Victor Davis Hanson: This is a massive victory for Trump

because he comes back and he says, "When I came into office, Iran had the ability to make 11 bombs apparently postfactor. We've realized they had missiles that would reach Europe. They had shut down through the proxies the Red Sea. They had caused October 7th and they can't do that anymore."

>> Thank you so much, Victor, for joining us.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> I want to get you to react to this ceasefire agreement to begin with. So this is according to the New York Times. Shortly after the ceasefire was announced, a US official said American military strikes against Iran had stopped. Iran's foreign minister said in a statement that the Iranians would cease their defensive operation and that for a period of two weeks, safe passage through the h the straight of Hormuz will be possible. Iran accepted Pakistan's ceasefire proposal after frantic diplomatic efforts by Pakistan and a lastminute intervention by China, a key allies according to three Iranian officials. Can you just react to this news that of this ceasefire for the next two weeks and this intervention of China?

>> Well, China gets uh buys 80% of Iranian oil and they have broken all the sanctions. They do it illegally, but they do it and it's they're they're in dire straits now because of the cut off in Venezuela. They don't get any more subsidized. Venezuela's got the third largest oil reserves in the world and it could probably pump 5 million barrels. It will pump five, but the Chinese thought that that was a concession. They've lost that. They probably lost their control of the Panama Canal and they didn't they don't come off very well here, as I said. So they were pressuring Iran to open the canal, the straight so they can come in and go to Car Island and get oil. That's what they want. And the United States, I think, is in a position of strength because if they cheat, if they send missiles, they can just say to them, you know what? We're going to continue. We're going to take out in one day all of your electricity and see how you like it and then just spend the next $500 billion fixing that and not buying arms. and then or take out the oil. But they have all the cards. The reason that they're opening the straits is there's no alternative to it. And what's un what's unusual is I don't know of a war where you negotiate right in the middle of hostilities like this. Nobody tried it in World War II. In Vietnam, it was a waste of time. in Paris, Korea, they they they negotiated for a year while they killed another 15,000 Americans. So I I don't know of anybody who was constantly trying to negotiate while they were bombing. And it was just a matter of he kept saying, "I've got a negotiator. We're talking." And the the hardcore would say no. So then he would up the ante. And as the 5 weeks wore on, their position worsened and his strengthened. So now when he said he wants negotiations, he's willing to negotiate and if they open the straight etc. they're willing to consider at least profess to do that because they have suffered a geometrically increasing level of damage and we haven't. We had we've we've suffered political damage the Trump administration. There's no doubt about it. He's his polls have been down. Although the recent Rasmusen poll, if you watched it, the daily poll had him back up to 47% after the rescue. So I I don't know what the actual politics are, but he's in a position of strength. I don't know if he knows he is, but he is.

>> Basically, is this a victory for Donald Trump? Does Does this ceasefire represent a victory for his sort of strategic campaign?

>> Well, if it's honored, it is because when all of the rhetoric and all of the politics vanish and if they abide by the agreement and we stop and the straits stay open and we are vigilant and if they break the the agreement not to enrich or they go back to this buried facility and try to extract when we keep we can stop that if we're viligent then it is because he comes back and he says when I came into office Iran had the ability to make 11 bombs apparently postfactor we've realized they had missiles that would reach Europe they had shut down through the proxies the Red Sea they had caused October 7th and they can't do that anymore at least for the foreseeable future and if they think they're going going to try I or any future president can stop them at very minimal cost. This has cost about50 to60 billion dollars. It's about probably a quarter of what was stolen in California under the Newsome regime by welfare fraud. And we've lost tragically 13 soldier. We lo we lost the same amount in one day in Afghanistan getting out of Afghanistan. So if everybody just keeps calm and looks at the actual data, the cost, the benefit, uh, and who wins and loses, I think it is it's going to be I think in two months nobody's going to be talking about this if it holds. And I think the left is going to to really I mean they said it was a we the left has said again and again we lost the war and we're headed for a depression and the economy is going to collapse. That's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. The economy is going to recover in three or four weeks and before the war foreign investment and deregulation and tax cuts and they had recalibrated the unemployment for February. The appointment was very good and there was they recalibrated the GDP of last. It was all looking for a summer um midsummer late summer boom and that can happen again very easily. And when that happens, nobody Trump will be the person who bled the cat. Everybody talked all the mice said that they needed to be warned by the cat coming and none of them were no none of them were willing to put the the bell around his neck. And so and it's it's not just that. It's it's and it begs the question, well, Victor, is was it worth this rhetoric and this dissension and this anger and this murial back and forth? I don't know. But when I look at five and a half years of his presidency, I do know there are no more Iranian proxies killing people in Syria and uh Iraq right now. They they just released the hostage they held. Uh there's no Wagner group anymore attacking us. The Panama Canal will probably have an American company at this entry and exit. The Maduro regime is gone. I think Cuba is being squeezed and it may either have to make radical reform or could collapse. And Iran is a shadow of itself. and the Gulf monarchies in Israel are talking to each other every day about a mutual common Islamic enemy. And I I don't see any downside in all that given the cost the cost to achieve that in matters of American lives. All of that was achieved with less than 20 American lives. So I I understand that he's a polarizing figure and he says things that upset people, but when you actually look at what has happened, it's a completely different story. This war in Iran has been going on for more than a month now. Donald Trump has faced serious criticism for his rhetoric around Iran, including from people who were who support him in supported him in 2024. in particular this statement that he put out that said, "A whole civilization will die tonight. You will never be brought uh never to be brought back again. I don't want this to happen, but it probably will." Is that the language appropriate of an American president?

>> Well, I mean it I think his vocabulary was inexact because we know from a simultaneous tweet that he wanted to help the Iranian people and he said that. So when he said civilization, I suppose he meant but it was inexact, the culture or the civilization of the theocracy of radical Islam, Islamic control of Iran because obviously when he has repeatedly say help is on the way or we want to give he tried to send arms via the Kurds to the Iranian resistance. He said that he I mean so far they have not deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure things like residential areas, power etc in the way that Iran has gone after airports, hotels, um apartment buildings and the Gulf States in Israel. So I think the question is he's dealing in an asymmetrical fashion. He's trying to do really the impossible. who's trying to liberate 93 million people from a nonpopular regime through the existence of air power with the restrictions upon him that range from the European denial of basing to the American left who's angling for a midterm win in November to people in his own party that are worried that he's taken his eye off the economy. But I don't think anything's changed. He said in the original March 1st and March 20th statement of this five fivew weekl long war that his purpose was to make sure that they did not have an immediate acceleration to a nuclear weapon. They wouldn't have it. They would not be able to launch ballistic missiles and um drones at their prior rate or status. He was going to try to weaken Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis by cutting off their money. And he was going to stop their ter reign of terror for 47 years against Americans. And to do that under the conditions that were self-imposed through the use exclusively of air power. I think it's pretty amazing that he's got most of them accomplished. By that I mean I have never seen a war in which one side has only lost 13 people after flying you know 15,000 sorties 99.9 of them successful we have two down we haven't lost any flyers in combat we've lost them through accidents so it's been a very asymmetrical war and he's basically along with Israeli help wiped out the command and control of the theocracy See, so then the question is what's next? Well, if he has a supposed twoe sessation of hostilities and they open the straits of Hormuz to everyone, then his mission is complete. He goes home and what happens then? Iran has probably a trillion dollars of four decades of munitions, infrastructure, factories, nuclear proliferation industries wiped out. And it's got its entire command and control wiped out. So, it's going to have to buy or purchase or barter with the Chinese or Russians for a number of years to restock to its former level at a time when its population is near starvation. So, I don't know whether that is a sustainable proposition for this government with a new leadership. It's going to have to tell the Iranian people, we got in a war for five weeks. We didn't inflict any damage on the United States, so to speak, and the Gulf States. We have alienated Israel proved militarily superior to us. We lost all our munitions and our infrastructure. We're going to have to buy that, and we're not going to be able to feed, clothe, supply you at what we would like to. I don't think that's that's a success for them at all.

