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Victor Davis Hanson Unpacks Trump’s Appeal
Why do so many Americans love Donald Trump? How has the former president changed since he left office and has faced significant legal attacks from the left? Historian Victor Davis Hanson, author of the newly updated “The Case for Trump,” analyzes Trump and what he means to the American people.
This transcript is lightly edited, for length and clarity.
Rob Bluey: You are out with an updated version of your fantastic book, “The Case for Trump,” newly updated and revised for the 2024 presidential election. So much has changed since you first published the book in 2019, including as you write, some remarkable things that have happened to Donald Trump, and frankly are happening in real time, even as we do this interview, in terms of whom he’s having to face off against for this presidential election.
What was the motivation for you to update and write a new introduction for this book?
Victor Davis Hanson: I was curious that people had not remarked that from Donald Trump’s status on January 7th of 2021 until I wrote the preface for the new book that was finished in April: It was really the most remarkable comeback in American political history, even more impressive than Richard Nixon’s phoenixlike rise after losing the [California] gubernatorial election to Pat Brown in 1962.
I mean, so I wanted to know why that was and … part of the reason, of course, when I started the introduction, everybody was talking that [former South Carolina Gov. Nikki] Haley or [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis … was going to easily win it.
They were ahead of him in the polls, and then a series of miscalculations on the part of the Left, this use of lawfare. It started with a Mar-a-Lago raid, and then it accelerated into the Fani Willis-Alvin Bragg-the E. Jean Carroll—the Letitia James and the Jack Smiths in succession. And that was all juxtaposed to the asymmetrical treatment that was given by [special counsel] Robert Hur to [President] Joe Biden for probably just as egregious, if more egregious, removal of files. And all of the people who had never been tried under these statutes, whether in Georgia or … in Manhattan.
And then I tried to juxtapose that again with two impeachments never happened, impeachment and a trial of a private citizen. We never had that. Sixteen states tried to remove him from the ballot. And of course, we had the collusion that continued on well after [former FBI Director] Robert Mueller; it still does. And then we had the laptop disinformation that discredited those 51 intelligence [agents]. So, I charted that step-by-step, insidious attack on him and the boomerang effect that it had.
And then there grew up in an admiration for Trump that anything that didn’t kill him seemed to be in a Nietzschean sense to make him stronger.
Bluey: You called it a miscalculation on the part of the Left in terms of the lawfare. Why do you think that that backfired in the way that it did?
Hanson: I think they were too blatant. I think what really got them in trouble was, again, this asymmetrical, the people said, Well, Joe Biden, for 30 years as a senator, took out files. And he never notified anybody, contrary to what he claimed until he appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel.
Then, he got worried that somebody might investigate him. So, then he kind of in a false, pseudo-manner came forward and said, “Maybe I have some.” And then the more you learned about it, his ghostwriter was having, had access to those classified files, which he didn’t have with security clearance. And then he destroyed subpoena evidence from Robert Hur. He wanted to get the transcripts and the tapes, and he destroyed them.
He was not prosecuted. I think anybody looked at the photos of Joe Biden’s garage compared to Mar-a-Lago saw that it was far less secure. He had more multiple places to put these files.
And finally, that just became overwhelming. People just said, “Well, if Robert Hur thinks he’s guilty, but he’s cognitively unable,” that was very, that was the beginning of this kind of consensus.
Well, if he’s cognitive, unable, and think some things, then he’s cognitively unable to be president. And that kind of trailed on, all the way to the removal of [Biden as candidate].
The same argument arose again. If he’s unable to be a candidate, then he’s unable to be president. And then the kind of the doctoring, these performance art, virtue-signaling way in which they raided Mar-a-Lago, the sort of sloppy rearrangement of the files as if Donald Trump had them all scattered over the floor.
It was just one thing after another. People just kind of said, “These people are out of control.”
And then, the judges especially, they were, whether it was [Judges Juan Marchan or Arthur Engoron], they were partisans. They were Democratic. Their families were Democratic. They had said things in the past.
The Letitia James and Fani Willis and Alvin Braggs boast that they were going to “get” Trump, the use of that boast for campaign fundraising. I think the American people, finally said, this is, as Trump said, a rigged, rigged series of indictments.
