The Case For Trump - Victor Hanson

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. Bonjour. Hi, Canada. Greetings around the globe from HughHewitt.com. I'm in the ReliefFactor.com studio. That music means it's the Hillsdale Dialogue. And, even though I'm actually in Vietnam, before I left for Vietnam, the wonderful Victor Davis Hanson agreed to sit down with me and take two Hillsdale Dialogues for today, March 1, and for next week, March 8, because he has a brand new book coming out, The Case for Trump, which I believe drops on March 4. And he has an essay that appeared, as well, that we've got to talk about. Victor Davis Hanson, welcome back to The Hugh Hewitt Show on the Hillsdale Dialogue.  

VICTOR HANSON: Thank you for having me.  

HEWITT: Is the book—March 4th, is that the publication date?  

HANSON: I think it's the 5th.  

HEWITT: It's amazing already when we're talking on the 20th of February, it's number one on Amazon pre-sale orders. What does that tell you?  

HANSON: I think it tells me that Rush Limbaugh and a lot of people like it and talked about it. And I hope they like it because it wasn't just rah rah, let's all vote for Trump. It was an analysis of how he got elected and why, contrary to most people's expectations, he's governed pretty well, at least if you look at his agenda. And then, finally, why people try to remove him, basically.  

HEWITT: It is the opposite of a rah-rah book. In fact, I made the comment on, having read it—Dr. Arnn sent it to me so I could prepare for this. I put out on Twitter that historians 100 years from now are going to start with the historians' account of the contemporary time. You're sort of doing Thucydides for Trump. And it is a difficult thing in the middle of a drama to understand the arc of the story.  

But we have a huge story unfolding in front of us. And I want to play for you, Victor, at the start, a bit of an interview that Andrew McCabe gave right before we talked, because I think it summarizes a lot of what I saw in The Case for Trumpabout the attempt to bring Trump down. This, of course, is Andrew McCabe speaking on February 20 about what he did and did not do concerning the president, with Willie Geist and then Joe Scarborough.  

Can you play that for us, Dwayne?  

WILLIE GEIST: Trump. So, I want to ask you about this Twenty-fifth Amendment conversation that you had with then-Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. There's been some interpretation of what you said on 60 Minutes. It's not actually in the book. Can you clarify the conversation you had with Rod Rosenstein about the Twenty-fifth Amendment and what exactly he wanted to do?  

ANDREW MCCABE: Yeah, so let me put you in that week. Rod and I had a series of meetings in the wake of Jim's firing—about four meetings between the time Jim was fired and when we went to Congress to brief the announcement of the special counsel and the work that we had done. Those were incredibly fraught conversations, some between just Rod and I, some with other people.  

We were grappling with the issue of what to do about a president who you think may have committed a federal crime and might present a national security risk. This is not easy stuff.  

GEIST: Let me stop you there. What is the national security risk you believe the president posed?  

MCCABE: That relates to the counterintelligence case. We felt like, if the president has obstructed justice for the purpose of negatively impacting our ability to investigate Russian interference with the campaign and Russian potential connections with his own campaign effort, why would any president do that? Why would a president not want the FBI to understand exactly what the Russians have been up to in our political process?  

GEIST: That you were discussing the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which removes a duly elected president from office.  

MCCABE: The conversation was not about removing the president.  

GEIST: Well, that's what the Twenty-fifty Amendment is.  

MCCABE: Rod brought up the Twenty-fifth Amendment, mentioned it in the course of a wide-ranging and frenetic conversation. It is not something that I'm aware of he took any action to pursue. I don't know about any other meetings that included discussions of it. It was simply one thing—one topic in the midst of a whole host of issues that we were thinking about and kind of working through our heads at that time.  

GEIST: Did he present that idea to other cabinet officials? Because, as you know, he had to count heads to see, do I have the votes to remove the president?  

MCCABE: Not that I'm aware of. I have no indication of that.  

