Why Voters Blamed Trump for Biden's Inflation | Victor Davis Hanson

What if Donald Trump and Besant had said this when they came into office? I inherited a 21% inflation. To get 21% down to where I left office, we need a recession or a depression because that's deflation. I don't want to have a recession, so I'm going to reduce the inflation rate and increase your net income. Donald Trump and his team paid the price for a 21% increase in prices that the public felt that they should have ended. And there was no way in the universe that you could end that, but they didn't explain that. Hello and welcome. This is Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. This is our Saturday edition. We're going to look at a little more news, but Victor will be talking about the presidents Grant and Coolidge. A couple of our readers pointed out that we had overlooked them. In our pursuit of presidents through the ages, and we had, I know that Victor talked a lot about Grant when he talked on Lincoln and on Johnson, but we'd never treated him individually. So we'll be doing that in our middle segment. But we have news after the election still, post-election things, J.D. Vance blames the war for the defeat of the Republicans in the elections. And then we'll look at Ron DeSantis' speech as well. We've got lots of news. Lots of things from the left, especially the violent left. Miranda Devine had a great post today on the New York Post, not a post, an article exploring all of the violent nature of the left threats as they've won their election. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I have a new book out on September 8th of this year, and I think you're going to enjoy it. It's called Counter Revolution: The Fall and Rise of Revolution. It's a book about Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It starts right after January 6th, and it details the lack of popularity of Donald Trump, the invective that he endured, the five civil and criminal trials, the effort to get him off the ballot, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the two impeachments earlier, one in which he was tried as a private citizen, and yet he came back. How did he come back and why did he come back, I explain in the book, how he defeated his primary opponents. He was outspent. He had a hostile media, and he defeated the Democratic machine and Kamala Harris. It starts on January 6th. It ends pretty much now in May of 2026. What's the title about? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He's not a revisionist. He's a counter-revolutionary. This time around, he is not addressing just the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years. He's talking about the causes. Not just. an open border, but how to stop illegal immigration entirely. Not just crime, but sending the National Guard in to make sure cities are safe. Not just an Iranian nuclear threat, but ending that threat that seven other presidents had identified but did not act on. Not just addressing the transgender issue or the Green New Deal and all of those issues that were so dear to the Democratic Party, but ending them. Not just addressing the transgender issue. But addressing the transgender issue. Welcome back. Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor's the Martin and Nellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him on his website, victorhansen.com. The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and please come join us there. We've got lots of things for subscribers if you would like to subscribe, and we've got lots of free material on it. It's all Victor's articles, his podcasts, short podcasts, and links to his books as well, so please join us there. So Victor J.D. Vance has come out to state that the defeat of the Republicans was due to, he said the economy as well, but the war in Iran was the first thing he said. He said, and our relationship was with Israel, and there's been a big shebang in the media about those two statements, and I was wondering your view on that. Well, he said four things. He said it was the war, two, it was the economy. I mean, I think he means the gas prices that occurred because of the war. And then he said we didn't put America first, and our relationship with Israel. Where I can dispose of the last very quickly. If it's people talk about, Tucker and people in that circle talk about all this money. We gave them two and a half billion to three billion, and it's not like we give it to them. We give them the money, and then they buy back our stuff, the F-35s. They don't go out and buy in the market, or they don't build, they buy our things. Number two, it's one. Fifth of 1% of the budget. And we talked about that in the context of that anti-Semitic ad that El-Sayed condoned in Michigan, claiming the price of bananas and eggs was because of the Jews in Israel. It's 1% basically of U.S. aid, foreign aid, 1%. And so when he says that, he should ask himself, if it's 1%, how about the other 5% here and the 5% here and the 5%, are they unduly influencing us? And is there anything unique about Israel, besides being a Jewish population, in that 500 million person, mostly Arabic, but Iranian as well, Middle East? And there is, and that is it has a consensual government. It has free elections, it has free speech, it has religious tolerance. I know Tucker calls it an ethno-state. But I don't think he's been to enough Arab countries and see the way Christians are treated, much less Jews, who a million of them were ethnically cleansed from all the Arab countries. When I go to Israel, I see 2 million Arabs better off voting and free than they are in the West Bank or Jordan or Lebanon. If people don't believe that, it's a free country in Israel. So the Arabs would say, this is an ethno-state, as Tucker Carlson reminded me. And I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that I live in an apartheid state, as the people at Columbia and El Sayed. He said in his very haughty acceptance speech, he said that we're going to be against apartheid. Okay, so they're living in apartheid. So why don't they go across the border to Lebanon, where it's an Arab-speaking, dominant Arab country? Or he could go to Jordan or Iraq. He could go to Egypt. But they don't want to do that, because they know. And I can tell you very quickly an anecdote. that put the whole thing in crystal clear perspective. 2006-7, I went to Israel. And the IDF asked me, would I be willing to go on the West Bank and talk to people in the West Bank and drive with an Army major who had been an American. And we drove for hours along because they were building the wall under Sharon. So we got to the northern part, and there was a huge demonstration. And this community was right in the pathway of, well, adjacent to the wall, an Arab-majority community. And I said, wow, what's going on? And he said, well, we're making adjustments in the 1948 line. And whatever acreage we take on one side, we're going to take some of the land that we're going to take on the other side. And we're going to take some out of 48 Israel so we can add some in Jerusalem, East Jerusalem. Okay. So I said, so they're very angry. I mean, you're just cutting them off from Arafat in the West Bank? He said, no, no, no. They're angry at us because we're cutting them off from us. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, they're an Arab village. A lot of them are civil servants. They vote in our elections. They have free speech. We don't interfere. We don't do anything. We're their religion. They have mosques. They can build them anywhere they want. And they're far more prosperous. And they have Israeli pensions and health care. And if we detour the wall and give them territory. But I said, you're giving them territory from your original UN mandate where the battle line stopped in 48. He said, yeah. So I said, they don't want that? He said, no. They want to be in Israel. And I said, why? And he said, well, let me just go down and explain what it was like to live on Arafat. If you spoke out against him or you were a Christian, despite what Tucker said about Bethlehem, I went to Bethlehem. And despite what he said about Jewish or intolerant of other religions, it wasn't true. true. If it was true, these people would have not protested. And they said, get us on the Arafat side of the line. We don't want to live with the Jews. They said, instead, I want to live with the Jews and not with Arafat. So, I don't know what J.D. meant by that. The war very quickly, Mark Thiessen, I think, had it right. People supported the war when it first happened, because they had seen what Trump had done with the first term, Soleimani, Baghdadi. He bombed the proverbial, I don't like the word he used, SHI, blank, blank, out of ISIS. But it was just a few weeks, and they gave up half of Iraq. And then he went out, and they just decimated within a day the Wagner group, Soleimani, Baghdadi, ISIS, Wagner group. And then the second term, bam, go down to Panama, straighten it out, no violence, bam, brilliant kidnapping or extraction of Maduro. So, then they, in June of last year, they bombed the 25 hours they took out a lot of the nuclear facilities. So, everybody was all fine with that. And then they hit Iran, and it looked like it was brilliant. We lost 23 people. That's tragic. But it wasn't 23 people that were lost for a failed cause. It was lost to try to denuclearize Iran, which has largely been achieved. It wasn't 13 Marines that were slaughtered in Kabul as we were leaving $50 billion and being humiliated from Kabul. So, what I'm getting at is, the problem was that that war, even though it was less money than we abandoned, and structure and weaponry in Kabul, or fraud in California, and even though, tragically, we lost 23, but compared to fighting in the Middle East, gosh, the point is that gas went up. And the reason gas went up is they started talk, talk, talk. And J.D. had a vision that he wanted it over. But you cannot, let me say this very carefully, you cannot talk to a theocratic apocalypse. J.D. And the oil price, I mean, right now, the oil price is going to crash because there's more oil going out of the Gulf now in various manner at Red Sea, Oman, and pipeline, et cetera, than before the war. So let's just suspense with that. There was a mistake, and all of us said that, that you don't stop. Napoleon had a, he told his marshals, he assembled them. And he says, when one set out, when one sets out to take Vienna, the capital, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, then take Vienna. What did he mean by that? You don't march all the way up into a very risky invasion of the capital city of an imperial power and stop at the gates and say, can we negotiate? You don't do that. You don't do that. And we did that. And I tried to be as polite as I could. I don't have any influence, but I thought that that was a mistake. And that was J.D.'s mistake. He was, well, ultimately, it's the commander-in-chief. I shouldn't say that. But that was his modus operandi, the memorandum of agreement, MOI. Okay. The third thing, I'll just not even talk about America first. I don't know. Donald Trump is being reviled every day in the Washington Post, New York Times, but especially the Wall Street. Journal for America first policies. The tariffs. Why are you doing the tariffs? Why? You can't get industry back into the United States. We have a $1.2 billion Audi plant that just opened. We have more new jobs. The jobs report came out of job creation. It's fantastic. Most of the jobs that have been created are almost all U.S. citizens. We have lost 3 million illegal aliens. The Wall Street Journal said that that was going to cripple the economy. Instead, it's booming at 3.4. GDP, and it's all to Americans. So it is America first. So now we get to the crux, economic activity. And there is a legitimate, the economic question, and that was gas right now is $4.18 a gallon. I think today it's $4.10 on average. It got up to about $4.40. Does anybody remember what gas was under Joe Biden in July of 2022? A midterms? It was $5.03. Does anybody remember what gas was when Joe Biden had midterms? Gas was $4.10. And was there a red wave? No, there was no red wave. So what was the difference? Why did Donald Trump, in every single category, his economy, by any disinterested observer, would say, it was booming compared to Biden? Let me answer what I think the ordinary person would say to you, or what the ordinary person's logic was, was they had high prices, and they thought that the prices themselves were going to bring down, but nothing in the economic history suggests that prices come down. Bingo. That's what I was going to say. So here's the deal. Joe Biden had less. He had 3.3 smaller GDP. The stock market in the 2022 midterms was 20,000 points lower. The per family median income was $14,000 lower. The job creation was lower. The inflation was three times higher than it is in this one. So all of those things together should have said that it wouldn't, Trump should, but he made a, critical some mistake. I don't mean he, Trump, but the whole administration. The difference was that Joe Biden inherited a 1.9 inflation rate in 2021, and an aggregate of only 7%. So when he went up to 9.1, what that meant was in 2022, the price increase had been 16%, right? When Donald Trump, came in, he had 21%. So he added 2.4%. That gate went up to 23. And then this year it's, it's 3%. That went up to 26. Well, 26 is a lot different than 16%. Number one, number two, I went back, as I said earlier, and looked at the media, they didn't even call it a crisis and Yellen said, well, it's just temporary. It's supply chains. And I wrote at the time, I said, yeah, it's idiocy. The supply chains are still aborted and disrupted from COVID, but there's pent up demand. People want the dryer. They couldn't get for four years. They want the car they couldn't buy. And all of a sudden there's too little product for too much demand. And you acerbated the problem by sticking $7 trillion and stuff into this inflationary atmosphere. But that was, so what am I getting at? What if, if Donald Trump and Besant had said this when they came into office, we're going to lower the inflation rate by two thirds. We're going to do it the first year and we're going to create more jobs than Biden did. And the stock market is going to go crazy and you're going to have 14,000. You're going to have a lot more money