The Hypocrisy Behind Obama's Latest Attack on Trump | Victor Davis Hanson

Rocco Bama, I'll just say it, is completely unaware of the contradictions in himself. He is criticizing the President of the United States for raising private funds to make a ballroom. He raised the entire Chicago Park of 20 acres. He ruined their avenues and why? So he wanted a 20 acre monument to himself, monolith that anybody has ever seen as a presidential library. Our first black president has stiffed hundreds of minority workers and contractors are saying they haven't been paid. Well, they haven't been paid because he's two or three hundred million over budgeted. Well, hello, ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words on the daily signal network. Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson senior fellow with the Hoover institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College. And he's also a senior contributor to the daily signal, which is the happy home of this podcast and also Victor's other show Victor Davis Hansen in a few words four times a week to catch that two. Victor's got a website the blade of Perseus Victor Hansen dot com is the address please do subscribe tons of free stuff. But if you want to read the twice weekly articles Victor writes exclusively for the blade and to catch the exclusive weekly video. Well, it's six dollars and 50 cents a month or discounted for the full year 65 dollars Christmas is coming up. I see it over the horizon and I think the blade makes a great gift also Victor's also best selling author the thank you counter revenue. You welcome Victor. It's just a fact. It's a sheer fact. It's in the New York time. So it must be true. Victor is the selling author of the counter revolution. The fall and rise of Donald Trump and the magma movement. We are talking on Sunday October 25th, 2026. And this episode will be up on Thursday October 29th and today is the anniversary of the battle of Aging Court. And it's therefore St. Crispin's day and hopefully by the end of the end of this podcast we'll get to some of Victor's reflections on that battle and maybe how is a precursor to current French battles. Not sure, but Barack Obama is on the stump. We have fake polls Trump as Nixon Irish government efforts to preclude grandparents from hugging their grandchildren. I mean, what the hell is wrong with this world? But Victor's going to tell us what's wrong with it and maybe maybe what's right with it when we come back from these important messages. If you're like me, you have problems sleeping. Your heads at the wrong angle, you get too hot. Your mattress feels like it's made of concrete or you're sinking into it like it's made of quick sand. That's why I'm excited to try out my brand new Ghost Bed. Ghost Bed is engineered to help produce the reasons your sleep gets interrupted. It's designed to relieve pressure, help regulate temperature with cooling technology built into every mattress and support your body. Better still, Ghost Bed is made in the USA. With Ghost Bed's 101 night sleep trial, you can try it at home because the real test of a mattress is how you feel in the morning. If you're waking up sore or tired, before the day even starts, then check out Ghost Bed. Ghost Bed is offering Victor Davis Hanson's audience an extra 10% off their lowest prices of the season. So go to ghostbed.com/vdh and use the promo code Vdh. That's ghostbed.com/vdh. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson. In his own words, I'm Jack Fowler by the way. Lucky man, I get to ask Victor questions. Victor Barack Obama in all his arrogant glory is out there on the stump in Michigan. I think he was in Iowa. Iowa also. He had some really snotty common misplaced my notes here attacking Donald Trump. There's gold everywhere. What's up with the gold? He's talking about the Oval Office. He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory. And then another quote and I'll shut up Victor. Now there is one thing he seems to focus on in addition to home renovation. Obama said and that's how to enrich himself and his family and his cronies. Something Barack Obama knows nothing about self enrichment. Your thoughts Victor. I don't think I was embedded twice in Iraq as a reporter. And in the first time they put us up in Saddam Hussein's palace that had a big hole in the roof. courtesy of the U.S. Navy Air Force. And it did have a lot of gold but it was. It doesn't seem the same type of gold. He's embossed here and there. But I mean, he's it's not Donald Trump likes gold. That's obvious. It's not my taste. But it's not if you see Saddam Hussein's palace. Believe me, it's not the same. I remember sitting out on a chair and watching the strange Amazonian crawling catfish type fish that are about four feet long. That he reportedly allegedly fed people to and some of the people would throw a piece of you know left over steak and these things would just hear it hit and they climb out like Beracuda. So that's that was right outside the palace. So I think the word was he threw corpses in there. I don't know but it was a very in-app because Barack Obama. I'll just say it is completely unaware of the contradictions in himself. He's completely for some person who thinks that he's so charismatic and so hip. And so he has vibe. He's completely lack self-awareness. Here, let me explain. He is criticizing the president of the United States for raising private funds to make a ballroom that will serve a dual purpose for the Pentagon in case of evacuation. It will have defenses from drones for the whole White House and everybody understood the East Wing was there was nothing really there. And this new ballroom will offer the first time in American history where you won't have to have tents out on the White House lawn. It will allow hundreds of people in a brand new up-to-date defensive so that the it's in Pennebert roll to attack. It's going to be safe. It's not going to be like the White House correspondence dinner where somebody almost got into and fired shots supposedly at the president. He did. He fired shots. He got that close where well, excuse me, he fired shots at a secret service one floor down and he was on his way up, had he not been stopped. That's not going to happen. But here's my point. He raised and raised with a Z. He raised entire Chicago Park of 20 acres. He expelled people's, he ruined their avenues and why so he wanted a 20 acre monument to himself. Then he shook down all these left wing donors for $550 million to build what I think and I think most people in history to come will see as the ugliest most obnoxious monolith that anybody has ever seen as a presidential library. Sometimes it looks like something out of a space odyssey 2000 when you saw those monoliths. Sometimes it looks like Stonehenge. I as a World War II historian reminds me of the flak towers that were built around Berlin. It is ugly. It has inscriptions like it's a hyroglyphics