Bluey: As you mentioned, it’s not that Trump didn’t face opposition. There were a number of formidable Republicans, including the governor of Florida, quite popular coming off a significant victory in his second [election], to earn a second term, and Nikki Haley.
Why do you believe that the Republican or conservative voters decided it was better to stick with Trump than go with an alternative like one of them?
Hanson: Their argument was ostensibly logical. Their argument was, “We support the MAGA agenda, but we don’t have the baggage of Donald Trump,”, baggage which they defined as tweeting or extraneous comments or something, as he said about Nikki Haley’s racial heritage. And they would say, We won’t do that, but we can enforce the border. We’ll get tough on China, et cetera, et cetera, in the MAGA sense of a populist, nationalist party. And the more that people saw them, they concluded two things: No. 1, that Trump, the person, was integral to the MAGA agenda just because he gave a sense that he was not a politician.
He didn’t care what happened to him. And he was their bulldog that they would cut the leash and point in the right direction. Or the others, although they were excellent politicians, they still did not have the ability to shock the world.
And we thought that was a positive trait, but the electorate, I think, thought it was negative.
The other thing is, and I pointed this out in the end, they were put in an impossible situation because as this unfair and really indiscriminate use of the legal system to punish an ex-president and leading campaign, their reaction to it was a lose-lose situation.
Because if they sympathize with what Trump was going through, then they were aiding the Trump cause. If they objected to what Trump was doing, then they were seen as traitorous and siding with the lawfare.
So, they tried to find, both of them tried to find a middle ground where they would say something like, This should have never happened, but it wouldn’t have happened to me because I wouldn’t have exposed myself to what they were trying to do to me. And that was the perfect, seemingly, that was the perfect squaring the circle, but it tended to, for the electorate, think, well, “You’re just trying to excuse what they’re doing.”
They would go after you, no matter what you said. And they never could resolve that dichotomy.
Bluey: Does it surprise you at all that Donald Trump, being this obviously very successful businessman from New York, somebody who doesn’t necessarily seem like an everyday American, yet still has this popular appeal with so many individuals across this country.
In all 50 states, obviously, he’s not competitive in all 50, but I mean, there are MAGA movements all over this country. What is it about his character, personality, or policies that makes him so popular?
Hanson: Two things: When he came in, in 2015, the Bush-McCain-Romney consensus was that the white working class, I think John McCain called them “Hobbits” or “crazies.” Their view of the white working class was similar to the Hillary [Clinton] “deplorable” or “clinger” [Barack] Obama view.
And they felt they were a liability. And they, remember, they had picked, I thought, a completely unqualified head of the [Republican National Committee] Michael Steele, to emulate Obama. And they had this position paper that said, We’re going to lose, because demographics are against us, and they’re bringing in people. And they were for open borders.
And so, the idea was, We have to play down the rule of law. We have to go with the flow. We have to out-Obama, Obama.
Trump came in and said, No, all you have to do is be authentic and protect the rights of people based on their class, the middle class. And I’ll try to make a radical change. I will try to substitute class for race, so that somebody who lives along the border who’s Mexican American will have more in common with me than the Harvard B.A., Senate staffer who runs for his congressional [district] that happens to be Hispanic. So, that really helped him that he said, We’re going to look at the class.
And he said in particular the white working class is not spent. The reason that the Republicans have lost seven, haven’t won 51% of the popular vote since the defeat of Michael Dukakis [in 1988] was because people aren’t voting.
They’re not getting out. They have no reason. They feel that McCain or Romney or the Bushes are the same as the … whether that’s true or not, that was a perception.
And then I think the other thing was authenticity.
I mentioned in the original book that he came to Tulare, California. They always have the props up there. They have hay bales. They give the guy the Caterpillar hats about 20 miles, 25 miles from where I’m speaking today, my farm, and it was [then-Rep] Devin Nunes’ [congressional district in California].
He would always remark on that, that Republicans would come. They would put on work shirts, bluejeans, boots, and then they would not twang, but they would kind of do what Hillary or Kamala Harris or Obama did. They would modulate their persona.
The particular day that Trump came, and I’m just using this as an example of what he did across the country: It was about 105 [degrees]. He wore a black suit, the red tie, the black shoes, the grating Queens accent, and he never changed.
He was sweating. He still had his orange tan, his blond hair, and people thought, whatever he is, he’s authentic. And when he goes in front of the black journalists, most Republican candidates would not have replied the way he did.