>> Just coming back to the point of rhetoric and then and then we'll talk about the the actions and the military campaign and everything else. But just on the rhetorical point, it seems unprecedented to me that an American president would talk about destroying civilizations. Now, you say that that's maybe imprecise wording. He has also been criticized for other statements which seem to imply he would want to target civilian infrastructure, energy infrastructure, water desalinization plants and so on. He has been criticized by lots of conservative figures including Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly and others for this language. What do you make of this this language of of destruction of death potentially aimed towards civilians? Do you accept that perhaps the president has gone too far there?

>> I wouldn't have said it, but I'm not president. But I'm saying that is his hyperbolic style. No other president would exchange missile attacks as he did with the first um summer incursion and then say I want to make American I want to make Iran a great again. I've never heard Bush say that. I've never heard anybody say that. Or I want Iran to be a great nation or I want to be free. So the second thing is when you say infrastructure and uh he hasn't done that yet but that has been a trademark of the Iranian theocracy this whole war that they don't just target they don't they target civilian infrastructure desalinization plants they chemical plants much more than they do uh military targets we help Ukraine and Russia has been attacking Ukrainian electricity, Ukrainian natural gas, and Ukraine has been doing the same thing. They just did attack on Russian infrastructure the other day. more more overly I didn't hear anybody talk about the Serbian war where the NATO powers went in and destroyed all the bridges on the Danube River and hit a hospital, hit the Chinese embassy during that Serbian um 1999 bombing in the Kosovo incident. Of course, no need to talk about the UN strategy in the Korean War, the U US strategy in the Vietnam War, the US strategy in the British strategy in World War II. So he has deliberately held off that and basically he's frustrated because they opened the straits they closed the streets of Vermuse and his military advisers came to him and said I really don't know um what the sizable or significant military targets are left. We've hit the barracks. We've hit military munitions. We've hit arsenals. We've hit storage. We've hit depots. We've destroyed their air force. We've destroyed the major ships of their navy. We've stored their air defenses. They may have shoulder fired missiles as we saw, but there's no more military targets that are significant. So then he he would have said and I think he did say to then what what would put them uh at a disadvantage to the extent that they would open the streets of Hormuz and maybe lose power or influence and this revolution would continue. And they said well you can hit the infrastructure because that will paralyze the regime. they won't be able to have any communications without electricity and maybe they will fall or be squeezed before the population um is it and that's what he was talking about but he didn't do it. I didn't think he'd ever do it. I did think that the Iranians believed he would do it and I think that's I mean we've had a lot of people say things like that. Curtis Lame said in World War II he'd be tried as a war criminal for bombing Tokyo. He said during the Vietnam War, my our intent is to bomb them back to the Stone Age, which Trump mimicked. But rhetoric, it's it's his style. And is it presidential? I can't comment on that other than it's deliberate. It's deliberate hypol hyperbole. It's deliberate recklessness to keep everybody completely unsure of what he's going to do. So each time he has taken out Solommani or Baghdaddy or bombed ISIS or hit the Wagner group or bombed the nuclear facilities in 2025 or kidnapped taken taken extradited Maduro or the latest bombing. No one had any idea that it was coming when it did. None. And I think that's because they don't they don't know what he means when he says all these things. Is there a political price to be paid? Yeah, I think so. I think it hurts him politically, domestically, but I'm not sure. Uh, it's very similar to the Yam Kipper war in 1973 when Richard Nixon sent Kissinger to negotiate and he said to him as he had done during the Vietnam bombing of 1973. It was, "I am the madman and you are the good cop. So, I'm going to say all kinds of I'm going to bomb Vietnam during Christmas. I'm going to let the Third Army, the Egyptian Third Army perish in the desert. Then you go over and tell them that I'm crazy and they better watch out. So, it's a good cop, bad cop. In this case, JD Vance has been assigned or taken on the role of emergency diplomat. And that's obvious because he wants the mega base to see that there are people within his administration that silently, quietly, implicitly don't want it to continue. So Vance goes over to tell the Iranian negotiators, whoever they may be, or the allies, Trump is kind of out of it. We've got to do something because I don't know what he's going to do. And that's and Rubio and Vance play that role. And I it's been done before. I there's risk to it. But the the final thing, Stephen, is when you look back at all of these things, all we can do is compare them to prior US and NATO actions. We bombed Serbia for 72 days and we we hit we destroyed their civilian infrastructure. We killed, you know, a lot of civilians. We we bombed Libya for 7 months. That was a British and French initiative that drafted the United States in and it made things worse. We got out of Afghanistan and got 13 people killed in one day and left $50 billion dollars of munitions and weapons and a three million $3 billion infrastructure of new bases uh buildings, university programs, a new brand new embassy. Um so compared to what we have done in the past eliminating the greatest terrorist threat of the last 47 years who's as a terrorist entities killed more than any other terrorist entity Americans and to have lost 13 people in it and pretty much reduced its much feared and formidable greatest army greatest military in the middle entire Middle East but reduced it to ashes without sizable or any losses really of American 13 dead. That's tragic, but that that's quite of an achievement. And so in that case, I don't know whether that that crazy rhetoric is part of it had nothing to play with. It kept the Iranians terrified, kept them off balance. I don't know. But I do know the results have been much more impressive than Barack Obama's Iran deal or Joe Biden's escape from Afghanistan or the 500 predator missions by Obama or the bombing of Libya. If you compare him to past, not to mention the huge misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 to 200 uh 8. So I I don't think the rhetoric and when you look at that picture is as important as the actual results.

>> Just to give an alternative view of the results and the outcome of this campaign so far, there hasn't been regime change in that there is a now suddenly a pro-American, pro-western regime in Iran, which is usually the definition of of regime change, not just killing and and replacing the Ayatollah with someone equally or more radical or anti-western. So, number one, no regime change. Number two, the nuclear enriched material still is in Iran and hasn't been extracted. They still have that. They could still try and convert that into a nuclear weapon in the future. Number three, they closed the straight of Hormuz, which has caused major disruptions to world oil supplies. 20% of the world's oil goes through the straight, 30% of the world's fertilizer, massively increasing costs of both both oil and food potentially in the medium to long term as the uh global supply chains are disrupted. So there's huge economic problems here. Also, the Gulf States have faced a huge economic uh issue as well with collapse of tourism, also the bombing of their energy infrastructure and their oil and gas production. So for example, Europe and Asia who which massively rely on oil and gas from the Middle East are going through very very difficult economic times at the moment because of this war in Iran. So take those uh outcomes.

