Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Tried to Bury Trump. Instead, They Fueled His Greatest Comeback.

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 haven’t talked much about my latest book that came out Sept. 8, roughly seven weeks ago. It was on The New York Times bestseller list, No. 1 for four days, I think.  

I think you’d like it. It’s not a diatribe. It’s not a campaign pamphlet. It’s an analysis, a historical analysis with a lot of footnotes, but it’s designed to be read by everybody, trying to explain how Donald Trump staged the most unlikely political comeback after the Jan. 6 demonstrations-riots that we’ve ever seen.  

Much more impressive than even Richard Nixon’s return to the presidency in 1968 or Bill Clinton’s return as the leading candidate after he had bombed out in the 1992 Democratic primaries. 

So how did Trump come back? Well, first of all, remember after Jan. 6., some putative polls had him behind by 30 points. Ron DeSantis, we forget that today. Nikki Haley, who hadn’t even declared, was considered more popular than Donald Trump.  

The media despised him. They had turned a demonstration gone awry into a supposed coup d’état. Kamala Harris was saying that it was worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11. People were saying 10 people got killed, including five police officers. The only police officer that died was from natural causes, Brian Sicknick, the next day.  

Polls that were taken showed the putative candidacy of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was ahead by 30 points. He hadn’t even declared yet. People were talking about Nikki Haley, who was more popular. 

More importantly, the Left then tried to destroy Donald Trump psychologically, physically, financially, politically, in every aspect. They waged lawfare in five different courtrooms. The E. Jean Carroll case, $82 million. The Letitia James case, that kind of trumped-up crazy real estate accusation, half a billion dollars in fines with interest. The fiasco with Fani Willis in Georgia, the Alvin Bragg silly bootstrapping of a federal indictment into a state campaign violation. And of course, Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor.  

It wasn’t just that they took him into five courtrooms. They raided his house for the first time in U.S. history, Mar-a-Lago. They said it was full of hundreds of classified documents. They pulled out somewhere between 11 and 14,000. There were only 102. They threw the dossiers all over the carpet. They put big signs on them, Classified. They tried to make it look like it was sloppy, almost like the documents in Joe Biden’s garage. 

That wasn’t the end of it. Twenty-five states tried to take him off the ballot so people couldn’t even vote for him in the next primary cycle or during the 2024 election. That was not the end of it.  

The major banks debanked him. He, his wife, his children couldn’t write a check. That wasn’t the end of it.  

He was banned from Facebook and the old Twitter, even Parler, as we say in English, the new conservative social media platform, they banned the apps. You couldn’t even get on it. So he was persona non grata. 

So what happened? How did he rise out of that? He was one of the most unpopular people in the United States. Well, the first thing, he wanted to redo his first term. He felt that he’d come into Washington, he’d hired good people, you know, but they weren’t on the MAGA agenda, so they were often obstructing him or reinterpreting what he wanted to do.  

He had a good record, but Rex Tillerson or Steve Mnuchin or John Bolton or Jim Mattis or John Kelly, they were not on the team. And he, in that first term, felt that he was putting his fingers in the dike, not addressing the causes of the progressive project. 

In other words, he wanted to redo his first term. He was angry that he had been picked out by the Left to be destroyed rather than just opposed. And then there was another reason that he wanted to run again, and that was he felt the first term he had addressed only the causes of this 50-, 60-, 70-year-old capture of the institutions by the progressive project. 

What do I mean? How did the Left have power when they did not have the Supreme Court, they did not have the Congress, they did not have the White House? And Trump, in his wilderness years, said they have the institutions. They control the administrative state. The bureaucracy is all left-wing. Entertainment is left-wing. Even sports are left-wing. K-12 is left-wing. Academia is left-wing. The media is left-wing. The corporate boardroom is left-wing.

They educate our youth. They are the ones on the two coasts that exercise financial power, intellectual power, social power, cultural power, and you will never be able to return to a normal United States unless you address those causes, and I’m going to run again. 

So in this fall period, he had wilderness years. And I think actually it was good for him to articulate what he wanted to do differently and more ambitiously, to get a new team in, and then to let the people see how crazy the Left was and how vindictive it was. 

