VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It's going to be scary if they win because that means they'll probably take the House, the entire Congress, and there won't be any redress of grievances.
But I don't think they will because they don't have any popular support because every single one of Joe Biden's issues -- economy, crime, energy, foreign policy, the border -- he's polling 30-40 percent. The only way they're retaining power is through the legal system and the administrative state and our institutions: media, entertainment, sports, education, K-12 and universities, and it is kind of an artificial way of getting power without popular consent.
That's why I think you were right on when you said they don't believe in democracy. In fact, op-ed writers in the New York Times will say that now, that democracy is a flawed idea because it doesn't any longer ensure the result they have to have. Like good Bolsheviks or Jacobins, they eventually always turn on elections. They don't want them.
So we'll see, it is going to be very explosive. I hope everybody can keep their head, because I think the next 12-18 months are going to be the most explosive in our history since the Great Depression.
TUCKER CARLSON: Trump is leading now, what do you think would happen if 11 months from now, Trump were still leading?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We have no idea about this election because we've never had a president running against an ex-president. Number two, we've never had an incumbent president who is utterly corrupt like Joe Biden, and has lost all or most of his cognitive ability, and is very unpopular. And yet, we've never had a challenger who has been the victim of lawfare and is facing 91 indictments.
Every time people say they wouldn't dare do this, "Fanni Willis wouldn't dare," "Letitia James is an absurd prosecutor, she wouldn't dare," "Alvin Bragg is a buffoon, he wouldn't dare," "Jack Smith is a partisan." Every time people say that they do! And so I don't know if there i a strategy to keep Donald Trump either out of a gag order, or out of confinement at Mar-a-Lago, or out of jail.
You can see where we're headed where Joe Biden isn't really a viable president anymore. He's a construct, he's being used by the hard left, by the Obamas and the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders "Squad" wing of the Democratic Party. And it is getting to the point of caricature. You put all of those things together and add in a Kamala Harris that frightens everybody because we've never had such an incompetent vice president, I think, and so unfit to be president.
All bets are off! It's like putting all sorts of ingredients of explosives into a kind of device and it is going to blow up I think, somehow. But I don't think we can predict what is going to happen, it is just too volatile. I think the left feels that they want to push the envelope, they want to take the leading Republican candidate and create charges against him, which they know they wouldn't ever lodge if he hadn't run for president. They would have left him alone.
So these are patently political, and they want to destroy him psychologically, financially, and of course politically. and they think they can get away with it without a pushback, and we'll see.
I think the other candidates, I don't know what their line should be, but I think it should be, "If you want to vote for me, I am going to be viable and make sure they never do to Donald Trump what they're doing now, and I'm in a better position to help Trump than he is."
That's the only legitimate argument to make, that this involves everybody. And if you are going to run for president and embrace the MAGA agenda, you should say I will not be in jail, I will not be exposed to the same degree, and if I can survive, I will change the system and make sure Donald Trump is exonerated, and no one else has to face this. Otherwise, it is going to be a very complex, bizarre, baffling period. I don't think the founder had --- this is their worst nightmare, 2023-24.
TUCKER CARLSON: I don't think you'd even have to support Trump's agenda or Trump the man to see this as an assault on a centuries-old system that has worked better than any other. I wonder why almost nobody in Washington seems to see that or be willing to say it out loud.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The only question I have about that is I don't know why they did not go to the same extreme -- they did go to extremes against McCain and Romney, but there was something about Trump, his personality, that was an affront to the bi-coastal standard of what they thought was acceptable or desirable. Or his agenda, when they looked at the MAGA agenda they said, "My God, we have sizable investments in China, and they are a partner, not an existential threat. This is really scary." Or, "We have this idea of global ecumenicalism, we can't have a border anymore and this guy wants to bring back a border." Or, "We have this idea that race is essential not incidental to who we are and he would want to bring back the crazy melting pot and destroy the entire woke movement."
So I think it did represent to them a DEFCON-1 and they said we can't have this, and it would have been alright had he been a third party running like Ross Perot, they've dealt with people like that in the past, and they've always been able to handle them. But he won the Republican nomination and got elected, and now he wants to be back, and they said, "We're going to do everything possible, even reject our prior democratic liberal heritage of ACLU free speech and transparency and the Church Committee." All of that is off the table, we don't want to do any of that anymore. "We're going to do anything necessary to destroy this guy's vision and the other candidates who share his vision, because if we don't, we're going back to an America that we didn't like when it was there, we don't like now, and we sure as hell don't want to be America in the future like that."
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