>> I will I'll start with regime change. That was never an objective. He never said I'm going to change the regime. What he did say was that would be a dividend of disarming it and denuclearizing it. That was what he said. And that that that's that's an open question. the I don't think he or anybody else thought that the regime would kill a reported 30 to 40,000 of its own people and silence the opposition which that happened in Medis Rabbus right before we were going to go in and maybe it had been one of the catalyst to go in to stop that and it did stop it uh for some either they they stopped it by not wanting to resist or maybe the regime stopped it by being afraid to slaughter its own people anymore and be completely obliterated. That was not an explicit uh point. The second thing is very quickly what was the alternative? Because for 47 years they had bombed the American embassy in Beirut. There were operatives have bombed us in Tanzania and Kenya. They had kidnapped people and butchered them. They blew up 243 Marines. They probably killed anywhere from 700 to,500 American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan by sending advisers and shape charges to the opposition. Uh they tried to kill Donald they had a plot to kill Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and they wanted to kill the Saudi ambassador right inside Washington DC. So, and they were supplying the Houthis that were disrupting and causing a lot longer and more extensive damage in the Red Sea, the entry to the Suez Canal. They shut that down for 5 months. And then in addition, we had the We would never have October 7th. None of this would have happened had Iran not supplied Houthis, Hamas, and and Hezbollah. So at some point somebody had to bell the cat and every single administration said they were going to do it. Ronald Reagan said he was going to do it. We had the tanker wars where they did shut down the horm straight. We had then George HW Bush said this was intolerable. He did nothing. Bill Clinton thought of doing something. He did nothing. George W. Bush people advised him. People say that uh Trump is guided by the Israelis. The Israelis told him in 2003 it was a mistake to go after Saddam and it would be a preferable target for Iran which was the nexus really of terror not Saddam did nothing about Iran even when they supplied these charges. Then we had Barack Obama and his idea was to appease them and create an alternate nexus of power in uh Tran and then Damascus and then Beirut and the Gaza and then play that off against the Gulf states in Israel and he would adjudicate as if there was a moral equivalence between the two. That didn't work. And then we had Trump's first term where he put maximum he didn't want to do this. He put maximum pressure. He sanctioned them. and he declared that the Houthi is a terrorist organization. Then they were silent for a while. Soon as Joe Biden came back in, he lifted all the sanctions, all the punitive measures. They got a hundred billion dollars in oil revenue. The Houthis were right back at it. And then he came in a second time, Trump, and he said he was going to do stop this. And I think you could make a plausible argument that they have suffered the greatest military loss in the history of the Middle East as far as the number of missiles, uh, launchers, uh, naval assets. They don't have an air force. They have shoulder fired missiles now. They will be resupplied by Russia and China, but they still, even when they had air defenses, the Israelis, the United States took them out. So for the rest of his term, he's going to have daily hourly satellite reconnaissance. And if they start doing what they probably will do, he will send in what the people call Molon. It'll be a 25hour 26-hour mission as we saw in the summer. As far as the nuclear material, we don't know yet where it is. We're told that it can appear in delicate sensors and we have a general idea that it's embedded in some mountain and we have bombed that repeatedly. The Israelis are making the argument that it might be sealed, but somebody on and they're if that is true, they're going to have to go in there and retrieve it and that's going to be known. Uh, as far as the economic damage, the price of gasoline right now in the United States is lower than at the high point of the Biden administration. And we it's much lower than uh the price of oil under Obama went up to a $1.70 I mean $170 for a period during his eight years. So in actual dollars, we've seen this before. If the straits are opened, you will see a collapse in the price of oil from 110 to 115 probably down to 60 or 70 in 3 weeks as people want to unload what they had hoarded. all those speculators who thought that this was going to be an forever war and it could be but if it's not they're stuck with highpriced oil that they are bought on the margin and they will dump it and the price will collapse and the United States is already releasing 1 million barrels from the strategic reserve and it's got another million barrels uh of excess capacity that it's that it's uh supplying through horizontal drilling and fracking and they're we're drilling like crazy. So that will be a temporary I think dislocation. The other thing about you mentioned Japan and Europe. But let's be honest about Europe. Europe had a a tacid understanding with Iran. And that tacid understanding was when we have Islamic terrorism throughout Europe, we are not going to directly fault Iran much less do anything about it. Even though that we know that even the Sunni terrorism, the majority of it was funded indirectly by Iran, but we're not going to say a word about it. Even with the diminishment, the diminishing of ISIS, Iran filled that vacuum. And now we were told that from the Europeans that Iran did not have the capability to reach any European city. They had no missile that would go over 1500 miles or 1,800. Now we know that they have a 2500 U mile missile. So all of those capitals were in range. So I think it would be legitimate to expect had he not done anything the Europeans would have basically been tacitly told we have all of your uh cities in our range and we probably are going to have enough uranium we were told enriched for 11 bombs. So this is what we want. and thei and I don't think the Europeans were going to say well we have France and Britain have a nuclear deterrent and I don't think they would have done that at all. I think they would have appeased them as we've seen again and again. There is a I don't think people on the right and left will say Russia is the great winner because of the price of oil. Well, Russia's lost their proxy in Syria and I don't think they're going to have an easy time going back into Iran. I don't think China is either. They've lost their um direct proxies in Venezuela and Panama. The price of oil is going to go down. In the case of Russia, it's going to be a temporary lift. They haven't been getting drone exports. They may have been trying to u export weapons across the Caspian Sea. We don't know. But I don't see how they come out a big winner. The big loser in this war, unfortunately, is NATO. uh unfortunately from that traditional point of view because there is a growing mood in the United States left and right that if United States takes a unilateral non-NATO sponsored action but it's generally believed to be advantageous in the long term for the West and Britain refuses to use let us build bases mo many of which were used with American funds. If spa Spain does the same and refuses airspace, if France refuses airspace, if Italy won't even let an American plane bomb and put all those pilots add four, five, 6, 700 miles to their missions and then you have Americans are saying, well, what's the purpose of the alliance? because historically it's been very common for NATO powers to seek unilateral national interest uh expeditionary agendas. I can name for 20 years France said we have to stop Gaddafi's Islamicism in Chad our former colony. Will you the United States fuel us over the Mediterranean? Will you supply tomahawks? Will you supply logistical support? Will you supply photo? Yes. Yes. Yes. Europe came to us. It was not a NATO sanctioned 1990 bombing. They said, "This is the Balkans. It's on European doorstep. We don't have the capacity. We don't have the expertise to bomb them sufficiently. We got to take out their bridges, infrastructure to stop Malloich. Will you do it?" United States flew 78% of those missions. A lot of people in the United States said, "Why are we doing this? This is Europe's problem." And it's not a NATO action. Kosovo is not a NATO power. 1982, Margaret Thatcher said, "We're going to get the Faullands back." This was in and a lot of people in the United States. So, now wait a minute. We've got 8% of the population is Hispanic. They've gone crazy over Argentina uh chauvinism. We've got all of Western the whole western hemisphere is pro-Argentine. We're we're trying to have some type of relations. What do you need? and That Thatcher said, "We can't do it unless you give us 2 million gallons of gas. We want tomahawk resupply. We want to know where all their submarines are. We want photo reconnaissance. And we want a backup carrier, a marine carrier in case we lose our Reagan said to Al Heg, forget it, heg, you're not going to stop this. Give them everything they want and more." That was not a NATO mission. It was not anybody. That was in the national interest of Britain. And we they would not have been able to do that without the United States. And the same thing is true with Ukraine. Ukraine is not a NATO member. There were a lot of people we you and I have talked about. And what happens? The Europeans came to us and said we don't have the expertise alone. We're not funded. We don't have the logistical supply. We don't have the highars. We don't have the Tomahawk. We don't have blank blank blank. We need it. Will you supply it? 200 billion dollars almost so far worth of that and we did. So my point is the NATO powers have a very strange attitude toward the United States. They say we want you to come in here and build bases basically on our territory for joint NATO protection of the NATO. But from time to time we're going to go on unilateral uh expeditionary missions for our own national interest. and we want your help. And from time to time, we're going to have non-NATO sanctioned but NATO members. I think they called them uh coalition of the willing to bomb in Libya, to bomb in Serbia, to help Ukraine, but it's not going to be official, but we want your 100% support. And we always did it. And so suddenly they not only said no, but they gave these soapbox speeches. Sturmer especially, but also Mertz, this is not our war. this is uh this is an Spanish it's an illegal war da da that's fine and so everybody is saying fine that's fine so what we will do they say I don't know if Trump will actually go through with it but there's a strong feeling they'll say NATO is obsolete what's preferable are bilateral relationships with particular European powers we we can work with the Portuguese we'll protect them they have the Azor's bases that are useful to us let the Germans see what they want to do. Let the French, but we're not going to give any more blanket uh NATO support because it's never reciprocal. It's not reciprocal in the amount of money that's spent. Uh if you count not just the budget, which is 16 or 17%, but the entire infrastructure, uh it's about 60%. And the United States is just tired of badgering all these these European countries to spend a measly 2% and then Spain said it wouldn't even do that. Maybe go up to four or 5% for their own protection and they don't want to do it. That would be problematic enough. But the attitude is that we're Greek philosophers and you're Roman legionnaires and from time to time you unthinking brutes are needed but otherwise we're going to ridicule your culture, your civilization and we want nothing to do with you. And that's that perception whether it's fair or not is deeply embedded now in the American people. It really is. You're going to see a big backlash and it's going to come not just from MAGA people, but from the Republican party and a lot of Democrats are going to say that. They won't say it now because they think it'll it will help Trump if they join, but after Trump is gone, they're going to be they're going to be more anti-NATO than the Republicans. I think it's worth mentioning as well that NATO obviously did respond after 9/11 and NATO countries sent thousands of troops to support the United States states.

