The 2026 Midterms Changed Everything | Victor Davis Hanson

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Winter is coming, and it's going to be a rough and tumble two to four years to see if we can get through this. We have no margin of error. We've all got to stick together. We've all got each according to our station to speak out and speak the truth and call out these people when they need to be called out and not waste our time with superfluous I own the libs or any of that stuff. It's all existential now. Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. This is the Thursday show, which Jack Fowler usually does, but he was unavailable to do it early Wednesday morning, which is when we are recording. So Sammy Wink is here to talk with Victor Davis Hanson about the results of the election. And boy, did blue win big. So we'll be exploring why that happened and what's next after that. Stay with us, and we'll be right back from these ads. If you're carrying extra pounds and you just can't seem to shake it, this message is for you. 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The Democrats had a great win, and so let's just read off what happened. According to RealClearPolitics, in the Senate, they have 54 seats now, Democrats to 44 Republicans. In the House. I could go up by one or two, I think. Yeah. The key number to watch is. 60. Yeah. If they get 60, they can break a veto. Veto. But I don't think they're going to do that. Yeah. In the House, right now, it looks like 242 to 149, and the governors as well. That is. How many seats did they pick up? Tendably 40. 36, or close to, yeah. Yeah, I think they're going to get up closer because of California. Yeah, that's true. And the West Coast states, they're not all in. Yeah, yeah. As we speak now, I think they could get. For a frame of reference, Bill Clinton lost 54 seats, 53 or 54 in 1994. Yeah. And Senate seats, but Obama got really wiped out. He got over 60 seats lost. I think he lost 12 senators or something. It was a wipeout. But this is in that category. Yeah. It is. And we can talk about why it happened and what to do about it and. Yeah. What's going to happen in 2028. Yeah. Maybe I can ask you first about some specific ones we were really watching closely. Just for the governors, we now have 28 governors who are Democrats and 20 that are Republican. That's sad, isn't it? It used to be 30, 20. Yeah. In California, the Associated Press announced Bracera had won right after the polls had closed at 8 o'clock. They didn't even count any votes. It was kind of like a 19th century campaign where they used to. The candidates would sit on their. Front porch. Yes. And what was really strange about it, when I looked this morning, and this may have changed, I looked at the California governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, and controller, all Democrats, all 64% to 35. It was like they just had all these ballots and everybody had the exact same percentage wipeout, 30-point wipeout. And it reflected the. Yeah. It was exactly the reflection of the Democratic registration versus Republican. Yeah, Republican. And we're not even going to find out. Yeah. Although, you know, now that they've won, they might want to really speed it up. Yeah. And. And maybe we'll get the count earlier, huh? So they can. I was watching El-Sayed's rallies, so they can yell, free Palestine. They didn't say that during the campaign, did they? No, they didn't. They don't tell us what free Palestine means. No. Okay. So while that. That's one of the races that we looked at very closely. So El-Sayed defeated Rogers. And I was wondering. By about five points, four points? It was five, four or five points. Rogers came on. Yeah. But what didn't happen, but we don't know yet, he probably got a larger black vote and Jewish vote that he might have otherwise not had Sayed not offended those people. but it wasn't a big, they were party lower. The story of one story that applies especially to this race is people voted a party ticket. Trump kind of dared him to do that. He said, I'm on the ballot. So they said, okay, you're on the ballot. We're going to just vote straight Democrat. And we're not going to differentiate whether they're a socialist or not, just so they have a D after their name. And I don't think a lot of people even knew who the candidates were. They just said gas is too high. And the war, we were for the war when it started. And after about a month, 38 days, it wasn't going to end. And it was talk bomb, talk bomb, talk bomb. And we don't like that. And gas went up. And that's pretty much all they said. And then there were peripheral issues. There was not a good slate of Republican candidates. I don't think it would have made any difference. So to tell you the truth, Cornyn was a better candidate than Paxton, but he would have lost, just like Susan Collins lost big time. And Graham's sister was not a good candidate, but I think anybody else would have lost that race unless they were completely charismatic and young. The problem the Republicans had is the most obnoxious, extreme, and dangerous of those candidates on the left were also the AOC type, superficially charismatic and glib, mellifluous. You know, when you see El Saeed strutting around lifting weights and with a Michigan football cap on, one day a cowboy hat, Tallarico renouncing everything he ever wanted, and driving up in a Ram with a cowboy hat on, it worked in a way that Paxton was, I don't even know where he was. He didn't seem to be around much. And Rogers is a good guy, but he's older and he's traditional. And we'll talk in a minute as you finish these races, what happened, why. Yeah, that, could I just, since you brought up Tallarico, I have it 55 to Paxton 43. That is just, he's, he just slaughtered him. I mean, that. He slaughtered him. And remember that earlier, Beto, whom I thought was a better candidate, in the sense he wasn't crazy, well, he was crazy, but not as crazy, couldn't beat Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz was a much better candidate than Paxton. But I had mentioned to Jack, I think, and I think I mentioned to you that I was at a dinner where I had to give the keynote. I had to give an interview with 400 people and they were all conservative and they were donors, mega donors, many of them. And I talked to a number of them. And they read me, some of them read me the riot act and said, what are you doing? You're making a silk purse out of the Trump cell ear. And many of them were from the South. And when I heard a very prominent family say to me, we want Tallarico to win. And I said, does that include you voting for him? I said, well, we probably won't vote for him, but we don't want to vote for pass. And then you're voting for him. And I said, as soon as he's elected, you're going to find out he's a radical vegan. He's against beef. He's against oil. His evangelical Christianity is very liberation theology. And he's big on trans. And he wanted an open border. And he's going to represent the new Texas. And you're going to rue the day because I said very politely, I don't think Texas is going to be a receptacle anymore of red state refugees. I mean, you know, red refugees from blue states. Why would you go to Texas now when they have a left-wing governor and a left-wing senator? And we'll see. I haven't looked at the Texas legislature, but we'll see. Tennessee kind of held the line. The senator won and also Marsha Blackburn. And Florida barely held the line. And didn't Kentucky? It's all red. Yeah. And Arkansas, all red. Yeah, there's places still. But it was Kansas, gone. Zoop, gone. Ohio, gone. Iowa, gone. Yeah. Minnesota wasn't even close, Michelle. She was a wonderful candidate. Now, gone. Michigan, gone. Maine, gone. A lot of the house seats in Texas were gone when I went to sleep last night. One thing. We're not talking yet about the causes, but one thing about the symptoms. We're going to try to look at this like a physician does. What are the symptoms? What is the diagnosis? What is the therapy? And what is the prognosis? So the diagnosis is, when you see all of this, about four or five things pop up. One, DEI and block voting are back. Almost every single rally I watched last night, I was looking at my phone, like when on CNN, it was first Black governor, first Native American this, first Hispanic governor, first immigrant governor, first gay senator. You know what I mean? And there was no 56% Hispanic males voting for