They would have been polite, much more polite, but they would have accepted the premise that it was kind of rigged, that Kamala Harris deliberately said she was going to go, then backed out, that he was late, there was no Zoom, and yet he authentically said, I don’t care what people say, I’m going to attack a black female journalist because what she did was misleading to me.
That’s what he did. So, they feel that whatever audience he’s confronting or addressing or whatever interview, he’s always the same.
And from what we just saw about Kamala Harris, when she’s with an LGBT community, she sounds like she’s a San Francisco politician. When she addresses a black audience in the South, and she starts to say, “you all.” And just like Hillary did, you know, I came, I had come too far … and that kind of stuff.
And people don’t, I think that’s, they don’t like that. They don’t like that modulation.
Bluey: I agree. And seeing how Trump reacted to that first question at the [National Association of Black Journalists] conference was so classic Trump.
I mean, he, as you said, was not willing to accept the premise and was willing to call out the journalist for doing it. So, I think that that authenticity does speak. …
You talked about, and you write about in this updated version, how he’s overcome the adversity. And obviously, your book, you had to have this published at a certain point. There have been a lot of developments just within the last month, the month of July, and we can start with the assassination attempt and talk about bouncing back from a traumatic experience.
Tell me about your observations about how Trump has reacted to that fateful moment.
Hanson: That could not be scripted, and he came within a quarter-inch of having his brains blown out. That’s traumatic.
I was embedded twice in Iraq, and on the second time coming home, a rocket came and hit the tarmac and bounced up or it would have got all of us. … The point I’m making is that all was going through his head, and yet he went right back on the campaign trail, and people acted, they were making fun of him—It wasn’t really a head shot. It was his ear. Maybe it was glass. Maybe it was shrapnel.
I mean, it was pretty incredible how the Left just went right after him.
He deserved it, et cetera. And yet he was on phase, and he got right back into the campaign. And he couldn’t have scripted that. So, I think it reminded people that, at 78, … he took all of these [COVID-19] drugs they gave him, monoclonal antibodies … and all of a sudden he was out bragging about monoclonal antibodies—I love those antibodies. You’ve got to all take those antibodies. Look at me. I feel strong. I’m robust.
Well, I don’t care how robust he is. If you have a 102 temperature, and you have pneumonia, starting to get pneumonia, and you’re in the hospital, and five days later, you’re addressing 80,000 people, y.ou cannot feel well. And yet no one, I don’t think anybody’s ever seen Trump sick or feel like he’s sick.
Or he never says, “I don’t feel well today.” So, there’s something that’s almost supernatural about his ability to get very little sleep. And that radiates, especially it was vis-a-vis Biden.
And so that was the remarkable thing about the [assassination bid]. If I could just say that he’s going to have a very tough race because everybody says, well, the Democrats are going to be playing catch-up because they don’t have an official candidate. They sort of coronated Kamala Harris. They removed Biden. There’s all sorts of hypocrisies and lying involved in that process that can come out.
But everyone knows that Kamala Harris has the same cognitive inability to communicate that Joe Biden did, but for different reasons. And they have a paradigm in 2020 that overcame that.
They put Biden off-limits to reporters. He didn’t address large crowds. He never gave a non-teleprompted speech.
They counted on this new change, where 70% of the electorate and most of the swing states would not vote on Election Day, and the majority that did that would be Democrats … .The rejection rate dived … as the amount of ballots swarmed. And then finally, they repackaged Joe as “old Joe Biden from Scranton, the moderate [who] was going to unite us.”
They feel that that worked. And you can already see that, in the 13 days that she’s been anointed, and Biden withdrew from the race, she hasn’t given an interview. She hasn’t spoken to a crowd that’s unscripted.
When she was at the tarmac [last week] with the hostages [returning from Russia], she just had one minute to explain. And in that one minute, she confirmed every suspicion that she cannot speak.
She just said,This is the art of diplomacy, and diplomacy is very important, and I really support diplomacy. And even Joe Biden, in his challenged state, looked at her like he was, “What is she saying?”
I can’t fathom them. So, they’re going to keep her off the campaign trail. They’re going to rely on early and mail balloting. And as we also see, they’re going to say there is no such thing as Kamala Harris prior to July 21.
This is the new, new Kamala Harris.
