The War for America's Soul

by Sebastian Gorka

  GORKA: I couldn’t concur more—the special counsel is a dangerous weapon, whoever the president is.

  VDH: It is. So what we need is for Attorney General Barr to go systematically, in a transparent fashion, through what is already on the record. Take for example James Comey. Did he lie under oath on two hundred fifty occasions when he said, “I don’t know, I can’t remember”? Was it a felony or not a felony to release probably classified memos of presidential conversations? Did he mislead the president when he said, “You’re not under investigation?” Did he mislead a FISA court by knowingly withholding the information that the documentation that he was using to get a court order for surveillance was paid for by Hillary Clinton? And if these things are true, then we have to have an open discussion and indictment. And all of these people need to be held accountable. And I could go on and on, but we don’t have the time, this applies to Comey, Brennan, McCabe.…

  GORKA: But do people have to go to jail, Professor Hanson?

  VDH: Well, they have to follow the law, Sebastian. So, with what James Comey did, or what James Clapper did, if they are felons, if they are guilty of felonious behavior, and they’re convicted, yes. We’ve already gone where there are no consequences. The reason that we’re here is because John Brennan, to take one example, lied on two occasions under oath to the U.S. Senate. Once about surveilling computers of staffers, and once about collateral damage. And Brennan admitted that he lied to the congressional investigation, and nothing happened.

  And that gave them a sense of emboldenment that they were set, and I could say the same thing about Susan Rice and her unmasking of people. It’s illegal to unmask, not to unmask per se, but to unmask and leak those names to the press, and we know that happened. We don’t know why Samantha Power was making hundreds of requests to unmask people.

  GORKA: As a U. N. Ambassador who isn’t technically part of the intelligence community, that’s the remarkable thing. Do you have confidence, Professor Hanson, that Attorney General Barr will try and see justice done?

  VDH: I do believe that he will, but I’m not sure that even his integrity and skill and jurisprudence can overcome a very biased federal court system and a Deep State bureaucratic apparatus within the Department of Justice. He’s got to deal not just with his own people, but the court system itself, and judges who feel that social justice is a higher calling than the actual letter of the law. So I’m not confident that any of these people will end up, if convicted, and if found guilty, facing the consequences that you or I would face had we been in this situation.

  GORKA: We have to wonder whether Lady Justice does indeed still wear a blindfold. Professor, let me touch upon the central theme of your book, The Case for Trump. I tend to agree with General Mike Flynn, whom I served with in the Presidential Transition Team and then in the White House, that on November 8, 2016, we saw a peaceful political revolution in the United States. Donald Trump would not have been possible, in my opinion, were it not for the abject failure, the moral and technical bankruptcy, of the “elite” on both Left and Right.

  Recently, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, President Trump gave a rally speech where he said basically that the elite is dead, and he pointed at the audience and said, “You are the super elite.”

  Professor Hanson, is the “elite” dead in America?

  VDH: Well, maybe the current elite. I mean there’s always going to be an elite in every society. It may be the elite as we came to view it in the post-war order that is gone. That is, the Ivy League elite, the corporate elite, the globalist elite, I think they’ve lost a lot of prestige. And on the major issues of our times, they’ve been on the wrong side. On the illegal immigration mess that we see today, for instance, they were either on the Left, hoping illegal immigration and changing demographics would enhance their power, and or they were on the Right and supporting illegal immigration because they thought cheap labor was good for business. They misread the American people, and they were discredited.

  And what you’re seeing now with China is the elite in the corporate world and on the so-called “humanitarian Left” scrambling and, without evoking the word “Trump,” trying to emulate Trump’s tough approach. I mean, where did this come from, as far as China? It’s only possible because Trump threw a hammer at the glass, and now they’re all suspicious of China. It’s the same thing with Iran, Obama’s Iran Deal. Trump disrupted a lot of assumed status quo pretensions, and people were bewildered because orthodoxy said, “You can’t do that, and if you do, chaos will ensue.” And not only did chaos not ensue, but foreign policy and economic successes did. And now they’re either trying to piggyback on it or deprecate Trump’s contributions, but whatever they’re doing, the message is that they could not do that, or they would not do that. And people started to grasp that.

  GORKA: Let’s talk about President Trump as commander in chief and his strategic impact. In the geopolitical landscape, how significant is it that we now have a president who doesn’t come from the “elite” Washington bubble, and who isn’t a former politician?

  VDH: I think, to sum it up, Trump looks at situations and evaluates them empirically. Is this working? Is this in the United States’ interests? Will this advance our allies’ or our own agendas? And then he makes his decision on that basis. So if you tell Donald Trump, “Don’t dare move our embassy to Jerusalem because you’ve got a lot of experts on the Middle East who say that will cause another Intifada,” he’ll wonder what empirical proof the experts have for that assumption. Or if they say, “You cannot decertify the Palestinians as refugees,” he’s more likely to say something like, “Are they refugees? Are Germans from the Sudetenland still refugees? Are Jews who were ethnically cleansed out of Egypt in 1956 still refugees?” He’s looking at the world empirically, and they’re not. Yet, they think that they are. So they got into double and triple and quadruple double think, or counterintuitive or counterfactual thinking; they got to the point of over-studying and overanalyzing everything, where an outsider could look at the situation empirically. The so-called experts got into the habit of making deals for the sake of making deals, like Obama’s Iranian deal, which allowed the Iranians to make a lot of money and keep up their technology—and then maybe spring a bomb on us in ten years.

