s the problem. It’s not the war per se. If he were successful and they are denuclearized for many years, and in a year or two, they’re stewing in their own juice because of the sanctions, and you have a rebellion. And he flips the Middle East like he did the Western Hemisphere, where we only have four communist anti-American states left.Then that would be something like the fall of the Berlin Wall. So it’s a lot more involved than that. 

I don’t know what JD means by America First, but I think we’ve heard that nonstop. And that’s what Trump is trying to do with the massive $11 trillion foreign investment, the big Audi plant that came in. He’s trying to create jobs, jobs. The tariffs are very controversial, but they are part of the America First agenda: that anybody who wants to invest in America is tariff-free, and anybody who doesn’t gets slapped with a tariff that is at least as much as they tariff us, and sometimes even more. 

So I don’t quite understand that. I don’t know what Israel has to do with it. I saw the El-Sayed commercial. Israel receives about $3 billion a year, a little over. That’s one per cent of all foreign aid. We have a $7 trillion budget. Israel’s—the amount that we give Israel, the only democratic, consensual society in the Middle East, the only Western society—the amount we give them is one-fifth of  one percent of the budget. 

We were told in Michigan that the price of bananas and eggs is because we give one-fifth of one percent of our seven trillion dollars to this democracy that’s beleaguered and surrounded by five hundred million enemies in the Middle East. And if JD believes that, I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with him. 

So, I don’t think that he’s putting into context the historicity that we usually lose, being the in-party, usually loses. They had a Congress also that didn’t do it; it was a do-nothing Congress. He had the majority in the House and Senate. He had a lot of apostates. They did not pass the Save America Act. They couldn’t really repeal Obamacare. I don’t know anything they did in the first two years, the Republican Congress. 

They really didn’t do anything, and yet, they had the majority. They made some good nominations, but even the judicial nominations were pretty slow, the confirmations. Then when they won the House, even during the Biden administration, when they won the House, all they did was fight. Remember the speaker’s confirmation? It went on for months. 

So, the Democrats don’t do that. They have absolute authoritarian control and party line, as socialists do. Once they get the prime directive from on high, they all step to it. We’ll see if that goes with the Islamicist socialist nexus now, but I don’t get that. One thing I think I do get is that there’s going to be a fight between the Republican and the Democratic, but also within the Republican party. 

So, who is the winner of this disaster? Is it the Marco Rubio people? Is it the JD Vance people? Is it the DeSantis people who say, well, Florida is the exception; we won the Senate and the governorship? So that’s going to be looming. I will say that the prime directive of a vice president, besides going to funerals and rhetorically battling on behalf of the president, which JD proved in 2024 he was a master at, but it’s also to protect the president from personal invective and attack. 

So when you have people on the Right claiming that he’s a pedophile, like Marjorie Taylor Greene did, or that he’s satanic and should be impeached, and he’s a crazy nuclear bomber, like Tucker Carlson did, and the vice president does not stand up and say, wait a minute. This is my president. 

This is the person we elected, we in the Republican Party. He’s not Satan. He’s not going to be impeached. He’s not going to bomb somebody with a new—what are you talking about? He didn’t do that for reasons unknown, especially in the Tucker case. But I think he’s going to have to at some point.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, I want to talk about your book, The Counter Revolution, and the subtitle, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump. So, we’ll have to kind of expand this a little. So, it’s the fall and rise. Is it the fall, or is it the imperial presidency? And how does the MAGA movement fit in too? Is it the fall and rise and fall, or is it a rise again?

Mr. Hanson:

Well, the fall was those wilderness years after January 6th, and then the rise started during the campaign and his election. And I don’t think it’s yet a fall, as I just explained, probably ad nauseam, that presidents like Obama or Clinton or Trump can really improve their ratings and do a lot of good things or a lot of bad things. But the point is, they do things like foreign policy. They get above the fray, they get empowered, they renew their attention, they don’t have to deal with Congress. And he can do a lot of things.

Mr. Jekielek:

Victor, if I may jump in, right? I think the thesis of your book, if I may, is that Trump’s approach has been to try to go after the sources of this progressive power, if you will, and so forth, this time around. And the question is, you know, he may be able to do what he wants, but can he actually do that?

