Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Economy Hits 3.4% Growth—Where Did All the Doomsayers Go?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: [Donald] Trump had a constitution to weather all of that onslaught against him, and we’re just seeing that constitution reveal itself again as he barnstorms, is that the word? Barnstorms the states for the— 

Victor Davis Hanson: And I love that. I actually counted how many times he, how many rallies he did versus Kamala Harris. It was about four times the amount. He was doing eight. He could do eight or nine states a day. He was basically getting up at 4:00 in the morning, and he was going to bed at midnight or 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. He was getting two or three hours of sleep. I’m not sure that’s changed.  

He just simply outworked them, and he got in another team. I think the Susie Wiles team was superior to the first team. He had some very good people around him. And people thought that JD Vance was a bad selection because he was a white male like Trump and who was a MAGA person like Trump from Ohio that was red and would go to Trump no matter who he made as vice president, and that [Marco] Rubio or somebody would have been a better pick.  

I don’t want to adjudicate that because there’s things about Rubio that had just been, Rubio had been amazing, but they picked him for one reason, Vance, that he is a very good debater, and he went on the talk shows. He was doing seven or eight TV appearances a day, and he was going mano a mano with CBS, NBC, Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all that stuff, and he was winning, and that really helped Trump. He articulated the Trump message. And you can see Rubio’s probably as good at that too. 

Sami Winc: So let’s move on to the things Donald Trump has done well. And in this third quarter of our economy, we’ve found out that they– he has led an economy that is growing at 3.4%, according to The Wall Street Journal, which is a great healthy economy growth rate. So I was wondering— 

Victor Davis Hanson: I know. I get really angry at that. I’ve been saying that for so long that the economy is gonna take off even with the high oil prices, and I got so many nasty letters.”You’re just a shill for Trump. You’re a stupid idiot that the economy only grew.”  

It was just revised in the third quarter, 3.4 GDP, and there’s predictions in the fourth quarter it’s gonna be 5%. There is now more oil being pumped out of the Gulf, and I mean the Gulf in the widest sense of the world, shipped out of the Gulf, whether through the Red Sea or through the Strait of Hormuz or the Gulf of… Twenty-four million barrels. 

The reason that oil today, as I speak, is a dollar nine is not because there’s not enough oil. It’s because there’s not enough refineries, because some have been damaged in the Gulf states by Iran, some have been damaged in Russia, and we had a hold on building them for basically the entire 12 years of Obama and Biden. But it’s gonna get better.  

And as soon as this war is complete, the price of oil will collapse. It will get down to about $60/barrel, which is about $2.50 gas. 

But otherwise, what did people think? If you go in there and you deregulate the economy the way they did, and you go in and you remove three million people, self-deportations and deportations, and you get rid of 300,000 criminals, that’s expensive to …  

And you cut taxes, you help the middle class, no taxes on tips, Social Security. And then in addition to that, you tell companies all over the world, “If you want to come to the United States, there’s no tariff. Just come and—But if you stay over there, we’re going to symmetrically tariff you pretty high.” 

So Audi just opens a plant, $1.2 billion. So it’s very strange about the reaction to this. Nobody wants to talk about that. The Wall Street Journal’s been doom and gloom.  

So today, you would think they would say third quarter GDP revised to 3.4. No, it just, it’s down in the middle. It’s, that is a big story. If you look at our competitors in Europe or Canada … Canada has like 0.31 or not even one some years. It’s the lowest. 

And now we see that [Canadian Prime Minister Mark] Carney is announcing that he’s close to cutting a deal with Trump. So everybody remember what we’ve been saying, and what you’ve been hearing and what you yourself, I know, think, that this guy Carney thought he was going to win a trade war with the biggest economy in the world, and he was gonna do that by foregoing a huge market where 75% of his exports go with no transportation cost and who buys four million barrels a day of his tar sands oil and then refines it or liquefies it so that they can send it back into Quebec, some of it, and they don’t even allow pipelines from Quebec to … 

You know what I mean? We’re doing it with no defense [contributions] whatsoever. They barely made the 2%, but for 15 years they just said, “We’re not gonna do it. We’re not gonna carry the load. The United States is right here. They defend our airspace. They defend NORAD. They tell us when missiles would come in. So if we have a bunch of, we have 70 or 80 old F-18s that are 45 years old, that’s fine. The United States has F-35.” 