  It’s the same thing with the “climate change” Paris Accord. It was just a mechanism to restrain the United States economically and transfer wealth to other powers. When it comes to energy, we can get by on our own with natural gas or fracking. Trump looked at this deal the way anybody would who had been in the real world and had to make a payroll, and he knew that if a building didn’t pencil out, he was going to lose money. But when you’re dealing with this bureaucratic mind, a public employee mind, an academic mind, they’re not subject to the ramifications of their own ideology. There’s no downside. And they’re wrong a lot. And then nobody really pays.

  GORKA: You make it sound—your description really is redolent of the Hans Christian Andersen story of the naked emperor. Along comes somebody who is not beholden to the court, and he just says, “They’ve got no clothes on.” Is that a fair analogy for the president?

  VDH: Yes, I think so. I think I’ve used that even. Nobody ever in their right mind—the establishment or whatever—would think empirically about Kim Jong-un, to take one example. They think, “He’s so volatile; he’s so crazy,” and they deal with him out of fear. Trump says basically, “Look, I’ve got a bigger button. We’ve got all of these nuclear advantages, we’ve got missile defense, we’ve got our allies, and we can’t establish a situation where this thug threatens us with six or seven nuclear weapons. And so, I’m going to reply in kind.” And that was just a heresy. And, yet, it’s in line with human nature. Once Kim saw that Trump had the wherewithal to back up his threats, he decided he wanted to talk. And Trump was wise enough to give Kim a carrot by saying we wouldn’t forcibly unify the Koreas through military force. That provided an avenue that didn’t exist before for a future deal.

  I
think that Trump is all about the art of the deal. His methodology is to go in, threaten and bluster, and demand three times more than what he would probably settle for, and then scale back and end up with more than anyone thought that he could get.

  Look at what President Trump has been doing with the Chinese over the last two years. He’s threatening, he’s tightening up the tariffs, he’s waiting for them to stew in their own juice, and he’s not going to cave to them. He slaps $200 billion in tariffs on China and then threatens to raise it to $340 billion if the Chinese don’t accept trade reform. But he will allow them to save face with compromises of his own and will get a huge victory because China needs our market more than we need theirs. Nobody in the foreign policy establishment has been thinking like that. But if they did, they would realize that nothing President Trump has done is crazy.

  GORKA: How significant is President Trump’s impact on the global establishment, the international “elite” that has dominated how politics is done since the end of the Cold War?

  VDH: He’s made enormous inroads with the EU and NATO. He’s set the new rules of the game and is basically saying, “You are a very wealthy, affluent continent, and we’re here to help you. But we’re not going to subsidize your defense at the same level—it’s still subsidized—but not at the same level that you’re accustomed to.” President Trump has set the new standards of behavior in the relationship. And I think that’s positive. He’s done the same thing with China. He’s telling China that we’re no longer going to allow you to have these asymmetrical advantages. That was a very radical thing. So Trump’s already made enormous changes in the establishment community, from Silicon Valley to Washington, which had been completely complacent with the Chinese.

  GORKA: Has President Trump changed America’s political culture for good—or only for the duration of his presidency?

  VDH: The problem that Trump is facing is that he is trying to set an example by sheer performance. That’s why I think Peter Thiel and some of Trump’s supporters are trying to create a commensurate intellectual movement. What Trump does is say, “This is what I did with China, and therefore, this is the model from now on. This is what I did to reindustrialize the Midwest; that’s the model. This is what I did on fair trade.” And he’s doing that partly because he’s more of an activist than a theorist, but partly because he’s orphaned, or he’s alienated, ostracized by the establishment and doesn’t have a kitchen cabinet of theorists to memorialize his presidency.

  This is the first time we’ve ever had a president, where the flagship—so-called flagship—magazines, journals, think tanks, councils, they’re all anti-Trump. So, there’s no effort to go and recruit from those areas. He needs to say to the Republican party, “In the last six elections, we haven’t had a 51 percent national party since George H. W. Bush in 1988 beat Dukakis; and we haven’t won the popular vote in the last five of the six national elections, and that came at a time when we picked up a thousand seats just to take the Obama administration alone. So until this midterm, we’ve been successful at the state and local level. But there’s something lacking in that wealthy, multimillion-dollar, white, male Romney, McCain, Dole, two Bushes profile that we gravitate to. That comes out of a particular background and cannot appeal to lower middle-class and working-class ‘deplorables’ in nine or ten states—which are still going to be absolutely essential for electoral success, even with a so-called changed demography.”

  So, I think, what I’m getting at is they’re going to have to really study in depth the Trump position on immigration, trade, manufacturing, and a lot of that is antithetical Milton Friedman, free-market “creative destruction.” And, yet, that Milton Friedman model gets you no more than 46 percent of the popular vote, which isn’t enough unless you have a really bad candidate running against you.