Bluey: That’s right. They will. And unfortunately, many people in the legacy and establishment media will go along with that, as we’ve already seen in the time since she’s been introduced.
Hanson: And remember, we don’t have two years to refute that. They only have 90 days, some 90 days.
So, that was my original point, that Trump has an enormous obstacle, that given the time that will be eaten up by the Olympics or the Democratic Convention or the debates, he doesn’t have a lot of time to redefine her. So, redefine her.
And I know that everybody on the conservative side wants to point out that she did adopt a different identity for the audience she was speaking to.
She had an amorous relationship with [former San Francisco Mayor] Willie Brown that really jump-started her [career]. She had an undistinguished career as a prosecutor both in San Francisco and statewide as California attorney general, but unfortunately for them, they don’t have time to do that.
I don’t see that, to get into that stuff, all they have time to do is to say, “This is what she was for” [and] show the clips. This is the most radical presidential candidate; far more radical than Jimmy Carter or Mike Dukakis or George McGovern. This is what she did as vice president, and this is what she will do if she’s [president], and if they can just hammer that in the way that the late [GOP campaign consultant] Lee Atwater did on Michael Dukakis.
It was very similar. He came off as he kept saying, I’ve been looking at that campaign.
[Dukakis] kept saying, “I’m not ideological. I’m not a liberal. I’m a competent governor. It’s about competence. It’s about technocracy. I engineered the Massachusetts miracle. This is not about George Bush, the conservative, or me, the Massachusetts liberal.”
Then Lee Atwater stepped up and said, “Yes, it is. Here’s the Willie Horton ad. Here’s the tank ad. Here’s the Boston Harbor ad.” And when I got done, Atwater said, “I’m going to take the bark off you.”
And the reason I’m mentioning this is Dukakis on August 1st [of 1988] was 17 points ahead in the polls. And when they got done with him, he lost almost by 8 points. It’s the same time frame that Trump has to work in. But the difference was, Lee Atwater sort of hijacked the Bush, elder Bush, aristocratic campaign. And once he was successful, if you remember, he died shortly of a brain tumor. He was asked to apologize to Dukakis.
Everybody said, “We’re never going to do that again.” Basically, the Republican establishment said, at the national level, we would rather win ugly—excuse me, “We would rather lose nobly than win ugly.”
And they never did quite that again, against Obama or Bill Clinton, and the result is, they’ve lost seven out of the last eight popular votes, and they’ve never won 51% since.
So, Donald Trump, if he wants to win, is going to have to be, doesn’t have to be ad hominem. In fact, he shouldn’t, but he has to show everybody who [Harris] is, and why she won’t run on her record, and why she won’t tell us that she’s still proud of being a radical.
And if he does that, he will win in the way that Bush did. If he doesn’t, he will lose.
Bluey: You are a Californian, a native Californian. You obviously saw Kamala Harris up close in her variety of roles that she held in the Bay Area and then as a U.S. senator from California. You describe her as the most radical candidate, progressive Democratic candidate who’s ever run for president.
Are there specific policy issues that stand out in your mind that you think would resonate with voters if Trump were to focus on them?
Hanson: She was the one that told us in California that you cannot use the word “illegal alien,” even though we had the large, we had more illegal aliens at the time than all the other states put together. And we were running massive deficits. We still are. We have a $50 billion deficit.
We have the fourth-largest reserves of natural gas and oil in the country. And yet, we’re the biggest consumer of oil. And we’re not using it.
We’re importing $25 billion of energy from places like Kuwait and before, probably again, Iran, all these illiberal regimes. And she was the one who banned, as attorney general—she just toured the state—no fracking, no more offshore drilling, no horizontal drilling. And so, we have all of this energy that just sits there where we pay the highest prices of gas in the country.
She was the one who was spearheading as … attorney general, this disastrous initiative, and she assured everybody, if you decriminalized theft, and that means that anything under $950 would be a misdemeanor, then you will have less crime, and you won’t have crowded prisons.
And everybody said, well, the criminals are not stupid. They’re going to know what $950 is, and they’re going to steal $800 so they don’t commit a felony.
And she thought that was absurd, and that’s exactly what happened. She was the one that said that we don’t want to criminalize homelessness. San Francisco has got the largest homeless population per capita in the country.