Mr. Hanson:

Well, he can do it. Yes, he’s done it. But he didn’t do it. Remember, he didn’t do it with congressional approval. He defunded PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] and NPR [National Public Radio]; it was an executive order. He got rid of USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] with executive budgetary prerogatives. He is suing the universities for antisemitism, racism, and racial essentialism. As his prerogative in a budgeting matter, they’re not going to get federal funds if they don’t do this. He shut the border by executive order; he built the wall by executive order, continued it. ICE is operating as part of its normal function. They all address the sources. 

So he said the second time, I think during the wilderness years, he said, I had never been to Washington much, and I had people in my cabinet the first time. They were nice people, Steve Mnuchin, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, John Kelly, but they weren’t MAGA people. So they saw their duty as to reinterpret my American First agenda, and that meant often obstructing it with bureaucratic expertise. 

This time, loyalty was the prime directive. They’re all loyal, they’re all on the same page, and they’re addressing the symptoms. And the symptoms, as I wrote in the book, answer the question: How does the Left exercise political power and influence when they do not have the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the White House, as they do not as we speak? 

The answer is a Gramscian, socialist, communist directive, a march through the institutions. And they understood that if you control K-12 in the schools of education, the universities where half the population goes, the media, the public and private media, NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, etc., Hollywood, professional sports, the corporate boardrooms, the foundations, and of course, the administrative state, then you can exercise enormous power without being elected. And so that’s what he tried to address for all of the controversies of his overdose. 

He cut 270,000 federal employees and probably another 100,000 have left. Nobody thought that would be possible. He defunded NPR and PBS. He stopped all immigration, and he went a step further and he said, no more catch and release, and I’m going to deport people and I’m going to round up 500 criminals. I thought to myself, how are you going to deport people when they were let in at 10,000 a day and they scattered through 50 states among 600 sanctuary jurisdictions? 

So, that was an existential challenge. But again, he was addressing the symptoms. I don’t want to tax one per cent on remittances sent to Mexico. I’m going to tax, in some cases, one per cent of the endowment of universities. So he’s trying to tell these countries abroad and interests at home that there had been existential problems, if you use that word again, that he had only addressed the manifestations or the symptoms, but not the causes. And now he’s going right after the causes. 

Why is NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] the way it is? Well, they don’t meet their two per cent. Why don’t they meet their two per cent ? Because they’ve adopted a green agenda, shut down their fossil fuels, low fertility, open borders, illegal immigration, censorship, and they discourage entrepreneurialism. So let’s scream and yell at them and shake them up and see if we can get conservative movements all over Europe so that they can be a partner rather than a subordinate and they can rearm themselves, kind of like Eastern Europe or the Baltic states or Norway or Sweden and Denmark, Finland especially. 

He’s trying to do that across the board. I think that explains the level of furor because the Left has said to themselves, this is not George W. Bush, it’s not George H.W. Bush, it’s not Bob Dole, it’s not John McCain, it’s not Mitt Romney. This is a counter-revolutionary, and he wants to undo our sources of power.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, I think, from what I’m seeing, we have a situation where there’s a split in terms of trying to impeach him. We’re talking about this Fuhrer, right? In a sense, if I heard you correctly earlier, the smartest thing you think the Democrats could do is actually just have restraint and govern, without giving strength to the bomb throwers, so to speak, and so forth. 

But what does governance look like with this, from the perspective of Congress? Like, you know, I’ve seen notes about subpoenas, get ready for the subpoenas. Apparently, there are going to be tech bros called in in significant numbers. I mean, of course, I’m just reading what’s on X mostly, right?

Mr. Hanson:

So, if they would read the first half of the Counter Revolution, they would see that each time they entered upon a civil or criminal suit, five of them, e.g., Carroll’s diabolical effort, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, Trump’s polls went up and they all collapsed. Even Alvin Bragg’s will eventually collapse.

And then, when they tried to get them off the ballot, that was a collapse. When they raided Mar-a-Lago, they found 101 classified documents. They said there was a whole trove of about 11,000. That was a mess. When they impeached him twice and tried to convict him as a private citizen, it only helped him. When Joe Biden said he was garbage, he got in a garbage truck, and that backfired. 