conservatives. No 26 Black. They went back to their original fee days. And I think they went back because they felt the economy was bad. And the Democrats were going to give them free stuff, more free stuff, a redistributionist. And they were angry about the price of gas. But that doesn't really matter. We're back to block voting. And that's one thing. And you can really see it, that Angie Nixon was crazy. And she almost won. And she had, when you break down, she had enormous support, even from the Hispanic and all of the Black community. So that was one thing that happened. The other thing was, it was very mysterious about, quote, unquote, affordability. And as I said earlier, the blue wave turned into be a tsunami midterm. But the 2022 Redway tsunami turned into a pathetic ripple. Only nine seats, and they lost one in the Senate. So we have to, as diagnosticians, ask why. They're both midterms. Biden was very unpopular, 40%. Trump was 39%. The economy, 84% said the economy was a issue in 2022. The economy was this issue. So the traditional exegesis is that things are terrible under Trump. And they were not that bad under Biden. But when you look at all the key indicators, the reverse is true. The reverse, take them one at a time. If you look at the market, 20,000 points higher in 2026 than just four years ago under Biden's midterms. Let's take GDP higher. Let's take unemployment about the same, a little bit worse under Trump, like a tenth of a point or something. Look at inflation. It's not even close. The inflation right now, the annual inflation rate is one-third of the 9.1 that was the yearly average in the midterm. If you look at income, per median family income, in just four years, the income has gone up $14,000 to a record of 87. So people are far wealthier now than they were four years ago. So if you look at inflation and gas and GDP and the stock market and incomes, it's not even close. Things were much worse there, and yet they didn't capitalize. The Republicans could not capitalize on the bad news, and the left really capitalized on not such bad news in comparison. So we have to ask why. Yeah, they created a myth of some sort of affordability crisis. The media, of course, we had Janet Yellen saying that this is just temporary, that we'll get back to 1% inflation. Don't worry. The media was all, and some of you are going to say, well, was the Iran war? Yes. But Biden. Was coming off the Afghanistan pullout, which was a controlled disaster and destroyed his 53% approval, went 13 points down and lost 13 soldiers and got nothing in return other than turning over $50 billion, the cost of the entire Iran war so far, in a billion-dollar embassy, a $300 million to $400 million refabbed airbase, weapons, equipment, infrastructure. To the terrorists. And then he had said, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, don't do it. That's all he said. But it would hinge on whether it was major or minor. And Putin looked at all these things I just mentioned, said they're not going to do anything. So foreign policy was really bad. Worse than right now. So what was it? And I think the answer is twofold. When Biden and his midterm spiked every year, everything, 9% inflation, and GDP was not bad, but not as good as Trump, and income was not as high, and the stock market was not as high. He was coming off a very robust economy. Donald Trump left office with 1.9 inflation, 7% aggregate. So what I'm getting at is if you spike up to 9.1, but 1.9% is not as good as Trump, then you're not going to be able to do anything. Prices over a four and a half year period have only gone up 7%. That's bad, but that's still less than 21%. So what I'm getting at is Trump comes in, well, lower prices. Yes. So his first term, he lowered first year, 2025. He took an average 5.1 inflation rate and cut it in half to 2.4. And then. People were pretty happy. And then this year it went up to 3.5. It's still a point and a half lower than Biden's average. But, and here's the killer, he inherited a 21%. So all the prices were one-fifth higher. And he didn't say to people, I'm Donald Trump. I want to explain something. The rate of inflation is not the same as prices. I inherited 21%. That is a gargantuan record number for high prices. I have done my best. I will cut the inflation rate by half. And I will raise per capita in family income to record levels. So you have more money and the inflation will be less. But I have to tell you that prices on top of that 21% that I inherit will go up two and a half. They're not going to go up like Biden did, but they're going to go up because I can't get rid of that. I can't get rid of that 21% without having a recession. You can never get rid, you can't have prices fall 21%, 20% deflation and survive. But nobody ever said that. They never said that. And as far as the war goes, he could have said, he could have said at the beginning, I think, and we talked about this. 38 days of bombing. He had them pretty much prostrate. It was over. And a couple, they could have hit pickaxe mountain in a week. And then they could have kept, and they didn't have the tough sanctions they have now. They could have had the secondary sanctions all planned out from before. But I think it was, they thought it was going to be like Maduro. But here's my point. People, if you looked at the original, it was 50-50. They weren't against the war. They just did not, the base did not want a forever war. And then rather than explain it. Yeah. Now, what would have been more effective? I'm Donald Trump, or I'm Marco Rubio. I'm the administration. I'm not picking on any one person. Well, the war is going to be over in two weeks. Well, it's a little hit. It will be over next week. We've got all the Navy. We destroyed all the missiles. Talking always about the numerator that you kill or destroyed and not the denominator, how many were there in the beginning, i.e., they don't know how much was left. They only know how much they took out. So that's what happened. Oh, we're going to negotiate. We're not going to negotiate. J.D. Vance, it's a good offer. No, it's not a good offer. They're liars. No, they're not. People just said, get it done. Or if they had said this, we are doing something historic. Iran has killed more Americans than any terrorist entity except Al-Qaeda on 9-11. They are the problem in the Middle East. They kill Americans. They kill ambassadors. They kill people all over the world. They tried to kill a Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. They take hostages. They supply Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah. They ruin countries. And we are going to do something historic. All seven presidents said they could not continue, and we are going to see if we can liberate 93 million people, not by boots on the ground, no ground troops, no nation building, but we are going to try to weaken this. We are going to try to weaken this industrial, military, and nuclear projects of this regime, and it's going to be tough. And we're going to try to do this quickly and at least cost we can. But it may take three months. It may take four months. We don't know. But we're going to see it to the end. If they had said that, and then no negotiations, none. You say from the beginning, we're not talking to you people. You're killers and you're liars. You don't even have to say that. You can assume. You can assume they're killers and liars. And then you just say, we are recognizing a coalition government in exile. Maybe the Shah's son, Pahlavi, will be a member, but it will be a group who's committed to holding elections and liberating Iran. And then we would have said to Turkey, butt out. Butt out. We can arm the Kurds. We can arm provincial people. They could have said to the Iranian people, we're not asking you to get killed again. But if you should decide that you want to be liberated and you're going to go out, this time somebody is going to offer air support. That's it. And then hit them very hard. Hit Pickaxe Mountain. And by 45 days, get out. And just say, we stopped the problem from eight to ten years and now it's up to the Iranian people. And the economy is destroyed. And we've got Scott Besson. We've got Scott Besson tightening the screws every day. And we've got a carrier force that's keeping the Strait open. And the price of oil would have, I think, crashed. And they would have been home. And it wouldn't have been an issue. But people were tired of on, off, on, off. We kept saying on this podcast, well, at least they've got nine months. Well, at least they got eight months. At least they got seven months. I'm kind of worried there's only six months left. I'm really worried there's five. Five months left. Oh, four months. Can't they do three months? Two months. Why is J.D. going over there? Why is Witkoff calling them the great people? They're three months, two months. And they ran out of time. Yeah. Victor, before we go on, I want to welcome back a sponsor. 