Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve had more melodramas in the news about the relations between the Trump administration, the Pentagon, and interdicting drug transfers, smuggling by sea to the United States. We all know the story that President Donald Trump has ordered these drug boats, which leave, mostly, the coast of Venezuela on their way to, essentially, spread poison in the United States, to be destroyed. What is the point of contention now? One of the drug boats was not completely obliterated, but then a second hit was needed to finish the job. The Left immediately seized on that and said it was an execution of prisoners and that Donald Trump, via War Secretary Pete Hegseth, had ordered—or perhaps Pete Hegseth on his own had ordered—something like to “kill them all.” Even though The New York Times denied that very report from The Washington Post. So, what is going on? We had Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we had the admirals involved testify. And they said there was no “kill them all” order, but they did testify to what is logical. And what is logical is, if you’re trying to take out a hostile boat or a hostile asset, and you partially take it out, then you always follow up, unless the people that were in there raise their hands or they swim away. But when they’re grabbing on the boat, as the video’s revealed, and the boat is still somewhat viable, then you’re going to do what? Say, “We only get one chance to stop you, and maybe you can get in the boat and go back and try again”? I don’t think that’s how it works in war. If you’re in World War II and you’re in a Sherman tank and you see a Tiger, and you get a shot and you knock off the tracks, and all of a sudden you see people coming out of the tank and they don’t have their hands up and they’re clinging to the tank, you just say, “Well, we only had one chance to get them. I can’t shoot them now because they’re not as capable as they were before I first hit the … ” I don’t think that’s how it works. But more importantly is the Left’s attitude. Two or three senators were suggesting, once again, that the military and the officers at the Pentagon and the regional commanders should think very carefully about obeying an order from Donald Trump. And the implication is: You can disobey them if you feel, in your considered opinion, as legal or psychiatric scholars, that they are unconstitutional. This is very dangerous. We saw the “Seditious Six,” the congresspeople who ordered, basically, 1.3 million in the military to consider very carefully the lawfulness or the legality of every order they receive from every commander, which would create chaos and destroy the military if anybody were to take them up on their views. But now we’re getting senators that are telling individual high-ranking officers, “You can disobey an order coming out of the White House.” This is deja vu. Does anybody remember the first administration? Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did precisely that. He appointed himself as a lawyer and a psychiatrist, and he said, “If I get an order from Donald Trump that I feel is dangerous—i.e., existential—I’m gonna call up my PLA, People’s Liberation Army, counterpart in China.” And that’s what he did, perhaps on two occasions. And he said, essentially, and he bragged about this, “If I get an order, I will tell you first.” So, basically, under pressure from the Left, he said, “Well, I told our communist enemies that if I ever get an order I disagree with and think is dangerous, I’m gonna tip off the communists that we may be attacking and therefore, I won’t attack.” That was high treason, if you think about it. We had two lieutenant colonels in the first Trump administration, retired lieutenant colonels, who actually wrote and said that the military should remove Donald Trump from office and that they felt that Trump’s “little green men” would not be able to withstand the 82nd Airborne Division. So, you can see what they were envisioning, some kind of armed conflict over the succession of the presidency. Then we had a number of high-ranking four-star generals and admirals who said things in the first administration that were absolutely contrary to Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: “Donald Trump is a liar,” “Donald Trump is Mussolini,” “Donald Trump is Hitlerite,” “Donald Trump should be removed sooner than later.” That set the precedent, and now we’re seeing an exaggeration, an amplification, an increase in that very dangerous rhetoric. And the fact is that no one has ever shown that anybody in the military got a “kill prisoners” order from the secretary of defense or the presidency. On the other hand, as the admirals and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have testified, if you are supposed to take out an enemy who is conducting offensive operations against your country—and that’s what smuggling dangerous drugs that have killed 70,000 people a year is—and you hit them and it blows a portion of the boat up, and then you see people still on the boat and trying to get away, what do you say then? “Marquess of Queensberry Rules apply”? “We only get one hit and therefore, because you escaped us, we can’t do it again”? No. We don’t do that. It wasn’t as if people swam off in the middle of the water and raised their hands up and said, “I surrender.” What is going on here? It’s a deliberate effort by the Left to undermine the chain of command and ultimately, the commander in chief itself. And the irony is, all of these senators and representatives and the media are talking about unconstitutionality. What they’re doing is unconstitutional. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Real Unconstitutionality? Undermining the Commander in Chief appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A Heritage Foundation expert is calling for the United States to respond to the European Union’s fine on the social media platform X and on owner Elon Musk, with sanctions on EU officials and restrictions of travel, including preventing them from attending next year’s World Cup festivities in the U.S. “We should sanction EU, European Commission officials who are responsible for fining Elon Musk and X,” Nile Gardiner, director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told The Daily Signal in an interview Monday. “They should not be welcome in the United States. They should be banned from attending the World Cup next summer.” The EU announced a $140 million fine on X Friday. The European Commission defended the fine as a response to X allegedly misleading users by allowing users to purchase a blue check mark, an identifier that previously symbolized verification. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the fine as an attack on Americans. “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on [X,] it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” he posted on the platform. “The days of censoring Americans online are over. The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on @X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.The days of censoring Americans online are over.— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) December 5, 2025 Musk called for the abolition of the EU in response. “The people of Europe should withdraw from the EU to regain their sovereignty,” he posted on X. The people of Europe should withdraw from the EU to regain their sovereignty https://t.co/QTbkSgePrh— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 6, 2025 Attack on Free Speech Gardiner framed the fine as an attack on free speech. “This is about power and control,” he said. “EU bureaucrats couldn’t care less about blue ticks and who buys them. What they care about is controlling content and the messaging.” “The European Union is an Orwellian nightmare and the European Commission thrives on controlling what people can and cannot say within the EU, which is why X is a huge threat to their whole modus operandi,” Gardiner added. “X is a very powerful force that undermines the Orwellian power of Brussels,” he argued. “They want to make it as expensive as possible for X to operate in Europe, in order to suppress freedom of speech.” The Twitter Files revealed European involvement in the massive pressure campaigns to force social media companies like Twitter to censor speech governments like the EU deemed to be “misinformation.” “We have seen a real revolution on thinking on U.S. policy towards Europe in the last year and Elon Musk is rightly advancing this revolution by standing up to the European Commission,” Gardiner noted. “Three cheers for Elon Musk for standing up for freedom, democracy, sovereignty, and self-determination!” Gardiner noted that X has allowed the British public to highlight many scandals, including the horrifying trend of men of Pakistani heritage forming “grooming gangs” to sexually abuse young women. “If we didn’t have X, we wouldn’t have seen this big spotlight on the grooming gangs scandal, we would not have seen the massive focus we have today on thousands of British citizens being arrested for their views and thoughts and free speech,” Gardiner noted. “If we didn’t have X in Europe, I would fear for the future of Europe—which is why the EU elites fear it so greatly.” Why Oppose the EU? Gardiner described the EU as a force against self-determination and sovereignty for European nations. “The European Union is not remotely democratic. It’s about power, it’s about the centralization of power in Brussels,” he said. “It is about trampling upon the sovereignty, the independence, the self-determination of European nation states.” “The EU behaves like a dictatorship,” he added. “It is a modern-day form of tyranny in Europe. Elon Musk is right, it’s time for the people of Europe to throw off the shackles of the EU and declare their freedom.” He compared the EU’s grand project to those of French Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. “The EU follows in the ambitions of Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin,” Gardiner said. “They all tried to create a centralized Europe and they all failed. The European Union also is failing and it will collapse.” He said the United States should adopt a formal policy of calling “for every European Union member state to hold a referendum” like the 2016 Brexit referendum in which British citizens voted to leave the EU. “The United States must always stand for freedom, democracy, and self-determination,” Gardiner declared. He praised President Donald Trump for fighting back against the EU and predicted that the union would collapse “in the next 2-3 decades.” Gardiner said his proposal to sanction EU officials and to ban their travel to the U.S. “will have a real impact in Europe” due to the popularity of soccer across the Atlantic. Neither the European Commission nor the U.S. State Department responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. The post US Should Sanction EU Over Elon Musk Fine, Block World Cup Attendance, Heritage Expert Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy is garnering support across the conservative movement. On Friday, the Department of State released its new National Security Strategy—a policy paper detailing the administration’s priorities across the world. To some in the conservative orbit, it is a 33-page crystallization of just how the Trump movement wants to re-think America’s role in the world. The paper advocates a new idea of America’s regional priorities: domination of the Western Hemisphere, shifting away from foreign aid and ideological influence campaigns in Africa, restoring peace and socio-economic vitality to Europe, and ending the policies that have made America cower before China on the world stage. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who sits on the Senate armed services committee, told The Daily Signal it is a welcome pivot away from misguided strategies of the past. “This strategy gets the priorities right. It reasserts American leadership in our own Hemisphere where border security, cartel violence, and foreign encroachment threaten our people, and it meets the China challenge with the strength and clarity we’ve lacked for decades. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who sits on the Senate armed services committee, wrote in a statement to The Daily Signal. Some of Scmitt’s Democrat colleagues in the senate, however, expressed their dismay that America will not be pursuing interventionist policies in the name of liberally-construed human rights. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., wrote on X that it “abandons the idea that we should stand up for freedom & human rights around the world,” and “lectures our European allies & embraces authoritarian leaders.” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., for instance, wrote on X that it “would weaken U.S. influence across the globe and undermine our national security.” In Schmitt’s mind, however, the new National Security Strategy “defines clear interests, aligns power to purpose, and rejects the fantasy that America can remake the world at will.” “Strength is used to deter war, not to chase endless nation-building,” the Missouri senator continued. “This strategy restores the first duty of government: to defend the American people. It secures our borders, rebuilds our industrial and military strength, and makes clear that our path to peace is through national power.” Dan Caldwell, a former Senior Adviser in the Pentagon, appears to agree with Schmitt’s assessment that the Trump administration is seeking to abandon the failed foreign policy of prior administrations. The strategy “is a true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus – a consensus that drove us headlong into endless wars and enabled free-riding by our allies,” Caldwell told The Daily Signal in a statement. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also praised the paper’s emphasis on hemispheric hegemony in a statement to The Daily Signal. “The Biden administration neglected our hemisphere to America’s detriment. Now we must contend with narco-terrorists, cartels, and Chinese influence. The NSS is an important first step in reasserting U.S. hegemony in our hemisphere and to make Americans safe and prosperous,” the Utah senator said. In many ways, the paper proposes a resurrection of the nineteenth-century idea of America having a duty to dominate its neighborhood. It explicitly calls for a “‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” wherein neighboring governments would cooperate with the United States to combat criminals, “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” and “ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images) Rob Greenway, director of the national security center at the Heritage Foundation and a former Deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, told The Daily Signal in a statement that he believes the document provides “timely context to what has been a successful tenure, and the thinking that will guide the nation going forward.” Middle East De-Emphasized In the Middle East, the White House argues that, despite the fact that the region has been a focus of American military strength for decades, it is in fact not as strategically important as many suggest. “Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe,” it reads, arguing that Israel and America’s strikes on Iran, as well as the recently negotiated ceasefire with Hamas, have brought new stability. “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over,” it bluntly states. “Not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was. Curt Mills, executive editor of The American Conservative, writes often about America’s regional priorities and argues that America funding and fighting wars is often to its detriment. Over all, he told The Daily Signal he is not surprised by the paper’s opposition to nation-building projects. “A document that just declared that the US is going to be back in the Middle East in a major way, I think, would have been fairly shocking. That’s not what Trump has been saying,” Mills told The Daily Signal. “That’s not what his subordinates generally espouse… it’s just a question of whether or not there’s the follow-through.” Curt Mills, editor-in-chief of The American Conservative. (Dominic Gwinn/ Middle East Images/AFP) Cool Down of Cold War with China? The lengthiest section—subtitled, “Win the Economic Future, Prevent Military Confrontation”— is on Asia, where the administration views America’s relationship with China as flawed but sees possibility for a positive relationship.  The paper calls for a rebalancing of the Sino-American economic relationship by reducing reliance on Chinese imports, combatting intellectual property theft, and finding new trading partners.  To ensure peace in the Pacific and the independence of Taiwan, it calls for building up a powerful military “to deter and prevent a large-scale military conflict.” However, Mills pointed out that the China policy appeared less hawkish than one might expect. The Asia section calls for “balanced” trade with China, rather than an embargo, and advocates taking steps to prevent military conflict. “This does not sound like an administration that wants a protracted kinetic war with China anytime soon, let alone a protracted economic war,” Mills said. New Policies For Europe and Africa In addition to the paper’s call for a revived Monroe Doctrine, it advocates reevaluating America’s role in Africa and Europe. In the brief section on Africa, for example, the authors call on America to “transition from an aid-focused relationship with Africa to a trade- and investment-focused relationship.” The White House proposes an America-first Africa strategy, in which “harnessing Africa’s abundant natural resources and latent economic potential” is the focus, rather than promoting “liberal ideology.” In the lengthier section on Europe, the paper includes much more explicitly civilizational goals, as it laments the continent’s “strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” it reads. At the top of the White House’s list of policy priorities is “reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia,” an effort Trump has been engaged in since his inauguration. A Global Rebalancing? What is clear is that the administration does not believe it can be everywhere at once—that some regions are simply more important than others when it comes to American national security. Greenway of the Heritage Foundation told The Daily Signal of the realignment of priorities, “I expect it will require a shift in resources -to include personnel- to the western hemisphere and possibly Asia to align with the administration’s priorities.” Still, Mills recommends that readers watch the administration’s actions more than its policy papers. “It’s very interesting. I think it’s much better than a bad NSS, but this isn’t the Magna Carta of Trumpism,” said Mills. “The President has