Even Never Trumpers Are Warming Up to The Donald

I’d like to talk a day about an irony. Maybe it’s something that’s a paradox. Have you noticed that there’s certain people who are coming out of the woodwork who are diehard Trump opponents and suddenly they say, sorta, “I like Donald Trump,” or they don’t say it publicly or they don’t write it emphatically. And here’s what I mean. He went to Davos and I thought, “Wow, they’re going to destroy Don.” I don’t mean destroy him effectively, but they’re going to try to destroy him. And then the question and answers were amazing. He outlined tax reform, transparency, low interest rates, targeted tariffs, more energy development, more fossil fuels, closed borders. I thought, “Wow, that is going to drive the Davos people crazy.”

And then the questions were, “Are you sure you can send us a liquid, not natural gas? We need it in Europe,” or there were, “This sounds great, but when will it start?” And you start to think, these are capitalists and they want Europe to be turned to its former grandeur. And all of a sudden, this man is saying something that is exactly opposite of the socialism that destroyed their countries and which they bought into. And now they don’t have to do it. And they’re secretly, but more openly even admiring Donald Trump.

Same phenomenon happened when I was on campus, not long on the Standford campus, a professor whom I know came up to me, and I would say that he is a moderately anti-Trumper, never Trumper maybe, and he whispered, said, “Wow, the end of DEI is actually not that bad, is it?” And what he was saying is, “There’s no more racial quotas and maybe I wanted to be a dean.” I’m saying, I’m extrapolating what he was saying. “Maybe I want to be a dean or maybe I want to get published at University Press and there’s not going to be any racial quotas anymore or discrimination and I’m for that because the DEI is a monstrosity. There won’t be any czar that calls me up and says your syllabus doesn’t have enough DEI material in it, or I’ve looked at your grading pattern and you’re inordinately giving Cs to people of color. No more commissars.”

So even they are, you know, happy that Donald Trump is doing this. And then we get into the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and people are really angry at Donald Trump because in this tragedy of the airline accident, Donald Trump actually said things that were quite blunt. He said that DEI was maybe at fault, and we now know that the, and I don’t want to get into a critique yet of the crash, but it seems like the helicopter was too low, and there was culpability, which seems like one of the air traffic controllers was not there. It seems like somebody left early. It seems like there was a mistake on, giving directions about the proper elevations.

But we do know this, and Donald Trump brought it up, and that was that the FAA consistently under Joe Biden had racial quotas and they abolish programs and universities that encourage people who had either expertise through the curriculum or prior military experience who would do well on meritocratic exams to try to join the FAA and they were rejected because of their race. That is a fact and in fact, there has been several lawsuits challenging the FAA and the first nomination to the FAA, of course, the candidate that Biden picked didn’t even know the fundamentals of aviation. He came from the Denver airport, but he didn’t have any knowledge of the actual mechanics of how airports worked, it seemed.

My point is that when he did that, everybody in the media thought it was awful. But then people who probably didn’t even vote for him said, “Wait a minute. I want to be safe. I want my daughter to be safe. I want my husband to be safe. You mean there’s people in these control towers that were selected for criteria other than merit?”

And while it might have been illiberal or maybe inconvenient, Donald Trump told the truth. What I’m getting at is this. This country has moved so far to the left on energy, on DEI, on transgenderism, on crime, on the border, that people even who supported it, whether they’re the people in LA that lost their homes, or the people who voted for Adam Schiff—and we saw what he did at the nomination—they want a return.

And this man is the only person, Donald Trump, with the guts and the backbone to not just make a transition, not to the far right. back to the center or the center traditional right that secretly, at least for now, they are happy that it’s going on because they feel that they and most Americans will be the beneficiaries, And you know what’s correct? They’re absolutely right.

Thank you. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Please subscribe to The Daily Signal for our next episode. Maybe you can check out my own website at VictorHansen.com for podcasts, lectures, Ultra Series, behind a paywall, but more importantly, just daily columns that are accessible and free to everyone.

Thank you very much.

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