JOE SCARBOROUGH: And what about wearing the wire? What are the conversations? Did he say in that meeting, I'll wear a wire to get evidence on the president?  

MCCABE: Rod offered to wear a wire—said he could wear one. He was never searched or patted down when he went in and out of the White House. It was a remarkable thing for a deputy attorney general to offer.  

SCARBOROUGH: Were you stunned when he made that offer?  

MCCABE: Absolutely.  

HEWITT: So, Victor Davis Hanson, as I'm listening to this, I have just read The Case for Trump, your new book. And in it is contained the counter-narrative, which is that, beginning in 2016, senior members of the FBI and the national security services—John Brennan, James Clapper, Ben Rhodes—decided that Hillary had it in the bag. But they were going to ice the deal on Hillary.  

They kept her safe. And this is the counter-narrative, again. We're not quite sure what the truth is. And that, having decided to make her safe, they also decided to make Trump vulnerable. And then, having been surprised by the election, which you explained on grounds unrelated to this investigation, they do what they have to do to cover their tracks and take the president down. But it failed.  

It failed then. It failed now. It continues to fail to this day. But McCabe is out there, and I think doing a classic defense thing of throwing up dirt—of throwing up smoke. What do you make of that?  

HANSON: Well, his story is not even coherent because, at some times, he says it was a very serious effort, and I think he's been advised by counsel that it's not a very wise thing to suggest that you met with the acting justice official in charge the DOJ, Rod Rosenstein; and then you two discussed how many cabinet secretaries might suggest to you that Trump was unfit.  

That's a little bit more than just speculation. And then he's not telling us what was the basis for that suspicion about Russian collusion. Because he's also testified, under oath, to the House Intelligence Committee, that there was no basis to get a FISA court on any suspicion of Russian collusion from any Trump subordinate except the evidence that was found in this Steele dossier.  

So, I think he's basically saying to us, I still have this Steele dossier. I've looked at all this salacious stuff. And I believe it. And I'm going to go after Trump.  

That's aside from the other problems he has, but he signed a FISA warrant. And, when he's explaining all of this stuff, he doesn't tell us that he deliberately misled a federal justice by not telling them that the evidence that he presented, and which he at least signed off on, and which he said was the primary evidence for the writ, was (A) unverified, (B) compiled by Christopher Steele that had departed FBI semi-employment or consultation—whatever you want to call it—because of his breaking of understood contract about leaking. 

And then (C) paid for through two firewalls by Hillary Clinton. And then (D) the source of news accounts, which the FBI presented to the court as proof that Russia—that there was concern about collusion with Carter Page and things. And then, of course, the one thing that gets me the angriest about what I hear there is he has a record of suggesting that anybody that criticizes the FBI—and Comey is the same way—is somehow obstructing justice or impugning the integrity of the FBI.  

And this is a man who the independent, Obama-appointed— 

HEWITT: Inspector General.  

HANSON: Inspector General Michael Horowitz said, on four occasions, he didn't tell the truth. Then he went on national television and a number of interviews and attacked the integrity of Michael Horowitz. He said he was biased, and he was not disinterested.  

HEWITT: It's absolutely mind-boggling. And what I come back to and, I think, you make in The Case for Trump abundantly clear, is that only a true story will account for all the facts that are not dispute. Only the correct narrative will account for everything that happened, including the tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch, including the decision not to charge Hillary Clinton, including the decision to reopen it and then close it, including the mysterious destruction of the email, including, especially, the Strzok-Page texts, which are the elephant in every room, right? And only the true narrative will account for every fact.  

HANSON: No, I agree. And, when I was writing the book, it was always the Occam's razor. The easiest thing to analyze and to conclude from were the facts and not some distortion of the facts, or suppositions, or assumptions. And that's what both McCabe and Comey are doing. And they've contradicted themselves so many times. And, when he says, Well, we were having a counterintelligence investigation, I think, what did he do that was wrong—Trump?  

