Jobs Up. Borders Closed. Trump’s Second Term Is Just Getting Started.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re at four months now in the new Trump second administration. And a strange thing has happened.

If you look at the polls, after diving for President Donald Trump with the announcement that he was going to subject certain countries to high tariffs—which panicked the stock market. Now, the stock market’s almost recovered, or has recovered, all of its lost. It went down a little bit when Trump said he was going to continue the tariffs, to force the European Union to have reciprocal treatment toward the United States.

But nevertheless, Trump in the RealClearPolitics averages—which to be fair, have a preponderance of left-wing polls—is still only about a point, point and a half down. But in other polls, Rasmussen, he’s either even or he is a couple of points ahead. And yet, all of the media and all of the major organs on the Left, but even in the center and Right—The Wall Street Journal, to take another example we’ve discussed—they have been uniformly negative.

So, how in the world is Donald Trump—and Donald Trump has not been reticent. He has tweeted all sorts of things about, you know, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift and Canada—things that were very controversial. How can he be almost equal and much higher than he was at his first term at this time? And the answer is twofold.

No. 1 is what he’s doing. Every time people say we’re headed for a recession or his trade war is gonna tank the economy, data comes out. This week, it was the corporate profits were unusually high, strong. It came out that we’re not in a housing recession, that housing sales are steady. Inflation is down. Energy prices are way down. Economic growth is up. Joblessness is down. So, that is one reason.

The second is Donald Trump has been touring the world. And you can call it mercantilism but essentially, the Trump doctrine is we’re not going to get into optional military engagements on the ground anywhere and we’re going to have our relations be transactional. So, even our enemies—to the degree it’s even possible—we’re gonna try to find some mechanism by which we can stop wars. Maybe rare earth mineral corridor in Ukraine or maybe we’re dangling an end of sanctions for Iran—I don’t think that’s going to work.

But the point is people appreciate the idea that Trump, first, is trying to exhaust peaceful avenues before he uses force. And he’s trying to address the theater wars that former President Joe Biden left him in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The economy is strong. The border is 99% closed. We’ve gone from over 150,000 entries down to less than 8,000, in many places fewer. The wall is going to be continued. The Border Patrol is increased. The deportations, despite the court orders, continue.

So, the things that he’s doing are very popular, especially to the working classes: black, white, Hispanic. They like cheap gas prices. They like news that there’s going to be $8 to $10 trillion of investment and new jobs and assembly manufacturing in the United States. They like the idea that we’re cutting unnecessary funds for government and we’re not touching Social Security. They like the idea that Trump is trying to reduce taxes on the middle class in terms of Social Security or tips. But there’s another facet. And that is not Trump, but the people who despise Trump and are attacking Trump.

When the electorate looks at that and they say, “Well, Trump—I like everything he’s doing but I don’t like what he said about Canada. It just kind of bothers me.” Or, “I don’t like him lowering himself to attacking Bruce Springsteen, in kind.” Yes. But what is the alternative?

Well, the alternative is the Left is glorifying a murderer, Luigi Mangione. And the campuses will not, cannot, do not want to stop the antisemitism. So, we see foreign guests with masks on who continue to use violence and vandalize our campuses. Now we have two wonderful Israeli citizens who have been murdered. And doesn’t seem that anybody in the core base of the Democratic Party is objecting at all.

This comes on the heels of attacks on Tesla. This comes on the heels of this strange Democratic reaction to Trump, where they use almost pornographic language: “s—,” the F-word. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz can’t give a speech without either comparing Trump to Hitler or calling him some pejorative.

The result of all this is when they look to the Democratic alternative, there is no alternative. There’s no explanation why they opened the border. There’s no explanation, opposition to what Trump is doing. Why aren’t they saying, “We like an open border. Stop it, Donald Trump”? They’re not even doing that.

They’re not presenting any positive, constructive alternative. There is no shadow government. There is nobody in the Democratic Party that is popular. Not Tim Walz. Not former Vice President Kamala Harris. Not Sen. Chuck Schumer. Not even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Especially not Rep. Jasmine Crockett. I mean popular to the American people in general.

And so, when you add the fact that the economic news is pretty good and there’s a lot of initiatives on the horizon—peace initiatives, foreign investment initiatives, trade initiatives. And when you look at the people around Trump—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—they’re very good. And when they go before Congress, they’re calm, they’re rational, they’re data-driven. The Democratic senators who press them and inquire of them and mock them are usually poorly prepared, hysterical, angry, and make fools of themselves.

Add it all up: Things are going pretty good in the country. Donald Trump is a whirlwind. He’s staging a counterrevolution. And most of the issues that he’s trying to undo of the progressive project, the public supports him.

And his Democratic opposition—four months into his tenure—has still completely lost its mind and not only does not offer an alternative agenda, but personally, emotionally, psychologically puts people off. They do not like the way that they’re talking. They do not like the way they’re acting. And they don’t like them in general.

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