glorifying the pharaoh and you can't even read them when you walk down, but it's it's just a monument to his vanity and it's two to 300 million dollars over budget. It's going to go up to $850 million dollars. This monument to his narcissism in megalomania and worse yet the endowment is not sufficient to hire and pay at a going wage according to the workers. The staff needed to administer this horrific thing. I mean, it's going to take a lot of people to upkeep and it's huge. And it's in direct proportion to the policy of his achievements. You would think he's Abraham Lincoln or Washington, but there's no, there's no there there. And then our first black president has stiffed hundreds of minority workers and contractors are saying they haven't been paid. Well, they haven't been paid because he's two or three hundred million. Julian. over budget and he's blaming minority contractors for the cost overruns. But he was the one who insisted that you hire by race a certain proportion of his workers. And then when he did do that, he didn't pay them reportedly. The next thing he said was he has an unnecessary war and he solved the problem on necessary war. The straight of our moves, he said, is completely closed. He was dominated by everything he said was a lie. The straight of our moves yesterday, the day before and the day before, had 23 to 24 million barrels along with the Red Sea and the straight of our mom, a mom. Right now the problem is not oil. It is getting oil to refineries. And that's part of the tension from the around war. The idea that the straight of our moves is closed when it's back up to our exceeds pre-war levels is a lie. The second thing, he was bragging on his Iran deal and he said before Trump canceled it, they had no nuclear program, that's not true. We know now that they were enriching and cheating on that deal the whole time during the Biden administration. In other words, they saw that Obama was a narcissist. They said, let's just sign this give away that the United States is giving to us and we'll keep quiet and we'll see who the next president is. And then we had Biden and they cheated and they increased, they didn't increase their missile range all the way to every European country just in the year that don't Trump came into office. I mean, he bombed that last June. They already had missiles that would reach Diego Garcia or the European capital. That came under the Obama plan. Then he said it was unnecessary and there were all these people had died. Yes, there's been many people wounded. There's 22 dead. But he bombed Libya. He bombed Libya for seven months. Did he go and ask Congress, no, no, no, no, he never did. Did Congress object? The Republicans may have for political reasons, but they gave him a blank check. I went to Libya in 2007. It was in reform, not that Kadafi, he's a monster, but his sons and daughters were taking over. They had just opened the archaeological sites of the Roman, the Roman 2nd century Renaissance in Libya and the province of Libya. And I spoke at them at Subrotha. I gave a lecture there. I mean, it wasn't very good. I had a lecture to Bindex, I didn't know, but the point I'm making is you could, you could get a cell phone and call the United States, that saved my life. So he bombed all that. The Italians were in the process of opening up a free trade zone and we're going to develop a lot of untapped oil wealth. The Maltese had a 20 acre concession with a Corinthian hotel. I stayed in it. It was a state of the art hotel after I got sick, I got a room there. It was booked up for two years, usually. So my point is he took all that reform and he destroyed it. He destroyed it. And there for no reason, and he didn't ask Congress. And his was the administration that gave us this colossal lie that the riots that ended up killing our consulate, Christopher Stevens, destroying our consulate, destroying much of the CIA annex, killing four brave Americans and routing us and running, was all due to a video. When we know it was a pre-planned al-Qaeda operation, which Susan Rice went on five different shows and lied about, and it ended up with the iconic Hillary Clinton secretary of state phrase, she had been warned and warned and warned. What difference does it make? He was, he reigned over that. When he was president, he was criticizing the wars. He gave us the Ukraine war. It was under his leadership that Vladimir Putin sized up all of this trash America, apology tour, were not exceptional, and he said to himself, this is the time 2014. He looked at Libya. Does everybody remember what Obama said about WMD? He said, if they start moving around WMD, that's a red line for me. And they did. And what did he do? Nothing. Nothing. And Putin collated all of his first six years. And he said, I'm going to take the Donbass and I'm going to take the Crimea. And he won't lift a finger. And he didn't. He wouldn't even okay offensive weapons to Ukraine. So that foreign policy of his is a disaster. The Iran deal accelerated. He's not telling the truth. And if he were telling the truth, he would not have had to send $400 million on a pallet in the middle of the night to these monstrous theocratic terrorists. He wouldn't have had to do it. He did that because he knew it was unsustainable if he told the American people what he was doing and lifting the sanctions to these creepy people. And he would not tell the people what his grand bin road's vision of the Middle East was. It was a sheer crescent of Iran, Assad's Syria that he warmed up to. Rezbollah's Lebanon, Hamas's Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. And they were going to provide a tension between Israel, the moderate states like Egypt and Jordan and the Gulf states which he loathed. And then in from time to time, his highness would come in, I'm just a communist organized. I'm going to settle the differences. And he thought he could do that and it blew up in his face. And what he did was he empowered the Assad dynasty, he empowered all of the surrogates for Iran because the money he gave him gave them and a wink went to Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis. And he stands here now talking about wealth and gold. Some and his wife three or four years ago were estimated to be worth 70 million dollars. And he didn't make that just by going around and charging $400,000 per speech. He made that because the last year in his White House, he checked out as Hillary and Trump fought it out in 2016. I shouldn't say he checked out. He had Susan Rice, John Brennan, uh, John James Clapper and James Comey in his White House. And they had told him that there was no evidence that Donald Trump was involved with the Russians. And he had ordered him to go back and find evidence. And then Susan Rice wrote that notorious infamous memo, remembers to herself that everything was upboard. And we know that his FBI director, a 245 times lied under oath when asked. We know that