And he's implying that he obstructed justice by firing Comey. But, of course, when McCabe thought he still had a chance to have his job retained, he testified before Congress that it was entirely in Trump's prerogative to relieve the FBI director,and he had no problem with it, especially because he was the new FBI director, at least temporarily, and thought he would survive.  

Then, when he got fired, suddenly, he's now, post facto—said, why open an investigation for obstruction of justice? But according to McCabe himself, he didn't obstruct anything because he can fire anybody in the FBI he wants for any cause, whatsoever.  

HEWITT: And, when we come back from break, we will delve deeper on this Hillsdale Dialogue into the brand-new book by Victor Davis Hanson, who is, of course, part of the faculty at Hillsdale. The book is The Case for Trump. It's very simple to remember. You can go get it at Amazon.com. I'm hoping Victor turns it into a series for Hillsdale. All things Hillsdale are at Hillsdale.edu.  

And, indeed, every conversation I've had with Dr. Larry Arnn, Victor Davis Hanson, the other colleagues at Hillsdale, dating back to 2013, are all available at HughForHillsdale.com for your binge-listening pleasure. This week and next, though, we are focused on Victor Davis Hanson's brand-new book, The Case for Trump. Stay right there. I'll be right back on The Hugh Hewitt Show.  

Welcome back, America to the Hillsdale Dialogue, which I pre-recorded before I went to Vietnam because Victor Davis Hanson, my guest on this Hillsdale Dialogue—all things Hillsdale are at Hillsdale.edu—has a brand-new book out, The Case for Trump, which you need to go and get—you need to give to all of your Never Trump friends and all of your Democrat Socialist buddies, so they can actually have a window onto how we think.  

Victor, before we get into the specifics, I've read the book. I've got pages and pages of notes. Everyone's going to have to read it to get the full thing. I have a proposition for you. The proposition is that there are some stories in the United States, like the Chick-fil-A story, that, though they are not covered in detail, mysteriously move and are known by everyone. And they know the essence of it.  

And they know it to be true. So, for example, almost instantly, everyone knew about the Smollett case. Everyone instantly knew about Chick-fil-A. I think everybody knows that Comey and McCabe are lying. I believe that they know that, and that The New York Times is in a desperate struggle to disprove the truth. Do you agree with me that the American people, by and large, intuit the truth about this?  

HANSON: Yeah, I think they do—I think, almost immediately. Just the one brief example, Comey testified to two house committees. And on 245 occasions, he said he did not remember, or he did not know. If you did that to the IRS, you'd be in jail. And, of course, if Michael Flynn had done that to Peter Strzok, he would be in jail. Even he didn't say on 245 times, “I don't remember.”  

So, we know that. We know that Comey went to Trump. And he assured him, Mr. President, you're not under an FBI investigation, while he was going right outside the door, memorializing that on FBI equipment in preparation, in case he got fired, to leak it. And he was, in fact, under FBI investigation, even before Andrew McCabe opened up. So, I can't think of anything that they've said that is reliable.  

And this is in a landscape where people like James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, the head of the CIA, respectively, on one and two occasions have lied under oath to Congress, admitted such, and had to apologize without any criminal exposure at all. So, there's a lot of people— 

HEWITT: We're also talking on page 86 of The Case for Trump, you write about the fact that the CIA had disclosed that Jerry Chun Shing Lee had been turned by the Chinese, and that Di-Fi had a Chinese intelligence operator as her chauffeur. That's one of those stories, as well, that everybody knows, and nobody talks about. And they infer from it certain things about Dianne Feinstein's obliviousness and the CIA's incompetence.  

And then we come up with a story where the CIA was penetrated by the IRGC, as we are talking. On the day that we are talking, we are discovering that during Brennan's tenure, the IRGC turned a CIA operator who then gave away all our networks in Iran. You begin to wonder, why in the world are we chasing after Trump? These people are the most incompetent administrators of the national security we've ever seen.  