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So, Victor, I know that a big part of what you're saying is that messaging did the administration and the Republicans in this time around. What impact do you think Donald Trump himself had on this election? Was it a pro or a con? Well, let me just, I'll answer that. But I have, we're talking about the symptoms. So I mentioned the economy. I mentioned the economy and the disconnect, 2026, 2022. And we mentioned immigration. I mean, we mentioned the war. There was a third issue. His second signature issue that he ran on was the closing the border and illegal immigration. And there had been 10 to 12 million who had spread all over the United States. Among them, most of them went to 600 sanctuary jurisdictions. People wanted that border closed and they wanted to end it. immigration. Okay. He closed it very, very quickly. I don't mean he closed it. He shut it tight, almost to zero. And so that issue, that part of it vanished. It's over with. They're not coming in. Okay. So let's look at what are you going to do with the 10 million? Well, letting 10,000 people a day, which is what Biden was doing, is an easy thing. I'm so empathetic. Oh, come on in. Oh, go to a sanctuary city, get on a bus, go to Massachusetts or California. Easy to do. But no one ever said, now we have to be the adults and we've got to find those 10,000 a day or 10 million in four years, among them 500,000 dangerous criminals. And this isn't going to be easy because we have 600. And instead of just like a Tom Holman doing that, he's good. We had for a year, Kristi Noem and this Corey Lewandowski. And it was like photo op. She was in a fashion thing. And then I like Pam Bonney, but she didn't step in as attorney general. And what happened, they just walked right into a left wing photo IED explosion. So you had these poor ICE people, many of them, Hispanic, that had to go find all these people. And what usually happened was there were four or five illegals in the community or a house. And then one of the recent ones that they had a detainer on and wanted to get. So they go in and get somebody, but then they say, well, what's your status? And some of them were not some of the original or they hadn't done anything, but that's the law. So then they resisted. And then you saw all these ICE protests as ginned up and paid for by these left wing foundations. And then you got a split screen with Corey and Kristi as if they're going to go down to what, Guatemala or Salvador or something. And it was like a fashion shoot. And what it should, it was kind of melodrama rather than tragedy. And then where were the American people on this? And this is very important. They weren't, they weren't really adult-like because I talked a lot of them, not just Hispanics, but everybody. And it was like, I don't want illegal immigration. I want the border closed. And then how about deportations? Ah, if I'm asleep at two in the morning and I wake up and there's 5,000 less immigrants that were here illegally. Great. I just don't want to see it. Not in my name. No, no. I don't want you people with ice uniforms dragging her Linda into your car. though she's been illegal and she's not paying taxes and her son. She's a drug runner. Yeah, a drug runner. But I don't like that. It's her Linda. She's my sister's maid. Don't do that. And why would you have to be so rough? So, well, you have to be rough because there's 10 million people and they're spread and they're hiding in sanctuary cities and they're disrupting the entire idea of the rule of law and a immigration law system. And so it was a bad card to deal with. We want, because the American people said, we want the border closed. We do not want illegal immigration, but we don't know how to get it off. I just want them all gone when I'm asleep and I don't have to see it. And the left knew that. And I said, no, no, no, we're going to get our team. We're going to go follow. We're going to dox them. We're going to ridicule them. We're going to throw. Theses at them. We're going to make this thing just like we did with Elon and Doge. We're going to make the Tesla burning fire bombings look like nothing. And they ginned it up to suddenly the American. Well, they're Gestapo. They're Nazis. This is not, this is not what I wanted. So they, they, they should have been doing it very carefully off the, they thought the publicity, Noam and Corey thought the publicity would build up support. It did. They did the opposite. They should have just said, we're speaking very softly and carrying a big stick. And that should apply to the whole administration, by the way, they should have just said, we are going to try to enforce the law in the most humane and caring way possible. But the American people voted to close the border and to have legal only immigration. And then they should have said to bring everybody in, do not do high profile with media. Just do it, but do it very quietly and humanely. And then we're going to talk about how we regret we have to do this rather than boast about it, you know, because the American people were schizophrenic on the issue. Again, no immigration, but I want to see it. It's too messy. And it didn't, then this is going to be very controversial, but, and I'm not sure I support it, but I'm just putting it out there. What do you do with the 30 million? Well, the left, what the left said, we have to have comprehensive immigration, but if you watch what they actually said, they were opposed to this. You say, here's five things. If you're here illegally before the Biden onslaught, we're going to give you a pathway to a green card, not citizenship. That's your choice. 1986, the Simpson-Mozoliak said amnesty. And guess what? One third of the people chose to be citizens. Why? Because there's no difference anymore in being a citizen. And that's why we're here. And a citizen, because we've destroyed the idea of a unique citizenry. But any case, they could have said, if you have not committed a crime, A, if you are not on welfare, B, if you are not, if you are not unemployed, you're working full time. If you have those three, if you have been here over two years, in this case, four years because of the Biden, if you've been here, let's say five years, no crime, no welfare, gainly employed, then pay a fine because you broke the law, say three to $5,000. And you can apply for a green card only to work. And after you're working here, the law says you have your own choice to apply for citizenship, but you're going to have to do it legally. And we don't care. We don't care what you do there, but you will get a green card if you pay a fine, if you haven't committed a crime, if you're not on welfare, and if you're fully employed. And you know what? There'd be a lot of people that wouldn't qualify. And that's why the left didn't like that. Well, drunk driving is not a crime. Yes, it is. It endangers people's lives. So they could have done that at the same time they were having ice and closing the borders, but that didn't work. So those were the symptoms. You ask, so what is the problem? Yeah, what is the problem? Was it the candidates? We start with a fact. 126 years from 1900 to 2026, the party occupying the White House loses 90% of their House seats. They lose 75%. They lose Senate seats. I don't mean the percent of the House. 90% of the cases, they lose seats. 90% of the cases, they lose Senate seats. in the House. 