Election 2024 – Why Trump Won | Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson joins John after President-elect Trump’s victory to explore why his direct style resonated with middle America. Hanson examines the economic and social factors driving Trump’s appeal, from rising inflation and border insecurity, to the sense of exclusion felt by many Americans. This interview highlights the stark divide between global elites and everyday citizens, examining how media and institutions underestimated public frustration. Hanson argues that Trump’s policies address real concerns, fostering a lasting loyalty among voters. In addition to domestic dynamics, Hanson assesses Trump’s assertive approach to foreign policy, from NATO to trade relations, and its effect on global alliances.
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Our Election’s Utter Losers and Winners Deservedly Losers The polls—with the exception once again of AltasIntel, Trafalgar, and Rasmussen—were off, and way off in the Senate races. The pollsters’ reputation is again in full reverse and now back to their nadir of 2020 and 2016. Many shamelessly warped their data in the last two weeks to gin up Harris momentum, fund-raising, and voter turnout. And to no avail. There were plenty of indications long ago in key states of a Trump thunderstorm: defections of minorities, anger among both the Jewish and Muslim voters, alienated union members, massive increases in Republican registrations and non-Election-Day balloting. And all were deliberately ignored by the corrupt media and pollsters. Democrats know —but will do nothing about the fact—they have become the party of the upscale professionals and rich, and the subsidized poor. They have alienated the entire middle class—white, black, Hispanic—and ceding it to the new Republican populist-nationalist party.
Open borders, hyperinflation, abortion deification, the transgendered mania, the crime wave, and the green obsessions all did their bit to repel voters. The “racist” Trump won more minority support than any Dole, McCain, or Romney figure of the past. What now will the buffoonish Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith do with their pseudo-indictments and convictions? Try to nullify an American election by putting the president-elect in jail, as the projectionist and now paranoid Left screams that a soon to be President Trump might lawfare them in the manner they did him? Democrat incumbent senators by late September knew their internal polls were bleeding. So, they decided to junk their lifelong voting records, ideology, and transient fealty to Harris, and chameleon-like to absorb the Trump agendas. That proved too fake and opportunistic for most voters. Remember, we will soon be soon back to 2017-era leftwing hysteria. The Left, as it licks its numerous wounds, will reemerge soon to get back the House and impeach Trump, riot on Inauguration Day, gin up more lawfare with hackish local and state prosecutors, insert more deep-state “Anonymous” obstructors into the swamp, draft more has-been generals to trash their commander-in-chief, and reach for the absurdities like the Logan Act, 25th Amendment or more collusion myths. After all, the party that said democracy was on the ballot is now the most anti-democratic force in modern history.
Will a Josh Shapiro try to do a Bill Clinton on the Democratic Party as the latter did after the McGovern/Carter disasters? Winners? Donald Trump, of course. After a decade of Russian collusion farces, laptop disinformation ruses, two impeachments, attempted ballot removal, five civil and criminal suits, two assassination attempts, and a swat team raid on his home, the indestructible 78-year-old Trump has just pulled off the greatest political comeback in presidential history. Trump was out-funded by Harris. The media gave him 95 percent negative coverage. The glitterati trashed him nonstop and even stooped to sabotage Saturday Night Live, in vain, to stop him. The ridiculous Obamas jetted out of their mansions to lie about Trump nonstop and talk down to their own voters. All they proved was that the phantom, supposedly miracle Michelle Obama candidacy would have been even worse than Harris. An arrogant Oprah and the View really believed people believed their gossipy paranoia about Trump. In the end, Trump proved more energetic and industrious than Harris, smarter than seasoned politicos, and utterly authentic, preferring to be genuine and occasionally crude than the inauthentic and sappy Harris.
He may likely be the first Republican to win 51 percent of the vote since 1988, and the first to win the popular vote in twenty years. As a general rule, those in the conservative and Republican movements who stood by Trump have won with him. Those who damned him ended up inert or wandering aimlessly in the political wilderness. What happens to the Liz Cheneys and Larry Hogans of the world? There are no now more “Never Trump” conservatives. That is a misnomer for those who were after a decade mostly either leftwing or subsidized by the Left as useful idiots—or irrelevant. Contrast all that with the even more ascendent and buoyant mavericks like Elon Musk, RFK, Jr., Joe Rogan, and Tulsi Gabbard. I watched the tears, denial, and fury of the MSNBC and CNN crowd as they struggled first to fantasize nonexistent pathways to victory, then to revisit “Russian collusion” and “lawfare”, then to claim the proverbial naïve and stupid electorate was deluded into voting against its “real” interests (as defined by MSNBC grandees), and finally to announce that the world—currently on the nuclear precipice of Biden-induced, escalating, theater-wide wars—will be “aghast” at the will of the American people. In other words, the political-media Leftist fusion sermonized about everything other than why they were rejected by the American people. What a pathetic bunch our media have become. And lastly Biden?
The left —who dreamed up the 2020 idea of using the fake “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” as “moderate” cover for the hard-left agenda—does not know whether to blame Joe for not getting out earlier, or to claim their July coup was now a mistake and they would have been better off with a candidate cognitively challenged by dementia rather than one by innate inability. So, Democrats will blame everyone and everything—except themselves who sought to drive down the American people’s throat the most radical and absurd agenda of the last two centuries that ruined the economy, exploded our border, made moonscapes of our big cities, destroyed women’s sports, set the world abroad afire, weaponized the courts and the bureaucracies, and sought to tear the country in two. RIP to all that.