She was the one that really was in, we in California are not in a permanent drought, as people say. Three years ago, we had the wettest year in history. But during her tenure, as attorney general, we had some wet years, but there was a policy developed by the [Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom] administrations, in which we let 90% of the stored water out to the ocean.
And we put thousands, if not a million acres of agricultural land that had contractual water agreements, both for the state water project and the federal government, and we didn’t give them any water.
She was, she was a principal on that movement as well. And so, and then of course, the craziest thing is San Francisco is $800 million in debt, right as we speak, and the state is $50 billion in debt.
And she was the one that pushed reparations. And she was asked specifically, “Are you for reparations?” And she said, yes, without even noting that California had always been a free state, that the black population was only about [2-1/2 to 3%], and more importantly, that 27% of the people who live in California were not born in the United States.
So, the idea that they’re culpable for something that happened, you know, 170 years ago in the Civil War, it was just mind-boggling. So, she always promotes these ideas to particular receptive audiences. And this gives a great advantage to the Trump administration, because she’s never spoken in California.
There is no such thing as an adversive or opponent audience. And she didn’t do that in her misadventure as a primary candidate. So, she has never spoken in her entire life to a hostile crowd.
And she can’t do it. And what that does to her, she doesn’t just say that she’s on the left, she says, “I’m a radical,” or she doesn’t just say, “I’m for reparations.” She says, “Let me be clear about it.” She doesn’t just say, “We should have no private health care. Let’s just get done with it and start over.” So, she emphatically doubles down, and that gives people an advantage to say, “Look, she was emphatic!”
And the other thing is, which is, I’ll finish is, that she’s the first presidential candidate, I think, in modern history that has never entered a primary, much less won a primary, and got the nomination. She’s never entered a primary, and I don’t know how that can happen, but what it shows you is that she’s never, ever gone before a mixed audience and tried to make the case for her views. She’s always assumed that everybody in the audience and all the reporters agree with her.
So, to ingratiate herself, she has been more left than they are.
Bluey: As I listen to you go through those different issues, I recall seeing recently Scott Rasmussen’s poll from RMG Research, which showed that Donald Trump holds a double-digit advantage on so many of those issues, whether it be economy, inflation, immigration, border, crime. You go down the list. I mean, he held this double-digit advantage, by the way, over Biden. And now he also holds it over Harris.
Yet at the same time, you look at a lot of these battleground states and the race is tightening up. And so, you have said that, in your updated book, that Donald Trump has overcome this adversity before.
Obviously, we’ve seen in the last couple of years what he’s had to endure. Do you remain an optimist today about his chances, or are you pessimistic about this here in the beginning of August?
Hanson: I think he has a lot better team that he had in 2020, and I’ve looked at some of the early commercials, and they do reflect that theme of trying to remind everybody who she is.
And so, again, because every single issue that Harris has embraced is unpopular and doesn’t poll anywhere near 50%, and she was not only for it for 30 years, but she helped implement it as vice president, all Donald Trump has to do is translate the opposition to those issues to her, and the two obstacles that he has is, she won’t be anywhere around.
She’s hiding, and she’s outsourced her defense to the media and journalists and the big money from [Big Tech] and Wall Street for ads.
And two, to the degree that she does give scripted interviews, they’re going to phrase the questions, or she’s going to have an audience in such a way that she’s going to say, “Donald Trump was for open borders. I’ve never been for open borders. I want all sorts of energy. I don’t want to hurt that.”
And that’s going to be very hard to penetrate in 90 days. But again, Lee Atwater did it in 90 days, and Michael Dukakis, to tell you the truth, had actually been a governor, and he was a far better-spoken candidate. He was a much kinder person, and yet they were able to reveal that he was disingenuous.
So, they can do it, but if they get into cul de sacs about, “Let’s talk about her, what percentage she’s black or Indian or her cackling.” That’s all known to the electorate. They don’t have to be reminded. All it is is fodder for the journalist when he does that. But they do not want to talk about who she is and what she’s been for and what she will do.
Bluey: Well, that’s sage advice, as always, from Victor Davis Hanson, an author of the newly updated book, “The Case for Trump.” Thank you so much, sir, for all of the things that you do, your contributions to The Daily Signal, your column, as I mentioned earlier, one of the most popular things that we publish every week. And so, we appreciate you spending time with us today.
Hanson: Thank you for having me again.
The post Victor Davis Hanson Unpacks Trump’s Appeal appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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