75, they lose the Senate. With those odds, there was going to be losses. But these are losses on the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama level of 1994 and 2010. So what caused that? Well, as I said, it was the Iran war. It was the immigration optics, and it was distortions about the economy that wasn't explained what they were doing. I tried to tell a very important podcaster very politely that poverty rate was at a historic low. Family income was $14,000 higher. Wall Street, 20,000 points higher. GDP blazing at 3.4, going up to 5, according to the Federal Reserve Bank, one of them, in the fourth quarter. And in the fourth quarter, it was $14,000 higher. And in inflation, one-third of the Biden, and I got cut off, basically. So people didn't want to hear that, but that was the truth. So the symptoms were immigration, economy, war. Okay. There were other things that added to it that we can talk about, and you just mentioned Trump. So we gave the symptoms, and then we said those three issues caused the loss. But there were force multipliers that turned what was likely to be a crisis into a crisis. And that's what we're talking about. Okay. There were force multipliers that turned what was likely to be a crisis into a crisis. And that was the truth. Okay. and people were sick of Roosevelt's lies about what the New Deal really was in 38, and the unemployment rate was 19%. Okay. So what were the force? Part of it was the candidates. These young socialists, remember, they're not that much different than the Socialist Democratic Party. They didn't take over the Democratic Party. The party is already saying that we're socialists. We want to pack the court. We want to get rid of the electoral college. We want to get rid of the filibuster. We want to bring in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. We want to defund the police. We want to have Green New Deal. We're going to war on fossil fuels. You name it. We like the trans thing. We want amnesty, open borders. They just said, look at the pathetic leadership. Pelosi is 80-something. Schumer is in la-la land. Elizabeth Warren is getting more strident every day as she gets into her 70s. There's no youth. We want a smiling Mandami. We want a smiling El Saeed. We want a smiling Talalico. We want a smiling AOC. We want a smiling Ilian Omar. We want a smile. And they got young, charismatic. I don't find them, and our listeners don't, but they are charismatic to the left. And they were better candidates than Paxton or Darlene Graham or even Susan Collins, and they didn't have a dynamic, youthful candidates. They didn't. Byron Donalds was. He was articulate, and he was in Florida, and Florida, because of thanks to Ron DeSantis, was saved from this disaster. That will be a question, though, eventually. By the skin of their teeth, they won in Florida. So that's. And that was because the Hispanics population and the black population block-voted. So you ask about Trump. Trump did a heroic job with the rallies. I think that might have saved Florida and some of the states. But when you lose Kansas and you lose Ohio and you lose Iowa, right, and you lose Texas, something is wrong. And I think part of it is there's going to have to be a new ethos at the White House and the administration. And I would sum it up with Teddy Roosevelt, keep quiet or speak softly and carry a big stick. When you're going to do something like shut that border and deport people or you're going to do something like hit Iran, then you don't talk very much. You just lay it out. This is what we're going to do. 93 million people. It's a it is a task that no one has ever dared could happen. And then you just unload on them and keep quiet about it. Nobody has ever shut the border. We will shut it. It will be very difficult to find the 10 million and we will do it in a humane way. But it's a lot harder to do that than Biden was opening the border. order, and then keep quiet. No photo ops with tight clothes and, you know, $500 sunglasses on a horse. Designer watches. Designer watches. No, no, no. Nobody needs it. And so that was one thing. The other thing is they lost the whole Hunter Biden corruption issue because there were people in the administration. And I want to make clear about, I don't know, I have no idea, nor am I making any alleged allegations that people broke the law. I don't know that. But the appearance that you have a lot of people that were going over to the Middle East and making a lot of money, and then also in the United States, going over to the Middle East and saying, here's how you invest your foreign investments here, and we can steer you to places and to invest our funds or our companies that pay us a fee. And then reversing the situation from the outflow from the Middle East to the inflow, saying this is a rare occasion where the Gulf is on our side and they have enormous needs to reconstruct some damage. They need a lot of infrastructure. And if you're interested, we can guide you to the royal family members in charge of the purse in these areas, but we'll take a fee. So that's what they were doing. And that got out as something that, and they were making so much more money than Hunter Biden, because he's incompetent and was a drug head. So they need to come out and say, I think Trump needs to come out immediately and say, this administration will be the most ethical in memory. And we are not just going to prohibit grifting or taking advantage ethically of the government. We are not just going to prohibit the But we're going to avoid the appearance of being unethical. And they need to do that right away. They really do. And then you ask about Trump. And Trump is like an invading army, and the left is a citadel. And that is, the citadel was the progressive project, the institutions, the media, Hollywood, K-12, and they were fortified. And all the reformers on MAGA were on the outside, and they couldn't get in Because a general Dole, a General Romney, a General McCain, a General Bush had medals and epaulets and said, let's put a couple of volleys over there, but be careful. Don't knock down too many crenellations on the fort. And Trump was a madman. He was a mad wolf at Quebec or something. And he was George Palin. And he said, just blast through that gate. Any way you can do it. And they did. At that point, when they blasted through and they had a counter-revolution, it required a radical change. You don't go in because they are the people that you're taking over, right? So you don't rub their noses in it. So what do I mean by that? People in the administration don't tweet. I mean, Bill Maher is aggravating. I can see why Trump got angry. He wanted to reach out to Maher because Maher was showing signs of being terrified of his own left. So Trump had him to dinner. In the Trump world, if you extend an invitation and people talk intimately and they get along, and then you go back out and trash the host, that is a mortal sin. the government. We are not just going to prohibit the government. We are not just going to prohibit the They have decided to go a different path than the PBS and NPR's charter said they were. They don't represent all of us anymore. They are hardcore leftist activists. So if they want to do that, they're perfectly fine to do it and go do it on your private dime. But I'm not going to ask the taxpayers who can hardly afford their property taxes to go and then shut up. That's it. You know, and just do that a lot. I think there's a lot of people doing that. We had Secretary Rollins on. She's doing a lot of stuff in ag. Have you noticed that? And she's letting people know what she's doing, but she's not on a horse. And she's a very charismatic, beautiful woman, but she's not doing a Kristi Noem. Her idea is to fade into the architecture, not bring attention to herself or what she's doing, but to do a lot because she's found billions of dollars of fraud, and she's doing a wonderful job. Even RFK, for all of his flamboyant unsteadiness, he's doing a lot of things, but you don't hear as much as you thought you would hear about him. Rubio's doing a wonderful job, but when he was at that rally with Trump, Trump said, come on in, Rubio. He spoke for 11 seconds. He just said, this is what we're doing, it's going to continue, and that was it. And that's what you need to do. You've got to stick to business, be terse. don't demonize your opponents. If you want to talk about them, say you feel sorry that they have gone this pathway, but maybe they'll find wisdom and join you. Da, da, da, da, da. You don't take, you know, if you take a chainsaw and say, this is what's going to happen to the bureaucracy. And by the way, I support that brilliant effort. Doge didn't fail. It took, it got rid of 270,000 employees that were, many of them weren't doing anything, but you have to be more of a tragic than melodramatic you'd say i don't want i'm worried about these people's jobs it bothers me to cut them because they have they have expenses so that's why we're growing the economy at 3.4 percent and we've got record job growth and we've got record income because we want to transfer uh transfer them from the government bloat which they everybody has to pay for to the private sector where they'll make more money yeah yeah victor well let me welcome back another sponsor, and then I have a question on Donald Trump's responses to his critics. VARwatch is still a sponsor, and we tend to forget that civilizations are remembered less by their politics than by what they made. The tools, the objects, the things built well enough to outlast the people who built them. For most of the last century, America made things. 