So how did he rise very quickly? Well, he was in his late 70s, but he simply outworked everybody. He campaigned more than DeSantis or Nikki Haley and all the other Republican primary candidates. He worked nonstop. He held rallies. He tweeted at three in the morning. He was unstoppable. 

He was given another gift, though, and that was the Biden presidency. After the Afghanistan disaster pullout in August of 2021, after the invasion of the Russians into Ukraine in February of 2022, after the Oct. 7 massacres in 2023, with the defense cuts and Joe Biden’s disability, his cognitive inability to really be president, people started to see that this administration was a disaster.  

And when you add in 21% inflation, 5.1 plus every single year, gas getting up to $5 in 2022, inflation hitting 9.1%, people were angry. 

And when they looked to answers, Joe Biden was putting a lid, a lid, that’s a term they use, on his day about every one o’clock, two o’clock. He had Jen Psaki, Karine Jean-Pierre. And what were they doing? They were lying about the actual physical and mental condition of the president. That helped Donald Trump. 

There was a third thing that helped him come back. When the campaign of 2024 started, Kamala Harris had sort of taken—it was a coup.  

Remember, Joe Biden had been put in in a coup-like fashion. All of the 2020 primary candidates, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Spartacus, they all vanished, even though Joe Biden had not won Iowa or New Hampshire, but it was the consensus of the Democratic donor class that these socialists or these radicals could not win.  

And good old Joe Biden from Scranton, as disabled as he was, would be a perfect veneer, a waxen effigy for the Obama third term. And that’s why they cleared the field. He won the primaries. He was elected, and then the proverbial truth came out. 

And that administration, I think, will go down as both the most radical and the greatest failure in the last 100 years of a four-year presidency. And that really helped Donald Trump. 

There was one other thing. They nominated Kamala Harris, or she had a hand in removing Joe Biden. For the first 90 days, she didn’t even talk to the media, and we all wondered why because we really hadn’t seen or heard of her as vice president other than border czar or space czar had been a disaster.  

Once people got to see her and the liberal media got angry that she wouldn’t even talk to them, it was an ungodly disaster. 

She had a vocabulary of about 500 words. She had word salads, the process of becoming out of the coconut tree. No one knew what she was saying. She had about an 8-to-5 workday. She told things that were not true. She didn’t really own a Glock. She didn’t work at McDonald’s. She wasn’t a lower-middle-class working girl. She was a child of two Ph.D.s that grew up in affluence in Berkeley and in Montreal. And above all, she was an incompetent candidate. 

Finally, one last thing ensured the recovery from the fall to the rise of Donald Trump, and that was the issues that he was embracing were 70/30 issues. Most Americans wanted a closed border. Most Americans did not want 10,000 illegal aliens a day. Most Americans did not want a military short of 50,000 recruits because of rampant DEI racial obsessions in the military.

Most Americans did not want to defund the police. Most Americans wanted to pump oil and gas and not subsidize inefficient wind and solar energy. Most Americans did not want something like what happened in Afghanistan or for us to be a laughingstock abroad. All of those issues were 70/30. 

Add it all up. And Donald Trump was a beneficiary of the Biden administration, the disastrous Harris candidacy, but he also knew where the American people were on the issues. He outworked people, and he had four wilderness years to think about his first term and say in the second, I’m going to address the causes, not the symptoms.  

When I get into power, I’m not just going to complain about the media, I’m gonna defund PBS and NPR. I’m not gonna complain about left-wing overseas foreign aid, I’m gonna go after USAID. Close the border, not just talk about it. Deport people, not just talk about it. 

Again and again, it was an effort in the second term to create a climate that you could not just complain or, in a stopgap fashion, deal with progressivism and leftism and socialism, but find out why they had power when they were not getting elected and address that through institutional reform. 

And that’s where we are today. I hope you’ll tune in for the next video where I’m going to talk about not just the fall and rise of Donald Trump, but his presidency and what he aimed to do and where we are now in the year 2026. 

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