Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: Victor, Barack Obama, in all his arrogant glory, is out there on the stump in Michigan. I think he was in Iowa also. He had some really snotty comment. I misplaced my notes here, attacking Donald Trump. “There’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold?” He’s talking about the Oval Office. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
And then another quote, and I’ll shut up, Victor. “Now there is one thing he seems to focus on in addition to home renovation,” Obama said, “and that’s how to enrich himself and his family and his cronies,” something Barack Obama knows nothing about, self-enrichment. Your thoughts, Victor.
Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t think he… I was embedded twice in Iraq as a reporter, and the first time, they put us up in Saddam Hussein’s palace that had a big hole in the roof, courtesy of the U.S. Navy Air Force.
And it did have a lot of gold, but it was, it doesn’t seem the same type of gold. He’s embossed here and there, but I mean, it’s not … Donald Trump likes gold. That’s obvious. It’s not my taste, but it’s not…
If you see Saddam Hussein’s palace, believe me, it’s not the same. I remember sitting out on a chair and watching these strange Amazonian, crawling catfish-type fish that are about four feet long that he reportedly, allegedly fed people to.
And some of the people would throw a piece of, you know, leftover steak, and these things would just hear it hit, and they’d climb out like barracuda. That was right outside the palace. The word was he threw corpses in there. I don’t know, but it was very inapt because Barack Obama, I’ll just say it, is completely unaware of the contradictions in himself.
He’s completely… For some person who thinks that he’s so charismatic and so hip and so he has vibe, he completely lacks self-awareness. Here, let me explain.
He is criticizing the president of the United States for raising private funds to make a ballroom that will serve a dual purpose for the Pentagon in case of evacuation.
It will have defenses from drones for the whole White House, and everybody understood the East Wing was… There was nothing really there. And this new ballroom will offer the first time in American history where you won’t have to have tents out on the White House lawn. It will allow hundreds of people in a brand-new, up-to-date, defensive, so that it’s impenetrable to attack.
It’s gonna be safe. It’s not gonna be like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where somebody almost got into and fired shots, supposedly at the president. He did. He fired shots. He got that close. Or, excuse me, he fired shots at a Secret Service one floor down, and he was on his way up had he not been stopped.
That’s not gonna happen. But here’s my point. He razed… razed with a Z, he razed the entire Chicago park of 20 acres. He expelled people’s … He ruined their avenues, and why? So he wanted a 20-acre monument to himself. Then he shook down all these left-wing donors for $550 million to build what I think, and I think most people in history to come will see, as the ugliest, most obnoxious monolith that anybody has ever seen as a presidential library.
It looks, sometimes it looks like something out of “A Space Odyssey 2001” when you saw those monoliths. Sometimes it looks like Stonehenge. I, as a World War II historian, it reminds me of the flak towers that were built around Berlin. It is ugly. It has inscriptions like it’s hieroglyphics glorifying the pharaoh, and you can’t even read them when you walk down, but it’s just a monument to his vanity, and it’s $200 to $300 million over budget.
It’s gonna go up to $850 million, this monument to his narcissism and megalomania. And worse yet, the endowment is not sufficient to hire and pay at a going wage, according to the workers, the staff needed to administer this horrific thing.
I mean, it’s gonna take a lot of people to upkeep, and it’s huge, and it’s in direct proportion to the paucity of his achievements.
You would think he’s Abraham Lincoln or Washington, but there’s no, there’s no there there. And then our first black president has stiffed hundreds of minority workers, and contractors are saying they haven’t been paid. Well, they haven’t been paid because he’s $200 or $300 million over budget, and he’s blaming minority contractors for the cost overruns.
But he was the one who insisted that you hire by race a certain proportion of his workers. And then when he did do that, he didn’t pay them, reportedly.
The next thing he said was, he has an unnecessary war and he solved the problem. Unnecessary war. The Strait of Hormuz, he said, is completely closed.
It’s dominated by… Everything he said was a lie. The Strait of Hormuz yesterday, the day before and the day before had 23 to 24 million barrels along with the Red Sea and the Strait of Oman. Right now, the problem is not oil. It is getting oil to refineries, and that’s part of the tension from the Iran war.
But the idea that the Strait of Hormuz is closed when it’s back up to or exceeds pre-war levels is a lie.
The second thing, he was bragging on his Iran deal, and he said before Trump canceled it, they had no nuclear program. That’s not true. We know now that they were enriching and cheating on that deal the whole time, during the Biden administration.
In other words, they saw that Obama was a narcissist. They said, “Let’s just sign this giveaway that the United States is giving to us, and we’ll keep quiet, and we’ll see who the next president is.”
And then we had Biden. And they cheated, and they increased… They didn’t increase their missile range all the way to every European country just in the year that Donald Trump came into office.