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If you value things that are rugged, made to last, and built here at home, go to varwatches.com slash v-d-h. That's v-a-e-r vairwatches.com slash v-d-h one more time v-a-e-r watches dot com slash v-d-h so it's funny i was in the bank uh earlier this week in the line and i had my watch and a young person came up to me and said are you worried about wearing that and i said no and he said well isn't that rolo something and i said do you mean roll it you know relax relax and i said he goes yeah those are worth thousands of dollars and you're wearing it and i said no it's a very good watch and it's very affordable he said really and so but he thought because of the crystal and the band it was you know a nine hundred dollar watch or i guess ten thousand ten thousand dollar and i didn't know if He was scouting me out, clubbing me when I got there. But he's very friendly, and I said, no, you can get one, and it's affordable. Okay, so I have one last question on your discussion of Donald Trump and his response to people like Bill Maher. I would argue he would say this. If I don't respond to these critics that are out there and obvious, they will control me. the narrative about me. So I need to do something, whether it's on social media or in the media. But the problem with that is, and I want to be very careful what I say because I'm a big supporter of Donald Trump. The problem is that once he does that and he spends five or 10 minutes and he goes after him, you're right, he restores deterrence. But the question is, do other people say, wow, I'm Robert De Niro. I want to say that I'm going to hit Trump in the face again at a big, should I do it? Or he's going to attack me and say I'm a loser and a low IQ or I'm Tucker. Now, let me think. I've already called him Satan. I've already said he should be impeached. I've already said he's a nut with a nuclear bomb and he called me low IQ and I'm a loser. So will that stop me or shall I bait him more? So people are starting to bait, bait him more. So people are starting to bait him more. So people are starting to bait him to get clicks and attention and that's taking a lot of his time away. So they're not worth it. Now, he has a response team that does that, but I want to be very careful. I like J.D. Vance. I do. But the primary mission of the vice president is to protect the president, right? That's all. If he does nothing else, I mean, he breaks, ties in the Senate votes. He goes to funerals. He does foreign, but his primary mission is not to let the critics gang up on the president. So he goes out in the country and he very eloquent and J. Nobody does it better than J.D. He eviscerated every host in 2024. But when you have people attacking Trump like Bill Maher or let's be honest, Tucker Carlson, then he's got to come out and he's got to say. Tucker, you were my friend, but you've stepped over the line. This president is not Satan. He's not Satan. What's wrong with you? I'm not going to. And he's going to have to cut it. And Trump is going to have to see that when people like Bill Maher themselves get turned, who's half Jewish and is rightly concerned about anti-Semitism because he knows that he's going to have to cut it. He knows the history of anti-Semitism. And once the embers takes fire and makes into a conflagration, they go after everybody and they will go after him. And but the fact that he wanted to talk, at least talk like Stephen Smith talks to Trump, that does not mean that they won't attack him once they get out of the White House. So if you want to bring them in big tent and they're on the other side, they will attack you. So decide. But it does. And you will have to respond. But you don't. You have to do it selectively and occasionally, not chronically and serially. It's all I'm saying. And I'm saying that for Trump's own good. He doesn't have time to waste on these people. He's only got two. He's only got two years and three months left. Yes, they did. I want to go even further. I think that Tyler Robinson and his trans crowd knew that. And they thought that by taking him out, they could do him great damage. Just the way that all three, all four assassins, if you count the person who broke into Mar-a-Lago and the person that went to the White House correspondence besides the two. And by the way, the Secret Service returned shots and new record at four different would-be assassins. I think they really thought that they could either hurt Trump or make him paranoid or cause him anxiety. And they did. And they thought they would be treated as heroes by the hard left. And they were. So absolutely. And I will say something, though, also about the midterms. Very quickly. Yes, what can he do now and what can he not do? There are no judicial appointments. If it was a reasonable Democratic opposition, maybe a lower court judge, district or circuit, they might approve. But he would have to appoint somebody antithetical to the whole MAGA movement for them to get. So they have veto power now. They run the Senate. He's going to have to push judges through like in the next. November, December. And I think the Congress is sworn in in early January. So they've only got two months. They've got to get about 100 judges. But how can they do it with Lisa Murkowski and people? They've got to get 51. They have to get 51 senators, you know what I mean, to get it through. So that's one thing they're not going to be able to do next year. And cabinet members, if they want to fire a cabinet member, they're not going to be able to do that. They're not going to be able to fire a cabinet member. They better do it right now because they have to be approved. And they better go talk to Congress a lot more than they have in the past to see if there's a vote there before you fire someone. But after that, all he has to do is saying, well, we took a shellacking in the words of Barack Obama. Oh, we got our blank kicked in the words of Bill Clinton. Oh, we got a thumping in the words of George W. Bush. However, however, Bill Clinton said, well, you know, I balanced the budget two years. I'm going to bomb the budget again. I'll have to work with Gingrich. I'll work with Gingrich. And he did. And then he said, well, you know, Europeans, Milosevic is killing people, Kosovo. We're going to go out and help a little bit. Well, he turned out doing 85 percent of the missions without congressional authority. He bombed for 77 days. He hit bridges in the suburbs or the approaches to Belgrade. He hit the power grid. And he was a lame duck president with a Republican Congress. And then there was Obama. And he said, well, I'm going to get a pen and phone. Remember that? Pen and phone. And I'll just do executive orders. And I'm sitting here with pen and phone. And then he said he got together with Ben Rhodes and the rest of that crowd, John Kerry. And he said, I'm a constitutional lawyer, but I'm not a constitutional lawyer in the next two years. So you know what we're going to do? We're going to go do a ran deal. We're going to give them 400 million dollars at night. We're going to lift the sanctions on all of their creepy subordinates. And we're going to have the ran deal. And they did it. And everybody said, well, that's a treaty. He has to have at least two thirds or maybe it's 60 votes, pretending on what the new rule is in the Senate. Should be two thirds. And they didn't do it. And then he said. Oh, you know, we got to have a green climate accord. We're going to go to the Paris climate accord and sign us, sign it away and we'll have a new green deal. And everybody said, well, how about China? They're cheating. They build two coal plants. Oh, yeah, I'm president. I have executive. And he did that. And then he said, oh, we've been too mean to Castro, brother. We're going to recognize Cuba. What? They're a communist thugocracy. Oh, no, we're going to have tourism and everything. They'll come around. So he did all of that. And then he not only did all of that, he said, John Brennan, James Clapper, call me coming in this office. Now, I told you to find dirt on Donald Trump, that he's with the Russians and you didn't find it. Now you go back out there and get me some stuff that I can that I can work on. And Susan, Susan Rice, you write her an email and record this that we didn't do this. Just write an email to yourself, send it yourself. Everything that happened during this meeting was according to protocol and the law. And that's what he did. He was unbound. So Donald Trump, foreign policy, they're not going to cut off. They don't have the votes to cut off. They don't have 60 votes. He can do what he wants to do in Iran and what must be done quickly, efficiently, so they don't have a bomb. And then we need to get out of there and we need to keep the straight open. And then he can deal with Putin on Ukraine deal. And I can tell you one thing. If by some hook and crook, they denuclearize Iran and within 18 months, that regime is squeezed so it falls and there's a peace in Ukraine, he will be go out of office popular. And by the way, lowest time, what was the lowest rating for Obama? 