Trump’s Economy Is Stronger Than Voters Think | Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words

Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc analyze the current economic landscape heading into the midterm elections, arguing that underlying indicators point to a booming economy despite voter

Key takeaways

• Hanson cites revised Federal Reserve growth projections (5% Q3), record-low poverty rates, and $87,000 familial income as evidence of economic strength under current policies.
• Jack Smith appeared stunned during congressional questioning; Hanson alleges coordinated DOJ actions against Trump supporters while noting a lack of consequences for left-leaning officials like Andrew McCabe and James Comey.

Main topics

• US Economic Indicators & Midterm Outlook
• Jack Smith Testimony & DOJ Surveillance

Notable quotes

"We are their personal physician. And we were never designed for that."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a call to action for voters to recognize ec

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I talked to a woman in town and she said that dialysis I have to get in three times a week and I can't get in the door because there's all these illegal aliens. I had gone to the emergency room twice now. Not one person spoke English and the people who were staffed and exasperated were all Mexican-Americans. They didn't like it. I said to one of the employees there, what's going on here? And he said, we are their personal physician. And we were never designed for that. The people who pay the taxes and were in that emergency room that were Americans, Mexican-Americans exclusively, are not getting the care that they should. Speaker 1 (0:44) And welcome. This is Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. For those who are new and to remind everybody, Victor's main affiliations are he is the Martin and Ely 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. And we hope you all come join him at his website, the Blade of Perseus. The URL for that website is victorhansen.com. And we'd like to. have you all there. So, Victor, we are going to be talking first about the economy and Jack Smith testimony. And we have a separate for this Saturday edition middle segment. And Victor's two presidents this time are FDR and Abraham Lincoln. So probably at least it could be argued the two most significant presidents. in U.S. history. Speaker 2 (1:40) Besides Speaker 1 (1:41) Donald J. Trump. No, besides George Speaker 2 (1:44) Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, yes. Speaker 1 (1:48) Yes. Not Speaker 2 (1:49) FDR. He's not in Jefferson's or Washington's. Speaker 1 (1:53) League. All right. But we'll be doing those in the middle segment. Speaker 2 (1:56) Unless you want to go put him on the Mount Rushmore. Speaker 1 (1:58) Yeah. So stay with us and we'll be right back. Speaker 2 (2:02) Victor Speaker 3 (2:02) is a close friend of Dennis Prager and has had the privilege of working with his remarkable team at PragerU. Victor has appeared in several five-minute videos reaching millions worldwide. Remarkably, more than 60 % of PragerU's audience is under 35, the very generation who most needs our enduring American principles. At a time when education and media too often erode confidence, in our country, PragerU stands firm in defending truth, reason, and the ideas of Western civilization. We are proud to be part of the PragerU family. Please support PragerU with a tax-deductible donation today. Go to PragerU.com slash VDH and give generously today. Speaker 1 (2:51) Welcome back. Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. So, Victor, I know that you wanted to talk a little bit about the economy because apparently, out of character, the Wall Street Journal has an article that's talking about all the great things Donald Trump has done. doing for the economy. Yeah, Speaker 2 (3:07) I was wondering when they're going to write this. I tell you that, I thought. Speaker 2 (3:12) As I said to our audience, when I look at all the bylines for the news, not the op-ed, but the news, they all come from the Atlantic, Politico, Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times. So they're left of center. And they try to have them, when the tariff thing was announced, they were gloom and doom. Canada, Greenland, Trump is... a mess. Tax cuts, deregulation, theory good, but it's just handled poorly. Iran war misadventure, oil tragedy, get wiped out in the midterms. Maybe he will. And then you start to see the last week, last week. Well, the Federal Reserve has revised their third quarter growth to 5%. Well, lowest poverty in history, 10%. That's all. 90 % are out of poverty. did more than a great society ever did. Speaker 2 (4:17) Wow. Highest familial