I mean, he bombed that last June. They already had missiles that would reach Diego Garcia or the European capitals. That came under the Obama plan. And then he said it was unnecessary, and there… All these people had died. Yes, there’s been many people wounded. There’s 22 dead. But he bombed Libya. He bombed Libya for seven months.
Did he go and ask Congress? No. No, no, no. He never did. Did Congress object? The Republicans may have for political reasons, but they gave him a blank check. I went to Libya in 2007. It was in reform. Not that Muammar Gaddafi … He’s a monster, but his sons and daughters were taking over. They had just opened the archeological sites of the Roman second-century Renaissance in Libya and the province of Libya.
And I spoke at them at Sabratha. I gave a lecture there. I mean, it wasn’t very good. I had a ruptured appendix I didn’t know. But the point I’m making is you could get a cell phone and call the United States. That saved my life. So he bombed all that. The Italians were in the process of opening up a free trade zone and were going to develop a lot of untapped oil wealth.
The Maltese had a 20-acre concession with a Corinthian hotel. I stayed in it. It was a state-of-the-art hotel. After I got sick, I got a room there. It was booked up for two years usually.
So my point is he took all that reform and he destroyed it. He destroyed it and for no reason, and he didn’t ask Congress.
And his was the administration that gave us this colossal lie that the riots that ended up killing our consulate, Christopher Stevens, destroying our consulate, destroying much of the CIA annex, killing four brave Americans and routing us and running, was all due to a video. When we know it was a pre-planned al-Qaeda operation, which Susan Rice went on five different shows and lied about.
And it ended up with the iconic Hillary Clinton Secretary of State phrase. She had been warned and warned and warned. “What difference does it make? What difference does it make?” He reigned over that.
When he was president, he was criticizing the wars. He gave us the Ukraine war. It was under his leadership that Vladimir Putin sized up all of this trash America apology tour, we’re not exceptional, and he said to himself, “This is the time, 2014.”
He looked at [Syria]. Does everybody remember what Obama said about WMD? He said, “If they start moving around, you know, if they start moving around WMD, that’s a red line for me.” And they did. And what did he do? Nothing. Nothing.
And Putin collated all of his first six years, and he said, “I’m going to take the Donbas, and I’m going to take the Crimea, and he won’t lift a finger.”
And he didn’t. He wouldn’t even OK offensive weapons to Ukraine. So that foreign policy of his is a disaster. The Iran deal accelerated. He’s not telling the truth. And if he were telling the truth, he would not have had to send $400 million on a pallet in the middle of the night to these monstrous theocratic terrorists.
He wouldn’t have had to do it. He did that because he knew it was unsustainable if he told the American people what he was doing and lifting the sanctions to these creepy people.
And he would not tell the people what his grand Ben Rhodes vision of the Middle East was. It was a Shia crescent of Iran, Assad’s Syria that he warmed up to, Hezbollah’s Lebanon, Hamas’ Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen.
And they were going to provide a tension between Israel, the moderate states like Egypt and Jordan, and the Gulf states, which he loathed. And then from time to time, his highness would come in, “I’m just a community organizer. I’m going to settle the differences.” And he thought he could do that. And it blew up in his face.
And what he did was he empowered the Assad dynasty. He empowered all of the surrogates for Iran because the money he gave them in a wink went to Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis. And he stands here now talking about wealth and gold. Obama and his wife three or four years ago were estimated to be worth $70 million.
And he didn’t make that just by going around and charging $400,000 per speech. He made that because the last year in his White House, he checked out as Hillary and Trump fought it out in 2016. I shouldn’t say he checked out. He had Susan Rice, John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in his White House.
And they had told him that there was no evidence that Donald Trump was involved with the Russians, and he had ordered them to go back and find evidence. And then Susan Rice wrote that notorious, infamous memo, remembers to herself that everything was up board. And we know that his FBI director 245 times lied under oath when asked.
We know that James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, admitted he lied when he said, “I gave the least untruthful answer,” when he was asked directly, “Does the National Security Agency spy on Americans?” “No.” He knew they did, and he admitted he did. They didn’t… Obama’s DOJ didn’t do anything to him.
And then John Brennan on two occasions lied. He said, “Does Barack Obama’s 400 targeted assassinations over the Afghan-Pakistani border that Congress did not authorize, did they kill any civilian?” “Nope, not a one.”
We know they killed 200 of them, including five U.S. citizens, as I remember, including, as I remember, a USAID worker who was collateral damage, just working on a bridge with people, walking on a bridge.
He never even talked about it, but he did joke about it. Yes, he did at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when people said, “Oh, you know, my daughter, they love Justin Bieber. I’ll tell you all you young men out there, if you want to date any of them, you know, it’s called Predator, P-R-E-D-A-T-O-R. You’ll never see it coming. Ha, ha, ha.”
