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.
This video was recorded before Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
In an earlier video, I talked a little bit about my new book, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.” And I talked mostly about the fall, and how he came back to political power, the rise.
But the second half of that rise is what is he actually doing in his first years of presidency, and what is the point of it?
In the prior video, as I said, he wanted to address the progressive revolution, how they took power without being elected. By that, I mean control of the institutions even when they did not have the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the presidency.
So he said, “This time I’m not gonna complain about the symptoms. I’m going to look at the causes.”
So he wanted to have zero immigration, zero immigration that was illegal, and cut back on immigration from countries where people were coming antithetical to the values and traditions of the United States, not assimilating, not acculturating, and not integrating, and often being very critical of the country that was so generously their host on the first day they set foot into it.
So he revolutionized immigration. For the first time in about 50 years, we did not have more immigrants than Americans being born. It’s the first year that immigration will fall until we can properly integrate people into the American tradition.
He also said, “If we do what Europe does with green energy, and the Biden and Obama administrations have put us on that disastrous pathway, we will be a third-rate nation.”
Solar and wind are good auxiliary sources of power. They cannot be subsidized at forty cents a kilowatt, like here in California, to provide reliable twenty-four-hour power. They will not work.
We have enough natural gas and oil to be, if we are wise, to be the greatest producer of both in the history of civilization. And indeed, that’s where we are today.
He greenlined new leasings, the construction of new pipelines, and, of course, encouraged fracking. In addition, he’s encouraging nuclear power, smaller decentralized nuclear power, more hydroelectric, more everything.
The third thing is he said, we hollowed out the interior of the United States. We just simply said they’re losers. We offshored. We outsourced. The coasts got wealthy.
They had a global audience for their media, their lawyers, their executives, their CEOs, their insurance, their academics of seven billion people.
The people in between, often the muscular classes, fell short under globalization. I’m going to tell the world that one way to reduce their huge surpluses, we have over a trillion dollars in trade deficits. If they come to the United States and they build plants and they invest in our superior Constitution, our superior legal system, our cheap energy, they will make money, and they will hire Americans.
And already we have somewhere between $10 and $15 trillion in the pipeline of foreign investment.
He also said that we have too many regulations and we have too many people working for government. He let go 270,000 federal employees. We forget about that.
He looked at the military and said, it’s been creeping for a long time, insidiously so, DEI programs. The Left likes the military because there is no discussion. There is no vote. There’s no argumentation about DEI. Once you get to the Pentagon, and you tell them we want DEI or else in a Democratic administration, then it’s the chain of command, and change happens like that.
And the results are we have about 50,000 recruits short. Donald Trump said his first year in office, and we’re going to get rid of DEI. And, of course, what happened? 50,000 Americans showed up. We’ve had the best recruiting years in a decade. We’ve got the highest energy production in a decade. We’ve got the most job creations from foreign investment probably in a decade.
He did. He wanted a couple of other things as well. He wanted American preeminence in the world in the broadest sense of the word. He increased the defense budget. He changed the idea from a few defense contractors with very expensive platforms, $160 million for an F-22, $90 million for an F-35. They’re great planes. $14 billion for a carrier.
We can shift a little bit now that we have those investments into quantity as well as quality. Why not build a million drones a year? We’re trying to build 350,000. Why not have 20,000 Tomahawks produced a year?
He also said that he was going to promote American companies, sort of like the War Production Board of FDR. FDR was a leftist. The corporations in World War II were rightist. But he brought in William Knudsen from GM, Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford, and said, “Go to it. I’m not going to regulate you. Produce, produce, produce, and we’ll win the war.”
Donald Trump was just the opposite. He was a rightist, and the companies were mostly in Silicon Valley, especially leftists. He brought them all in and he said, “If you make America preeminent in software, digital media, space launches, satellite launches, bioengineering, artificial intelligence, what’s gonna determine who leads the world in the next 50 years, I’m gonna protect you from Canadian regulation, from European arbitrary fining, from Chinese patent and copyright theft, as long as you put your country first.”