in your pocket, but I inherited a 21% inflation and there is a difference between affordability. I eat the price of things versus the inflation rate. I'm going to get 21% down to where I left office. If you want the PR the Trump prices of 2021 in January and not the Biden prices of January, 2005, we need a recession or depression because that's deflation and you're not going to lower 21%. So what I'm trying to do is two things. I'm trying to cut the inflation the first year by two thirds, and then I'm trying to raise the median. The median income and the family income by three or 4% so that gradually these prices don't go any higher, but your disposable income and spending is much higher and then that won't matter. But they didn't explain that and the media just attacked them and attack. And one of the biggest attackers was the Wall Street Journal. All they could talk about was tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. And then when something happened, like a low inflation rate or a record stock market or a record family income or a record low poverty, the poverty rate is almost two points lower than Biden. They use this adverb unexpectedly, unexpectedly, unexpectedly, unexpectedly. So the media coverage was biased. They didn't explain to the consumer the difference between prices and the inflation rate. And all of a sudden, the price was high. And that explains why the MAGA people, they did take the House in 2022. They only had nine seats and they lost one Senate seat. That's unheard of in a midterm election from a doddering. But they had the entire echo chamber on their side. And when this time came around, Donald Trump and his team paid the price for a 21 percent increase in prices that the public felt that they should have ended. And there was no way in the universe you could end that. You could only ameliorate it by raising wages, getting no tax on tips, helping the middle class. And then. Cutting drastically the rate of inflation. And so I have one other curiosity. So. Can I just before you continue, I feel like Donald Trump did hit the topic of the economy constantly on his. Not what I just said. In his speeches. I mean, he wasn't explaining the intricacies of the. It's not intricacy. It's just I inherited 21 percent. Prices when I left office versus when I came back are one fifth over one fifth higher. Yes. And I don't know what to do about it because I don't want to have a recession. So I'm going to reduce the inflation rate and increase your your net income. OK. And I just want to say for an average person, that's not a simple explanation. I think it's pretty simple. Well, it is simple for the average person is not going to follow along the difference between inflation and wage and actual wages. Another question. If you believe that. I've been living and you've been living in California. I went down yesterday with six dollars a gallon. OK. It's five dollars before we went into the Iran war. It's always five dollars. It's it. It was two dollars in Iowa before the war. So we're three dollars higher because of our blends, because of our high taxes, because we don't have enough refineries, because we import gasoline. We find special gas. We buy gasoline from Japan and the Caribbean because and with oil from Saudi Arabia, if you if you wanted to destroy a price pricing of fuel, you couldn't do better than Newsom did. OK. So why if gas is what everybody's worried about and the cost of living, why did Steve Hilton, who said just what I did, why did he lose by 33? He lost 64 percent to 34 percent. In California, it's somewhat unique. And I in the sense that they're voting tribal. So all the Hispanics went away from the Trump mega and into the Bessarican. The Hispanics voted for Trump because he was for the middle class and the first term he had lowered price of gas and he was. So now you're telling me that if you're Hispanic and you are voting in the midterm against Donald Trump because the price of gas went up, but you're living in California where it is 40 percent. Higher, you're not going to blame the people who did that because they are welfare redistributionists and they're tribal. OK, that's all I want to know. And I have another question for you. So why in 2022, when Donald Trump was in the wilderness and he was under all this legal assault and there were the first signs of Joe Biden was clearly demented and his polls had. Gone from 54 percent after he had been inaugurated by his first year in the ninth month of his first year, they were down to 40 because of the Afghans catastrophe, a and the 10,000 people he let in every day. So given that unpopularity, because we're always told the midterm is lost if you're the president in power and your ratings are 40 percent and the economy is bad. OK, and the economy, as I said, had a lower GDP. The stock market was rising, but not like it is now. And the inflation was out of sight. Nine point one. It was almost a record in the last 50 years. And and gasoline was five dollars in July. So why didn't people say, as they did now, this is terrible? And the Democrats and Biden campaigned. I heard him say. I heard him say it, that he was going to stop fracking. And I heard Kamala Harris said she was going to ban fracking and he put a hold on leases of all. So I am going to vote for the Republicans. And they didn't do it. No, but they did in 2020. No, no, they didn't in 2022. Well, in 2022. They lost the Senate seat. But they won several. Yeah, they won the House. Yeah, they won nine seats. That's pathetic. So you're the question that you're asking is why was it so much? Less. They took there was a wave, but there wasn't like a tsunami. It wasn't less in the Senate. They gained. So the people said basically, huh, I'm paying the record price for gas. Hmm. I have the highest inflation in 50 years this year. Huh. We were just humiliated in Afghanistan. We left 50 billion dollars in various ways. Oh, Joe Biden. Biden said he would react to a Russian invasion, depending on it was major or minor. Oh, I just learned that he cut all offensive aid to Ukraine and Putin then invaded. And now he's in the Donbass and he's in Crimea and there's nothing good. But I'm going to give him one of the best midterm results in history. Yes, that's what happened. Yeah. And that's because the Democrats convinced them that they're delusional about the inflation. I remember that they were basically saying, you're delusional if you think there's any problem with inflation right now. And they, their message got out there. They said that, Yellen said that. Yes. And they said, uh, Mayorkas went to the border and he put a podium there. I saw, I saw it happen. And behind him, people were members knocking down fences and swarming and he said, the border is secure. And I don't know why these people are lying. It is secure and trust me. And you look around. And there's 10,000 people literally on each side of him running in across the river into it. But on that issue, the border 2024 paid off. I mean, the border in 2024. But then I have another question for you. Given that dismal economic record, why did, why did Harris who had been on record canceling Keystone, subsidizing green power against fracking, how did she get 