HANSON: And that's a terrible adjective, incompetent. If they're not warped themselves, or highly partisan, or engaged in illegal behavior—Brennan, remember, was leaking this dossier and then lying about it to Harry Reid. And Clapper, we know, probably leaked it to Jake Tapper. And both of these people became paid consultants to attack Trump. And both, on national television, said he was treasonous and perhaps a traitor while they had security clearances and access to classified information.  

So, it's pretty scary. And I think it's not just the psychological condition of projection that they feel what they did, they project onto Trump. But it's more of a preemptive defense. They feel that the more that they throw out there—you said it at the beginning of the interview—the more they throw out there, then the more confusion and obfuscation there is. And maybe it's a way of shielding themselves from criminal exposure.  

HEWITT: You know, Victor, it reminds me of the gamblers in Las Vegas who fall deeper and deeper into debt. So they start doubling their bets. And they get deeper and deeper into debt. And, eventually, they bankrupt. They go crash. We got a minute to the break. Do you think this is eventually going to break open so that everyone will agree on the narrative?  

HANSON: Yeah, I think so. I think the new attorney general, Barr, is going to get to the bottom of it. And I think, if he doesn't, there's such an asymmetry in the application of the law that people are very angry. This is aside from Uranium One, the email scandal, the pre-Trump scandal. It's just that what these people did in the Obama administration—unmasking names, leaking them to the press, the dossier—that people feel if they're not prosecuted, then nobody can be prosecuted for anything.  

HEWITT: And on the policy side, the JCPOA, which was all put together on a false and admitted echo chamber of media complicity. Stay with me, Victor Davis Hanson. We'll be right back.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt, the Hillsdale Dialogue that I taped this week and next, before I left for Vietnam, with Victor Davis Hanson is underway. But I want to remind you all things Hillsdale are found at Hillsdale.edu, many amazing online courses, including one that VDH did on his brand new other book, The Second World Wars, which, by the way, I got to tell you, Victor. I read that when I accompanied John Bolton to Israel and Turkey on both, there. And we stopped at Shannon. It's an amazing book.  

It's changed my view of the war completely. And it's also made me very concerned that the same errors that led to us to rely on battleships as the instrument of war, prior to the war, are being made about our current force structure. It's a very disturbing book. Did you have any of those qualms when you wrote The Second World Wars?  

HANSON: I did. And I didn't want to be too contemporary because every historian is a captive of his own time and place. But I was thinking a lot that a $30 billion carrier group is very vulnerable to ship-to-shore, drone-type aviation in the South China Sea. So the Chinese are developing a strategy, basically, to nullify our offensive reach, and can take out billions of dollars of assets and lives at very little cost, without really having to have a blue-water navy in the Caribbean.  

So, I wish that we'd be more diversified. And that's the story of World War II. The United States was diversified, finally, and had a lot of smaller ships, as well as the carriers and the battleships. And we don't have that, now.  

HEWITT: I had a great conversation with a dear, dear family member who is a naval aviator, who rejects the idea that we have to retreat beyond range, which is the title of a groundbreaking essay by Jerry Hendrix, which said carrier groups are obsolete. Got him in big trouble when he was Pentagon. But he pointed out Chinese surface-to-ship missiles are destroying the carrier flotilla power.  

And the aviators contest that. They say they've got stealth capability and defense mechanism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But all I keep going back to is those battleships were not worth the investment, not that they weren't worth anything. It's just they weren't worth the investment, whereas we could be making B-21 stealth bombers that can move around the world and go anywhere and Columbia-class guided missile submarines that can scoot around quietly on the ocean depths.  

We just may not be allocating resources correctly.  

HANSON: No, I think that's right. For $30 billion and up, which is the carrier battle group, which is necessary to protect the carrier in addition to the carrier's costs, you can get a lot of different assets—a lot more than you can get. We have twelve. We're going to have eleven carrier battle groups. I wish we had maybe 8 and commiserate money invested in different types of aircraft and smaller ships.  