So they should go back and say, did the Russian collusion get Donald Trump elected? Maybe it did. Did the laptop lie that it was Russian collusion? We got Biden maybe elected by it, but did that hurt us? Yes. And so if they want to continue to do that, they will have Trump’s mugshot everywhere, and he will rebound from it. It’s counterproductive.

If they go back to the 30/70 issues that put them in the wilderness and put Kamala Harris, you know, made her inert, and we know what they are. They’re the trans issue, they’re the open border issue, they’re the 10,000-a-day illegal immigrants, they’re the defund the police, defund ICE, Green New Deal, stop fossil fuels, neutral in the world, and globalism. It’s not going to work. 

But what I meant, if they were sober, they would get together and say, what is our problem right now? Can we have a nonpartisan effort with congressmen and senators from both sides to address the $3 billion a day interest on the national debt?The national debt is unsustainable. Can’t we both work at this the way Clinton and Gingrich did? It helped both of them. 

That would be something they can do. Can they get together and say, the world is changing, and Ukraine is producing a million drones a year? Tiny little Ukraine, we’re only doing 300, we’re doing something wrong with these $180 million airplanes and $14 billion carriers. 

Can we have decentralized suppliers that can do things in mass like we did in World War II? There’s a lot of things they could do together. Are they going to do it? I don’t think so because they’re ideologues and they’re socialists. And they have an agenda that they feel they’re morally superior, and their ends justify any means necessary to get there. And anybody, the way that socialist revolutions work is that anybody who objects becomes a counter-revolutionary or a traitor. 

So they always get further and further to the Left, whether in 1848 or the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks. They devour their own, they create a system, and then it implodes because it doesn’t work. But it does a lot of damage and a lot of damage until it implodes. And they’re capable of doing a lot of damage.

The Republicans are not going to get back the House and Senate in the next election. With these huge leads, it’s going to take them two or three elections. It did last time. And the next president will be, I think, from the left of the Democratic Party, their nominee. If that president should win with this Congress, then you can see what 2029 is going to be like. 

It’s going to be pack the court, let in two new states.The filibuster will be gone in January, I imagine. 200 years old. They’ll get rid of that. They’ll pack the court with 15 liberal judges. They’ll probably defund ICE. They’ll restore USAID on steroids and make sure it’s bulletproof this time around and give Left-wing governments abroad help. 

It’ll be pretty bad, and they’ll have the power to do it, unless the Republicans can get their act together and Trump can really have some big foreign policy successes and use his executive orders and veto to stymie them and work with them on bipartisan issues that Americans care about. That’s the way to handle it.

The polls weren’t even closed, and Robert Garcia was saying subpoenas, and Jamie Raskin was saying lawfare, and they’re already talking about bringing CEOs in. And Slotkin was saying they’re going to go after any young person that works for Trump. And if they do that, they’re going to divide the country like you’ve never seen it. 

The country, for all of these back and forth midterms, is still 55 per cent conservative. And you can see that even in these states that voted to not allow biological males to compete in women’s sports. Some of them were Left-wing states. So that’s what we’re looking at. And I think history is a pretty good guide to what we can expect.

One thing that I noticed looking at how people voted, right, and looking at the age differentials, was that young people basically overwhelmingly voted blue. I forget the number right now, but a very significant number. You were mentioning how powerful it is when you have so much influence on the educational system, for example, and how people are taught. And so that’s not something that’s going to change election to election, at least that’s what I’m thinking when I see that. It’s not. 

And this is the first administration that realized the problem: half the country is going to college, and there’s a matrix operating.That ensurers are Left-wing—not just Left-wing, but downwardly mobile and angry. And that is a $1.7 trillion student loan; 33 per cent of it is in arrears, coupled with therapeutic education where we have a whole generation now, for four years, that was admitted without an SAT score. 

These students are not well-prepared; they’re not well-trained; they’re indoctrinated, and they leave with debt and they leave with non-marketable, in many cases, majors: a sociology degree, a psych degree, a studies degree—ethnic studies, Black studies, environmental studies, peace studies. And then they move and gravitate from these universities into urban Left-wing enclaves: Boulder, Austin, Washington, New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, and Portland. 