1.7? Why wasn't there a blowout like there was in 2020? So I think what I'm getting at is I'm not trying to be combative. There, there were other things there. One of them was the media. The media hated Donald Trump and they made this economic good news into the great depression. They made the Iran war into Vietnam. And I heard I've been on one thing I've learned about all this. It doesn't do any good, especially if you're trying to recover from lung cancer and six transfusions to go on certain talk shows and try to explain this, to help our listeners and other people get the other side. When somebody is a complete lunatic, which I'm not going to do anymore, no, no more. But what I'm trying to say is there wasn't an, the media just completely turned something into something that was not, and that is unavoidable. So JD didn't say that number two, JD is a part of that administration. Why didn't he? You say we, we, we didn't explain to the American people that this economy was much stronger than the Biden economy in 2022, where they avoided a red wave and we got killed by a blue tsunami. And the reason was they in the media made something in a terrible economy and terrible gas prices into something that wasn't. And we allowed the media to take a. It's a pretty good picture, with one exception that we inherited, unlike Biden, he inherited a 1.9 inflation rate. We inherited 5.1 every year to the Biden or 21 aggregate, and we didn't explain it, but they didn't do that. Well, I, maybe social media had something to do with this inability to get the message out. And I think that people, a lot of people get their way of life. from social media, the way they think from social media, I think the left has a lot more people that are hooked on their channels because the hysterical style is their way. I think this idea that people say we own the libs because we have the podcast and we – just look at – just to give you an example. I really like Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, but nobody, not them, they're not Herculean gods. Nobody can replace Rush Limbaugh. That voice was essential. At one time, Tucker was getting 5 million viewers, you know what I mean? And Bill O'Reilly was almost doing it. Those two people were very influential, you know what I mean? Bill O'Reilly had to retire, you know, because of the allegations. I think they didn't give him a chance to, you know what I mean, to reply, and they got rid of Roger Ailes. And then Tucker completely flipped. But when I mean flipped, he's – if you took Tucker in those years and then you had Tucker debate now, they would be at a – the Tucker one and Tucker two would be punching each other out. And then with Rush, you lost a lot of communication. Another thing, very quickly before we go to a commercial, I heard Megyn Kelly had a clip and she was on fire about it. You know, against Trump. And she said something that I didn't know was true. And I haven't checked all of it. But she said the Fox ratings are in the garbage. Well, she used another term, I think. And then she said all of the conservative podcasters have crashed. And I looked at some of them. Bongino has gone way down. But I think that was his hiatus because I know that when I was off for three months and could hardly talk. We lost, obviously, because we had nothing. So he was in the FBI. And Ben Shapiro is down somewhat, not catastrophic. But I was wondering because I just got data on our podcast and our advertisers and my five to 15-minute daily. And we're way up. We're way up. And I can't figure it out if that's true. Because I'm not suggesting that our podcast is any better than anybody else's. But I'm not sure that the conservative podcasting world has collapsed. I don't believe it. I go on a lot of podcasts. And they're pretty good. A lot of them. I just don't think that the message goes deeper. We have more advertisers than ever, don't we? We do. And we've got a sponsor right here. And we have two sponsors. I think the other one is Blackout Coffee. And this one is Pure Health Research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels, or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, then this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best-selling health supplements are leading the way. First is Liver Health Formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds, and make you feel tired. Liver Health Formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special ingredients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. 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One was the record in the Congress of our representatives. And one of the things, or the big thing mentioned there, not voting to release epidemics. That they aren't taking care of the whole problem of insider trading and thus corruption. And finally, they have no positive message. Those were his regrets. That's absolutely right. No, he, a couple of things. His stock went way up because Texas, we thought, was redder even than Florida. Florida was a vacation home from New Yorkers or a permanent residence in these days. So, no one can believe the shockwave that every major state. And the state-wide office went blue. And the Senate went blue. It is a blue state. I don't care what anybody says. It is a blue state. And I know that because I don't think Cornyn would have won this cycle. But even if he didn't, you had a sizable number of, I would call them rhino Texans. There is, part of the problem in Texas is there's enormous influx from California. There's probably over a couple of million after the last. And Californians are very strange people. They ruin their state. And they vote for high taxes. And they vote for open borders. And they vote for all these crazy things. And then when they look at their paycheck or their big salary, they make $500,000. And they're paying $300,000 in taxes, federal, state, 13.3, which they voted for. And then they look at. They go to Oakland or they go into San Francisco, the old San Francisco, and they see a mess. And then they go, I'm going to Texas because it runs well. Then they get to Texas and say, hmm, they haven't screwed it up yet. Excuse my language. So I can be a Californian and vote for all these left-wing candidates because the right has made the freeways work. And they made the taxes low. And they made things affluent. And they leave you alone. And then. And then they vote for. And then you know what's going to happen? They will ruin Texas and they will California-ize it. And then they'll say, I want to go to Florida. That's how they are. I know some of them that say they've left. So not all of them. I'd say 60% of the people, 50% are conservative that leave. More than that. But there's a lot of liberals that do. So Juan DeSantis, what I'm getting at, Florida shouldn't have survived. It's not as red as Texas. It did. It elected all conservative statewide offices and a conservative senator and a conservative governor. Now, you can argue that Tallarico was a lot better, a lot harder to beat than Nixon. But you can also say that Moody, the one, is that her name? Yes. Yes, it's Ashley Moody. She's a better candidate than Paxton. So it's a wash. So what I'm getting at is. Because