This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.  Sami Winc: So Victor, Donald Trump was actually a lot easier on his Secret Service and the others that were protecting him that night than actually you were.   He was interviewed by Norah O’Donnell. And he kind of said in that interview, and this is incidental to other things, but, well, you know, things happen and nothing goes quite as you expect in life, and he was kind of philosophic about it.  But I was wondering your thoughts on the interview. She seemed to want to bring out what the manifesto said, by the shooter, that Donald Trump was a pedophile, rapist, and traitor.   And he said, this is a shameful question to ask. Of course, I am none of those things. And you shouldn’t have this job. He was really combative. I loved it. And he was—that the lock—she asked him about the mocking of law enforcement, and that’s where he was kind of good on it, by the shooter saying, that this level of incompetence is insane.  Victor Davis Hanson: It’s not the, again, it’s not the individual officers. You could see the way they reacted, tactically, in that room. As soon as they heard the first shot, they jumped up and they dispatched people into the stairway. Go downstairs. They could tell where the sound came from. They got everybody out. They protected them. That wasn’t the problem.   The problem was that if somebody’s running by you and you have some agents there with firearms and you shoot five times and they’re all missing, that’s a problem. And you should not—that shouldn’t be in that venue with Trump.  I know it seats 2,500. I’ve been there for a White House Correspondence thing. You know it’s kind of a maze. But strategically is the breakdown. They didn’t have anybody to organize correctly, a means of security to get in and out of that hotel. If that guy got off the train with a suitcase with a shotgun and all that stuff, and he had to go through the main door of the hotel to check in, he wouldn’t have been able to go in there. And if they had everything covered, all the exits, he would not have been able to go in.  Winc: You know what you’re reminding me of, the guy in Las Vegas who got into that room on the upstairs. But he was there for an entire week before. So you know how long before would they have to, I think Donald Trump’s right about that, building that ballroom on the White House. It really would solve the problem.  Hanson: Yeah. I mean, everybody said, well, wouldn’t have a hotel—I got so—there was somebody in National Review—I’m not trying to single him out, but he said, oh, you know, it’s a terrible idea because it’s a government building. You can’t have private—come on. You can have a government-related event by the White House, even though it’s a private foundation, you can allow them to come into the government [building].   They rent all sorts of facilities from the government. They can do that. And it’s an advantage not to have a hotel because that just gets rid of a lot of your worries, that you don’t have to look at every single room. They all have to come to your place, bulletproof windows, cameras everywhere, completely designed for security. And I don’t know why they don’t do it. I know why they don’t do it, but it’s after this.  As far as Norah O’Donnell, I mean, she’s been humiliated by so many people. I think JD Vance and people.   But think about it, it would be as if FDR is doing a fireside chat and all of a sudden, I don’t know, Edward R. Murrow in World War II says, could I read you something? Here’s what  [Joseph] Goebbels said about you. And he said, you—and this is, I’m almost quoting verbatim what Goebbels would say—Rosestein, the Jewish puppet, has caused a whole war and attacked us and is committing atrocities, and we’re fighting the Bolshevik communist Jews. All this crazy stuff. And what would Roosevelt say? Oh, let me reply to that. How could you reply to it?  So nobody would do that. But she was airing a manifesto. It’s really weird because the press was always telling us when the trans shooter in Tennessee had the manifesto that basically said, from the little bit that leaked out, that trans was great, and anybody who opposed trans—and they hate he/she, she/he hated Christians. Oh, we can’t let that out because it might incite people against trans. Oh no.   But we can voice this thing because it will incite people, because he’s going to—I can get on national TV that Trump is the cause of his own assassination attempt. Trump didn’t have to be—let’s check it off—pedophile, rapist, traitor. And she wanted to get that out. And then she wanted to say, how do you feel about, basically, if you translate what she was saying, here’s the subtext. It wasn’t much—  Hey, Mr. President, how do you feel now that you committed rape and pedophilia and you were a traitor, what came around went around to you. And you got a boomerang. Do you feel like that was—that’s what she was saying.  Winc: Yeah. She was saying she agreed with this guy’s manifesto because, it in turn reflected hers, the Left’s ideas   Hanson: about Donald Trump.  And as I said, it was a petri dish. Where did she get this? Well, she got it from all these people repeating it ad nauseam. Jimmy Kimmel every night. Robert De Niro. Jeremy Raskin, Tim Walz when he went over to that Commie Social conference in Barcelona. And he trashed the United States and trashed our military effort, while we’re fighting. And said that it was fascism. That was the eighth time, seventh or eighth time, he’s called Trump a fascist.  