>> They did

>> and Britain, you know, sacrificed hundreds of lives troops.

>> There was only about six or seven that had any sizable and that was Britain.

>> Spain, Britain, Germany didn't. Uh the French had a few, Netherlands did, Denmark did, Australia did. there was about six or seven nations that had sizable 10,000 15,000 20,000 uh people but again that was whether that was true or not that was sold as something that was in the interest of everybody after 9/11 uh especially in the initial one of Afghanistan where Bin Laden was who had been the architect of terror that affected everybody and I just don't think these are going to happen anymore that's all I'm saying

>> yeah I don't want to get too caught up that. But let let's stay let's stick with Iran. Christopher Cordwell, the fantastic American conservative author.

>> Yes, I know him well.

>> Um yeah, he he's brilliant and he's written some amazing books.

>> He is very he's very astute.

>> He wrote an article recently in the British Spectator and I want to quote over the next couple of questions.

>> I read it twice.

>> Yeah. Well, I'm going to quote some of the article and get you to respond in the next couple of questions. So number one, this is what Christopher wrote. The president has pressed his luck. He has joined Israel in a campaign of aerial assassination and bombardment against Iran. This time of an almost incredible violence, and has wound up trapped. American air power proved sufficient to kill Iran's 86-year-old leader and dozens of school girls, flattened residential apartment blocks, and blew up much of the country's navy. but not to neutralize Iran's missiles which have been able to re destruction on American bases and Tel Aviv's neighborhoods. Trump has escaped other predicaments of his own making. But there is something different about this one. Iran has closed the straight of Hormuz through which 20% of the world's oil passes. The reversal has not brought out the president's dignified side. He now boasts about the comprehensiveness of his glorious victory while imploring America, America's hitherto unconsulted allies, to join him in a naval campaign to get the straight back open. The message seems to be help, help, we're kicking ass.

>> Uh, I like Christopher a lot, but that what you quoted was full of hyperbole when he said destroyed this and destroyed. Why does he mean they destroyed bases? They hit some bases. They hit some radar. But those attacks on American bases uh have led to casual, but we're talking about 13 people have been killed. We've got 40,000 of them in the Middle East. We have hundreds of bases. And this isn't the first time they've been attacked. Christopher knows the Wagner, the Russians tried to storm an entire marine installation. Christopher knows that under Biden there were 300 missile attacks by Iranian surrogates from Syria and Iraq on America. They killed three Americans in Jordan. So this has been going on for a long long time when he says that they reign death and destruction or on Israel and American bases. Israel has been fighting now for five weeks and if you count the earlier attacks probably for seven or eight weeks. I think the total civilian casualties are about 30 dead in a country of almost 11 million. They killed 1,200 in one day on October 7th. So if you want to talk about reigning death and destruction, they have one incident in the la in their recent history where that happened. It was on October 7th. For all of the doom and gloom and all these missiles, when you look at them, 90% are not getting through. There's a lot of spectacular material damage, especially in the Gulf States, but that's going to turn out to the American advantage because there's no uni unified Islamic world now. There's nobody saying openly if anybody can think of a of an Islamic country who says, "Come on, Iran, we want you to win. We're hoping that there's none because of they've attacked 12 different countries." And so I don't think that's that the straits of Armuse have been closed for two weeks. Two weeks. So he says the state of it's not a permanent fact. The Red Sea was closed for almost 4 months and you couldn't even get to the Suez Canal. That was a terrible that spiked as I said with Joe Biden that really spiked prices. And the long-term effect of this is going to be very very very negative for Iran because Saudi Arabia has already directed 4 million barrels of their oil to their Red Sea port and Israel is working on a plan to send it across Jordan into Hifa. another three or four million. The Gulf of Oman is already exporting, but the Kuwaitis, a lot of pe and the Omani, all these people are talking about alternate routes of pipelines to bypass the straits of Hormuz because it's not, this isn't the first time they did it. They did it in 1980. Jim Mattis in 2011 and 12, he was secretary of defense. He took a whole naval armada through the Gulf of the Straight Moose to show that they could not be intimidated. They took hostages, British and American sailors. They raised their they had motorboats that went in. They threatened carriers. They've been doing that for years. And so for two weeks, they closed it. And the reason the United States did not immediately open it was because it was felt that in a campaign year that would cause casualties. They could do it. All they had to do was go into Car Island and take the island and take the corridor across from the straight and they would probably lost three or 4 hundred people doing it. But they thought that was an intolerability to do it. And Trump knows the reason that there may be a sessation is Iran knows he'll do it, that he will take out their bridges and he will take out uh their electricity and they feel that that's a greater price to pay than any damage they do to pro-American. And the what they were trying to do and what they've always tried to do is create a toll booth in international waters. So they were going to pick and choose individual European and Asian countries that appease them and give them right of way and anybody who didn't whether they were in the Red Sea or the Straight of Amuse would be attacked and everybody knew that and that's what they were aiming at and the United States was the one power that told them not to do that and so yes but if you if you look at the tankers that have come through the straight whether they're Turkish or French or whatever, Spanish, and you you compare the rhetoric from those governments, there's a direct connection, a direct connection. the degree to which they have attacked the United States and said this was not their war or the US could not use airspaces and their prior rhetoric that was very uh neutral about Iranian terrorism or they were quiet about it correlates with their access to the Red Sea and the and the straight of our paying the dang gold to this terrorist regime and so this has been building up everybody says it's no apparent threat the threat was there it just nobody Everybody passed it on to the next person as it got worse and they got stronger. They didn't have this many missiles and drones and centrifuges under Obama. They g they gained it under Obama, but they didn't start out with as much. They didn't start out as much as there is. They gained and processed this all through Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump. And now it got to a point where they were an international power with ballistic missile capability to destroy European cities and soon American cities. And we were we kept saying unlike the North Koreans, they're even crazier enough to do it. So nobody wanted to live with a sword of dem domicles over their head forever. And and the only the only way to stop it, you're quite correct, was regime change. And regime change we could have done. But if you look at what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, we're not very good at it. We're much better at the Maduro Venezuela solution where you take out the thug, extradite him, and then work with the existing hardliners that for some various reasons want to be complacent and maybe transition. So there might be people in Iran in the army, not the Islamic guard who will um who say, you know what, I don't want this to go on anymore. The theocrats are trident. I'll work with you if you leave me in power for three or four years and I won't I won't send missiles or I won't enrich. That would be a solution. I don't know if you'd call it regime change. You'd call it regime change light maybe.