and per capita income in history. Familial, $87,000. Right across the border, it's $35,000 less. Wow. Record highs in the stock market, but for the year, they're going to average about 10 % growth. Speaker 2 (4:38) 4.2 unemployment. Speaker 2 (4:42) 140,000 new jobs, and that takes into consideration they've already eliminated 400,000. Speaker 2 (4:51) Then we hear today, well, the economy is unexpectedly strong, and it might even kind of sort of maybe perhaps be booming because the Federal Reserve banks and columnists have looked back at the first six months, and they have revised 1.9 up to 2.4. So the economy was never as bad as we were saying. And inflation doesn't look like, despite the high gas, it hasn't spiked like we told you when the awful tariffs would do it. So it was kind of difficult. And the editorial board basically said that everything was booming, booming. So now the question is. Speaker 2 (5:45) Are they going to vote in a party that gave us 21 % inflation just two years ago, over four years, 5.1%, and 30 % of staples, vehicles, fuel, housing, insurance, etc.? Are they really going to do that? Well, the... Speaker 2 (6:10) Wall Street Journal is sort of responsible for that because if you read the comments, they're mostly left-wing now. I guess the strategy was on the Murdoch family to move it to the left and get a bigger readership. I would say that the readership of the Wall Street Journal is left-wing based on the comments. So... In any case, it was a shock to wake up and read, excuse me? Speaker 2 (6:36) It was a shock to get up and read that everything is going pretty well. And the question now is time. It always was time. Do they have, we always said, well, they had an eight months, seven months, six months, five, but time is running out. Can they get that message across that every indicator is booming that Those tech lords that were at the White House the other day are leading the world in every category of their enterprises, from digital media to software to AI to space launches, etc. And they're all, they don't like Trump, but they all are on board because he wants them to make America preeminent and they want to be preeminent. Will that all convince people? Speaker 2 (7:24) that the economy is not the worst since the Great Depression, basically, and that gas prices, 98 % of the oil has gotten through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran is desperate. They're trying to hit tankers. One day they send a letter to the American people, mean the American left, please, please, please call off your president. We just want to be friends. We never made fun of you. When we said... Death to the great Satan? We didn't mean you. That was a misinterpretation. We love you. That's why we sent terrorists in your country all these years. And we love you so much we blew up your Marines in the Beirut. We love you so much we blew up your embassy in Beirut and in Africa. We love you so much we wanted to kill a Saudi ambassador in your hometown capital. That's why we love you. So they're pathetic. And they're at the end of the rope. And their only way out is to hope that the left takes power in a landslide in the House and Senate and cuts off a veto-proof resolution of cutoff. That's not going to happen. So, the economy is, as we've always said it was here on this podcast, pretty strong. And when the price of oil collapses... If I was a trader and I said, oh, I've been reading the Wall Street Journal and things are so bad, and then I read all of these New York Times and the war is lost and all these iconic figures on the left say it's horrible and gas is going to get to, oh, I better go buy some futures at $120 a barrel because it'll go up to $150 or $110 or even $100. Now what do they do? Price was at 93. It went down to 85 for a little bit. It's going to get down to 80. When it gets to 60, gas is under $3. So when those people start to see that it starts to go down without going back up, they're going to start panicking and selling, selling their futures and get out of the market because they're going to take big losses the lower it gets. Speaker 2 (9:31) So they are committed to buying oil at $1.05, $1.10, when oil is only worth $65 or $70. That's better than $110 and $115. Yeah. So I think... Things are going very well. I just, one other commentary. Speaker 2 (9:50) I like Karl Rove. I've met him. He's a very good person. I know people are critical. And he is, I think what he's been doing is trying to help Trump by being very critical of the campaign. And he was right that we didn't get the message out. But he's been so critical that today he came out, this week he came out and said, well, two weeks ago he came out and said, I have to vote for a Democrat in Texas. He didn't