They’re very expensive blue cities, blue places. They don’t work. And they rub shoulders with wealthy people, you know, Wall Street doctors, and they say, I’ve got a BA from Williams. Oh, I’ve got a BA from Grinnell, and I owe $200,000. I’m working for an NGO, or I’m a beginning editor at Alfred A. Knopf in New York, and I’m making $60,000 and rent is $60,000. So, the whole system is rotten. Nobody appreciates my genius, my effort, my degree. And that’s the 85 per cent of white college-degree socialists, the official membership of the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America]. 

I think people on the Right understood that and they said, your universities are not going to segregate by what you call adjacent graduations or what you call theme houses. You’re not going to overcharge us 40 per cent on federal grants. It’s going to go back to 15 per cent. We’re looking very seriously at taxing your endowments or making your endowments guaranteed. The student loan, so you have a moral hazard. 

We’re thinking of getting out of the student loan business, but more importantly, we’re telling people that the college degree is no longer prestigious if it doesn’t produce the results that it had once ensured was worth the effort and expense and time. So, half the country, we need electricians and sheetrockers and carpenters and plumbers and carpenters—all these people and their noble professions. 

The result of that has been quite spectacular in its infancy, even if you look at the polls: 65 per cent five years ago said they had a high regard for the reputation of higher education. That’s down to 33 per cent. People said, do you think that a college degree is essential for upward mobility? That’s down to about 45 per cent. 

So, the public is starting to get the message that these universities turn out people who are not analytical. They’re not equipped orally or in writing to express themselves clearly. They have no mathematical skills. And these brands don’t mean anything. I have a BA from Cal State Northridge. I have a degree in psychology from Stanford. 80 per cent of the grades at Stanford are A’s. There hasn’t been an SAT for four years until last year. Also, nine percent of the incoming class were white males. That’s nine per cent of a demographic, that’s around 35 per cent of the population.

Mr. Jekielek:

And then, Victor, on the other side of that, you have what you described to be one of the big dangers, from what I can tell, in the counter-revolution, which is this lost generation, the disillusioned young white males, so to speak. And you’re describing the scenario where you could even have further polarization. I’ve been arguing that the technology, the social media juiced up by AI, lends itself to that anyway. But now you have these political forces at play that are creating that. It just creates something very volatile that looks to me very foreboding.

Mr. Hanson:

It does. When globalization came upon us at the millennium, there was a six billion dollar, six billion person clientele for the first time, and there was a six billion consumer class, and the people who could take advantage of that were largely on the West and East Coast. That’s where the banks were, that’s where the big corporate CEOs were, that’s where, for the most part, the universities were. 

And certain people that were in the media, in sports, entertainment, law, but especially investment stocks, they made a killing. I had people that I knew very well at Stanford as students five years ago, and they’re making four or five hundred thousand dollars in Silicon Valley. 

And the people in the middle, the so-called irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, hobbits, crazies, garbage—these are all terms that Obama, Clinton, clingers for Obama, and Biden use. They were outsourced or offshored. They missed out on that. That was what the MAGA movement grew up out of that anger. And it was very successful in addressing it for four years and for the first two years. 

But I think that’s what JD means when he says we didn’t put America first. What he’s talking about is the lost generation that you mentioned in the middle of the country or in, you know, upstate New York or the San Joaquin Valley of California or Eastern Washington and Oregon. And they’ve been lost out. 

They grew up in an era where they were 60, 50 years from the civil rights movement, all they knew was affirmative action and racial set-asides. They had no role in Jim Crow, much less six generations of slavery. They didn’t really understand the civil rights movement because it was so ancient. 

All they knew is that when they applied to school or they went to college or they were out in the public space, they were told they had toxic masculinity by feminists, that they were racist, sexist, xenophobes, etc., etc. And the irony was, if you look at where they ended up as per capita income and opportunities, they would be classified as underprivileged. There was no such thing in this Leftist collective as whites. These people had less commonality with white elites on the coast than they did with a Mexican truck driver or a black electrician that worked alongside them. 

That’s what Trump tried to do. I don’t know if it’s going to succeed or not. He tried to create a class solidarity rather than a racial solidarity. And it worked in 2024. It apparently fell apart in this latest election. But this class was also despised. If you want to get a Left-wing DEI person or a liberal person infuriated, then mention the lower white working class. They are despised by those people. They lack the romance of the poor and the culture of the aristocracy. So that’s really the enemy. 