HEWITT: I have a different solution, which is we ought to have 15. But we also ought to be spending 6% of GDP on national defense because no great power endures without doing that. And we're down to 3½% or 3.2%.  

HANSON: 3½, yeah.  

HEWITT: It's just crazy. But let's go back to The Case for Trump, because The Second World Wars, we'll do another show. And it's an amazing book. My hat is off to you. But how did you manage to write The Case for Trump, even as you had just finished The Second World Wars? And it's plural, The Second World Wars.  

HANSON: Well I kind of was in a psychological continuum. I thought, you know what? They asked me at Basic if I would write something about Trump and why he got elected. And I thought, I can do it if I do it in a historical manner, as if I'm going to try to have a blueprint based on the facts, because you're right when you said it's so fast-developing. Who can write something in the middle of something?  

But I thought, if I have the right paradigm, based on the evidence, then all of the news it breaks will be fitting into particular categories or analyses that I made. So what McCabe has said, or disclosures about the Chinese, and other things that have happened since the book was finished on October 1—and then I had a little epilogue after the election—I think fit what I said was true in the book.  

And I couldn't have done that if I was going to say, I know Trump. I've been in the White House. I like the guy. I want to help him.  

And I've never met him. I've never been to the White House. I've never asked for a job. I've never been offered a job. So it was a historical analysis. And the people who asked me to write the book were pretty much on the other side of the political fence.  

So they were curious if anybody could make that case because, I think, the left says the case can't be made.  

HEWITT: And what—and you make it so well. That's why, I think, The Case for Trump basically kills every other pro-Trump book, because this isn't a pro-Trump book. It's a history book. And you're very self-effacing and humble, Victor. So you will reject my comparison. But Thucydides was a general in the war. So he brought a lot of baggage to his writing of the Peloponnesian War.  

You're not a general in this war. You're basically going from Selma to Stanford to Hillsdale, back to Selma to Stanford to Hillsdale. You're not playing the Beltway game.  

HANSON: No, I don't. And I don't like to go there. And I don't talk to people in the administration. Once in a while, somebody will call me about a historical question. But I just wanted to think Trump—and I use that metaphor in one chapter, that he's a tragic hero. And a tragic hero is not necessarily a wonderful person. They're people who the community brings in.  

And you know from the old Western script, it's so true that they are unable to address an existential threat. And then when the tragic hero is Shane, The Magnificent Seven, High Noon—Will Kane—whoever they are, they use methods and they have types of behaviors that shock the community. And then, usually, the community turns on the person.  

An ancient equivalent or maybe a Western equivalent of George Patton or Curtis LeMay—when the danger is over, and then the tragic hero really doesn't feel that he is appreciated, you can really see that with Trump. He's frustrated. He's angry. He looks at the economic record. He looks at the political record. He looks at the energy production. He says,Anybody else would get full credit for this. I'm getting no credit.  

He's like Ajax railing that he should have got the armor of Achilles after the judgment between him and Odysseus. And he didn't. And he didn't because he was a polarizing figure, partly because he was a very capable figure. And that's part of Trump's problem. He can get things done. And he incites envy and anger. And he fights back.  

And he's never going to get commiserate credit for the actual things he's done. And I think that's a very frustrating thing for a figure like that.  

HEWITT: And he fights in a way the Israelis have developed, which is to use every object at your disposal to destroy your enemy. And it doesn't matter if it's the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. You fight to win. What I like about The Case for Trump, though, Victor Davis Hanson— that's the brand-new book. And we're talking to Victor Davis Hanson, professor at both Stanford and Hillsdale, and author of the new book, The Case for Trump—is that you put the context of the two Americas in.  

And I say that, advisedly, I am a product of that two Americas. So my great grandfather comes from Ulster with nothing. And my grandfather gets a farm. And he becomes a lawyer. And my father becomes a lawyer. And they send me off to the big city. And I end up in Washington, DC on TV and the radio. That's the American experience. But I keep going back to the other America.  