we've talked about Rubio, Rubio, Rubio, Vance, Vance, Vance. But here's a guy that is a technocrat, basically. He's not as charismatic as those two as we saw. But he created an environment that withstood a historic blue tsunami. So he has a lot of clout now. And he will run for president. And one of the reasons he lost. In the 2023-24 primary, he was in an impossible situation. I wrote about it. In other words, he was challenging Donald Trump. People felt that Donald Trump rightly had been treated terribly. Five civil and criminal courtrooms. So each time these happened, what do you think about it? Well, he was a rival. He was trying to be president. So was Trump. So Mar-a-Lago, what do you think about it? Should I do what Bill Barr did? And Mike Pompeo said? They said it's an overreach, but Donald Trump asked for it by not cooperating. If you do that, you're dead. So he couldn't criticize anything, which most candidates would do. They'd say, well, E. Jean Carroll was a complete farce. And Alvin Bragg was a farce. And Fannie Willis was a farce. And Jack Smith was a farce. And Latita James was a farce. But there must have been something there. You do that. And you're done. So he couldn't criticize them, but he couldn't say this. This is horrible. They're going after this. This is horrible. Donald Trump was a good president. And he's been a victim. And he felt that. I know he did. But if you say that, people are going to say, yes. So why are you running against him? You see what I mean? So he had no choice in that. And he kind of never figured that out. And he couldn't figure out. It was unfigured. So he's going to be a candidate. candidate and Florida did as about as well as you could do. And it's a model. And then his criticisms, like you said, are absolutely on spot. I have gotten a little bit of flack because I've gone on some talk shows and I've been asked, so you're a Trump supporter. Does it bother you about the grifting? I was asked this at a big 400 person event at the Hoover Institution. Yes, it does. And if you read the counter-revolution, I said, are there pitfalls in Donald Trump? And I said, the explication is going to be, you have to explain things. The language can be over at the top. And there are people, friends, associates, and family members who are making an amount of money, largely in the Middle East, that if Trump were not president, they would not be making. In other words, the implicit idea, is you hire me as an investor or a co-investor or a co-owner, or you give to my hedge fund or investment fund. And then I, because I can get you places. And then you say to people in the United States, I've been over the Middle East so many times. I know the whole royal families of Kuwait, Saudi, UAE, on personal notice, my dad's president, my friend's president, my father's president, my uncle's, something like that. And I can get you a contract for a price. And I know that's true because they weren't even, what's the word? They opened a club in Washington DC and they charge $500,000. And it's kind of like the deal-making club where you all go in there. And then occasionally these people come in and say, you paid your 500,000. Now you can make deals with each other and we'll oversee it and help facilitate it. And this was at a time, when the middle-class is struggling. And so, and the Epstein files, I mean, that was, I, he, he released more than anything. Was he at one point chummy like everybody else with, with Epstein's? Yes. But he did kick him out and said he was a pervert. Come on. He wasn't like Reid Hoffman, for example, who continued, continued, continued after he was a known convicted pedophile talking to him. But my point is, yes, here's what he should do. Release all of the Epstein file. Don't even say I'm releasing it. Don't even say it. Just release it. And then when they say you have to get the Epstein, oh, it's released. I didn't know that. Just release it and don't comment on it. And then the second of it, if he wants to, uh, he should, he should go into, uh, negotiations with Highcomb Jeffrey and Chuck Schumer. Yes. I know everybody's going to get mad, but he said, I, I will agree to legislation that we clamped down on grifting and the executive branch, but you have to do it in Congress. We don't want any more Nancy Pelosi's who go in there worth about 300,000 and end up worth a hundred million because they make legislation that they know will affect the stock market. And then they go in and they invest ahead of them. And then they go in and they invest the curve and their husband knows where federal contracts are going to be in the Bay area and buys adjacent real. We're not going to do that. And then they should say to the left, cause they're in the majority now. And I will bet you five bucks that these left-wing socialists will resist that because they're making money as well. But that's what he should do. He should say to the American people, I am tired of grifting. I spoke against Hunter Biden and I can't be credible unless we in the executive branch take the initiative. So I am going to go talk to the Congress and I am going to say, I will do my part on the executive branch that people that are in the executive branch cannot engage formally or informally in business pursuits. And when they leave the executive branch, they have to have a period of non-investment, maybe two years. And that includes the bureaucracy. That includes the Pentagon. You cannot be a four-star general and then retire and go to work for these defense companies. You've got to wait five years or 10 years. But in exchange for that, nobody can engage in stock trading, buying and selling while they are in Congress and two to three years after they leave. And let's see what happens. Put the ball in their court. And as far as the upstream, let it rip. And I think that would be, the best thing to do, I think he should do a third thing. He should call their bluff. He said, we all spend too much money. We are 40 trillion, according to some bookmate. I don't know how we went from 31 to 41 suddenly. And we're paying $3 billion a day and it's unsustainable. So let us work to balance the budget. We can do it in two ways. I will do my part in growing the economy. And we're going to shoot for 5% in the fourth quarter. That's the only way to get out of it is to grow the economy, but you have to have physical discipline. Now I had Doge and I cut 270 jobs. I cut the amount of federal workforce, which you people opposed to 2005 levels, 20, 21 years of growth. I stopped and went back 21 years. And you know what you said? You said that everything would, people would starve. And the government wouldn't run. It's running better than ever. So I challenge you, you pick five Congress people, three Democrats and two in the January, and I will pick a team and we will meet and we will try to cut government. You'll help us. And we will try to save social security and we will try to reduce the debt by a trillion dollars a year for the next 21 years. And nobody will go over, there won't be, we'll try to get to balanced budget in two or three years and see what happens. And he would, he can do it. He's a deal maker. Yeah, exactly. So there's lots of places to go. You