500 deaths. Maybe they were terrorists and they needed to die. I don’t know, but he did kill 200 people accidentally, and he’s on his stump now trashing collateral damage, and we’re down on missiles. We’re down on missiles because he and Joe Biden cut the defense budget. When Donald Trump came back into office, it wasn’t as if he said, “I don’t need missiles.”
No, we’re building them like crazy. He attacked Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon. When Biden left, given the Obama policies, we were 45,000 recruits short because we were being bombarded with Obama, Biden, DEI, trans. We’re not going to really promote people meritocratically. We think, as Lloyd Austin said, there’s a conspiracy in the ranks of white supremacists, white privileged people, white rage.
We’re going to investigate them. And then they let, a year later, they just kind of said, “Well, we’re going to release the report in December near Christmas, but I guess we didn’t find anything.” Well, that was a little too late to say that after he had turned off 45,000 potential recruits. And where are they now?
They’re back in the military. So I think people are tired of him. Every time he… He said on the other thing I remember right now, Jack, he said, you remember this? “I think there’s some… Everybody’s got to remember there’s a point in your life where you don’t need any more money. At some point you don’t need to make any more money.”
Well, what is that point, Barack? Is it you have a $200,000 pension? You get $450,000 every time you open your mouth in front of somebody. You’re worth, according to three years ago, $70 million. Now people have suggested you’re worth $100 million. You have a 20-acre mansion and land right on the coast at Martha’s Vineyard.
You’ve got a $9 million mansion in Kalorama. You have a $10 million beachfront home in Hawaii, and you still have your two-and-a-half-million digs in Chicago. Is four… Can you say this to us? At some point, everybody’s got to say you only need one or two homes. You don’t need four mansions. So he’s a total hypocrite, and he’s totally unaware of… I’m not defending… And then he started talking about grifting, grifting.
Donald Trump’s… Maybe I’ve said this again. If they find that people are in the Trump family and those associated with him are using official influence to raise money by offering entree to the administration or vice versa, entree to the Gulf states from American companies, and that is not just found to be unethical but illegal, I hope they get prosecuted to the full extent.
I don’t know if they’ve done that. But I do know that his last year in office, he had almost every single major person, whether it was James Baker and the FBI or his EPA person, they were all rotating back to where? Silicon Valley, which had given them a lot of money and which Obama praised and lauded before they turned right wing, of course.
And does anybody really believe that Barack and Michelle are brilliant screenwriters? So brilliant that they were given $50 million as, I don’t even know what a content creator is. I’m a content creator.
Jack Fowler: You are. You’re an actual one as opposed to a phantom one.
Victor Davis Hanson: I mean, if he can say that these people are grifting, does he really believe that when he left office, when he left office that everybody understood he was a content creator? I mean, there were allegations that “Dreams From My Father” was either ghostwritten or heavily edited in a creative fashion by Bill Ayers.
And it’s just stunning that he’s out on this stump saying all this stuff, and almost everything he says, from people having too much money, people grifting, people making narcissistic projects for themselves, da, da, da, can apply to him.
He’s the one that told us that global warming would inundate the United States within 20 years, and then he went out and bought two mansions right on the coast.
Jack Fowler: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: And we’re supposed to take this guy seriously.
Jack Fowler: He really is. As a commie, he should follow the teachings of Dr. Zhivago when he came back from the war. He said, “Oh, this is much more just …”
Victor Davis Hanson: And you know what? Barack, I’ll address this to you. History’s going to know you for two things. Maybe not The New York Times and not all the people, the presidential historians, Michael Beschloss and all those people that surround yourself with. But they’re going to know you for two of the greatest scandals of the 21st century.
No. 1, you helped peddle the Steele dossier. You weaponized the FBI. You sicced James Comey on a political opponent along with Hillary Clinton. That dossier was completely fabricated, and your people, to your knowledge, met in the White House and knew that, and yet you told them to keep digging.
No. 2, you knew in 2020 that Joe Biden was non compos mentis, and yet you pushed him, along with James Clyburn, for one reason.
You guys were scared that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg and Spartacus, not that they were socialists, that didn’t bother you, but they couldn’t win. And you wanted socialism, and they couldn’t win. So you used this mannequin, this waxen effigy, Joe Biden. You all collapsed around him.
You got everybody out of the field, and then you put him into the presidency. You changed the voting laws in 2020 under the guise of COVID so that was 70% not appearing on Election Day in many states rather than 30%, and mail-in early voting, IDs not required in most states. And you got him elected, and what did you do?
You surrounded him with your people, and he turned out to be the most radical socialist president we’ve ever had. You destroyed the border under Biden. You let in 10 million illegal aliens. I don’t need to go on, but this guy really is aggravating.
He’s so sanctimonious and self-righteous.
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