>> Let me come back to Christopher Caldwell and his article. The article was entitled the end of Trumpism. Let me quote again from the key a key point in the article. The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest that is that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. Those with claims to speak for Trumpism, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, have reacted to the invasion with incred incredul. Trump may entertain himself with the presidency for the next three years, barring impeachment, but the mutual respect him and his movement has has between him and his movement has been ruptured, and his revolution is essentially over. How do you react?

>> Well, I I try to react to all of that rhetoric with data. So, I look at the recent polls of people who identify themselves as MAGA Republicans and Republicans in general. Republicans general, it's 90% support. And for the war, it's 88%. And among MAGA people who say they're MAGA Republicans, it's over it's about 70% support. So I don't know what he means by the base. If he mean and it's I think it's indicative when he talks about the MAGA base who whom to whom is he referring to? He's talking about podcasters. Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly. All of them. Uh I have a feeling Megan Kelly said the other day that she would rather vote for anybody. she would vote for Trump over anybody. Uh Trump said yesterday that Tucker Carlson has been calling him repeatedly. I don't consider Candace Owens a MAGA or anything. She's gone off into wild she's

>> He didn't mention Candace Owens. Can we just

>> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm talking about who the base would be. Steve Bannon. I I don't think they have a large constituency. And if I heard that MAGA supporters in Congress uh if I saw a I mean we saw Joe Kent but if if I talk if I see major people like Rubio say I'm going to resign or if I see a prominent senator like Tom Cotton say this is not right. I haven't seen that. I've seen nothing but unqualified support. And then if I've seen he says the counter the revolution is over with but almost every single day I see as in the university that people are frightened because DEI has been systematically dismantled. Stanford University, Yale University, Harvard are reinstinstating the S SAT scores. They're cutting deals with the Department of Education so they won't have to be sued. They're facing anti-semitic lawsuits. That revolution is going on. The trans re counterrevolution that's going on. The US Olympic Committee and the NCA say they're not going to recognize men competing in female sports. That's been going on. Um the oil re the fossil fuel, he destroyed the green agenda. There's no more solar, wind, uh, subsidies that I can see. We're pumping, we're pumping more gas and oil than any country any time in the history of civilization. It's getting up to 14 million barrels of oil. And who would have ever thought we're resupplying with liquid na natural gas liqufied natural gas Europe? So, I'm looking at the border. That was a counterrevolution. He stopped he didn't just reduce 10,000. He stopped it to near zero and he has deported almost a half a million criminals and he's still fighting that and he's got every single poll despite the media sympathy with the anti-ICE protests the people are still with him 55%. So he's revolutionized immigration. So, I I would like to know what Christopher means. When the movement is dead and the revolution is over with, is the border open? Are the universities dropping the SAT again? Is crime spiking with defund the police and Black Lives Matter? I don't I don't know. I don't see any indicators of what he means by that. If he means Tucker's through with him, yes. Megan's quasi through with him. Maybe Joe Rogan Joe Rogan endorsed Donald Trump on the last the last day of the campaign. The last day he voted for Bernie Sanders. So I'd never thought that he was a member of the MAGA movement. I think he got caught up in

The Trump euphoria, and he was distressed by the mediocrity of Camela Harris. But he's never been a representative of the MAGA movement at all. I saw today there's an argu there was an article in Smart News that said Republican revolt of Republican vote against Trump, and I looked at I thought, well, who would this be? Who was listed? Marjorie Taylor Green, Bill Crystal, yes. David from, yes. Uh, Tucker Carlson, yes. But I didn't see a single major active senator or a prominent House member or Republican governor. Maybe Chris Christie, uh, washed-up New Jersey ex-politician. But I, I just don't see it. If you, if you could, you or Christopher could show me the data where this is dead in the water now. Maybe you could say that his appointments haven't been that's that's a legitimate argument. The appointments haven't been approved quick enough on judicial nominees, but I think the revolution, I guess I would call it a counterrevolution, is in full swing. And I don't see prominent, um, I, I nuke Tucker very well and I like him. I still like him. But and I was on his show every Monday night with due to his hospitality and generosity. But Tucker said he's on record right after the 2001 demonstration that he hated Donald Trump. Said that I hate Donald Trump. That was on part of the Dominion subpoenas. So all of these people have had a prior hot and cold relationship, is what I'm trying to say. And if, if Christopher had said, you know, the MAGA base is in full rea, there's 50, 60, 70 representatives that are calling for the war to end. There's 10 senators that have joined the Democrats to cut off funding. I haven't seen that. That I did see in my life with Richard Nixon, both during Watergate and during the Vietnam War. We did see that and we saw it even a little bit with Ronald Reagan and the Persian missiles, but I haven't seen this.