remember what Obama did? The Trump administration. Yeah. The Simpson committee, Alan Simpson. I talked to Alan Simpson about it. They, Obama said, we need to get a bipartisan. This debt is getting out. I want to be like Bill Clinton and balance the budget. So we got this committee. We got this committee, Republicans and Democrats, and they had a three-tier tax system. Remember that? It was one level to simplify the tax code, encourage investment, and it had some cuts. It slowed the rate of social security growth, Medicare, everything. It had to. And they, and Obama goes, I'm going to be real serious. And then they present it to Obama and his Democrats were the majority on that commission. Remember that? Bowles, he was the Democrat. Alan Simpson was the retired. And now I knew Alan Simpson very well. Alan Simpson, although he came from Wyoming, was not a doctrinaire conservative. I had a lot of discussions with him. I loved the guy. He was very pleasant. He was witty. I really liked his brother. I liked his whole family. I liked all of them. But when I would talk to him, he was a idiosyncratic conservative, more of a libertarian. I don't know what he was. But my point is he was reasonable. And what did Obama do? Well, I'm going to take this very seriously. And then I took this very seriously. I'm taking it even more seriously. And he didn't do a blank, blank thing. But Trump should just go back. It's all done. He should just go back and say, once upon a time, you guys talked for bipartisanship. There was a guy named Simpson and there was a guy named Bowles. And your godhead, Barack Obama, created a commission. And they had great ideas. And he rejected it. And I won't reject it. How's that? Put it on their court. Put Epstein on their court and just get rid of him. And put especially an effort to reform the grifting in Congress and the executive branch and the Pentagon. Let's see what happens. Yeah. Well, Victor, let's welcome back, before we go into Grant and Coolidge, our sponsor, Blackout Coffee. And I highly recommend it. They do a great job with their coffee. It tastes great. And I am a black coffee drinker. So Blackout Coffee is the place to go. We are delighted to welcome them to the show as a sponsor. And they've been making huge waves in the coffee industry for reasons you'll love. Blackout Coffee has started eight years ago by John and Rachel, a husband and wife team who built the company from the ground up and are still very involved in the business today. They're 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. 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That's blackoutcoffee.com slash VDH. blackoutcoffee.com slash VDH and I highly recommend that coffee for real coffee drinkers. So, Victor, we're interested and I would like to thank a couple of our listeners who went through and they said, you've missed Grant and Coolidge. And so, we did. So, here we are. We're going to be talking about both. And I'm excited because obviously Grant is one of the greatest generals. I'll start with Grant. And I have to apologize. I only have about 15 minutes because I had a rather earlier appointment I forgot about. But Grant was our 18th president. He came out of the Civil War as the Union hero. I would argue that Sherman had done as much as Grant and they were partners. But nevertheless, he broke the Army of Northern Virginia. And he started out very, he was a beautiful writer. He had a Tacitian terse style. If you read his memoirs, Sherman is more flowery. What we used to say in classics is the Asiatic style. The terse hemmingway. We came there. The enemy was spotted. I ordered the following. And he was a grocer in Galena. And he was a child of Ohio. He was a hero in the Mexican War. He fought well. He had been decorated by Winfield Scott. And then the war broke out. But in that period, of 15 years, he just drifted. He couldn't hold a job. He was just like Sherman. They were geniuses, but their genius was like Patton, was for war. But there wasn't a war. They were outspoken. They kind of had moody. Sherman was temperamental and inflammatory at times. Grant, unfortunately, started drinking. And he was chastised by his commanding officer. It said, either you reform, or you're out. And he got out of the military. And then he didn't do as well as Sherman in class ranking. He was about half. War changes everything. Because you, what did you remember? Admiral King in World War II. He said, when war starts, they call them the sons of blank, meaning himself, Patton, Curtis LeMay, people like that. The tragic heroes. And so he went to the Ohio legislator and said, hey, I was a captain and I'm here and I can give me in the militia and I will go take the initiative in the Midwest because the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers have Confederate forts and we don't stop them. People kind of forget sometimes if you look at the map of Kentucky, Illinois is, you know what I mean? Ohio and Illinois are somewhat Southern cities and he said they'll be in Cincinnati. So he raised an on his own initiative at Fort Henry and Donaldson on the Tennessee and the Cumberland river. He took the command and then he showed initiative and he was recognized. And the next thing you knew he was at Shiloh and he was drinking. He was up, he was 17 miles away from the battle. People chastise him. They said he was drunk. He was not drunk, but he had been drinking. He was far from the battlefield. He should headquarters were two and they were completely surprised by a huge army under Albert Sidney Johnson, April 4th and six, I think of 1862 and William to come to Sherman had been declared crazy. And because he'd said correctly that the war would take 300,000 casualties to defeat the South. And he brought in Sherman and he put him on the right wing and Lou Wallace took the wrong world, but he got there and they were completely almost wiped out. They lost about a thousand dead 5,000 on the first day and the South thought they were on the way north and Albert Sidney Johnson got a freak shot in the popular artery behind his knee. He bled to death. There was squabbling, but they had every Southern. Southern general there, Braxton Bragg, Johnston Hardy, Beauregard and even Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was brilliant at the end and they were going to go all the way in and Sherman met Grant and he said, we've had a took a licking today and he said, he said, we took a beating today and Grant just said, beat him tomorrow, lick him tomorrow and he didn't waver. General Buell bought over 20,000 troops. Lou Wallace showed up with 7,500. The next day they pushed the South out and Shiloh was famous. Sherman got his reputation back and was on to fame. Grant was blamed for being surprised. Halleck tried to blame him, but he survived. Sherman supported him and Grant said, thank you. And he said, well, Ulysses, you supported me when I was crazy. And I supported you when you were drunk and we're going to fight together. And the rest is history. He went on to in the Overland campaign at Chattanooga. And then that terrible summer of 1864, when he basically said, Lincoln said, do the terrible arithmetic and, and a series of battles at