explain it well because the headline says, Roe votes for Democrat. Well, they didn't say that it was the ag commissioner who'd said kind of a racist thing. But he kind of virtue signaled that he wasn't for that. And then he attacked Trump. And then he wrote another one that says this is inept. And then all of a sudden, he starts to get a sense of the economy. And when you look at these races in Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, Texas, even Ohio at some point, they're starting to tighten up. And the momentum is very subtly shifting. And this news of all this investment and the tech lords and all these statistics will start to filter down in the last month. And you haven't even spent the war chest of Elon and Trump, and he's going to be at 30 rallies. So today, or the other day, yeah, today, Karl Rove was basically saying. They can win if they do what I say. I'm not being sarcastic. What he says is pretty wise. So the fact that he's changing a little bit and that people on the right are not as depressed is Mark Halpern, who's a really smart guy. I like him. I've been on his show. He basically had been calling people on the right, not the left. He's a moderate Democrat. Speaker 2 (11:39) And he said they're in panic. They don't know what to do. They're going to be wiped out. And he's been telling them on all the podcasts. And the left loves him and everybody. And now he's sort of saying, take a deep breath. Carl Wolf wrote a column, what if we're all wrong about the midterm? You know what I mean? So something's going on. And I think that something going on is the scent of an economic boom. Speaker 1 (12:08) Yes. And with the Wall Street Journal, they don't want to get to the end of the year and have all the statistics really good and all of their articles be doom and gloom, right? They're just like Speaker 2 (12:17) pollsters on the left. Speaker 1 (12:18) I know. They sure are. You say Speaker 2 (12:19) they're going to lose. They're going to lose. Kamala's going to win by four. She's going to win by ten. Trump's going to lose. Oh, wow. The Des Moines Register was stupid. They could have corrected. But the rest of them started correcting. So when you saw the last polls of the 2024 election. There were some that said it's either dead even or 0.1 for Trump. And they were the ones that said he was hopeless. So what the left does, they build up momentum and fundraising and they rig the polls. And then the last week, it gets tight. And they say, unexpectedly, the race is tightened up. No, it was never that asymmetrical. You've tightened up and told the truth for a change. That it was always close. Trump was always either. Ahead of Kamala or dead even. He was never behind. And that's why these Democrats, when you saw them in 2016, they were crying on the screen. 2024, Speaker 1 (13:17) because they Speaker 2 (13:20) believed those lies. Speaker 1 (13:23) They believe all their own lies, too, which is weird. They Speaker 2 (13:26) were right in 2000. 2024, they were crying. But 2020, they weren't because they had switched from 70 % in-person voting and 30 % mail-in to the other 70 % early and mail-in. And they were confident. And that was a record turnout. It was more than. the next year, the next election, and then the election behind. And they had been registering. I won't go further than that and impugn their integrity, but they knew something was up, that they had done structural changes in the balloting procedures. Mark Zuckerberg gave, Mark Zuckerberg was right next to Trump, two persons down. I wonder if Trump said, hey, I want Facebook to be preeminent and I'm going to do, and they're not going, the Europeans are not going to have any more surcharge and go after you and neither the Canadians. I'm going to protect you. I am FDR and you're the war production board and go to it and make us. But Mark. What was that $419 million you put into 2020 that made me lose by appropriating the role of the registrars with your little drop boxes and your little get out the vote and your same day registration and your ballot harvesting and your ballot curing that you funded? He didn't do that, did he? Speaker 1 (14:46) No, he sure didn't. Well, Victor, let's welcome back one of our sponsors. Speaker 1 (14:53) VAR watches. We tend to forget that civilizations are remembered less by their politics than by what they made. The tools, the objects, the things built well enough to outlast the people who built them. For most of the last century, America made things. Then, like much of the old productive economy, watchmaking packed up and moved overseas. Today's sponsor is trying to bring back a piece of that. VAR. That's V-A-E-R. Again, that's V-A-E-R. VAR is a Los Angeles watchmaking company whose goal is pretty straightforward. bring America watchmaking back. 