I think the overarching point that Christopher was making was that Donald Trump's election, and you can disagree with this, and you know, I think there's a there's a good argument against this, but was was based on in a in a major part not starting new wars and and being, I mean, there was this incredible moment when Donald Trump really differentiated himself from every single other mainstream Republican in 2015, 2016, the primaries, when they were asked on the debate stage, was the Iran, the Iraq war a a failure or, um, you know, was that regrettable? And Donald Trump was the only candidate who said that the Iraq war was a disaster. And he has been consistently touting the idea, including in the 2024 campaign, that he is the president of peace. He is the president that won't start new wars. And I think you're right to say that the MAGA, um, base massively support this war. Republicans to a large extent support the war. Independents, on the other hand, who are crucial when it comes to the midterms, when it comes to these elections, 64% against the war. Americans largely are against the war. This is the most unpopular war in modern American history, um, from the beginning. So if Coldwell was, if Christopher was making the point that this was about, you know, not starting new wars, being the president of peace, >> you mean, his was he consistent on that issue? That's the question. >> Yeah, I think you can make the argument. He said, >> What he did say, if I remember, so I'm against optional middle optional wars on the ground. He said he didn't want forever wars or what he called endless wars. So I think if you ask him, and I, he would say, "Every time that I've used force, it was prophylactic or in retaliation." So, I got Solamani because he was planning to kill more Americans, and they were shelling American facilities. And he, he took a lot of them out in Syria. He took some of the facilities out. And then, if he said, "I killed Baghdaddy because he was killing innocent people, and I didn't have to use ground troops. I bomb, I got rid of ISIS because they took over half of Iraq, and those didn't cost us anything, and they were one-offs. There was a, an a beginning and an end, and there were no ground troops." He said on numerous occasions, "I don't want to fight their way. I don't want us in the streets of Fallujah around corners shooting at them because we lose." But if you mean, is what happened the last five weeks consistent with, "I'm going to protect American interests," were in short uses of military force almost exclusively, except for maybe Venezuela for one day with air power and minimal casualties, and in a cost-benefit analysis, it will have tangible results in our favor? Yes, I think he did that. I could say to you that if you go back, it's kind of an internet, I agree, it's kind of an internet cliche now, but he's, if you look at all of the things he said since 1980, right after the hostages were taken, they ask him point blank, would you use force to get the hostages back and bomb Iran? Yes. He's, he's not an isolationist. He never was. And if you look what ex, I have a book coming out in September called The Trump C, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the Counterrevolution. It's called Counterrevolution. And I went back and looked at almost everything he said. And the only person that really described him accurately was Walter Russell Mead. He called him a jonian. In other words, just leave us alone. Leave our friends alone, and we'll leave you alone. But from time to time, they won't do that. And I'm going to, little rocket man, threaten North Korea, kill Solamani, devastate the Wagner group, and then we get a period of restored deterrence. And when that doesn't happen, he said, then you get something like the invasion of Ukraine or October 7th under Biden's watch. When you say, as Biden said, well, I'll react depending on whether it's a major or minor invasion, or you, or you let it be known you're not going to do anything. You tell Vladimir Putin, "Will you cut it out when you're hacking American facilities and not hack hospitals?" Which Biden said to him. So, or if you're Anthony Blinken and you say, "Well, my portfolio in the Middle East is the calmest of all," then you invite aggression. And so, under Donald Trump, we've, you had a lot of the use of force, but I don't think you've had anything like the Ukraine war or anything like the blow-up of the Middle East and Gaza, etc. And that was brought along by a lack of deterrence and specifically in the Middle East because of Iran. Take away Iran right now. If you said to Iran, "Do you think that you would want to continue the war against Israel? Will you want to arm the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas again so they can have stage two?" They'd say, "No, no, not now. Please, no." And if you ask the Houthis and Hamas, "No, no, we're not going to do that anymore. Not for the foreseeable future. Not until we get a Democratic president and we get enough money from Iran and their oil revenues to rearm, but not now." And that's what he said he was going to do.

Just on the issue of regime change in Iran, do you think now we can debate about the strategic outcomes of the war? Do you think that Trump, following the success of Maduro, following the success of of Midnight Hammer and with BB advising him, that the Iranian regime was already faltering? Do you think that this was a case of of hubistic, um, or or bad intelligence that the Iranian regime would be very easy to collapse from an air campaign? And there's this famous quote, you know, "We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down." I'm sure you know who said that. >> Yeah, Hitler said that about Operation Barbarossa. >> Absolutely. And and Putin, obviously, there's there's reports that Putin thought Ukraine would be very, very easy to take within days. >> Was something similar going on here? I know you said that they never said that their aim, the aim was regime change. I, I think it was slightly more, uh, confused than that, the messaging, at least. I don't know the answer, but I do know that unlike Saudi Arabia or any of the Gulf States, unlike Egypt, unlike any of them, Iran is a special case. It has a fervent, radical, apocalyptic Shia version of Islam. It's got 93 million people. It is centrally located. It's got borders with almost all the key players in the Middle East. Borders across the Caspian Sea with Russia. It controls, it could control the Straits of Hormuz and by association, the entire Persian Gulf. It is, um, one and a half times the size of Alaska. So just the sheer population, the size of the territory, the frenzy of that regime, the history of killing. No, we haven't seen even North Korea has not in a week killed 30,000 of its own people. So, this was a special case. I don't know if he appreciated all of that, given the successes that you enumerated. He thought, well, maybe this military is is unbeatable, and they can knock it out. But we're only in five weeks. If he did mis, misjudge it, and if this piece holds, and if the straits open, and if we'll find out exactly how disarmed and neutered Iran is when you look at the cost over five weeks, the political cost was enormous, but the actual cost in lives and treasure was not, was not. And the benefits are, if what we find out as we suspect are accurate, the benefits are quite, quite large because I, I think for the first time in my lifetime, nobody's going to tell me that Iran is the terror of the Middle East. It's indominal. Well, don't, dare get on the wrong side of Iran. They control the whole Middle East. As far as Israel, very quickly, if you came from another planet and you looked at the influence of the Gulf Leadership Council, the Six Nations of the Gulf, and the amount of money they have, it's probably in the lifetime of the United States, they've given a half a trillion dollars to American higher education. And you have everybody in the American political sphere from Tucker Carlson to members of the Trump family that are investing in those countries and vice versa. They exercise, uh, and with the rising Muslim population in the United States, which is almost 60% of the Jewish population, they exercise as much control, I thought, over this administration as Israel did because remember they had said initially, "Do not oppose Iran, it's too tricky for us." D and that was pretty much taken as the gospel for the first, for the four years of Trump administration, earlier in the first year and a half. And then when the action started, they said to Trump, "No negotiations," after they got hit, and Trump wanted to negotiate. And I think they're still going to be quite angry at it because they said, "You wounded this cougar, and he's right next to us now." But my point is that they exercise a lot of influence, more than almost any entity, and I have no problem with that to the degree their interests on occasion overlap with ours. They don't always, but when I see people say that Israel is running things, and we have a different agenda because we're distant and powerful, and they're proximate and vulnerable. So, I understand they're, they're more edgy than we are, but it's a democratic society. It's Western, and I don't, and it's small, but I don't think it exercises any more influence than the the oil and the money of the Gulf on us. They have a, especially if you look at the campuses today in the United States, and I, I visit them a lot, and I say to myself, which is larger, the Jewish studies or the Middle East studies programs? And when the demonstrations I see at Stanford, are they, are they on behalf of sympathy for the October 7th or are they for more blood and guts from Hamas? It's not even close. And when I see terrorism and things, I say to myself, are these Jewish terrorists? Half of all hate crimes in New York, according to the NYPD, are committed against Jewish people, not Islam, not Muslim. So, I don't quite get the this narrative that Israel is running everything. If anybody's running anything, I don't think the Gulf is running everything, but they're more likely to have influence. I think they've invested a lot more money in the United States than Israel has. They have, Israel has 300 combat aircraft. The best pilots in the world. The Gulf, six, they have 600 aircraft. If they were a true ally of the United States and really wanted to be protected, they would have gone to Donald Trump and said, "You got to finish the job. Our 600 aircraft are going to handle all of southern Iran." They didn't do that.

>> Just briefly on the on the Israel point you make, just very briefly, because I've got a couple other areas I want to ask about. Um, Marco Rubio, when the war began, said in a press conference that the Americans came in because the Israelis were going to strike first, and they were worried about repercussions from Iran. So essentially, this was an Israeli operation, and the Americans came in after them because they were worried that, um, Iran would would >> I think that's been interpreted rightly as a tactical, a tactical, not a strategic observation. In other words, we were watching very carefully when we would likely have to attack, and they felt that their national interests were different than ours, and they attacked. And then when they attacked tactically, we fought, we thought, "We better do it now rather than later because water's under the bridge. There's a war going on." And if anything, when I heard that, it tells me that there was no coordination between Israel and the United States, or there was little. That they were acting as an independent entity. Maybe they thought, and that was quite a risk that he took, because he had done the same thing earlier with the summer war of 2025. He acted first, and then we followed. He had been there for 12 days, and we only followed because he destroyed the Iranian air defenses. So I think it might be just the case, and I'm just speculating here without evidence, that Rubio was saying, "Well, we were ready to go, but we weren't quite sure of what's go, what what we would find when we went into Iran." So the Israelis went in a day earlier, and they found it was a piece of cake. So we just followed in like we did in the summer. But I think that was a tactical observation, not that they were running the strategy of the United States.

