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.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re watching the greatest counterrevolution in some 90 years. We have not seen any president try to radically change the political calculus and the nature of government since Franklin D. Roosevelt did it, from the Left, during the New Deal of the mid-1930s.
And what do I mean by that? President Donald Trump closed the border. Nobody thought he could. He closed it. He has now deported over 100,000 criminal illegal aliens and 1 million have self-deported, of all statuses, who were here illegally.
He’s basically declared war on DEI. And he’s winning that argument. He has barred biological males from competing in women’s sports. He has full public support for doing that and he’s making enormous inroads.
The universities are rushing and competing with each other to cut a deal with Donald Trump, and to agree to not gouge the federal government on federal grants through their surcharges of way over 40% or 50%; to follow civil rights legislation, the Supreme Court, and not discriminate by race or gender, as they do in admissions, hiring, promotion, tenure; and to be disinterested and be fair and follow, as I said, free speech canons in the Bill of Rights on campus.
What am I getting at? Donald Trump is winning on all of these social and cultural issues.
Abroad, we see that Iran no longer poses a nuclear threat for the immediate future; that Israel’s enemies—whether Hezbollah or Hamas or Houthis—are in disarray or severely attrited; Iran is no longer a threat to the Gulf states or Israel, at least for the immediate future; and we see some progress with Ukrainian war.
People are angry about this counterrevolution for two reasons: It’s succeeding and it’s succeeding beyond anybody’s wild expectation.
Naysayers, The Wall Street Journal news page said we would be in a recession now, the tariffs would cause a trade war, and we would see the stock market collapse. The opposite has happened: $15 trillion of foreign investment promised and $300 billion in tariff revenue anticipated.
We don’t know the eventual effects of these new tariffs, but for now, all of our economists who predicted gloom and doom were wrong. All of our cultural critics who said the universities would be destroyed by Donald Trump, that he would arrest innocent people who just happened to forget to get a visa, and he wouldn’t go after criminals—they are wrong too.
So, people are angry about this counterrevolution because it’s working. But there’s another reason why they’re angry. He’s not addressing the symptoms, as he did in the first administration.
He doesn’t have people around him, as he did in the first administration—a Rex Tillerson; a Bill Barr, a good man, but Bill Barr was not on the MAGA agenda; Jim Mattis; people like “anonymous” Omarosa Manigault Newman—all of these people who thought that they knew better than Donald Trump and they would either stop what he was trying to do or reinterpret what he was trying to do.
In other words, he has a team that is devoted to his counterrevolution, and more importantly, to the symptoms of the progressive project.
The symptoms of the progressive project are not just the Democrats exercising power in Congress or holding the White House, it’s how they get that power.
And they get that power through PBS and NPR, now defunded; cable news and slanted network news, now under assault when they lie and defame and face court ramifications; the universities that indoctrinate people, now facing large fines, tax on their endowments, a renewed way of a new government attention toward student loans, $1.7 trillion program surcharges, as I said, and segregation on campus in dorms, graduation ceremonies. The universities are now under scrutiny. We’re seeing the Department of Education itself being questioned.
And I mentioned before, in addition to education and the media, Donald Trump is attacking the very idea that residency is synonymous with citizenship. That if you came here illegally, if you reside illegally, then you are eventually going to face a deportation—even if you have not been a violent criminal, and even if you haven’t been served with deportation papers.
So, what he is trying to do is tell the American people that the Left exercises power, even when they do not control government, any branch of government. And they exercise power, even though on most of the issues, if not all of them, their constituency is only 40%. The majority of the American people oppose their agenda.
And they do this through the bureaucracies, through the media, through the universities, through the popular culture. And these are the very sources that Donald Trump is asking them to reform. And the government is going to shrink. The government’s gonna get out of the media business. The government’s gonna take a hard look at universities who want and obtain federal funds.
And we’re going to see the counterrevolution, I think, succeed, with one caveat. We’re going to see in the next year a frenzy, a frantic, almost out-of-mind reaction from the Left because they know that if this counterrevolution succeeds, it’ll be very difficult for them to push down an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.
So, brace yourself. We’re looking at the resistance coming up to the counterrevolution, and it’s going to be fierce and unhinged.
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