When we had that toxic plume in East Palestine, you could see that no one from the administration wanted to set foot there. Finally, Pete Buttigieg looked like he was an outer space alien when he came there. He was so out of place, and so was all of them. But these were people they had written off. If that had been any other community, it would have been on the front page of the New York Times as an environmental catastrophe aimed at a poor, underprivileged community. 

And I’m afraid of the midterms because I thought we were over that DEI racial essentialism, and all I heard on every station last night was first Native American, first gay person, first woman governor, first this, first this, not what their ideas were or anything. They were all part of a collective, not an individual with unique characteristics. 

So, winter is coming, and it’s going to be a rough two years, but it’s survivable if the Republicans can stick together and prevent a veto-proof Congress. And Trump can keep his eye on the ball and foreign policy and follow the model of the earlier presidents that were very successful after losing the Congress. But there is no margin of error now. 

You can’t get in a spat with Bill Maher. It’s not worth it. You can’t do things like that. It’s just too many people depending on you. And we’re going to, there’s going to be a lot of fights ahead in the MAGA movement. I think the one thing that people agree on, we’re not going to go back to, we’ve got to privatize Social Security or cut the capital gains, the Bush, McCain, Romney agenda. I don’t think we’re going to go back to that. It’s just that the MAGA movement is going to have to refine some of its positions. But I think it still represents the majority of middle-class conservatives.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so, Victor, as we finish up, right, this is the thing that I don’t know the answer to at all, or I don’t have a sense. And I want to just start that conversation maybe in a final moment here, but the polarization seems to be a feature of how this political system functions increasingly. And the outcome, the logical outcome of that, is something really bad, I think. So, is there a way out?

Mr. Hanson:

There is, but it has to be a moral way out. So, because the country is truly in danger, everybody, according to their station, has to step up. I know I do four podcasts a week, and from the very outset, I said there’s not going to be any guest or any host that says the F-word or goes after somebody. That’s all I hear on podcasts now, and we’re not going to do that. 

We’re going to treat people that we interview and disagree with with dignity. And we’re not going to—you know, we’re going to be tough and critical, as I have been right now—but I’m not going to say that Tucker Carlson is insane and he’s a crazy, white nationalist. I don’t know that. I think he’s said and done things that are very disturbing, but I’m not going to go after him personally. 

I will say, though, that when I look at the most egregious examples, who are the people out on the street attacking officers? Who is wearing Charlie Kirk t-shirts with blood on them? Who is giving a talk about celebrating the Kirk anniversary? Who is engaging in violence on campus against Jews? It’s coming from the Left. I don’t see people on the Left encouraging them to stop. I don’t. 

A lot of people on the Right have said that  Candace Owens or someone like that, and Nick Fuentes, have gone out of bounds, and they have been criticized. And they said, that’s not helpful what you’re doing, and that’s not part of the MAGA movement. But I don’t see that self-correction on the Left. And you can’t fight it by using their methods. 

You have to elevate it, elevate it, and not be like them to appeal to the better angels of the American people’s natures. But it doesn’t do any good either to say, we’ve got to tone it down. We’ve got to tone it down. Are there people on the Right that are too loud and too vulgar? Yes. 

But is the hate, the real hate, the idolizing a murderer like Mangione, or glorifying in the wound of Charlie Kirk? Does that have a comparable side? Have there been four assassination attempts against the majority of Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris, as there had been against Trump? I don’t think it’s symmetric. I really don’t. It doesn’t serve any purpose to pretend that it is.

The only way that that’s going to be reflected is you have to defeat them at the polls. And you have to have better ideas and galvanize and get the traditional, make the argument that America was good at its founding, it got better in its maturity, and it’s got a great future, and it’s far better than the alternative. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. And then say, we on this side have certain rules of decorum and tradition that we’re not going to violate for expedient purposes. And then win that argument and vote them out.

It can happen, but we’re seeing something that is historical. We have never seen this before—this radicalism. I think part of it is that we have 55 million people who were not born in the United States, which can be very good. Talent, diversity, I am all for it, and 17 per cent of the population. But if you have a salad bowl environment, or you say the melting pot is passé, or you don’t really think that everybody should be essentially their ethnic tribe and not American, which the Left says, and you’re going to be DEI, DEI, DEI, and you’re going to bring back a pre-civilizational tribalism and fragment this, then it’s not going to work. 