>> So you say the the political cost of the operation was enormous, in your own words. >> Let's talk about that. Um, yeah. >> Some people, obviously, the opinion polls look very bad for Republicans right now. We've had some special elections which have been really bad in in in Texas, in Florida, other places. Democrats have been flipping heavily MAGA districts. The districts that that Trump won hugely in '24 have been have been swinging massively to the Democrats. It looks like the the midterms are going to be a bloodbath for Republicans. It looks like >> I'm not sure about that. The Democratic generic poll on Democrats, it's lower than for Trump. So, and you're right, historically, I mean, uh, Obama got wiped out. The only person that's really done it is FDR in '36, '34, and George W. Bush in 2002. So, it's almost impossible not to lose seats, and if you lose seats in the House, you lose the House. But we've got seven months, and if the, there's a lot of ifs, but if this things turns out, and people start to digest it, and Iran does honor its concession, and the straits open, and in a month or two months, the economy is back to where it was, and, uh, Donald Trump pivots and looks at the economy, and people, you know, we don't know what's going to go on in Cuba. I don't think anybody, I don't think he has the intention of getting involved militarily with Cuba. That would be disastrous. Not because it couldn't be done, but because it would confirm the Caldwell hypothesis to a greater degree. But I think Cuba is on the point of some type of internal dissension. Then people are going to look at that and they're going to say it was a pretty good record, and we, we are in a much better position vis-a-vis China and Russia, and the our enemies in the Middle East, and our friends are in a much more ascended position. When I mean political cost, when you are up against the money and the media and the institutional power of the left, and you h, you go into the Middle East because you feel it's in the strategic interest of the United States, and that plays to their anti-war playbook, and he took a big hit with the Doge demonstration. Doge was working, and they called it off because of the Tesla vandalism and Elon Musk falling out with Trump, and then you, that was followed up by the anti-ICE hysteria, took a hit on that, the no kings, all these funded from outside sources, the no kings, and then you had the anti-war, uh, and that hurt him because he didn't have the time and the resources to focus on what will either ensure his counterrevol, olution or make it much, much more tenuous if he loses the House and the Senate, and that's possible. So, yeah, he paid a political price for that. Uh, he paid a political polite price in the sense that Tucker and, uh, Bannon and Joe Rogan, all of them had u agendas that were not compatible with what Trump's had to do as a Republican president. In other words, they wanted certain thing. I mean, you, it wasn't politically possible to deport everybody who came immediately. Tom Holman said, "We're going to go after the worst of the worst." They were asking for blanket deportations. That the sheer mechanics of that and the optics were politically dangerous. So there was, we concentrated, and even the concentration on the criminal element, 80% of the deportees were criminals or had criminal records, was so controversial. But what I'm getting at is that at some point, all of these people who have defected, I think we're not going to be happy between the gulf of the idealized MAGA agenda and what was practical in the real world of its imple, implement, and that's common in politics. I have no problem if they want to be purists. But, uh, I would say this, in the war between Trump and the base, uh, they've taken a lot of damage. They really have. And the people who were, Marjgerie Taylor Green is a complete non-entity now. She was a player in the House. She was a rising star. I met her. I talked to her. And, uh, she had calmed down her antics and was getting very serious. And Thomas Massie may be defeated, and he's marginalized. And I don't think 72% according to a recent study of Tucker's broadcast are dealing with Israel or Jewish questions. And I don't think that's going to be a winning formula for him if he continues that. He needs to spread out to other topics. And, you know, I, I don't think that Steve Bannon helped himself. I think it would have been much wiser for all of these influencers to say something like they could have said this: "I'm disappointed at Donald Trump and his rhetoric about no forever wars. However, I'm glad that it looks like there is a beginning and an end and very little cost in terms of human lives on our part and some long-term gain, u, in diminishing the threat of radical Islam to the West. And I'm happy about that. And I also want to say that I agree with the majority. I think Megan Kelly said that the other day. I agree with the majority of agenda of his agenda because it's so far different. It's so much more antithetical to the left than anything else I could imagine that I'm willing to allow him areas of dispute." And they would have been fine. They would have had integrity, and then they would have still been close to Trump. Instead, they called the war evil, a folly, World War II, and they used a level of hyperbole that wasn't grounded in reality. It was pure emotion. And then they got into this. I mean, it's completely legitimate if a person wants to say that Israel operates, uh, uh, it has more influence than its population was warren or something like that. But when you start going into the Jews and certain things like that, it's counterproductive. So, I think they hurt themselves more than they hurt Trump is what I'm saying. And I like them all. I wish they would come back in the fold. And I think that, and maybe by the time of the midterms, they will.

>> So, you you talk about the deportations. Um, you know, they didn't do this mass deportations of all the illegals because it would do be too politically controversial to do that with the farm workers and everything, and you know, a lot of big companies rely on these illegals essentially with the almost quasi slave labor. Matt Walsh, um, tweeted today, "If Trump is going to spend huge amounts of political capital on something ugly and difficult but necessary, it should be on mass deportations of every single illegal alien, regardless of age or criminal record, and defying every judge who tries to stop him." That's the kind of war, the kind of risky move with potential disastrous political ramifications, but maybe not, that I would get behind every step of the way, and so would millions of ordinary Americans, is an extreme measure that must be done. If and if Trump doesn't do it, it is likely that no one ever will. What do you make of this, uh, this argument about deportations? >> Well, the first thing is there's deportation, and then there's border security. Once the border is secure, and it is secure now, but it has to have the wall finished. I'm kind of disappointed that that of the rapidity of the lack of such. But once they get the wall and they beef up, I think they can keep up the secure. So then you have a finite pool, and it's not 11 million, it's about 30 million. 20 million before, and 11 to 12 under Biden. And the problem they're having when I say it's controversial is there is probably half of that 11 who have been working. They don't have a criminal record. They're not on public assistance, and they're willing to pay a fine and get a green card, not citizenship. And the problem with that is they're indistinguishable from American citizens. So when Matt Walsh says that, I would try to remind him of something. I went to dinner right before I was operated on with a Hispanic friends of mine. And one of them was a, a law enforcement officer. And the, the other person's referred to someone at the table, I won't mention the relationship, who she spoke perfect English. She had a wonderful job. She had children that were legal. Her husband was legal, but she had come, I think, at 2 years old across the border. And she had never gone through the formalization. And she was very well off, employed, very nice, very capable at her job. I talked to her for about 30 minutes. And the idea that you were going to go into their home and put her back in Mexico, where she's never been, is going to be politically, that's what I meant, politically. And there's a, there's millions of people like that. So if you said to her, as I did, "Well, you broke the law, are you willing to pay a fine, um, you know, rep 5,000 or 20, and because you're, and then get a green card? We can't give you citizenship, but after we give you a green card, it's up to you to do what you want." That 1986 Simpson Mazoli Act, Reagan gave that option. You know how many took citizenship? 33%. Because mo, I mean, it's a commentary on the diminishing value of citizenship. They didn't see any difference between legal residency. But the point I'm making is if you did that, uh, and then you deported the people, all of the people who came in under Biden, all 12 million, then you would be back to a selective problem. And out of that 20 million, the, how many people fit the category that I did, that I just mentioned, probably maybe 40%. And they're productive citizens. They knew they did wrong. They pay a fine. I have no problem with that. As long as the border is secure, and it doesn't destroy deterrence and encourage other people to come. That's it. That's the key. But it's going to be controversial because there's going to be other people whom I think should be deported. And they're going to say, "Well, when I was 19, I'm 30 now, and I'm working construction. I'm a union member, and I'm well paid. I got three kids. I got a mortgage. I got one DUI. And if it's a felony, DNI, I think you should go back because you abuse the hospitality of the host." But that's going, that's what I meant that you, that type of person that speaks perfect English, probably doesn't speak Spanish anymore in some cases. So that's the hurdle. But I don't think I, I don't think people realize that when you let in 12 million people and you deliberately disperse them on buses throughout the United States, just how hard it is to find them all. And what that's when Matt Walsh says that it's a herculean task, and just to get the 500 thou, we've got a million and a half self-deported, and I think a million, that's amazing, a million deported, but we still have about 150,000 criminals, and I don't know how you get them all. I wish they would, but it's going to be a very, very lengthy process. And let's hope he can get all 11 million that Biden let in. And then he can work case by case on the other pull of 20 million.