And what are we looking at now? If you look at those categories I just delineated, American companies are eight to nine of the top 10 in AI, in digital media, in satellite launches. Elon Musk, by June this year, has launched more satellites than all the satellites in history. In history. So we are dominating all the new fields.
He also said the world has taken advantage of us, or at least sized us up as ossified, calcified, asleep, and the result is American power and prestige is waning throughout the world.
I’m gonna go down to Latin America. I’m gonna get the Chinese and Russians, if I can, out of Venezuela. I’ll stop the Maduro communist spread of countries. I’ll get the Chinese out of Panama. Instead of having 28 of the 32 Caribbean nations anti-American for the most part, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, we’ll flip them.
And as we speak today, all but four or five countries in Latin America are pro-U.S. and pro-capitalist, with the exception maybe of Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua.
He also said we have to look at the Middle East. We have an existential problem. Iran is getting closer and closer to getting a nuclear weapon. We had a one-day strike. Apparently, we didn’t get all of the nuclear materials.
So on Feb. 28th of 2026, in a very controversial move when the economy was going very well, oil prices were near historic lows, he took on the 93 million-person Iran, and he said that I will bomb their infrastructure but not their dual-use infrastructure. I do not want to destroy their oil sector. I do not want to destroy their bridges, their highways, their factories. I want the Iranian people to have an infrastructure when they get rid of this odious regime.
It’s a very hard thing to do. There were certain taboos. He said no ground troops. No dual-use targeting like Barack Obama did in Libya and Bill Clinton did in Serbia.
And here we are into our ninth month. People are unhappy about the war. Oil has gone up over $100 a barrel, even though more oil is leaving the Gulf through the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Hormuz Strait than before. But we have sort of a bottleneck with distilleries.
People are very angry. It may cost Donald Trump the midterms, people are predicting. But the point of this is that if you can strangle the Iranian regime, strip away its money, strip away its nuclear threat, strip away its missiles, strip away its subordinates, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, from their source of income, the entire Middle East will start to change.
And again, he’s not nation-building, no boots on the ground. No, we’re gonna make a democracy here or there. No, what he’s saying is that Shia minorities and terrorist groups are funded by Iran, and they make it impossible to have a stable pro-Western Middle East. I’m going to address not the symptoms, but the cause of this.
I’d like to finish with, very quickly, Europe. Trump is not critical of Europe in the hostile sense, nor is his administration. What they envision is a partnership, but that’s impossible right now because European fertility is about 1.35. They have open borders. They have, in some European nations, 15% of unassimilated immigrants, mostly from the hostile Middle East. And when you count first- and second-generation, that number can get up in some countries to 30% or 40% of the population.
In a democratic society, they’re captive to that very powerful constituency. Until recently, they were pretty much disarmed. Even 2% of GDP, which they have just achieved, is pretty meager.
They have made disastrous choices on energy and shut down their fossil fuel industry for all practical purposes and are paying for highly subsidized, highly inefficient wind and solar, especially in places like the United Kingdom and Germany.
I could go on and on, but what I’m getting at is it makes them weaker than they should be for a 500-million-person EU with a $20 trillion GDP. We want them to be strong. Remember, we have about 100, we have about 340 million people. They have 500 million, and our GDP is $10 trillion larger.
So what we want is Europe to be confident and armed and a partner and to resist the Russia-China axis, not in a hostile way, just a rivalry. But when you’re failing economically, and you have these open borders, and there’s a threat that under your system that these immigrants will get a very powerful voice in your government, then you get insecure. And when you get insecure, you get angry and envious.
And we can’t be partners when we’re not equals. And they are not equal to us economically or militarily, and they can be ’cause they’ve done it before.
So what Trump is trying to say in this counterrevolution, as it applies to foreign affairs: be strong, be a partner, take half the responsibility, and we will get along better than ever.
Thank you very much. I hope you will enjoy “The Counterrevolution: The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.”
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