That was their attitude. 

And we’re gonna ally with the biggest mercantile cheater of all time, China, and we’re gonna go over and cut a special deal with EU whose, what, economy is totally ossified. And we’re gonna do that because they have the same idea that we do on open borders and illegal immigration and abortion and socialism and maybe euthanasia. Dutch are really good like us. And we don’t like the United States. 

So then the EU now just this week said, “Nah, thinking about what’s in it for us to give you a special trade relation. You know, all it will do is get Trump’s United States mad at us. And compared to the United States, let’s face it, your economy is one-tenth the size, basically. So it’s $4 trillion, and the United States is $30 trillion, so I should say it’s eight times. Excuse me. But it’s not worth it.” 

So now he says, “Well, how about China?” We have … And the Chinese said, “Eh, well, we’ll steal your resources, and we will dump product below the cost of production if you can get it in the United States as assembled stuff. But otherwise, you should know us better than that. We have contempt for people who wanna like us who are weak. We admire people that hate us and are strong.”  

Sami Winc: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: That’s how they think.  

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: So now he’s saying, “Eh, we lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, and the economy is moribund, and I think we better cut a deal with Donald Trump, especially because they have a conservative government now in British Columbia that nobody thought would happen, and my days may be numbered.”  

And I think Trump is gonna say, when he rings the doorbell, “Can’t hear you. Ring it louder. I wanna help. We love Canada.”  

Sami Winc: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: “But we just can’t hear the doorbell ring. I’m sorry.” 

I hope, you know, I hope they do cut a deal, ’cause I like Canadians. Yeah. But they shouldn’t do that. They should look after their self-interest. Their self-interest is to get a private property capitalist economy, use their treasure house of oil, timber, rare minerals. They’re sitting on a gold mine, and forget the green subsidized stuff. Open up the economy, open up their health system, close their borders, legal-only immigration, and they would be just like they used to be. Their dollar was higher than ours.  

Sami Winc: They should be out on the streets against Carney, and they should force that. 

Don’t they have the multi-party system where the—  

Victor Davis Hanson: Parliamentarian …  

Sami Winc: Yeah, where the prime minister has to call an election or— 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, well, they, wouldn’t … people in the world—   

Sami Winc: That just does it every four—  

Victor Davis Hanson: Our founders were the only people who thought that there were flaws in that system.  

Sami Winc: Yeah. Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: There is, because you can get a prime minister who was never elected. Yeah. He can be a party hack, and then all of a sudden, the prime ministers, they say, “You’re unpopular, and we want you out.” And they go in a back room like they did [Margaret] Thatcher, and then they get her out. And then you get John Major nobody voted for. And they just pick him. 

Sami Winc: And the other thing is you always want to remember Hitler got to the head of the German government in a multi-party system that way. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, you can imagine what would happen right now if Trump was in a parliamentary. The cabinet would get together, and they’d say, “He’s got 40%, he’s out.”  

Sami Winc: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: And then they would pick somebody in the cabinet to be the new president of the United States. Yeah. And the people would be furious.  

Sami Winc: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Our system favors a two-party system. So you don’t have to do that, and it’s not parliamentary. They have scheduled elections. You don’t call an election when you think it’s beneficial to your party. 

Sami Winc: There is some danger in that, though. I mean, think of it, Kamala Harris only lost by two million votes. Like, if there’s some greater work on the part of the Democrats, we could have had that brain dead president. Yes.  

Victor Davis Hanson: But that’s not the system’s fault. That’s the left-wing takeover of the institutions and a whole generation who says, “From the river to the sea,” and they think this river is the Mississippi, and they think the sea is the Great Salt Lake. You know what I mean? That’s how they think. 

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