37%, just where Trump lower than Trump is today. And what was Clinton? 38%. What did Clinton go out of office at? Almost 70%. And what did Obama go out? 60%. So if he wants to follow a paradigm where he will be very popular, then all he has to do is A, use executive orders to get his conservative message where possible done. Two, get them denuclearized and get out of Iran with the oil price low and then straight open. And then he will go out and then you know what happens? he's so absorbed with these things he's doing, he doesn't get into the fray. No Bill Maher stuff. Obama, as I keep saying to people, the more you didn't see him or hear him, the more you liked him. He got up 60% because he just played golf. And then he did it by executive order. And then the other thing is the election's going to heat up. And there's going to be, starting, it's going to be in six months they're going to start. And you know what's going to happen. Wait, Victor, can we go to an ad first and then come to the 2028 elections? All right, stay with us and we'll be right back from these messages. Many Americans are going to have a big wake-up call. We have never seen net migration as high as it has been in the last few years. This year, there have been more people coming to the UK in small boats than ever before. You did an extreme thing to the country. Britain is facing a migrant crime epidemic. We don't actually know where they're coming from, who they are, how old they are. Why would you let in millions of people who are undeaded if not to change the country from within? There is no other word for it. Demographic replacement. England's a blueprint for America. It's coming. It's just a blueprint. Thousands of daily migrant crossings. A political earthquake threatens to reshape America. We are showing there is a new path for politics in our country. Not all cultures are the same. You cannot ban Sharia. America is a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. The Immigration Crisis. Watch now on the Heritage Foundation's YouTube channel. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. I wanted to just say a few things. Our website went down strangely on Monday into Tuesday, but we got it fixed up. And our webmaster is exploring why it had a strange error on it. And then also, you can catch Victor on his social media. His handle is at VD Hanson and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. Oh, another thing also. I had talked about in passing Calvin Coolidge and U.S. Grant. But as one person wrote back, said, Victor, Victor, you didn't you you talked about you didn't give us a formal presentation. So we're going to do that in the next one. I'll go back and pick up U.S. Grant and Calvin. Yes. And so while Jack is doing a special edition of the Friday on Saturday, we will have Grant and Calvin Coolidge. Thanks for reminding me of this. OK, so I'm interested to hear now, where is this going in 2020? Well, what I'm saying is not only will he be able with a free hand in foreign policy and not only will he executive orders, there's only two limitations on him. Number one, no judges after January 3rd will be nominated, no cabinet. But he can get them through now if he hurries because he has a Senate majority still. And number two. He will have 45 seats, probably 44. They want 40. So they have 60 to override a veto. He's got to go men fences with Murkowski and some of the rhinos so that they don't bolt. He needs all 45 of those people to support him so that when he has a veto and they vote to override, they don't get they only get 57 or 55 or 58. But they do not get 60. If it gets we don't know some of the races, if it gets up to 58 or 59, you've got people like Murkowski and a couple of others, you're in trouble. So he has to have discipline. And Thune, the majority leader, if he's still the leader, he's he'll be a minority leader, but he will have to be ironclad about that. But then the other thing is the Donald Trump declared Donald Trump declared his candidacy for presidency on November 15th of 2022. It is now November 4th in 18 days. We might have a candidate do the same and declare his candidacy right now and then have the rest of 2026 and all of 27 before the primaries of 28. So what I'm getting at is if you look what also Obama and Clinton did besides dissing themselves and executive orders and doing a free hand in foreign policy and not getting in to. Squabbles being above, you're going to see the most bitter campaign. I can remember when Al Gore said, I don't want Bill Clinton on. He's marred with he was that was the stupidest thing you could ever do. He was 65 percent approval rating because of the impeachment. And he just and Clinton said, OK, I'm not going to be on the stump. I'm going to be working with bipartisan and working across the aisle with, you know, Newt Gingrich and the two of us, we're going to get another third and fourth year of a surplus. We're going to have a problem because pretty soon the debt's gone and we don't know what's happening when all that money piles up. And that was a winning thing. But he didn't get involved. And then George W. Bush and Gore went at it. And everybody said, oh, I wish politics wasn't so mean and so mean. And I'm not involved. I'm not involved. They don't want. And the same thing with Barack Obama. Trump versus Trump won very quickly. And it was Trump versus Hillary, arch enemies, both controversial people. And they fought it out. Russian collusion, the secure server dumping the email. It was a mess. And Barack Obama. I don't know. I haven't talked to any of them. Don't know what's happening. And everybody said, well, look at Obama. Look at what Clinton. They're not involved in this rough and tumble dirty. So Trump, it'll be it'll be dirty. And he but he doesn't have to get into it. And people will see Trump as a statesman. He's working on Ukraine. He's working to make sure that Iran is done with nuclear projects. He is going to try to liberate Cuba. He's got too much on his mind to get into another campaign. Maybe he's looking forward to golfing like Barack Obama did. Yeah, he's a very good golfer and he should. I have one question, though. Big one on the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. They were saying before the election that if El-Said wins, then this will be bring AOC in as a presidential candidate. There's that question I would like. But the other one is, how do you think it will be in the Democratic caucus with these new with the so many more DSA and so many more? So everybody remind you, we gave the Senate. We gave the Senate the symptoms of this disease, and then we gave a diagnosis and said it had to do with the truth that we would explain the economy, we explain the border, we explain the war and the paradoxes of them. And then we came up with a diagnosis that this was. And then we talked about the therapy, the medicine. I just said what we should do. He'll be a lame duck, but he will have problems. Speak softly, Kerry. And now we're in our. Final cycle, and that is the prognosis of the patient. I don't think, number one, you can address this size loss. It's not like two thousand twenty eight. You're going to get back those seats as to what you'd have to have a tsunami