James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, admitted he lied when he said I gave the least untruthal answer when he was asked directly, does the national security agency spy on Americans? No, he knew they did and he admitted he did. They didn't Obama's DOJ didn't do anything to him. And then James Brent, uh, John Brennan on two occasions lied. He said, does Barack Obama's 400 targeted assassinations over the Afghan Pakistani border that Congress did not authorize, did they kill any civilian? Nope, not at one. We know they killed 200 of them, including five US citizens, as I remember, including as I remember a USAID worker who was a collateral damage is working on a bridge with people walking on a bridge. He never even talked about it, but he did joke about it. Yes, he did at the White House correspondent's dinner when people said, all, you know, my daughter, they love Justin Barbara, I'll tell you all your young men out there. If you want to date any of them, you know, it's called predator, P-R-E-D-A-T-O-R, you'll never see it coming. Ha, ha, ha. 500 deaths. Maybe they were terrorists and they needed to die. I don't know, but he did kill 200 people accidentally and he's on his stump. Now, trashing collateral damage and we're down on missiles, we're down on missiles because Because he and Joe Biden cut the da- offensive budget. When Donald Trump came back into office, it wasn't as if he said, "I don't need missiles." No, we're building them like crazy. He attacked Pete Hexeth and the Pentagon. When Biden left, given the Obama policies, we were 45,000 recruits short because we were being bombarded with Obama, Biden, DEI, trans. We're not going to really promote people merit radically. We think there's, as Lloyd Austin said, there's a conspiracy in the ranks of white supremacists, white privilege people, white rage. We're going to investigate them. And then they let a year later, they just kind of said, "Well, we're going to release the report in December near Christmas, but I guess we didn't find anything." Well, that was a little too late to say that after he had turned off 45,000 potential recruits. And where are they now? They're back in the military. So, I think people are tired of them. Every time he said on there the thing, I remember right now, Jack, he said, "You remember this? I think there's some, everybody's got to remember. There's a point in your life, but you don't need any more money." At some point, you don't need to make any more money. Well, what does that point, Barack, is that we have a $200,000 pension. You get $450,000 every time you open your mouth and front of somebody. You're worth, according three years ago, 70 million now that people have suggested you're worth 100 million. You have a 20 acre mansion and land right on the coast at Martha's Vineyard. You've got a $9 million mansion in Calorama. You have a $10 million beachfront home in Hawaii, and you still have your two and a half million digs in Chicago. Can you say this to us? At some point, everybody's got to say, "You only need one or two homes. You don't need four mansions." So, he's a toll hypocrite, and he's totally unaware of, I'm not defending, and then he started talking about grifting. Maybe I've said this again, if they find that people are in the Trump family and those associated with them are using official influence to raise money by offering on trade to the administration or vice versa, on trade to the Gulf States from American companies. That is not just found to be unethical, but illegal. I hope they get prosecuted at the full extent. I don't know if they've done that, but I do know that he is last year in office. He had almost every single major person, whether it was James Baker in the FBI or his EPA person. They were all rotating back to where Silicon Valley, which had given them a lot of money and which Obama praised and lauded before they turned right-wing, of course. Does anybody really believe that Brock and Michelle are brilliant screenwriters? So brilliant that they were given $50 million as, quote, I don't even know what a content creator is. I'm a content creator. You are. You're an actual one. If he can say that these people are grifting, does he really believe that when he left office, when he left office, that everybody understudy was a content creator? There were allegations that dreams from my father were either ghostwritten or heavily edited in a creative fashion by Bill Errors. It's just stunning that he's out on this stump, saying all this stuff, and almost everything he says from people having too much money, people grifting, people making narcissistic projects for themselves, can apply to him. He's one that told us that what global warming would inundate the United States within 20 years, anyone out and bought two mansions right on the coast. And we're supposed to take this guy seriously. Really? Tommy, he should follow the teachings of Dr. Shivago when he came back from the war. He said, "Oh, this is much more just." And you know what? Barack, I'll address this to you. History's going to know you for two things. Maybe not the New York Times and not all the people, the presidential historians, Michael Beschloss and all those people surround yourself with. But they're going to know you for the two of the greatest scandals of the 21st century. Number one, you help pedal the steel dossier. You weaponize the FBI. You sick James Komey on a political opponent, along with Hillary Clinton. That dossier was completely fabricated. And your people to your knowledge met in the White House and knew that, and yet you told them to keep digging. Number two, you knew in 2020 that Joe Biden was non-composmentes. And yet you pushed him along with James Clyburn for one reason. You guys were scared that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg and Spartacus, not that they were socialists. I didn't bother you, but they couldn't win. And you wanted socialism and they couldn't win. So you used this mannequin, this wax and effigy, Joe Biden. You all collapsed around him. You got everybody out of the field. And then you put him into the presidency. You changed the voting laws in 2020 under the guise of COVID so that was 70% not appearing on election day in many states, rather than 30% and mail in early voting IDs and not required in most states. And you got him elected. And what did you do? You surrounded him with your people. And he turned out to be the most radical socialist president we've ever had. You destroyed the border under Biden. You got in 10 million illegal agents. I need, I don't need to go on. But this guy really is aggravating. He's so sanctimonious and self-righteous. Well, I have, I've one other thing along those lines to raise with you with him, Victor. First, for our listeners and viewers, if you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern, nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations, you thought were permanent, were never permanent at all. Today America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid up price. The wise, though, they never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history, physical, gold, not a speculation, but as insulation. 