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And get yourself a new watch and a non-monitoring object on your wrist that you can keep time with in the old-fashioned way. All right, Victor, let's look at Jack Smith's testimony. I know he was in Congress this week, and he was questioned in the... Republicans questioning him had no doubt that he was surveilling members of Congress by obtaining their text messages. But my question to this, I want to know what you think on that. But my question is, wouldn't he have had to have a subpoena? So wouldn't there be a judge that would also be connected to allowing these text messages? And then I just want to read you what Josh Hawley had to say in as it went on. He goes, he said to. Jack Smith, we are glad you failed because I can't imagine what our country would be like if you had succeeded. Well, I Speaker 2 (17:30) don't know whether he got a judge's order or it was done administratively by the DOJ, but the reason they know that he did it, he made a request and somebody approved it. Whether it was a Biden person or a judge, I don't know. Speaker 2 (17:48) People should dispense with this idea that... Trump is an enemy of democracy. The left feels that it's morally superior vis-a-vis Trump. And then any, got to remember that, that's a theme that characterizes this last decade. Any methodology that they use is justified by their moral ends of destroying him or destroying anybody that supports him. So just a brief little flashback during the Obama administration. They went after James Rosen, the Fox correspondent. They not only went after his text messages and his phone calls, even to his grandmother, they monitored him GPS-wise where he was. They went after the AP reporters. I think there were eight of them. Speaker 2 (18:39) And they were preparing indictments of other reporters they claimed that were leaking stories. So that was a war on the press, and the press didn't say much at all. We're kind of bothered. It's kind of confusing that our constitutional lawyer president, it was out of character, no doubt. Somebody did it. That was their attitude. And so now we see that they come back in, and Jack Smith. Speaker 2 (19:08) thinks that he's going to find some coordination between Trump and the main senator. So he wants to know if they're talking to each other or they're advising him or they're speaking. Jack. He looked, first of all, he looked completely stunned, like a deer in the headlights. Speaker 2 (19:30) There was only one coordination in this whole Sorted Lawfare episode. It was you. You were appointed, I think, on November 18th, and that was only because he had announced he was going to run for president three days earlier in 2022. Okay? You knew you were going to be appointed. Then you knew also that very day that Nathan Wade, the boyfriend of Fannie Willis, was in the White House for a long consultation. He even billed, I think, eight hours. That same day, your buddy Michael Colangelo in the DOJ, who was number three, most prestigious job he'd ever had, had come in from where? Latita James' farcical lawfare suit. And what did he do the day you were appointed as Biden got his team into the field, his army, and the day Nathan Wade was being tutored by your White House counsel to tell Fannie what to do and when to do it? He went back and helped Alvin Bragg trump up that stupid federal campaign financed by a local Manhattan prosecutor. And people have argued they deny it, but there had been reports that Latita James was in the White House that day. Speaker 3 (20:44) So that's what Jack Speaker 2 (20:46) Smith did. And he knows it. And his wife, you know, made a, what would be the word, an obsequious little film about Michelle Obama. So he was a partisan from way, way back. And he had gone after the governor of Virginia. And the Supreme Court had reversed him nine to nothing. So he doesn't have a good record. I almost felt sorry for him. He looked... The only time he came to life was there had been a rumor that he was at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game and may have been in contact with Fannie in Atlanta or in Georgia. And they wanted to have some kind of internal communication. So they had bad info, the senators. I think it was Senator Schmidt said. what were you doing? Did you ever go to a hawk? He says, no, no. And he didn't. That was wrong. But that was the only reprieve he got. He looked like an old man. He looked tired. He looks like I do. Speaker 1 (21:51) I've heard talk of indictment. Do you have any thoughts on whether he'll get indicted? Will we get any sort of criminal punishment for these things? I would like to Speaker 2 (22:01) say so. Speaker 1 (22:02) It's hard to say.