in a non midterm. And that's very rare. So what I'm getting at is this is a very critical election in two thousand twenty eight, because I think they're going to nominate what you just said, a very radical leftist. Not Josh Shapiro, maybe the new commie, or he thinks he's a communist or socialist Newsome, but he could even be a Saeed vice president or AOC or somebody even more radical. And so what's the outlook for that, that if they should win, they will have the Senate for sure and the House, even if the Republicans pick up seats, you're not going to raise such a huge deficit. So what you're talking about in two thousand twenty eight is the first time in my life and many of the people listening lives where there is a real potential that in January of two thousand twenty nine, which is. You know, it's only what two years a little over. It's going to be twenty two years from now in January. You could see people say. We're going to get rid of the electoral college. We don't really care about the Constitution, whether you have to get three quarters to amend it. We're going to pack the court. There's nothing that says we can't. We want 15 new judges. We're going to get all left wing and ram them through. And the court's going to be more liberal than the Warren court. We're going to bring in two states. I don't like the idea that we have to have three quarters of the states vote for that. Screw that. We have the power and we're going to I think they'll get rid of the filibuster, by the way, next year. Republicans wouldn't dare do that, but they will. And then they're going. To open the border and they're going to stop all deportations. They're going to defund ICE. They are probably going to war as Biden. And when Biden came into office, remember, Harris and he said they were against fracking. They stopped new leases and then they for the midterms, they relented a little bit. But you're going to see windmills and solar panels and subsidies. And then they're going to go after people. They are going to go after Don Jr. all of his associates, Eric, all of the Trump family. And what do I mean by that? Subpoena, subpoena, subpoena, investigation, investigation. And even if there's nothing there, they're going to say, you know, this is going to cost them a billion dollars in legal fees. They're going to run out of cash when we get. They've already said that. They've said subpoena and lawfare. Garcia has already said that. Well, Trump will pardon them, of course, before he leaves office. Yes, but that doesn't mean that he's not going to pardon them from a subpoena. They're still going to have to show up there, and they're still going to have to spend a fortune. And then, in addition to that, they're going to go after Elon in Texas. The governor will go after him. Tallarico will go after him. They will call him in. Robert Reich's already talked about nationalizing his company. I think the AI data centers, which will give the lead to China, are dead. They will ban those, and it's going to be radical if they get elected. This is all predicated in 2028, because they're going to have all branches of government by then. Because if they get elected, they will pack the court, and they will have the presidency, and they already have the House and Senate. And so that is scary, and that's what they will try to do. Then the next question is, as you said, well, are they going to have an agenda? No, they're not going to have an agenda. They had an agenda, and nobody liked it. It was a 30% open the border. It was a 30% let's let in 10,000 a day. It was a 30%. Let's have drag shows on military bases. Let's have trans women competing biologically as men in sports. Let's say DEI runs the Pentagon and lose 50,000 votes. Let's try to defund. Let's try to defund the police. Nobody wanted that, so that's why they didn't have an agenda. They never mentioned any of that in this election. Their election was two things. Donald Trump is Satan, and he caused your gas to be high while he bombed poor kids and ran for nothing. That was it. Well, after that's over, and there is no Trump around, I mean, he won't be in the campaign. He won't be out there. He's not the candidate. He won't be on the ballot. And the Iran war will be over. And gas, and I think the economy is going to boom. That's going to be another irony. You get all that foreign investment, the GDP growth, the low in the inflation going down, cheap, cheap energy. It's going to go crazy. And they're going to try to take credit for it, even though it was Trump's doing. But my point is, they don't have an agenda. Their agenda will be back in the court. And everybody said, well, they're not stupid. They're not going to show they're radical. Well, did you hear? El-Said, victory speech. Tell everybody, Mike Rogers, and he, you know, and free Palestine, freeze Palestine. You think Tallarico is suddenly going to say, give me a Big Mac? Is he suddenly going to get his cowboy hat and his ram and go visit an oil field? No. He is what he is for six years. And they're all going to do that. Is it wise for them to do it? No. They can't help themselves. They're socialists and Islamicists. And it's going to get ugly. And I hope. That there will be a, I think my paperback edition will be counter-revolution, the fall and rise and fall and rise of Donald Trump. Of course. And I'll do. Yes. I had a suggestion, you know, I had the fall, rise, and question mark, but that didn't go over very well. Yeah. They didn't think that would work. Yeah. Well, Victor, we are at the end of our program. And I have some comments. I think we got through. Yeah. Discussion as doctors of the patient. That's us, by the way. We're the ones that are ailing, everybody this morning. Oh, I know. That's so true. Well, I have a comment from a reader, Jill Hunter. I have been a fan of your writing since December of 2002 when I read your article, I Love Iraq, Let's Bomb Texas. My favorite sentence among so many awesome choices is, I remember that was a quote. Israel could give over the entire West Bank, suffer 10,000 dead from suicide bombers, and apologize formally for its existence, and it would still be despised by American and European intellectuals for being what it is, Western, prosperous, confident, and successful amid a sea of abject, self-induced failure. And by the way, that wasn't my title. That was the title of the article, but I took it from a protest sign. Oh, did you? Yes. Oh, my gosh. Yes. What was that again? It was, I love Iraq, let's bomb Texas. Yes. And that was because George Bush was from Texas, and he had the war. When you say free Palestine, that means, I mean, there is, Gaza was free. I mean, the Israelis supplied its electricity and fuel and water, but there wasn't one Jew in there. Not one Jewish person was in there. Not one Israeli citizen was in there. And they had $40 billion in money. And what did they do? They thought, they got up every morning and said, I hate Jews. I want to kill them all. And then they went to bed that night and said, I didn't do enough to kill Jews. And they took it and they built 360 miles of a subterranean hideout so that when they did slaughter Jews, they could go in there and put all the civilians to get killed at the entry and exits at hospitals and mosques and schools. And then this useful idiots in the world. In the West, which are plentiful, would say, oh, these weren't shields. You just went out and bombed all these people. You guys are apartheid genocidal people. So, and that's what El-Sayed said, by the way. No, this was a vote against apartheid and a vote against genocide. And I thought, okay, apartheid. You mean you're voting against all the Arab countries that have Christian enclaves and they don't? You mean you don't allow any Christians to build a church or worship openly? Is that what you're doing? Or are you saying that you're against apartheid because Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and the Gulf states deported, ostracized, kicked out, forcibly, in some case, killed them, but took them all? You mean you're saying that you took one million Jews after the 67 War, they had been there for 500 years in those countries, and ethnically cleansed them, and they fled to Israel? So, today, when you go to those places, there are no Jews to speak of. Isn't that apartheid? So, get your seatbelt on. It's going to be a Mr. Toad's wild ride. It's very strange how they're able to flip the narrative. I mean, basically, El-Sayed and his lot say, we