Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, likened President Donald Trump to “chemotherapy” used to cure the “cancer” of America’s “permanent political class.”
Hanson joined Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow to discuss his latest book, The Case for Trump. He explained his motivation for writing the book.
“I wrote it because I felt the literature so far had been either ra-ra fanatically pro-Trump without a lot of analysis, or had been just Trump Derangement Syndrome stuff,” said Hanson. “I felt that people who had voted for him and expected that he would govern successfully were actually pretty astute, so I analyzed how he devised a geographical and political agenda different from pretty much 16 other gifted candidates, and then he beat somebody who would spend $2.5 billion to his $600 million, flip the electoral college, and then he would survive pretty much an orchestrated political effort to abort his campaign and then his presidency.”
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Hanson added, “Contrary to the so-called Never Trumpers who said Trump would govern as a liberal, or the left that said he would be so chaotic that government would all but collapse, if you look at all of the rubrics that we assess presidents by — unemployment, GDP, oil and gas production, regulations, judicial appointments, foreign policy — he’s probably had the most successful two years … that we’ve seen in 25 or 30 years, maybe even longer.”
Trump is driving a political realignment and forcing reevaluations of deeply entrenched institutions, said Hanson.
“Henry Kissinger said in an Atlantic interview, every once in awhile, a guy like Trump comes along and shakes everything up, and makes us reexamine whether all these institutions — I guess he was talking about NAFTA and NATO and EU — are still doing what they were designed to do,” said Hanson. “Or maybe there’s no need for them, at least in their present iterations. I think he was very valuable.”
Hanson likened Trump to “chemotherapy” used to treat the “cancer” of America’s “permanent political class.”
“He’s sort of like chemotherapy,” stated Hanson. “Chemotherapy is a very toxic drug and it can kill the host — that’s us — but it’s not as bad as the cancer, and the cancer is this permanent political class of people who have contempt for people geographically … in between the two coasts, but also in class terms. I think he really hit something.”
Hanson also credited Trump with driving a a new national discourse on the status quo of both legal and illegal immigration and resulting demographic changes.
“People realized the border — we have another caravan coming up — was out of control,” noted Hanson.
Americans now critically examine the premise that “a melting pot with legal measured meritocratic diverse immigration is the only thing that worked in a multiracial society.” remarked Hanson. Trump broke away from “Republican orthodoxy” regarding immigration, he added. “The Republican attitude was basically, ‘Let as many cheaper laborers in,’ wink and nod, hope they have family values, they express family values, [and] in three generations they’ll vote for us. [Donald Trump] destroyed that paradigm.”
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