It’s not going to work. You’re going to have too many people who are not on the same page. And, you know, when you have people at Columbia and they’re waving Hezbollah flags and they’re saying to Jewish students, go back to Poland, which they mean Treblinka, the German camps that were stationed in Poland during World War II, and nobody’s speaking about it, and the college president’s terrified of her own students, as we see in Columbia and Harvard, then it’s not symmetrical, but it doesn’t mean that you have to adopt those tactics. You have to be better than they are in your discourse and your analysis. 

I understand sometimes Trump can be crude, and in the book, I said things like not speaking ill of Rob Reiner’s death, who was kind of obnoxious at times and personally unfair to Trump and called him names, but nevertheless, you don’t attack somebody who’s just dead, just died tragically by his own son’s hand. 

So I think everybody’s got it. I think people on the Right are seeing that much more, and they are policing the people who are conspiracy theorists and really out there much better than the left is. The Left is being carried along by those people. And we saw that in the campaign.

When Mamdami says, I’m going to go after richer, whiter neighborhoods, what did that mean? Was that empirical? The most affluent ethnic minority in the United States are Indian American immigrants. He’s an Indian American immigrant. Did he say, I’m going to go after Indian American immigrant communities because they’re the wealthiest? No. 

He said, I’m going to go after richer and whiter. Does that mean some plumber that works in the Bronx? I don’t know, but when you have a synagogue attacked by a terrorist whose two brothers were in Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization in Michigan, and you have the next senator saying, hurt people, hurt people, and justifying that, who hurt that man? 

He came from Lebanon. We gave him the most magnanimous reception. He became a U.S. citizen with all the bounty and privileges of being American, and he pays back us, the host, by driving a car and trying to kill innocent Jews. And then the next U.S. Senator says, hurt people, meaning he had two brothers that were working for Hezbollah on a high level, organizing rocket attacks at civilians, and the Israelis retaliated and killed them. Therefore, he has legitimate hurts because his brothers were warriors in a war and lost, and therefore he has a right to go in there and kill Jews. 

That’s what it boils down to. Nobody said a word about it much. So, I think it’s coming from the Left. I agree. People have to be more considerate, and it won’t do any good to tell the Left to be more considerate because they won’t. You have to be considerate on our side and temperate in what we say and do. And then you have to win a decisive vote to show the country that that model is not acceptable. That’s how our system works.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, essentially, you’re doubling down on America. That’s what I’m hearing.

Mr. Hanson:

I am. Ronald Reagan was written off when I was in California as a young man, here at this house, as a complete nut. They made fun of him at Woodstock and everything. And when he ran for president, they said he was an extremist, but he was smiling. He was kind to people. He reached out to Tip O’Neill, and he basically stopped the 60s, 70s Cultural Revolution himself for 15, 20 years. He did that. 

And Donald Trump had a very different approach. It was much more confrontational, but he did stop what would have been, I think. Eight more years of that, and I don’t know what we would have done. And I’m very optimistic because I’ll just finish by saying, when I look at, I don’t listen to people, I just ask myself; What is the inflation rate? What is the GDP? What is the foreign investment? What’s the poverty rate? What is the median income? What’s the stock market? What’s the job growth, unemployment, labor? 

It’s all good. It’s getting really good. Gas is the only real thing that’s missing out of this mosaic. And I think there’s a really good chance with this record foreign investment and the new technologies like AI and stuff, you’re going to have a real boom in the first and second quarter next year. And I think we’re almost on the verge of it now, and that’s going to really change things. I think it’ll give people a lot more economic opportunity. 

And if the president can work with the Congress about affordability of housing, maybe get rid of some of the regulations and zoning restrictions and let people build homes that are affordable, I think it could really work out well. So I’m optimistic, but I’m also worried that this is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. This is not Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, you know, writing the Democratic Convention agenda for 1992 and 96. 

I went and read it the other day. It sounded like a fossil, you know. We’re going to balance the budget. We’re going to try violent offenders who are 17 as adults. We’re going to close the border. We’re going to deport people that are here illegally and taking advantage of our system. We’re going to put 100,000 cops on the beat. That’s what it was. And the Right thought that was Left-wing. Today, the Left-wing would say that was Right-wing, don’t you think?

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes. Well, Victor Davis Hanson, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Hanson:

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.