Petersburg, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, Cold Harbor, the wilderness, I mean the Overland campaign. He wore down Robert E Lee didn't beat Robert E Lee. He confined him to Richmond. And then Sherman pulled up with this magnificent army of 60,000 people through the Carolinas. And that was it. Johnson was a, as we said, a kind of a disaster. Grant was a strong advocate of civil rights and reconstruction. He won the election of 68 after Johnson could not run for a second term. And when I grew up and studied history, he was considered along with Warren Harding, the two worst presidents because of corruption. But the more you examine his record, the more that people around Grant were corrupt, but there was never any suggestion that he was, but he did a lot. He had a lot of internal improvements. He tried to keep reconstruction during his term from 1864 to 1865. In 1869 when he took office all the way to 1877 and then the so-called grand bargain that we talked about that the Electoral College vote would go to the Republicans in exchange for ending reconstruction. But he's now considered because of his civil rights record and because of his generalship. In other words, what I'm saying is most a Halleck, a Hooker, a McClellan, any of those guys, Burnside, if they ran up to him and say, "Oh my gosh, we lost the right wing. We just got a thousand killed and they're rebels." They would panic or they'd withdraw and he wouldn't. He'd say, "Okay, keep them." And he said famously during the Overland campaign, "I'm so tired of hearing what Bobby, Lee is going to do to us. Just worry what we're going to do to him." He was cool. He had kind of a sad post. He viewed the world, the corruption, and then he did a very heroic thing. He was flat broke. For somebody who was supposed to be corrupt, his friends stole money from him and he collapsed. Mark Twain bought his memoirs and he had throat cancer at the age of 63. Beautiful wife, Julia, and they were lifelong partners. And he wrote his memoirs while he was dying with opiates in his. He didn't take opiates because he wanted to be clear, but he took painkillers. That picture of him, he's all shrunk and he's got heavy clothes on and he's writing his memoirs in longhand. And they turned out to be best sellers and they made her $600,000 and he provided for his family and they broke Mark Twain's publishing house because he gave him, I think, 40 or 50 percent royalties. Everybody had a I had a first edition for a while, I don't know if I still, edition. But anyway, he was a great general, one of the greatest, although he had a completely different philosophy than the indirect approach of Sherman. Sherman's idea was to wreck the system that produced the soldiers. His was to wreck the soldiers and not touch the system. And we go back and forth in our own history. World War II, we did both. But Calvin Coolidge, very briefly, he was Warren Harding's vice president. And the room that I'm sitting in, which was kind of a manger and a barn, but it had an upstairs with all the memorabilia. So when I first remodeled it into a garage 20 years ago myself, I went upstairs and hadn't been opened in years. I had to break down the door. It was a little tiny 300 square, and there was a big sign on the wall, a big metal poster, keep cool with Coolidge. And I guess my great grandfather had been a big Coolidge supporter, or my grandfather as well. But he was very quiet, silent cow. He was Harding's vice president. He never thought he was going to be president. Harding died in San Francisco of a heart attack, essentially. And he filled out in August 1923, booming economy. It was a roaring 20s, libertarian economic policy. There was no SEC. It was kind of wild. You read F. Scott Fitzgerald about the period or Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe has a really great description of what life was like in the boom or John Dos Passos maybe. In any case, he ran for re-election and he was elected. He had so from 25 to 29 and he left the presidency eight months before the stock market collapsed. So that was on Hoover, his secretary of commerce. But his whole philosophy was not to be seen, not to be heard and to allow, he had a great confidence in business, an organic business. He was probably the most libertarian president we've had. And the economy boomed under him. You can argue that there was such wild speculation that was growing that he could have clamped down, but he didn't. And Hoover inherited that problem. And so if that had happened Black Tuesday earlier, I think they would have blamed Coolidge. But he was a pretty good president. The American historians hate him. They rated him near last because he was a staunch conservative. Somebody, I think it's even, it's in every book you read about him. He was so silent. A guy, Goldman said, I'm going to bet in the next number of hours that I can get you to say more than two words. And he said, you lose and then shut up. So he was kind of a very New England. He was born in Vermont, but he had been Massachusetts governor. Remember, this is the age in the 20s and 30s that New England was the most conservative area. It was still the puritanical. Strict personal thriftiness, hard work. It wasn't that puritanical. Then under Roosevelt turned into, I'm going to tell everybody what to do. And you're not as holy as I am. Once they lost their God and became secular Puritans, but they weren't secular Puritans. Then they were religious Puritans. And, and he was a very upstanding person. He was a big sponsor like grant of secular Puritans. He was a big sponsor like civil rights. So I would tell all the liberal people who say, well, you know, uh, the Republican party, uh, was really the one that was opposed to civil rights. Uh, we just had a few, no, no, no grant, you know, from 1860 to the 1920s and beyond, uh, Hoover, but, uh, but, um, Harding and Coolidge, uh, and Hoover were all for civil rights as Republicans. This was the Edward Brook type of, he was the first black Senator after reconstruction in Massachusetts. And he represented, and that was, uh, not Rupert Burke, but Edward, Edward broke the Senator in the 1960s and early seventies. He was a black reelected Senator in Massachusetts. He would have never been elected Mississippi or any of the democratic States. So, uh, he, he was a good president, but he wasn't recognized. All right, Victor, well, we're going to go to an ad and then we're going to talk a little bit before we leave, um, on the violent nature of the democratic party or its violent faction. Stay with us for that. 