  GORKA: So, unless the conservative establishment embraces the nascent Trump Doctrine, or the MAGA model, his incredibly significant and positive effect will be ephemeral, is what you’re saying?

  VDH: Yes. In 2024, you will see candidates like Cruz, or Rubio, maybe, half-heartedly emulate his nationalist themes—but not to Trump’s extent or success. The irony is that they criticize Trump for being crude and callous, but his approach is far more empathetic and caring about people than is this abstract creative-destruction, Republican orthodoxy. You really saw that with Paul Ryan—the way that an inept Joe Biden beat him in the 2012 vice-presidential televised debate. He was pathetic because he just relied on all of these, sort of free-market, think tank nostrums, and Biden just talked about people in a very adolescent way, but it still came off as better than what Ryan had to say.

  GORKA: And the president’s empathy derives from his desire to help working-class Americans get their jobs back, correct?

  VDH: I think so. I’ve talked to a lot of people about that. And whether it’s personal that he’s done these building deals where he saw the actual people who were building them, and he had to actually deal with the unions and workers—whether it came from that, or whether it came from having a chip on his shoulder about being a Queens outsider, or whether he developed a natural difference of opinion from the financiers and bankers and investors about interest rates, economic growth, unions, and nationalism. He’s not a globalist. He’s a pragmatic economic nationalist less interested in high-interest rates and making money without actual, visible, tangible results than he is about jobs that matter to working people. Trump is definitely about manufacturing, production, farming, mining, timber, and not the hedge fund, global insurance, high-tech world where the big money now is. I don’t think Romney or McCain could have said as passionately as Trump does that our miners, our vets, our farmers are important.

  GORKA: Yes, and he means it. He really means it.

  VDH: If he’s going to get reelected—and save the Republican party—he’s going to have to emphasize that sincere passion. He’s also very effective when he’s self-deprecatory. I wish he would emphasize that more because it makes him much more complex and really confuses his enemies. He can be very funny in a weird way.

  The problem is that they create such a 360-degree pressure front around him: media, foundations, universities, activists, Hollywood, entertainment, television, that he’s in 24/7 combat mode. And he feels that to let down his guard would be to lose deterrence and only incur more attacks. But, at some point, he’s going to have to risk being more—as I said—self-critical and funny. He can do it very well, which is ironic.

  GORKA: Given the scope of your expertise, historically, is there a character from history who is a close analogue to the impact that this non-politician, this outsider, has had on the elites? Is there someone who comes to mind who is similar to Trump?

  VDH: Well, that answer would entail two aspects. One, is there anybody who, whatever his background was, came into power on the idea that national or civilizational decline was not fated, but is a matter of choice? You can really see somebody like that in the Emperor Justinian.

  The Empire was lost in the west. The demography wasn’t good. The enemies were surrounding the Byzantine Empire, and yet he basically had to “make Byzantium great again,” and he went in and conquered North Africa; he invaded Sicily; he took over two-thirds of Italy; he got to some degree into Spain, into Thrace; he codified the Justinian code of law; he crushed the decadent establishment in Byzantium; he crushed the blues and the greens—the so-called sports gangs who were actually subversives—and he unleashed some really talented generals with Narses and especially Belisarius. So, he was a guy who basically said, “It’s not twilight for the Eastern Empire. All of the ingredients of stability and progress are still here. We have just psychologically given into the idea that we have to follow the decline and fall of the Western Empire.” And he did have a very different background. He didn’t speak Greek at all. He grew up in parts of Western Europe that were Latin, north of the Danube, near Romania. So, he was a real outsider-guy, and he brought a lot of outsiders with him.

 
So, for me, Trump is somebody like that—an outsider intent on really changing things. And he may well succeed. Whatever we think about Justinian, his legacy lasted for a thousand years.

  GORKA: And the other aspect?

  VDH: The first aspect is not so much the agenda but the nature of the historical figure, an Augustus or Justinian, who feels that they can—by sheer force of will—convince their people that the problem is in their minds, not in the stars. This kind of man is just so different, like Napoleon, a two-bit Corsican artillery officer, who does not have the pedigree of any of the French military elite.

  Nobody quite knew how to square the circle of creating a revolutionary egalitarianism without at the same time destroying the institutions necessary for French nationalism. And then in a brilliant fashion Napoleon basically says, “My marshals of France are going to be meritocratic; even if they’re aristocrats, they’re going to have to compete, and my spoils and the laurels of victory are going to go to people along the lines of revolutionary egalitarianism,” even though he was an authoritarian-nationalist. He was a complete outsider; linguistically, ethnically, he was not a part of the French elite, and he capitalized on that. And, so, we’ve had these people—we’ve had two presidents actually, Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower—who never had any political experience, but they did have military experience. What’s unique about Trump is that he’s the first president to have neither political nor military experience, and nobody thought that’d be possible. And I think we’ll see a lot of people on the other side especially, who will think that they can emulate Trump’s ability.