You do the same thing. You're up at Stanford, hanging out in the Silicon Valley. George W. Bush used to consult you. Your books are national bestsellers. You travel the world. And then you go back to Selma, which is a suburb of Fresno, where the average income, I think you said, is $12,000. If you don't know both Americas, you don't really see what's going on in this country.  

Do you agree or disagree with me on that?  

HANSON: No, absolutely. I had a mother who—my grandfather just had a farm. He mortgaged it in the 1930s and sent his daughter to Stanford. And she got a law degree, became the first female appellate court judge. But, before she died, she always said to me, the greatest danger that this family has is that we'll get educated and forget who we are, and who we hang out with, and who we live among. So, no matter what you do, always stay back out here, on the farm.  

So, I was just talking yesterday to a couple of Hispanic guys about open borders. And they made an argument to me—passionate—that we never hear in Washington, that they wish Trump would really close the borders because tilers would get $2 to $3 more an hour. And the economy is booming. They're short tilers. And people are trying to hire illegal aliens in cash. And that hurts them.  

If you were to say that, no academic or no political in Washington would believe you. But that's a reality. And that explains, despite the hype, why Trump may have got 35%, 40% of the Hispanic vote in a way that Romney did not in some of these key constituencies. And he may get more in the next election.  

And they were voicing everything from they were worried about anti-Catholicism. Why are people picking on Catholics? I don't know whether they knew the examples of Feinstein, Hirono, and Harris. But they'd heard that.  

HEWITT: One of those Chick-fil-A stories, right? One of those stories that travels through, by ways mysterious to me.  

HANSON: Exactly.  

HEWITT: How do these two Hispanic laborers, you know, know about questioning someone being in the Knights of Columbus? How do they know that, Victor?  

HANSON: I think they just hear it. I think they hear it on the radio, when they're on the way to work. They hear sound clips. They have friends that heard it. And it's not inaccurate. And I assured them it was not inaccurate. And so, when you add up the Trump economic record and the effort to try to stop cheap labor competing against entry-level and low-wage labor, here in the United States, and then you add the Catholic dimension, you can see that Trump, if he's astute—and he is astute—he will start to develop that message.  

And it'll be a compelling one, I think, for the Hispanic, Catholic vote. And given the demography and the electoral college, et cetera, et cetera, Trump doesn't need to get 50% of the Hispanic vote. He doesn't need to get 50% of the African-American. He needs 15% of the African-American, maybe 45, because this Democratic Party has completely alienated the white wage worker and lower-middle class voter.  

HEWITT: If Donald Trump gets 15% of the African-American vote, it's over before it begins.  

HANSON: It is.  

HEWITT: And when we come back, we'll talk more with Victor Davis Hanson about his brand-new book, The Case for Trump. It's in Amazon. It's in bookstores everywhere. And its very success is proving unnerving to the left. We'll tell you why when we come back.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt at the Hillsdale Dialogue, wrapping up my first week of vacation. Kurt Schlichter has held down the fort for me all week long. Thank you, Kurt.  

Next week, it'll be Bob Franz and Mark Davis doing the same. But I'm going to come back for the last radio hour of the week, the Hillsdale Dialogue, because Victor Davis Hanson was kind enough to carve some time out for me, before I left for Vietnam, to spend a couple hours talking about his brand-new book, The Case for Trump. He is, of course, a professor at Hillsdale College.  

All things Hillsdale are at Hillsdale.edu. They are the sponsor of this hour. And we've been doing this since 2013. For big issues and big topics with big brains, all you have to do is go to HughForHillsdale.com. And you can binge-listen to all of them, beginning with Homer, up to the present moment.  

Victor, early in your book—I think it's about page 28 or 29—you write, quote, “Respected polls such as the Princeton Election Consortium on election eve put Trump's chances of victory at 1%. In the last 24 hours of the campaign, The New York Times, tracking various pollsters' models, concluded to its reassured readers that Trump's chances of winning in such surveys were respectively 15%, 8%, 2%, and less than 1%. Clinton supporters grew irate at fellow progressive pollmaster, Nate Silver, shortly before the vote. As an apostate, Silver had dared to suggest that Trump at a 29% chance of winning the electoral college.”  