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 unvetted 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 reemerge. We shape 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. You can catch Victor on social media. He is on X. His handle is @VDHanson and on Facebook with Hanson's Morning Cup. So, Victor, I thought Miranda Devine had a great article analyzing the whole situation but she started it out with all the violent nature and she did a great job of showing us El Said saying that Michigan was no longer a place for Rogers. He needed to be out. As a general rule in politics, you collate what a candidate said the day before election and what he says the day after election if he wins. And if they're different, you're in trouble because you realize that he was completely a fraud. So, he with a heavy Arabic accent, Abdul, he gave his whole name and then he really was an unsavory Victor. He started to say, you know, Mike Rogers, you're out of a job. And JD, you're going to have to throw me in. And he started talking and then people were yelling, "Free Palestine." So, you get the impression that for most of the campaign, he told all of his Arab community brothers, "Don't ever come here and say free Palestine." After he was elected, shout out free. And I'm going to tell you, voters of Michigan, maybe you had different reasons for voting. I'm not suggesting you didn't, but this is who you voted for and you're going to have to live with it. And we're going to have to live with it because he is an Islamist racist. That ad that was run was one of the most anti-Semitic ads I've seen, blaming Israel for high prices in the United States. So, and then you had this Professor Galloway who says he wants to, basically, they shoot people like Elon Musk. Yes. Firing squads for Elon Musk. I guess he doesn't think Elon has security. If you believe that, Mr. Galloway, why don't you go up and tell Elon that? See what happens. And there's a reason why he is a truly alien error and why he created from nothing SpaceX and Tesla and the Boring Company and Neuralink and we did completely X. And it's not because he's stupid, because he's a genius we'll never see again. And he's done a lot for this U.S. He's launched more space satellites than the history of the world up to his period. He launched more last year than the whole world combined. And you want to kill this person or you're Robert Reich and you want to confiscate his fortune and nationalize it and turn it into the DMV? I don't think so. You know what Miranda Devine also mentioned, the shellacking that that Haley Stevens took when she chose Rogers. I mean, they don't need to be so violent. They could say, "Well, we really regret that she sided with Rogers." People are foul-mouthed. I don't know why they always put James Carville on there. There were people around Clinton that were. Doug Schoen and Mark Pinn basically wrote the '92 and '96 convention. And when they're on there, they're sober, judicious. They don't do that. I mean, he has a shtick, but when he says that she's of no more use anymore to the Democratic Party than a used condom or prophylactic, it's disgusting. And I don't know why he does that. not normal or he's not in control of his. cognitive abilities. But they're very vicious people. A lot of us get into, on the right, we get into this fallacy that because they're humanitarians and they wanted to redistribute money and they care for the poor, come give us your poor. They're not. No, that's a psychological mechanism. They're very self-interested and they're interested in power, just like the Bolsheviks, just like the Jacobins, just like the 1848 anarchists. That's who they are. And this whole thing about being humanitarian and caring, I'm worried about. Just look how they live. Look where they live. Look how they live. Look at where their children go to school. They're all about status and making. Look at Nancy Pelosi. Just look at her and her husband and tell me that she's a humanitarian. Look what she came into the Congress with, and look what she's going to exit with. Her palatial Italian villa up in Napa or her mansion in San. Anyway. Well, did you see the guy who slapped the TPS at USA? Wow, that was something. Just for talking. The kid was so polite and he said, you don't have any data. And he just screamed and yelled. He was like a Karen, only he's a male Karen. He started screaming, and I said, wait a minute, I'm not supposed to say Karen anymore. I've been rebuked for that. But he was a poet. I thought poets were sensitive. No, he's a leftist. And he slapped that kid. And he could have hurt him because it was just a cheap shot. If he really wanted to confront him and he was so angry, he should have said, let's go to it. But he's a coward. And it was a backhanded slap. It was hard. It was a Parthian shot. He was leaving and he just. But they did arrest him. Yeah. And I hope they put him in. I hope he's sued for assault. Yeah. Civilly. Just, I know we're coming to a hard stop here, but I just wanted to let your audience know that in this violent nature of the left, that in Philadelphia this weekend, they are having an anti-Semitic celebration. It has to be on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht. And that's in our city of love, Philadelphia, this weekend. And that will be a left. Parade, I guess. Yeah. Think of that, everybody, that this democratic affiliated group is picking the anniversary that is really regarded as the first open acknowledgement in Nazi Germany that we were going to kill Jews and nobody's going to do anything about it. And they killed Jews that night and they drove them out and they destroyed their stores. And they are going to march to commemorate that as a good thing. And they have the names of all these stores and they're going to each one of them. And let's see who's. Let's not just see who on the democratic side is. Well, we deplore anti-Semitic. Done. I said it. No, no. I'm talking about people who go out there. Why don't you see Haikam Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, Elizabeth Warren, walk out and tell. I challenge here right now, each democratic leader, you sit in front of those stores. Get a chair and just sit there. So they have to come through you before they attack the Jewish store or the owner. None of them will do that. They are siding with the people who are doing this. Let's see what else I eat. And it doesn't do any good. Like El Said says, I didn't support that ad. Oh, my uncle did it? It works? Okay. Go run it. But I don't support it. I'm sick of those people. And so. So it's getting scary. And the democratic party is. The people on the right have said they're done with people on the right that do that. But not on the left. That is the party now. And you. Ilyan Omar, it's the baby. It's the Benjamin's baby. Haikam Jeffries, you Jews, don't think you're not going to be target if you keep supporting Israel. That was a direct threat to Jews. Anyway. And the Democrats. And just so people know also that Soros was planning on sponsoring a protest if there hadn't been a blue tsunami in San Diego. And that was going to get heavily funded. So they were planning. They're always planning these violent actions. Look at George Floyd. One day at January 6th, and Kamala Harris says it's worse than Pearl Harbor and 9-11, and four months, and 38 people killed, and 2 billion in damage, and 1,500 officers. And she said, this isn't going to stop, nor should it stop. It's going to go on to election day. You hear that? She said that on national TV. Yeah. And people should note the difference in the Republicans who just had a terrible loss in the election and we're not seeing violence coming out. So thank you to the audience for joining us this Saturday. And thank you, Victor, for the words of wisdom. And this is Sam. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.