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Victor, one thing he did, he Obama, I know you don't want to talk about him anymore. This line about the cheesecake factory, now I have to save it. I've wrote a little list down, I've eaten it, a friendlies, dairy queen, cracker barrel, olive garden, cheesecake factory, apple bees, bob Evans, poor boys, Denny's, chilies, subway. I've never eaten it. Hooters, I don't want anyone to put a little bit around here. I've also, you know, I've also been at some cafe Milano and other places because my job, but to denigrate most Americans eat at places like cheesecake factory and they're very happy to choose it. And they give you a product that's cheesecake that's as good as any, almost any cheesecake at an affordable price and people like it. And they have all these other accoutrements, but he's always been- But that's where deplorable St. Klingers go, right? Yeah, he's always been an elitist. He always has been. That whole community organizer thing was a complete fraud. He can't show they did anything. The whole idea that he was a Constitutional law professor and I was going to the University of Chicago on a sabbatical from my teaching to to write a seminal. work on constitutional. He never wrote a word. He went to University of Chicago to teach law. He did it for about a year, and then he took a sabbatical and wrote his autobiography about himself. That's what he did. How a friend, John, you, have you ever talked to him about his experience? I talked to Richard Epstein who knew him. He was also a colleague of mine. It was all a complete fraud. Everything about him, from, you know, he was Barry Sartello, his, took the name of his stepfather. His father abandoned him. His mother was a hardcore leftist, perennial PhD, and he had a wonderful grandmother. And she worked like a dog and elevated her up self. I think she was vice president of the bank and insisted he go to prep school, which he did. And then his grandfather was an old sort of semi, I don't know what he was, Marxist. And he made sure that Obama was tutored in Marxism and Black radicalism by John Marshall Davis. And he got, and that is completely a taboo subject in his autobiography. We don't really know who the person he mentions tutoring him case. And John Marshall Davis, I'm not corrected, was has been arrested for a variety of disturbing convictions. Yeah. I think it was coming. Offences. It was a communist, yes. And he hated the United States. Well, Victor, speaking of fake made up things, just get your take on fake polls. Here's a headline from the Daily Mail. Fake polls pushing far left dems are a threat to elections. Here's two examples, far left state representative France, Francesca Haan was supposed to win Wisconsin's Democrat gubernatorial primary by around 20 percentage points. She lost. Democrats Senate candidate Abdul-Aliad was up by double digits in his primary. He eventually defeated representative Hayley Stevens, but only by a single point. Earlier this week, an election data analysis website 50 plus one published an extensive investigation into an upstart polling firm named Wedgewood, alleging that the firm had outright fabricated its data. Wedgewood responded not with a denial, but with a direct message to the co-founder of 50 plus one writing, our official response to your article FU. That though was quickly followed by a Wedgewood statement acknowledging that they had fake their data, claiming it was part of an "experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerability's lack of oversight and overall low barrier to entry in the modern polling industry." So Victor, we also had the last election that Iowa poll a couple of days before Trump was lose Iowa by three points. He won by two. That was 15 points all. And as I mentioned, this notorious Harvard Harris poll, the Gold Standard 24, that was sponsored by PBS and Harvard Harris. That was 24 hours before the election. And they had Kamala Harris beyond the margin of error, winning the presidency by four points, right? When people were going to the polls, she lost by about 1.4 percent. So in other words, they were five and a half percent off. And as I said, so often on this show, these polls were never accurate about Donald Trump being behind Kamala Harris three to five, but there was one point I think they had behind I eight. And there was these polls were never accurate that El Saeed was up by 10 or hung was up by I think one of them said she was up by 20. And they were never accurate that the Talleriko was up by five or that Saeed was up by six. And I said that I think I said twice on this show that they were going to taper down as we got to the election because their usefulness has been served. Their usefulness was to get Democrats to give money and to get people all fired up and go out and vote early voting because they were going to be part of a winning team. Their team was 10 and all this year and go to the stadium, that type of stuff. But they knew that the data did not support that. So when they got close to the election, they would say things like, well, there's, it's closing. We're worried. It's closing. And now we're only by one and a half points. We're dead even now. They are dead even in Texas and some polls and dead even in. But they were always that way. And now they're just trying to save their reputation because they feel that the election these candidates on the left will either win or lose within two points either way. But that's not what they were telling us because the polls for them are a tool like everything is for a leftist. And it's not the methodology. It's the end that justifies the methodology. And the end is as good as many of these people elected anyway possible. And they completely discredit the whole polling process. They really have. If you look at the 2024 people who were accurate, it was Trial Fowlgar, Insider, Advantage, Rasmussen, and the Brazilian poll. And all the rest were way off. Speaking of Brazil, there, but while we're speaking in real time on Sunday, the the runoff elections being held there, the, I know you and the great Sammy Wink will probably talk about that outcome. I think he's I think his life is in danger like his father's was also. Well, what won't the left stoop to speaking of that? Just quick thing I'd like to put out there. Get your quick take on, Victor. This is a headline from the Brussels signal Irish charity polls state funded video telling grandparents to ask before hugging the Dublin rape crisis center has withdrawn three consent advertisements after ministers in Dublin distanced the Irish government from a clip. The justice minister served eventually called demeaning to grandparents. I've seen