Victor Davis Hanson wants to make it clear: Although he voted for Donald Trump, when he writes about the president, he is doing so as a historian, bringing the same dispassionate eye to the work as he does when writing about warfare in ancient Greece.
“My interests are not in defending or attacking Trump but in offering an explanation of why he did not disappear from the political scene and likely will not for quite some time,” Hanson writes in his latest book, “The Counterrevolution,” which chronicles what he calls Trump’s “wilderness years” between presidencies and the factors that led to his political resurrection after the 2020 defeat.
Hanson calls it the “greatest political comeback in American presidential history.”
Last year, CNN commentator Scott Jennings wrote about what he called “A Revolution of Common Sense” that Trump ushered in. Hanson, conversely, sees Trump’s fall and rise as a counterrevolution — a reversal of liberal ideologies that had seized the country — and says that although Trump might not be the hero that people wanted, he was what the country needed to change course.
“He’s done some fundamental things that no one else can do, and he doesn’t care what people say about him,” Hanson said in an interview with the Deseret News.
A military historian, retired professor of the classics and the author of more than 20 books, Hanson is now the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a frequent guest on conservative-leaning podcasts and TV shows. He often works from his family farm in the Central Valley of California, about 200 miles from Stanford, where he earned his Ph.D. in the classics.
Hanson, who is 73, is the fifth generation in his family to live on the land acquired by his great-great-grandmother in 1870. He often quotes the adage that farming doesn’t just produce food, it produces citizens, and one of his bios at the Hoover Institution describes him as “scholar, writer and farmer.” But since Hanson published “The Case for Trump” in 2019, arguing that Trump was the antihero that the country needed, he has increasingly been seen by some as a Trump apologist, despite his insistence that this is not his intent.
In conversation with the Deseret News, Hanson explained why he believes that Trump may be one of the rare presidents who pulls off a victory for his party in the midterms, what he thinks of the president’s strategy in Iran, and what he thinks Trump’s legacy will be.
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: “The Counterrevolution” covers the years between Trump’s presidencies and also the first few months of his second term. But lately he has seen a decline in his favorability ratings. Why do you think this has happened, and does it matter to the president in terms of what he wants to accomplish?
Victor Davis Hanson: I think RealClear Politics has him around 40 today. That’s an aggregate of polling. He has been up to 45, so he’s pretty much where George Bush was or Barack Obama right before the midterms in the second term. I think Obama was a little higher, at 41, Bush a little lower at 38, but he did drop and I think that was a result of his decision, not necessarily to go into Iran and deal with that problem, but more importantly, there was the expectation by both his adversaries and also his supporters that the operation would be similar to his taking out, in the first term, of (Hasem) Soleimani, or (Abu Bakr) al-Baghdadi or the Wagner Group ... or the bombing last year in June of the nuclear facilities.
And I think the administration underestimated two things. First, that Iran is the largest area in the Middle East; it’s the size of Oklahoma and Texas. It has the second-largest population, 93 million. And it’s invested essentially a half-trillion dollars in a nuclear industrial military complex. It’s a vast country, and it terrified everybody. Everybody in the Middle East said, it’s going to be worse than Afghanistan, it’s going to be worse than Iraq; you can’t deal with these people, they’re crazy.
So I think they underestimated the challenge that was posed. They thought they would do some damage and then these people will be rational. That didn’t happen.
I don’t think he was ever going to win any of the left, but the fall in the polls I think reflects three things: The war is too long for the MAGA base. There are some defections there, like Tucker Carlson ... maybe 5 or 6% of the Republican base. And I think the independents were for the elimination of the threat, but they wanted it, like the other operations, quickly.
Then there’s the affordability question; for five months, (the administration) did not address these issues. They didn’t address those defections and the economy.
DN: There is talk among some Republicans of this being another “forever war.”
VDH: It’s tragic we lost 18 people, but it’s not a forever war. It’s not 20 years in Afghanistan, or eight or nine. But now they’re in a test of wills with Iran, and Iran feels they can delay, delay, say they’re going to negotiate, back off, play “good cop, bad cop” with the various factions and drag it out.