>> It's also worth mentioning, isn't it, that the Republican Congress has let down its voters. It's not about Trump necessarily, although you can criticize Trump over all of these things, but for example, the Save Act and and and lots of other pieces of legislation that could have been passed or forced through through Congress, but but wasn't because of certain Republicans who refused to touch this stuff. Um, >> Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, they wanted comprehensive immigration reform, which is a euphemism for blanket amnesty. Trump stopped that. He said no. John McCain, who spent his life damning Obamacare, cast the deciding vote to reject the repeal of Obamacare. So, what I would say to Matt Walsh, whom I like and respect, all of these, uh, people make good points as the as the MAGA base, but given what Trump has accomplished compared to what other people said they were going to do, we've had a lot of people on third parties who voiced prototypes of MAGA stuff. We've had Pat Buchanan. We've had Ross Perot. We've had, um, Ron Paul. We've had a lot of them, but as purists, they made it almost impossible to get elected in this at this third party. And it was impossible for any of them to be nominated in the Republican party. What was astonishing about Trump was he had a contrarian agenda, and he did not run as a third party, but he got nominated by the Democratic party. So he hijacked the Democratic part, uh, the Republican party, excuse me. He hijacked it and changed it and got elected and mainstreamed these formerly third party, what the majority called wacko views, and he institutionalized them and normalized them, and he got 70% of them enacted. I have criticism of him. I'm not a blanket supporter. I think I was really upset that we're not going to reduce the debt at all or the deficit. Uh, I don't know that the trade surplus, we'll see what happens. We do, we have diminished it somewhat, but that's out. Um, I'm disappointed about the rapidity of these these lower court justices. There's hundreds of slots open. We can make a change. They have to come up with a strategy to bulldoze those nominations through. They haven't yet. So, it's legitimate to criticize him. But in all of these cases, that pales in my mind to the alternative, living in California and seeing what Gavin Newsome has done to the state, and what the left will do do if they get in power. If the, if she was president right now, you would have another 10 million people here. She would have opened the borders, and the fraud, all of that's fraud that we're invest, that would be sanctioned. There would be no mention of it. And they, they talk about lawfare. They would be continuing. They would renew lawfare against the entire Trump cadre.

>> Well, Trump would probably be in prison. Um, just to just to finish the interview, there is one last thing I want to ask about, and you mentioned it earlier. >> Britain's response to the war in Iran. Britain couldn't even send a naval, um, destroyer to Cyprus originally, um, or or our aircraft carriers. The country of Lord Nelson, and I know you're an Anglophile despite all of the, uh, criticism that you've said in this interview of Star and everything. >> I'm not criticizing Britain. I'm criticizing your current pres, uh, prime minister. >> Yeah. So, so what do you make of Britain's role in the world now? I mean, with our diminished Royal Navy, with Karma, how have we come out of this war? >> Not very well. That's why I'm worried. I don't know if you can have the special relationship when it's so asymmetrical. Uh, you have more admirals than you do warships. You have about, I don't know, 40, 50 admirals, but major capital re warships, you're only down to about 40. They count the British Navy counts like 70, but they count small little tiny boats and stuff. World War II, you had this, at first, the largest navy, and then by the time we came in, the second, 900 ships, and Britain had 20 million fewer people. It was much poorer. So it's not a matter of wherewithal. British technology, you have the, you still have the ability to discover oil and gas. You could, you don't have to do this suicidal, uh, wind and solar. As bad as the immigration is, Britain is not at the point of France or Germany. I don't think you have six. I think it's more like 7 to 9% immigrants from the Middle East. It can be stopped. Um, so, uh, I don't, it's all self-inflicted, and it's, it's our left here in the United States on steroids. And the fertility. What, what bothers me about Europe, but Britain especially, because I thought it would be different than Europe, is your fertility rates about 1.3, 1.4. Uh, the borders have been opened, your energy costs are exorbitant and non-competitive on the world markets on the stage world market, and you're, you don't have a defense anymore. You have a nuclear deterrent, but it's aging and shrinking. And I don't know why he's doing this because we have big, we have submarine bases, and we pre, we provide Britain with their intercontinental sub, uh, missiles on their submarines. We have a close working relationship. I don't know why he'd want to endanger that by saying this is not our war and all. There was so many ways to finesse it. He could have said, "As a partner of the United States, we stand with the United States. But of course, on certain instances, we can't be an active participant, but there are, but we are in communication with the United States." And then call them up and say, "Whatever you guys need, you have, but I'm not going to talk about how's that." And we would have been more than happy. And I think some countries are doing that in Europe. And so, yeah, I don't know how you get out of it. I, I don't unless you get, I'm not acquainted enough, but I think the problem you've had is your conservative party is to the left of our democrat, ocratic party. It is. And I don't know. I've met Farage, but I don't know enough about politics if he's going to be a viable candidate for that movement or not. I hope so, but I don't know because I haven't followed him. But everybody in the United States on the conservative side is rooting for a Thatcherite return to Britain. And we were delighted when you got out. I think a lot of us were very disappointed by Boris because we thought he might be something other than he proved to be. I don't mean his annex and his personal life. I'm talking about his caving to the left on critical issues. So, yeah, I'm a big Anglophile, and I've tried to write extensively in support of Britain during World War II. This revisionism about Churchill and the British war effort. I've said it repeatedly, we don't recognize that Britain was the first ally to enter the war and the last ally to leave the war, and was the only country to fight for the entire six years on the Allied side, not Russia. And it was the only one, it was the only ally of of the big three who went to war for a principle of defending another country. We and Russia only went to war because we were attacked. Britain was never attacked when it went to, and that's controversial, but it does show that it was a pr, very principled country, and it knew that when it went to war, it didn't have the wherewithal of the Third Reich at that point. And then more miraculously, and this is the final thing I'll say, no one appreciates the British war mobilization right during the Blitz, they were producing 400 Spitfires a month, and the British people, we talk about our amazing achievement because it's, it's a much on large, much larger scale, but per capita, the British war effort was just astounding, the rearmament, much better than the Germans or the Japanese, almost comparable to the United States. So, and to to remember and know all that, and then see what's going on now is very disturbing, and I know that a lot of British people are upset about it. I think the majority, I hope that they have a landslide victory. I think they will too. The conservative side. Let's hope.

>> Victor, thank you so much. >> Yep. >> Okay. Thank you, Stephen.