Victor, I was on NBC that night—on the network with Chuck Todd, James Carville, Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie, and Tom Brokaw. I guarantee you, I think I was the only one who voted for Trump in the building. I know I was the only one who said so. I was a reluctant Trump voter. I was not happy about it because of the Access Hollywood tape and my Catholicism. But I voted for him because it was a binary choice.  

Nevertheless, the shock of that night, I will never forget. And I continue to believe that it warps coverage today. And they're afraid of your book, because they're afraid you might be John the Baptist, a prophet. And, if it happens again, after all they've invested in destroying Trump, it may destroy media.  

HANSON: I think you're right. And I think you mentioned the Chick-fil-A phenomenon. You know and I know, in 2016, and even today, we bumped into people that we have no idea, no supposition they would ever vote for Trump. And they look both ways. And then they quietly whisper to you, I think he's doing a good job.  

Or you'll see somebody who's in a minority group that we're told hates Trump. And they will vote for Trump. So polls, both on favorability and who they're going to vote for, keep being under-reported. And I think that they're misled by the midterms, because Trump was not on the ballot. And even in those key races in Florida and Georgia, where they thought they had these new types of identity politics candidates, they were over-reported.  

So, I think the phenomenon is still there, except that the media doesn't think lightning can strike twice.  

HEWITT: And it predates Trump. And that, I want to go back to The Case for Trump. You continually go back. J. D. Vance was an early proponent of this view. Peggy Noonan wrote about it in her unprotected versus protected. Ross Douthat wrote the Democrats’ “Samantha Bee Problem.” It's a cultural problem. Let me see. And you have many examples of this.  

My favorite is this. “The condescending blue state narrative was almost as if opioids and trailer houses had driven away the hardware stores, 160-acre farms, entire factories rather than the global disappearance of jobs fueling the malaise of the unemployed. From the view of capitalization and profitability, traditional mining, farming, fuel, and rail companies lost clout to tech finance service information conglomerates.”  

You are always constantly stepping back to an emotional argument that people in the red world feel—understand to be true condescension by their Progressive, self-assumed superiors. And it corrodes, Victor. It really burns.  

HANSON: I think it does. I have the gift of working at the Hoover Institution, which is part of Stanford University. So, it's not hard to conduct research on that topic because colleagues that are really great people, like Stanford professors, Silicon Valley grandees—they all have that attitude of superiority. And they have assumed privilege. And they're absolutely clueless about people 150 miles inland.  

So, most of my colleagues have been to London or Paris two or three times this year. But they have not been to Bakersfield or Merced. So there's a whole world out there that they not only don't know about, but they don't want to know about it. And at the National Review, I had some colleagues, as well. I don't want to mention names. But it's this reversal of cause and effect.  

The Midwest was wiped out because people were on opiates, and they didn't make choices. They didn't learn how to code. They didn't understand globalization. It was never that jobs and capital were offshored or outsourced in asymmetrical trade relationships. And I'm a free trader. But the idea that free trade is good for us in every single situation because it drives down the cost of consumer goods, or it makes unsustainable subsidies for our trading rivals and they won't be able to continue it, or it makes us more efficient—I heard all that as a farmer when the crop price of raisins crashed—I wrote two books about it—from $1,400 to $400. I was told that was good for us. Everybody—I'm looking out this window, now, to you—was gone. They went broke.  

HEWITT: When we come back—  

HANSON: Naturally excluded.  

HEWITT: And we're going to do part two of my interview with Victor Davis Hanson next week at the same time. Don't wait that long. Go to Amazon and get yourself a copy of The Case for Trump by Victor Davis Hanson. And all things Hillsdale, Hillsdale.edu. Thank you, VDH. Thank you, Adam Van and Generalissimo. Stay here at The Hugh Hewitt Show, America.