And the administration I think is at the point where either they are going to hit them very, very hard and then outsource the containment to the Arabs and Israel and our bases in the area, or they’re just going to forget about it and start emphasizing the economy on the idea that everybody would say they’ve lost, but actually Iran is losing $100 million a day. They don’t get the message out that the embargo is in place, the sanctions are in place, the debanking is in place; they bombed all the bridges to Russia and China. There’s no import, no export. And they’re just about at the brink of bankruptcy. Why they didn’t do that earlier, I don’t know, but they wasted about 90 days before they went nuclear on the sanctions, so to speak.
DN: So where does that leave the president politically?
VDH: The only thing that is saving him right now is, he has been given a number of gifts that he didn’t expect. Thirty-nine out of the last 41 midterms, the incumbent president and party in the White House have lost seats — (but for) Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Franklin Roosevelt, as I remember.
Nobody anticipated there would be more red-state legislatures gerrymandering than blue states, so (Republicans) could pick up three or four seats. We never thought the Supreme Court would outlaw racial gerrymandering, they may pick up one or two seats from that. In addition, people were talking about the Democrats getting a whole lot of money, but the Republicans have raised more. So they’re going to have a lot more money, and that’s aside from people like the so-called tech oligarchs, like Elon Musk, who have pledged to put hundreds of millions of dollars in.
And then finally, he was given a great gift by the prominence of these democratic socialists. Everybody thought they were kind of an isolated phenomenon, but they’re in the news, people like Hasan Piker and Zohran Mamdani.
Ironically, I think there’s more pressure on Trump now, because now people are saying you could win the midterms, you could hold it, if you get out of Iran. That’s the dilemma they’re in.
DN: There is still the perception that there is a problem with the economy.
VDH: Most people, if you look at the polls, they’re not following the Iran war because it’s not really a war. It’s bombast, back and forth negotiations, and a week of destruction. What they’re following is affordability of houses, insurance, food, fuel. Donald Trump promised to lower them. And so the argument that he made, or his team is making, is “I only have half the rate of inflation of my predecessor, and in my first year, if it hadn’t been for gas prices, I’d have considerably less.” That doesn’t persuade the independents because they feel prices went up 20-22% and if you look at the basket of insurance, rent, gas, food, under (Joe) Biden, it was almost 25 or 28%.
They thought Donald Trump was going to come in and not just have lower inflation, but lower the price. He’s saying the inflation is a lot lower (than under Biden), but that’s a bad argument. It’s almost impossible historically for a president to get into a deflationary cycle and lower the prices of his predecessor.
DN: So how can he overcome that, with Iran dragging on?
VDH: It’s going to be very hard. I think they’re going to have hit things very hard for about a week. He’s going to have to do what Bill Clinton did. Bill Clinton was paralyzed for 60 days when he was trying to get (Slobodan) Milošević out of Serbia in 1999. But then he started hitting the Danube bridges; I remember everybody was shocked that he knocked out the power grid of Belgrade. And then Milošević just caved.
I’m not saying the Iranians would do that, but if he gave a little bit more pressure on them, and then said, after two weeks, they are crippled now, they won’t be able to do any harm for 10 years, we have containment forces in the area ... our European and Asian allies will help us patrol the Hormuz Strait, and we’ve sealed the enrichment at the Pickaxe Mountain, and for 2½ months we’re going to talk about affordability and get the price of fuel down.
One thing I made clear in the book is, I didn’t want to go the White House. I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to interview him, or talk to any of his advisers, although I know a lot of his advisers well, and in the past, he has called me.
I think that was important. I don’t feel invested in anything but a disinterested point of view about what he’s doing.
It’s a very high-stakes gamble he has taken. I don’t think any (other) president would have, in a midterm year, try to take on Iran. Seven presidents said they couldn’t have nuclear weapons, but not one of them did anything about it.
DN: To your point about remaining disinterested, people will look at this book and at “The Case for Trump,” and your appearances, particularly on Fox News, and paint you as a Trump supporter.
VDH: They already have. And I voted for Donald Trump.