this video, Victor. It's two grandparents there, they're being over sloppily portrayed, but they just want to give their grandchild a kiss. And this official campaign now pulled was you should don't do that. You need to get consent before to the destruction of the family and everything related to the family, including the love of grandparents after they grandchildren. Yeah, so funny about the left. We had a legislature, a legislator and the state senate. I think in the assembly who was trying to reduce the penalties for pedophilia and for pedophilia track being in pornography on the left. And they didn't blink an eye here when those trans shows were in full bloom during the Biden administration. Remember that? And there were pornographic books and libraries about how to become a trans and all this self abuse stuff. And no one said a word. I don't know what it is that if they go, they're so schizophrenic. One moment they're Victorians don't dare do this, but at the same time their Victorians, they they advocate and they promote they promote the most promiscuous behavior possible. That's part of the what's wrong right now on these campuses like Cornell or Stanford. We had a dominic tricks go come to Stanford. We have all this stuff about masturbation and I want to get into it at Cornell. And then people, you know, they act on it. They think, wow, if the universities inviting speakers are giving student organizations money to invite them, it must be free thing to get drunk at a fraternity and jump in and sex. And then Numanator kicks in and they said, I was attacked. Yes, you were. Or you thought you were, but your university gave a different, you know, a different signal you may have too. That's not to excuse the horrific behavior of the Cornell people, as I said in the past, but I don't know where what era we're in. Are we in the 1960s? Free love? Are we in 1890? Where you don't touch anybody? And you have to have permission to have sex. You have to say, I'm having sex with you. This is the sexual steps that I intend to take. Will you sign off on them? I don't understand. At least the Victorian people had class about it, about their so-called prudishness, about sex. And there was decorum. We're a craft society. And we, it's, um, yeah, it's social media. Like everything else that it all starts in the university. Well, I'm going to ask you or Ireland, one of the two. Well, Ireland saved, saved civilization once upon a time, but I think now they're trying to make up for that. I'm going to ask you about an article, your colleague, Neil Ferguson, has written, but first to our listeners and viewers we're delighted to welcome blackout coffee to the show as a sponsor. the coffee industry. For reasons you'll love, Blackout Coffee was started eight years ago by John and Rachel, a husband and life team who built the company from the ground up, and they're still very involved in the business today. Blackout Coffee is an American family-owned company roasting their coffee in Florida, and they stand for the same things we praise here. Hard work, family, and the American values that keep this country running. How refreshing to see a company built around all the right things, and since they take their coffee seriously, you can get an awesome cup each time. Blackout coffee is a small batch roast to perfection using premium specialty grade arabica coffee beans and shipped within days of roasting, so it arrives to your door fresh. Blackout has a wide range of roasts available in ground coffee, whole bean, and coffee pods, so there's something for just about every coffee drinker. They've even got pumpkin spice for the pumpkin coffee people out there. 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So Neil Ferguson, essay in the free press, the method to Trump's foreign policy madness, and here's just one little quote from it. The Donald has to do with Richard Dixon. The Donald replaying Nixon's superpower dealmaking. You should by now have divined where I'm going with this. Like Nixon, Trump's instinct is to negotiate superpower to superpower regardless of ideological labels. He would indeed enjoy nothing more than a big three summit with Putin and Xi at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders meeting in Shenzhen next month. His preference would be to settle the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran without regard to the smaller players involved, to say nothing of the irritatingly idealistic Europeans with their nostalgia for the quote liberal international order. Victor, what are your thoughts that Neil has here on Trump? Well, we have a policy at the Hoover Institution that we don't publicly criticize fellow senior fellows, at least not in ad homam. So he's a colleague and he's a personal friend of mine, but his argument as I read the article says that in 1969 through '73, Richard Nixon said, "I'm going to enlist China the weaker party to basically check Russian dominance. Then I'm going to go to Russia and say we better be worried about China and use Henry Kissinger to triangulate. Therefore, because we didn't really have a geostrategic mechanism to address ongoing wars such as Vietnam and such as the tensions between '67 and '73, the Six Day War and the '73 War, which broke out. Nixon felt that by offering incentives like recognition opening up China and Daytona with Russia, they might stop supplying the communist forces in Vietnam and they might be restraining the radical Arab-Bathast, except for secular powers in the Middle East. He had something he called the year of Europe, but he couldn't. Neil is arguing people who have used that analogy of triangulation and I have are wrong because he says that in those days Russia was the dominant power. Now it's the weaker China is the dominant power and he is basically ignoring lesser powers, as you've supported in Europe. And this could end up, I think he said it could end up like our Vietnam and Ukraine. I didn't quite understand that, but I just want to ask not Neil, but anybody who looks at the year, what is the plan? Just tell me what the plan is. We've had two and a half million dead wounded. We've given, depending on how you calibrate it, between $100 and $200 billion in aid. And the battle line is pretty much where it was, where it was after the failed offensive. Everybody applauded the heroic defense, and now I want everybody to tell me what is the plan to stop the bloodletting? Or, wars everybody can end in four or five different ways historically. You can have what we call a Carthaginian peace, where you completely obliterate the ability of the enemy to make war. That happened, of course, with Carthage and Rome. It happened in World War II, which a pan and it's usually followed by an unconditional surrender. That's what happened to the South, and it didn't happen during the Revolutionary War. It didn't happen during the War of 1812. It didn't happen during 1848. It didn't happen World War I. It's