want to stay. We want to support the inhumane people and accuse the inhumane people of genocide. And the statistics are obvious out there that those are. I always go back to Tolkien. I know it's supposedly a children's book, but it's not a children's book. It's a sophisticated lament for Western civilization by somebody who saw Europe destroy itself at the Battle of the Somme in Verdun. He wasn't at Verdun, but he was at the Somme, and saw what happened in World War II when his kids were in the war. And Europe is Gondor. It's an outpost next to Mordor, and it's old, it's shrinking, and it's not up to it. And Rohan is sort of the American frisky Nordic, in his view, frisky Viking type, but unsophisticated people who still want to fight, and they have to come to Gondor's aid, in his view. And Mordor, Sauron is the Soviet Union, the greater threat. He saw the Cold War coming from the alliance with them. And Sauron was the evil Hitler who was a Westerner who traded on his own people and caused a horrific war in Europe. And what I'm getting at is that Israel is a little window on the West. It's little tiny Israels there, and you go there, and it's Western, it's cosmopolitan, it's modern, it's humane. And then you go anywhere else, and it's not. Because I've been everywhere else, and it's not the same. And yet, we are told that that small little nation is our problem. And as Tucker and El-Sayed, that ad that they got away with, and what Tucker said about aid, everybody should remember that. There will be no aid to Israel, apparently, after the end of the year. But the $2.5 billion that we give them is 1%, 1%, 1% of all foreign aid. Nobody I know of is saying, we got eggs and bananas we can't afford because we give money to Egypt, we give money to USAID, we give money to Ukraine. Only little Israel, 1%, caused our. inflation at 3.4%. And then of the total almost $7 trillion budget, it's one-fifth of 1%. So imagine a new U.S. senator who won that election with ads saying that spending one-fifth of 1% to help the only democracy in the Middle East and the only Western country caused all of our inflation. Or that Tucker and his cohorts are saying that money to Israel is undermining the United States and we're spending a vast fortune of one-fifth of 1% of our budget. And that's the biggest problem we're facing, one-fifth of 1%. Not the multi-billion dollar fraud in Minnesota, not the money we give all these other countries, the 99% that doesn't go to Israel for foreign aid, none of that, just Israel. And what's the common denominator? They're Jews. Yeah. And these people hate Jews. They do. And the lie is sellable and they sold it. If you guys think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. I'm not a Zionist fanatic. I never met somebody who was Jewish until I was 18, but I have developed over my lifetime a deep admiration for Jews. Jewish people, they're very accomplished. They're very law-abiding. They're admirable. And especially Israel because what it represents and the neighborhood it has to live within. But winter is coming and these people want to destroy it. And they have a lot. They have 500 million people around them that get up every morning and want to destroy them. And it's mostly they look at the skyline of Tel Aviv. They look at all of the success, the Nobel Prize winner. RFK had a wonderful essay, by the way, on this that is out. By the way, an Islamist has killed RFK's father, Bobby Kennedy, senior. So everybody should keep that in mind because we've elected a group of people who want to cut off all relations, not just support. They will not allow us. When they get in control, they won't allow us to sell F-35s, even though Israel will pay for them. They won't do that. Turkey, yes. Saudi, yes. Not Israel. And winter is coming. And it's going to be a rough and tumble two to four years to see if we can get through this. Yeah. And as that— We have no margin of error. We've all got each according to our station to speak out and speak the truth and call out these people. When they need to be called out and not waste our time with the superfluous, I own the libs or any of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And just to finish this, that saying, I guess it was when Harry Reid won, that he won off of a big lie. Well, he said that Mitt Romack, as you're referring, he ran on in 2012, he said, as the DNC did, Mitt Romney's a cheater. He never paid any income tax. How do you know that? Well, I have my sources. Afterwards, on 60 Minutes, they said, do you want to retract that, that you had no evidence and, in fact, did pay his income tax? It worked, didn't it? That's exactly it. He was a despicable—he was a—rest in peace. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but he was a despicable person. And sad as it may be, Al-Said's anti-Semitism seems to work, doesn't it? Yeah. It does. At least in Michigan. You should have seen the celebration in Dearborn. Yeah. We're going into a new ethnic second-generation paradigm on immigration. We're going into the idea that it's perfectly acceptable for first and second and even to the third generation not to fully assimilate. Al-Said keeps saying that this is un-American to say that I'm not American, and then he deliberately writes letters about the Muslim Brotherhood. He says, "You've got to be careful about my people in Dearborn if you celebrate the death of the Iranian chief terrorist because they favor him." They all talk in collectives, and that's not compatible with American democracy—assimilation, acculturation, integration, not ethnic tribalism, but that's what we're seeing because the subtext of every single race last night was, "This group got out." He says, "You've got to be careful about my people in Dearborn if you celebrate the death of the Iranian chief terrorist because they favor him." They all talk in collectives, and that's not compatible with American democracy—assimilation, acculturation, integration, not ethnic tribalism, but that's what we're seeing because the subtext of every single race last night was, "This group got out." This group came out. This person is the first this. This woman is the first this. And it's always a hyphenated, "First gay senator in the thing." So what? The first black governor of this. The first Native American of this. That's fine and good, but— The first what? Is it capable? Is she going to—they're people. They're individuals. They're not nameless faces in a Soviet collective. But that's what we're dealing with, a Soviet collective. Yeah. Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show. I'd like to thank our audience for joining us, and I'd like to thank you as well. Thanks, everybody, for listening and watching. And that's about—I will make one final statement. I had the book come out on September 8th, so I've been doing four or five interviews a day in maybe 10 to 12 hours. And I had the midterms, so I was doing a lot of interviews. And I'm going to cut radically back because I have more tests coming up next week, and I may have or may not have a problem in my lungs. But my point is, I want to devote my time to our audience. Yes. And I can do the podcast every morning and hours, but I cannot do all— All of these other things. Yeah. Yet. Yeah. And I don't want to anymore either. I'd rather just talk to our own audience than go on Piers Morgan or somebody and get in a shouting—I never shout, but I get shouted at a lot. I think the last six or seven interviews I've done, it was not pleasant. Yeah. So I'm not going to do that anymore. Yeah. I'm going to cut way back. Not with ambushes. Cut way back. I have two books I want to work on, too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, our Saturday show is coming up, so we'll save topics like the Iran War and the Ukraine War, which will be— It'll be interesting for that show. And we will, as we said, be doing Grant and Coolidge as the presidents. So please join us on the Saturday show and join Jack and Victor on the Friday edition as well. Thank you again. And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. And also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition. And also check out my website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition. Being honest. That's what you get when you have Farmers. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Learn more at Farmers.com. Underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or Affiliate. Products not available in every state.