I picked the title, “Counterrevolution,” because he’s a little different from prior Republican presidents, and a little different from his first term. His agenda is to slow down or moderate or redirect the progressive project. For 50 years, schools of education, academics, popular culture, has been moving to the left.
This time around, for good or evil, he hasn’t appointed people like Steve Mnuchin, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, fixtures in the bipartisan Washington atmosphere. He’s picked people that were sometimes accused of lack of expertise — like Dan Bongino or Kash Patel — sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Their main criteria is loyalty to what he’s trying to do.
And what he’s trying to do is not look at the symptomatology of the progressive trajectory, but the causes. And no one has ever done that before. And that explains a lot of the outrage.
I’m at Stanford so I can tell you that they’re terrified. Because the first thing (the Trump administration) did was say you’re not going to gouge the government with 50, 40, 35% overhead on your grants. The private sector is 15%; that’s it. We’re going to tax some of the endowment you have. We’re going to look very carefully at your separate racial graduations, your separate racially set aside safe spaces … And we’re going to be tough with you.
And we’re not just going to close the border, we’re going to try to address the 14th Amendment, we’re going to try to get the wall completely finished, we’re going to stop catch-and-release, we’re going to make refugees apply, and we might even deport people who are naturalized citizens who have been convicted of a crime. Those are very radical ideas.
The same thing with crime. We’re not just going to say don’t defund the police. We’re going to send the National Guard into Washington and elsewhere. ...
And so, it’s kind of a 360-degree, 24/7 effort by that entire team to redirect the course of the United States culturally, socially, economically and politically.
DN: You say in the book that Trump “unknowingly incited the Democratic Party into a doom loop.” But some people would argue that he knows exactly what he is doing.
VDH: Maybe he does. It’s hard to know. Every once in a while, someone in the Senate will call me and say, “Well, Victor, I listened to your podcast and you were talking about the negotiations (with Iran) being on and off. But if you’re confused, don’t you think the Iranians are more confused? Don’t you think that while he’s doing this talking and bombing, and talking and bombing, and you look at Tehran in January of this year, and you look at it now and you look at their military — they have lost almost a century (of work) and a half a trillion dollars in investment while he’s been confusing us, but confusing them more.”
That’s an old controversy, where Trump people say he plays three-dimensional chess and you just don’t understand it, and his critics say, no, he’s just all over the map.
DN: The legacy of Bill Clinton, despite his accomplishments, will always be associated with Monica Lewinsky and impeachment. Do you think that Trump’s legacy will also be primarily about the coarseness, the mean tweets, the roughness around the edges, to put it mildly?
VDH: I take it as a truism that people on the hard right will always say that Clinton was a scoundrel and a liar and a perjurer. And that’s all true. And people on the left will say Donald Trump is crude and he’s mean and he gloated over the death of Rob Reiner and things like that.
But there’s actually a renaissance on the right now about Richard Nixon — he did a lot of good things on foreign policy and some on economics and he had good people around him. And I’ve seen a lot of conservatives who have given Bill Clinton credit for what he did. Oddly, they give him more credit, sometimes, than what the left does. I don’t see a lot of socialists saying we’ve got to go back to Clintonism even though he won two elections.
I think that will happen in the case of Donald Trump, too. ... Most people will say Donald Trump did a lot of very good things.
In the book, I’ve used the stereotype of “Shane” or “The Magnificent Seven,” the tragic hero in Western cinema, which goes all the way back to classical tragedy. Society needs to have things done, but in an ossified state, they can’t deal with the cattle barons, or some other problem. And they bring in somebody who is dubious, and he has a set of skills that break the ice, so to speak, and he solves the problem, but in the process of solving the problem, once they get to the point where things are pretty good and he didn’t destroy everything, then they have the luxury of saying, you know, I don’t like these tweets.
There’s a famous line in the Western “Shane” that only he can stop the cattle barons, but yet one person says, “I don’t like the idea that you have a gun.” But without him, they wouldn’t have solved the problem.
When Donald Trump leaves, I don’t think he’s going to be invited to inaugurations. I don’t think he’s going to be in a group portrait. I think he’s going to be a pariah. But he had certain skill sets that were needed at the time.