very rare. So my point is, does anybody think that Ukraine is going to so devastate Russia, that it's going to collapse? Or do you think Russia is going to take another million and a half casualties to destroy Ukraine? I don't see that happening on either side. There's another scenario. The Romans had a word for it, a bellum interruptum, bella interruptum. It means that it just keeps going on, hot cold, hot cold. What's the best example? Israel and its circle of fire enemies. They've been doing this, trying to destroy Israel in '48, '56, '67, '1973, '2003 and '45 and '06, and after October 7. And then it calms down, but the problem doesn't disappear, because Gaza, Palestine and its allies don't have the ability, nor does the Arab world, to defeat Israel. And Israel has humanitarian self-limitations on what it can do. And I know people are going to get angry. But when you say there's a genocide in Gaza, and the population was 1.4 when the last Jewish person left Gaza, and now it's 2.4, a genocide don't increase by 1 million people over mere 18 or 17 years. They just don't do it. And they don't provide vaccines, food, electrical power, fuel. You think the Germans said, well, the Warsaw ghetto is cut off, yeah, and we're going to give all this stuff. We're going to give the Polish people in the ghetto, all the fuel, electricity, vaccinations they need. No, it was a complete different idea. So what I'm getting at is there's another way of war, and that's a mutual Ute posse deitas, everything stops where it is, right now in the battlefield. Ukraine has a defensible position. Russia can't break it. If it were to break it, or if it were to be surrendered during negotiations, Russia would have the advantage in going to kill. So why not just have a peace in place, no territorial concessions either way, and admit if you're Ukrainians that you don't have the wherewithal, nor do you are allies to force Russia out of historical Russian control Crimea's in 1783, or historically controlled Eastern Ukraine. Just you can't get it back. And then fortify our armed Ukraine so it can defend itself. I think that's the only solution. And I don't see the United States getting involved as a, I don't know what, what we mean that's going to be our Vietnam. Don't come. Well, what could he do? I mean, if he says we're told that the Europeans are morally superior to us. And there's 500 million of them. We only have 340 million. We're told that they are got some of the best arms industries now. They've got Sweden. They've got Finland. And they don't like us anymore. They don't want us to use our air, their airspace or dual use. They don't even jail terrorists that try to destroy our bombers on British soil. So you're telling me that 500 million people with really the third largest economy after China, I mean after China. US China, then the EU, DASH NATO. They can't arm Ukraine to stop 140 million people in Russia. We can give them nuclear security, so Putin doesn't threaten them in a nuclear fashion, but they do have about 400 nuclear weapons in Britain and France. So I don't quite get how we're going to turn it into Vietnam. I don't. Unless he means that if we don't keep supplying Ukraine, I don't know, 50, 60 billion a year, they're going to collapse. And maybe if we get a piece, he will do that. I think he probably will. But I don't see anybody saying, let's just stop the killing. This is worse than the Verdun, some style and grab combined. Well, speaking of Verdun, Victor, I want to ask you, pose you a question or an idea presented by a viewer of the podcast and then also ask you about Aging Courts. And these are both France-related. And why don't we do that when we come back from these final important 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 fry 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 undead if not to change the country from within? There is no other word for it. Demographic replacement. England's a blue thing for America. It's coming. It's just a blue thing. 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. No occultists are the sites. You cannot that city. America is a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. We're nation of immigrants. The immigration crisis. Watch now on the Heritage Foundations YouTube channel. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words on Sunday, October 25th. And again, this is the anniversary of the Battle of Aging Court, which was in 1415. But before I get your take on that, Victor, let me raise these two things and then you take it all on as you will. So Bruno Thouin writes, "A missing part of French historiography of history written by French historians is the cataclysmic impact of Verdun on the fate of France. Falkenheim's project to bleed France white goes beyond anything yet seen in horror and cruelty. Downright genocide. German troops indeed did not pass. As Patan hailed, Germany loses the battle, but France's next demographic base, male youth, peasantry, manpower, was blood white. Next, Germany finishes France 20 years later. No guts left on the French beast. Stripped of its blood and soil 20 years prior. Germany lost again on paper. But it put an end to French history as a leading nation. We're seeing this a century later. So that's a pretty, it is what it is. And I'm sure many people have these thoughts, but your comment on that would be interesting. And the other thing I would like to know about Aging Court, which is also major battle, I'll be from 1415. Does it have any lessons for today, vis-a-vis the longbow of 1415, the drone of today? Anyway, would you take these French military history matters on? Well, Verdun was this catastrophic nine-month battle in 1916, and there were remnants into 1970, and it tail ended in coinciding with the British at Passiondale and the psalm. So what I'm getting at is if you look at the German army in the West, they were outnumbered by the British army and the French army combined. And usually the offense, which was the Germans, they had a plan to get to the coast in World War I and destroy the French government, destroy Belgium, and then annex a corridor under Carl Liesling's September program, and actually take hold of the Brittany and Northern French ports, probably Dunkirk, Kale, St. Nazarene, Breast, etc. And have for the first time an outlaw outlet on the warmer Atlantic ocean rather than their Bremen ports in the the cold Baltic Sea. So that was the idea, and they were stopped, and then they didn't have enough manpower until they knocked Russia out late 1917, early 18, to overwhelm the French, but the French couldn't get help from the British. So Falkenheim concentrated on it for done, and he thought that he could break a make a hole in the line and scoot in, but even if he couldn't after two to three months, he saw that the defenders for some reason because of the superior of Germany and gas, etc. were losing about two soldiers to his one. And he felt that Germany