many virtues, but I would say drafting policy documents, reading policy documents, and sticking to specific details of policy is not exactly his modus operandi.” The post Trump’s New National Security Strategy Garners Support Across Conservative Movement appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Recent reports suggest the Trump administration is considering a request by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to ease export controls in order to sell more advanced Artificial Intelligence chips to China. Specifically, Huang is lobbying the White House to permit Nvidia to sell China significant quantities of its H200 chip. This would be a colossal mistake. The H200 chip is far more powerful than the best chips China can manufacture today and is several times more powerful than the best chips China can legally purchase from the U.S. today. The Heritage Foundation has been a strong supporter of export controls on advanced chip sales to China, calling on the U.S. government to “limit Chinese access to advanced technology with dual-use applications” in our landmark paper on the New Cold War in 2023. In an October 2025 article for the Washington Examiner, Bryan Burack and I argued that it “makes little strategic sense to invigorate China’s AI industry, which is starved of computing resources, at a time when U.S. AI firms are hungry for more. Doing so would only help China build superior AI models, globalize Chinese AI products to compete with the U.S. ‘AI stack,’ and aid China’s military modernization.” Export controls need to be carefully monitored for effectiveness. China has already spent countless billions evading existing U.S. export controls and enforcement must be strengthened. On the other hand, if China is able to develop competitive substitutes for U.S. chips at comparable scale and reliability, export controls will have to be reevaluated and updated. In the long run, the AI race will be won by the side that is most successful at protecting its technological edge while simultaneously innovating and winning global market share. As the AI Action plan states, “Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global standards and reap economic and military benefits.” For now, the United States is winning the AI race. Selling China large quantities of H200 chips would give America’s top adversary something it vitally needs to catch, and potentially surpass, the U.S. The leaders of China’s AI industry have repeatedly admitted that their principal constraint is compute capacity and high bandwidth memory; we should take them at their word. The Trump administration’s own AI Action Plan rightly argues: “Denying our foreign adversaries access to [advanced AI compute] is a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security.”  We trust President Donald Trump will make the right decision and deny H200 sales to China. The post Don’t Feed the Beast: America Should Not Be Sending H200 Chips to China appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Firebrand progressive Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, has made it official—she is entering the Texas Senate Race in 2026. On Monday, ahead of an anticipated “special announcement” in Dallas, a Texas Democratic Party spokesperson confirmed to Fox News that Crockett had filed her candidacy. Crockett released a campaign video on Monday that simply showed Crockett sitting in front of a gray background, wearing all black, and silently listening to names President Donald Trump has called her in the past. Jasmine Crockett's launch video for Senate was unlisted on YouTube and it's just President Trump calling her a "low IQ person" over and over again haha. pic.twitter.com/40WBvRBM0P— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 8, 2025 “Jasmine Crockett’s launch video for Senate was unlisted on YouTube and it’s just President Trump calling her a ‘low IQ person’ over and over again,” Greg Price, a GOP strategist and consultant, posted on X. Monday was the day of the filing deadline to run for the United States Senate. The same day, former Rep. Colin Allred cancelled his bid for Senate in the Lone Star State, instead opting for a run for Texas’ 33rd Congressional District. With Allred out of the primary, she will have to contend with Democrat state Rep. James Talarico, who has amassed a large social media following and appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The senate primary is heating up on the Republican side, too. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, an incumbent of over two decades, is up for reelection in 2026 and is facing primary challenges from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas. The 2026 Texas Senate primaries for both parties will take place on March 3, 2026—in roughly three months. If no candidate receives over 50% of the vote in either of the primaries, a runoff election will be triggered on May 26, in which the top two candidates in a primary would face off. Crockett, 44, is originally from Missouri, and later moved to Texas, and has served in the House of Representatives since 2021, building a reputation as a firebrand after a viral verbal spat with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. In 2024, for example, she delivered an impassioned response to Republicans’ opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices in a House committee hearing, telling them, “There has been no oppression for the white man in this country. You tell me which White men were dragged out of their homes.” Crockett added, “Don’t let it escape you that it is white men on this side of the aisle telling us, people of color on this side of the aisle, that y’all are the ones being oppressed, that y’all are the ones that are being harmed. That’s not the definition of oppression.” In 2025, she referred to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who is wheelchair-bound, as “Governor Hot Wheels.” Crockett’s candidacy reinforces a major reshuffling of the Texas U.S. House map, with court-affirmed redistricting legislation appearing likely to flip nearly a half dozen Democrat-held seats and many prominent Republican House members choosing to depart for other offices or for retirement. The post CROCKETT LAUNCH: Jasmine Crockett Announces Bid for Texas Senate Seat appeared first on The Daily Signal.