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. Everyone is talking about President Donald Trump’s big last three weeks in praise.
I mean, after all, when you look at foreign policy, he eliminated—for some time to come—the Iranian nuclear threat without widening the war. And the Middle East is on the verge, with further membership in the Abraham Accords, maybe a comprehensive settlement between elements and the Palestinian Authority that might break away or Gaza and cut a deal with Israel.
He’s now turning his attention to Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin and getting pretty hard on Putin to make a deal. We talked about the Rwanda-Congo conflict in the past. It seems to be somewhat settled. And then there was India and Pakistan.
The economy did not crash or crater. Wall Street is at all-time high. Stock prices, job growth unexpectedly—that’s a word have to use because the Left always says it’s going to get very angry. The angry Left. And they’re very angry and they say, “It’s not going to work.” And then they have to say, “Well, it worked.” So, it’s “unexpectedly.” But job growth was good. Inflation was low. Personal income and savings were up. And all tariff revenue was up. There was no inflation, as anticipated by the Left.
When you look at cultural issues, people cannot believe what happened. The military, we were told, could not recruit because of the falling demographics or gang activity. Young people took drugs. They were obese. We’re just going to be 45,000 recruits short. No. We’ve now met our recruiting goals, up to 50,000. Some days, 10,000 people a day.
It’s a mere image of the border. Remember, “We have to have comprehensive immigration reform. We can’t stop 12,000 coming across every day. There’s going to be 10 million.” No. We just needed a new president. I could go on.
But these are amazing developments. When you add into NATO, when he went over there and the NATO leadership called him “daddy,” and they agreed to a 5% target of their gross domestic product in investments and defense.
There’s one thing that’s interesting about all of this, and that is that he didn’t just do this. He did it contrary to the gospel of our experts.
The people in the military, the general said, “You can’t get 55,000 people back into the military.” He did. We know how he did it. He appealed to their patriotism and promised they would be judged on their merit.
“You can’t shut down the border. You just can’t go from 10,000 to zero.” He did it.
“You can’t have tariffs and not have high inflation.” Well, he said, “Well, they want to be in the U.S. market. You know, Japan, Europe, everybody. They love the U.S. market. And where else would they sell their merchandise?”
And they were gouging. They were making a lot of profit. So maybe they wanted to pay the tariffs and get to stay in the market and make a little bit less of their substantial profit. And then, prices would not go up.
That’s exactly what seems to be happening, contrary to the experts. Contrary to the experts on the border, on military, on the economy, and on foreign policy.
“We’re going to have a World War III if he hits the Iranian nuclear installations. You can’t damage them. We’re going to see 30,000 people killed.” That didn’t happen.
And so, a lot of the frustration that we’re seeing in the country derives from two phenomenon: One, Donald Trump, for a variety of reasons we can get into later, but he’s been very, very successful in the last three weeks. I’d go so far as more successful than any president, surely, of the 21st century and maybe the latter half of the 20th century.
And he’s done so in defiance. Antithetical. Rejecting the expertise, the so-called experts and what they had told us would happen on the economy, on the military, on foreign policy.
And the idea that all of their Ph.D.s, all the letters after their names, all of their ZIP codes, all of their prestige meant nothing. That here we have a billionaire builder from New York, with a Queens accent, who’s transactional. And he was able to create a revolutionary change in culture, in social life, in economics, on foreign policy, on border security. And we can see the fruits of that in just three weeks, contrary to what everybody told us.
It’s startling. It’s embarrassing for them. But it’s to Donald Trump’s credit that he alone had the courage to persevere when everybody said that he was either wrong or crazy. And it’s part, again, of this very interesting human story of the fall and rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda.
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Author: Victor Davis Hanson
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