had 80 million people in France had 60, but he didn't know. There was almost 45 million brits, and there were soon to be 130 million Americans get in. But the point I'm making is he tried to bleed the French army in this deadlock, just kill them, even though they very slowly retreated for Dumont, and then they would counter attack. And it was a high point of French courage. It really was. And they stopped the Germans, and that famous phrase, they shall not pass. Meaning nobody's going to let the Germans get through the fortifications and run wild into the interior of France. But the problem was it did leave a searing wound in the French mentality. After the war was over in 1918, as Marshall Folk said, this is not an armistice to Versailles. This is a parenthesis between the Second War, because we didn't occupy and disabuse the Germans of their aggressive tendencies. We got back the Alsace Lorraine, but it's too vulnerable, and we should have occupied Germany. And pretty soon the socialist governments were elected in the 20s and 30s, and it was really, it's really remarkable. Tom Sol mentioned that in one of his books. I was really surprised to read it because he doesn't really talk about where we're one a lot in his, but he was talking about the pernicious wages of socialism. And he said, the socialist educational system made it illegal to print a book where you were glorifying Verdun. It was a national humiliation. Even though after World War I, they had medals at People War and they shall not pass. I was at Verdun. And that created a loss of confidence in the cultural what was in in 19, I don't know, 1900, 1910. The cultural capital of the world was Paris. And after this devastating loss, it wiped out about six to 700,000 dead wounded and missing Frenchmen in a single battle that waged on for eight, nine months. Things really heated up in post-war. If you read a movable feast, you know, by Hemingway, you can see that sexuality changed. People lived together when they were not married. Birth control started to become very prevalent, drug use. More importantly, in literature, there was no idealism anymore. Poetry, there was no meter, no rhyme, very much anymore. It was blank verse. Impressionist or abstract or surrealistic cubism, salvernor, dolly and surrealism. I'm not saying that they're impressionist. When war and syrup were not brilliant people, but they were art was starting to move away from what the eye sees. Art no longer one to capture, what the eye is looking at. It wanted to have impressions in your brain, what you were looking at. And sometimes as we know from Modern Art, it didn't have anything to do with what a artist saw. So Picasso was a good example. He was a mediocre craftsman, but he would never have been a great painter unless he created really the abstract momentum that he did. He lived in Paris for a while as well. And he lived there, I think, during the Franco years. So it had catastrophic effects on traditionalism and classicism and the French nation. And then when you combine that with the collapse of the French Empire, after World War II, in Niger and the Belgian Congo, the Belgians and Algeria, Morocco, Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Dan Ben Fou, etc., Algeria, they were, that was it. And they haven't we covered. That's true. And I think he makes a good point that a lot of it started it for done. But when you look at what's happening in France today, I don't know whether there's enough people, the rural French are pretty much the same, but I don't know if there's enough French people that outnumber the anarchists, the socialists, the radical students, the Islamists, the immigrant, illegal immigrants, the legal second, first generation immigrants from the Middle East that are radicalized. I mean, you have people that are technocrats. Mycron is just a poor imitation of deston. He was a technocrat. After De Gaulle, there were no people of strong views, maybe Sarkozy tried to do that for a while, but they destroyed him. Well, Victor, the closer down back to Aging Court, is it just an interesting ancient battle? Or does it still have relevance for. Well, it does. It was warfare today. We remember the 100 years war was this existential fight for France and Britain, or claims that the British crown had property or normity that this was part of Britain, and so King Henry V invaded in 1415, and he went to the little plane at Aging Court, and he only had about seven or eight thousand soldiers about 60 or 70 percent of them were longbowman. And they were very vulnerable on the battlefield. They had to dig in a big stick into the ground, and then they sharpened the end so that a Calvaryman couldn't overrun them. So they'd make a line of pikes buried into the ground at an angle, and then they had a range of, you know, three, four, or five hundred yards, and before they got tired, they could fire at a rate on like a crossbow at four to five, can't say shots, because it was not gunpowder, but Lucin, I suppose, Lucis, Lucin the bull, they could have bullies, and they had about four thousand of them, five thousand, and they were against the heavy Normandy French Calvary. So the question was, could the French with these armored horses and armored men with huge pikes plow through the small contingent of British infantrymen, and get to the bowmen and mow them out, because if you could get near them, they were completely vulnerable. They had, they were not very good swordsman, they had no armor, and they would run. But the problem was the ground was very wet and muddy. And so once the French Calvary charged, they got bogged down, and as they got bogged down, the archers gained enthusiasm, and they began slaughtering them. And by the time they did get there, they were worn out, and tired, and dehorced by mean wounded, or the English infantrymen surrounded them. And even though the French army probably had some words, I remember 15 to 17,000, the British only had eight. It was a total disaster for France. They lost about a half of everybody. And the British only lost a couple of hundred people. So it was a fantastic victory. And it was very sad. If you're interested in the battle, John Keegan's magisterial, it's just a masterful account of battle, the face of battle, and he examines edging court, waterloo, and the battle of the psalm. But and tells how that people felt and how they actually fought the battle. And the first example is the edging court, and it's pretty gruesome, but I recommend that you get that brilliant book. And the tragedy was twofold. There were about two thousand nights that were alive. They were unhorst, and they were prisoners and bound. And Henry V who had kind of a name as an enlightened order, they all be executed, or at least there was a some order people dispute whether it was misinterpreted or what, but they they slit the throat of two two thousand French nights. And when you sum up the six thousand who were dead, it was kind of the social it would be like the social register of Manhattan in the 1920s. They were completely wiped out. French lords, big landowners, people who were related to the French king. So it was a catastrophic you millitate you mill it. It's a catastrophic yeah. Well, so you humiliation as was I trying to say of the entire French effort. The war went on and they did a little better, but it's emblemizing right around sixteen hundred fifteen ninety nine. Shakespeare wrote the famous Henry the fifth. And in that play, there's a long description of adjunct court and that famous band of brother speech. Anybody fights on St. Christmas Day, she'll be da da da. And that band of brothers. It was popularized by Stephen Ambrose for the 101st I suppose that his description and band of brothers. There was St. Crispin and St. Crispy in sort of two of them, but both martyrs. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, he says Crispin Crispy in. Yeah. So when he's like, well, what's that all about? But yeah, they were they were both they were two of them. Okay, they said well that St. Crispin's day today. Well, yeah, today is the feast of St. Crispin. I know, but do they celebrate it? Well, they don't know. Does the church celebrate it? If I were to go to a Catholic mass today in Fresno, would anybody mention it a celebratory mass? Maybe at the maybe at the beginning of the mass of priests might say today is the feast of St. Crispin, but probably not there are certain saints, St. Joseph, St. Anthony, or there are others that have more get a more festive response. St. Patrick, of course, is it depend on the branch of Catholicism? I have a feeling they're the Orthodox which are have emphasized some saints that we do not we share the saints. The Dominicans and Jesuits would differ on St. Crispin's day. You know, it's funny about the Jesuit specter. They have so many martyrs and and including the first martyrs in North America were Isaac Jones. Yes. And they we talked about this. I think the other day black robe. Yeah, that was with Robert De Niro wasn't it? Yeah. And to show how how courageous the French were to go to this strength and they knew they were going to be martyred, but they were there to spread the faith. And if you look at the French today, what's up with their courage? And if you look at the Jesuits today, because those they were Jesuits those priests, they are so they they were ashamed to the to the earlier Jesuits. They're probably about 40 or 50 Jesuit martyrs. So you won't find any today anyway. I'll teach you all about this Victor when you when when you do training to become a Catholic when I say works. Yes. When I become a Protestant apostate, there's a special place for you in heaven, but I think it's called for a long time. I hope that don't don't. Very good toys. From what I hear, it's rough. Okay. I've been reading too much of the progatorio by Don T. I was bad at the infernal. Yeah, Bruno was not the parody seal. That's for sure. Yeah. Okay, five comments quickly. Stephen Valdez writes the most mature and level headed person on the right right now. VDH is the person I trust the most when I want sanity and clarity. Then Gooch McDux writes, I'm so glad I found this man in life. Just makes me see how ridiculous I was in my twenties. BBBBB King writes, Sammy always has great hats. Very true. James Burlow writes the WNBA is the new roller derby. And that's another road warrior roller derby. That's a great image. Yeah. And then John Boy, 9912 writes, it is a shame and a great loss for the US and the world that VDH decided against a political life. He is so well-read and sensible and has an uncanny ability to articulate issues so clearly and offer sensible solutions unlike any member of the political class. Victor, you're failing there. I would be a lawyer. I think my lips are still numb and I can't speak. But I would be a lousy politician. The man has, did that, was that Clint Eastwood. It says a man has to know his limitation. What Western was that out? Someone. Let's look it up off top. My head don't know. But yeah, you do have to know limitations. And I think you find out, we find out typically little later in life what they are. I found out what I was not good at. I was a good farmer in the cultivation aspect and I had ideas about farming. But I didn't succeed in that. I think it was above average classroom professor. But oh, come on. I don't know. You look back at your I'm going to be in philosophical because I took the biopsy. So I said to myself, I was going to limit myself. to two peaks a day to see if the results, whether the cancer spread or not. Did you peak today? I did. Number one peak. I'm not doing it again until five or twelve. No news. And especially on Sunday, because they've always said it takes eight or nine days and the last three tests Sunday morning, it pops up. Your results are in or I find the results by checking on Sunday. So I'll check at a due time today. I have to have some limitation, I'm not quite that neurotic. Why don't you pray to St. Who's the Patron St of students? I don't think there is one, Victor. Well, there is a patron saint of cancer about that. It's not of cancer, but for St. Cancuras. No, my gosh. All right. All right. This voodoo catholicism is too much. Victor, you've been terrific. Of course, but I want to remind people Victor's website is the blade of Perseus. Victor Hanson.com is the address. If you're on X at VD Hanson is his handle. If you're on Facebook, visit our friends at the Victor Davis Hanson fan club. And Victor has a page on Facebook also VDH's morning cup. And me, Jack Fowler, I write civil thoughts for the Center for Civil Society comes out every Friday. It's a newsletter email. Fourteen recommended readings. You're going to love it. Go to civilthoughts.com. Sign up. We're not selling your name. It's totally free. Victor, thank you for all the wisdom you share today. And I wish you, I hope by the end of the day, you get good news. I think I will. Thanks, folks. I'm very happy. Actually, I have so many nice letters. I read every one of them. I wish I could reply to all of them. Again, beautifully handwritten, predominantly from rural or Midwestern areas. Very logical, often tragic stories of their own fights with cancer. That's really been a big help. You're in a band. It's your band of brothers. I am. Well, we have a band of brothers with my letter writers. I really feel that. Yeah. Well, thanks, Victor. Okay. Thanks everyone for watching. Thanks for listening. Oh, and be sure if we don't. We're down to nine days. Everybody has. Well, the only can vote once. Just vote once. Please only once. But vote. Vote. Vote like your life depended on it. Don't. Because it does. Thank you for joining me here. Okay. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back soon with another episode. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. 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