So if you keep doing that, and doing that, and doing that, and you inundate social media and communications with all of these alleged stuff, then somebody’s going to say, well, I want to be a Luigi Mangione, because the coolest guy, Hasan Piker—he’s got a weird little great Islamic first name. He’s part Turkish, he’s kind of DEI and he drives an $80,000 Porsche and he is a multimillionaire and his parents were multimillionaires and he’s a commie. This is great. He is cool. Well, when they echo all of that, then they come out of the woodwork.  Where did they get it originally? Well, it’s a petri dish. If you go through the rapist—the rapist came from Judge Kaplan,in the E. Jean Carroll case. That was a complete travesty. And if you want to read about it, as I said to Jack, I wrote about it in Counter-Revolution at length.   It was the biggest travesty of a thing I’ve ever read in my life. She’s completely—they had a bill of attainder, which is illegal. The New York Legislature, just to hurt Trump, passed a law that said for one year there will be no statute of limitations on sex allegation crimes. And that was for her. And then she immediately filed it, and she didn’t know the date. She didn’t—anyway, my point is that, that thing was a joke. And they acquitted him of rape.  They said he was guilty of sexual assault. And they don’t know what happened. And that he said, she said. She said she accompanied him willingly to a dressing room and they closed the door, and they engaged in contact. But she felt he went too far. So they called that sexual assault, according to no witnesses, nothing.  Winc: No. And a Left-wing jury,   Hanson: And she said her favorite—in, you know, ten years, later or 20 years later, said her favorite show was The Apprentice.  And she thought Donald Trump was great. So when she saw him, he was a celebrity. She thought even then. But my point is that, that’s what the judge said. Well, he wasn’t convicted of rape, but it was equivalent to it. It wasn’t. Or they would have convicted him. And then [George] Stephanopoulos got that and said, rapist, rapist, rapist, rapist, rape. 11 times. And lost that—They had to settle.  Winc: That was CBS.  Hanson: I thought it was ABC.  Winc: Was that ABC? Well, said that CBS was paying him millions. He was on 60 Minutues. Donald Trump said…  Hanson: Well, they are too. Yeah, they both are, I think. And then pedophilia came from the Epstein files. All these people said he is holding the Epstein files. And they never said why [Joe] Biden held it for four years. Well, there were a lot more Democrats in the Epstein files than Republicans. And one of the victims said that Donald Trump, and so did [Gislaine] Maxwell, had nothing to do with it, with the sex crime. But they issued that Democratic talking point.  Traitor, that came from—James Clapper said that Donald Trump was [Vladimir] Putin’s poodle. And so did [John] Brennan. He said he was working with the Russians. All of them did during Russian Collusion. That was all debunked, even [Robert] Mueller couldn’t prove it.  So they were all lies. And she wanted to get those lies on national TV and then say, if you hadn’t—Mr. President, if you hadn’t been a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor, you probably wouldn’t have been shot. How do you feel about that? And that’s what made him get angry.  Winc: Yeah. And he didn’t let her do that because he just said, those are all demonstrably untrue. And nobody that was a professional interviewer would ever do that. You are the worst interviewer. It was a fascinating interview to watch. I recommend it to everybody.  She deserved it.  Yeah, she deserved every bit. Donald Trump really gave it to her.  Hanson: The thing about Trump is—everybody gets angry   Winc: that he can be rude and uncooth but just ask yourself real quickly—she would have done that with any other president, that was a Republican. She would.  She wouldn’t have done that with any …  Hanson: I think she would have.  Winc: You think?  Hanson: If she could go—they did it—they tried to do that with George W. Bush, with the National Guard. And they said he was a coward. And they tried to do it with George H.W. Bush. He was a war hero, and they tried to—I think—a guy wrote article in—I don’t know which magazine—and he said he had bailed out too early and he got his two people killed. And it was crazy.  But my point—and if you look at what they said about [John] McCain. He can’t remember which house—he has 11 houses. He doesn’t know where he is. And he had an affair. With Romney, they said he hazed people in high school. He put his dog out there. Remember that? All that stuff.   But none of them would have ever said to a reporter, you should be ashamed of yourself. That is disgusting. And that’s why people voted for Trump, because they were tired of the Marquess of Queensberry rules. That every Republican candidate, whether it’s the losing track of Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, or it was the winning track after, Reagan and George H.W. and George W., they didn’t want to get down and fight in the gutter. And I’m not saying it’s the gutter, but they didn’t want to get dirty.   And the last guy that wanted to get dirty was Lee Atwater. And he got dirty. And he destroyed Michael Dukakis and tore off his—he called it the bark. Boston Harbor ad, Tank ad, Willie Horton ad. And he got Bush elected. And then they thought, I’m never going to do that again. I would rather lose nobly than win ugly. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.