The Trump-Deranged ‘Experts’ Were Wrong. Again.

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. I want to talk about our so-called experts.

We know they’ve been wrong when they sign these collective letters—51 Intelligence authorities assured us Hunter Biden’s laptop was pretty much made up in Russia. But recently, in some of the marquee newspapers, sites—Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, of course, The New York Times—they made a series of statements by so-called experts that are absolutely confounded by reality.

Let’s take Iran. We get all of these stories that the combined Israel and the later United States strikes on the three key sites of uranium enrichment in Iran may not have done very much. We had a leak from the Pentagon, of course, that the media picked up that there was marginal damage.

Anybody who looked at the post-operational photographs could see that there was substantial damage. And so, we had David Albright, one of the most prestigious analysts of nuclear proliferation, he said there was serious damage. We had the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi: serious damage. We had Israel: serious damage—Israel intelligence. And our intelligence agencies said serious damage except for this outlying one from the Pentagon that the left-wing media picked up.

So, there is serious damage. I don’t know why the Left, especially, tried to suggest there wasn’t. Remember, this is very, very ironic and paradoxical. The Left told us before there was no need to strike Iran because they were months or years away from developing a bomb. There was no real existential danger now. As soon as we did hit, they said, ”Oh my gosh, there might be uranium that could be quickly enriched.”

Think of that. They were hyping up the threat after this complete obliteration of many sites than they were before.

The same inexactitude is true of the reaction to the Iran war. People on the Right—the MAGA base—said there would be 30,000 people killed, could cause World War III. We were told by the American and European Left that we were going to mix up a cauldron of hatred.

We were in Iranian airspace for about 25 minutes. No Americans were killed. Probably very few, if any, Iranians were killed. Immediately, President Donald Trump was able to enact a ceasefire when Iran retaliated and hit our base in Qatar with some ballistic missiles. We had 22-year-old, 23-year-old skeleton crews manning those Patriot batteries. They knocked them down. Trump did not reply. End of story. No World War III. No 30,000 killed. No endless wars.

Then we get to the border. And we were told that there’s only one solution for the border, and that was “comprehensive immigration reform.” We heard that for years. In fact, all that we needed was a new president to enforce existing laws.

We were told, even Donald Trump—should he come in and get everything he wants—there’s no way you can reduce 10,000 people a day to zero. He did that. He did that. We were told that self-deportation was a myth. That was former Sen. Mitt Romney’s idea in the 2012 election. He kept saying, “We can self-deport a lot of people. They will want to leave.” But he had no plan how to do it.

Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol and Justice Department came up with a tripartite system. If you’d self-deport and you go back and you ever want to come back, you can. Legally. You can reapply. But if you’re apprehended in the United States, illegally, you can’t come back at least for 10 years. And we will give you a thousand dollars to go back. And we will pay your air ticket deep into your country.

And you know what? Almost a million people have self-deported. And immigration is now exclusively a problem of how to round up the people who came under President Joe Biden’s administration. Not to prevent new people. They’re not coming because of these deterrents.

Finally, The Wall Street Journal had told us that the tariffs in March and April, they were going to crash the stock market. They were going to raise prices. We would have a hyperinflation. We were going to have a recession. We were going to lose jobs when coupled with deportation of, you know, a million people leaving and another 300,000 or 400,000 deported.

And yet, here we are in June and the stock market is at a record high. The Japanese, the Chinese, their prices for their products, despite the tariffs that they’re paying, are the same, if not lower. Job creation is good.

What am I getting at? Donald Trump is pretty commonsensical. If you take a million people away that were working in the shadows at cheaper wages and hurting American job opportunities and you make countries that had asymmetrical tariffs and were responsible for a $1.1 trillion trade deficit and you can stop that and they still want entry into the American market, then you can have an economic renaissance.

So just to conclude: On nuclear proliferation—wrong. On a forever war, following the bombing of the uranium enrichment plants in Iran—wrong. Wrong on the border that couldn’t be defended, that you couldn’t stop illegal immigration, you couldn’t self-deport people. Wrong on tariffs. Wrong on the so-called trade war. No recession. No inflation. No sudden loss of jobs.

What is the analysis that binds all of us together, whether it’s The Wall Street Journal, as I said, or Bloomberg, or any of these so-called economic gurus who write on those pages? You should try to shed your Trump Derangement Syndrome because it’s really affecting your powers of judgment and analysis. And you’re going to lose readers.

You are so wedded to the idea that Donald Trump is going to destroy the United States because of your personal animus, you cannot see that most people have commonsense solutions. Close the border. Tell people to leave, who are here illegally. Tell countries not to put tariffs on our goods unless they want tariffs on theirs. And don’t ever underestimate the U.S. Air Force when it flies into an undefended airspace.

In short, most of the criticism of Donald Trump was not based on reality. Is this going to stop that fraudulent reporting? No. It’s going to continue. But we’re going to be astute and awake for their inconsistencies.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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