Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Economy Is on the Verge of a Major Boom

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’d like to talk very briefly about the current economy. We’re in a very Orwellian situation when everybody’s talking about affordability, and they have legitimate concerns to do so because prices are pretty high, and they’ve risen higher in the last few years than wages.  

But here’s my point. If you look at the actual economic data, the economy is on the edge of a boom. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In 2022, affordability was an issue. Eighty percent had polled that in that midterm year they were upset with Joe Biden, whose positive polls had dropped—likability, performance, etc.—all the way from 52% before the August Kabul skedaddle down to 40% during the 2022 midterms.  

But here’s my point. All the economic indicators were much worse in 2022 than they are now, whether you’re talking about inflation three times higher, median income thousands of dollars lower, stock market about 20,000 points lower than it is now. Gas prices roughly the same. They had gotten up to $5 in 2022, except—etc. You can go through every single indicator. The only one, that GDP was lower. Unemployment was a little bit better, but mostly the same.  

And yet the red wave didn’t materialize. So there’s something going on in the way that the blue wave did materialize with a more robust economy.  

And what I’m getting at is, everybody talks about the tariffs causing inflation. The inflation rate right now is 3.7%. 3.7. It was 2.7 in the first term. That’s still well below the average of the Biden administration, 5.1%, the aggregate 21% inflation, and the record of 9.1% in 2022, which was the midterm year, and it apparently didn’t do Biden very much damage.  

But what I’m getting at is the problem with the economy is essentially there was a 21% price hike under Joe Biden that was given to the Trump administration, and they did lower the inflation rate almost by half, from 5.1 to 2.7. This year, because of oil, it’ll be about 3.7, still much lower than 5.1.  

But you cannot reduce that rat in the snake, that big hump. We have to work through it by lowering the rate of inflation and increasing living wages.  

But look at the other indicators where we are right now, at a period of Donald Trump’s greatest unpopularity and a historic wipeout of the Republicans: 

Unemployment: 165 [thousand] new jobs. Of course, we all use the word unexpectedly. Wall Street Journal said that because the doom and gloomers said it would be a dismal 70,000 creation. And remember, these are not government jobs. It’s not Joe Biden padding the workforce at the federal level. We have lost 270,000 federal jobs due to the DOGE cuts, so the unemployment rate should be sky-high, but it fell this October from 4.2; it’s down to 4.1. 

GDP, we were told it’s a dismal two point—it’s been revised to 3.4. It may get up to 4.4. So inflation is just a third, a little over a third, that it was under Biden. GDP is strong.  

The poverty rate has never been lower. It’s 10.2, a point and a half lower than the Biden administration. The per family median income is $87,000. It’s thousands of dollars higher than it was during the Biden administration.  

Until the Democratic takeover of the midterms, their big win, which has now been recorded in a huge stock market loss because investors are worried about some of the things they’re talking about—higher taxes, more regulation, even confiscations, attacks on Elon Musk, etc. Even with that, the stock market is 20,000 points higher than it was under Biden.  

If you look at any other indicator, foreign investment, it’s triple what it was during the Biden midterms of 2022, and it’s double what, gone, the highest year that Joe Biden had foreign investment.  

If you look at U.S. companies and all of the emerging technology, even with the war on AI centers that we’re seeing here, AI companies worldwide by terms of use of AI or market capitalization, eight out of the 10 are American. Digital media, nine out of the 10 are American. Software, nine out of the 10. 

Space launches, almost nine out of 10 are SpaceX, or Elon Musk, that’s being demonized and attacked. He launched more American satellites this year than the world put together, and now he has launched more American satellites than all the satellites launched in the world.  

So what am I getting at? We’re getting… And if you want to talk about energy, no country in the history of civilization has pumped per year as much gas and oil as the United States will in 2026. Not Russia, not Kuwait, not Iran, not Saudi Arabia, not—none of them, not Venezuela, none.  

So if you look at the building blocks of an economy—unemployment, inflation, GDP, stock market, per family income, poverty rate—everything is going good.  

So why is this important? There were other reasons why the Republicans got wiped out. The price of gas because of the Iran war had spiked, yes, and that’s the first thing everybody feels, and diesel fuel is the blood of the American circulatory system, and that was high.  

There was also, and we don’t even talk about it, there was furor over corruption. There was a feeling that there were people that had contacts with the administration that were making money in double-dealing or influence peddling or grifting in the Middle East while people were hurting, and that got people angry.  

There was also the idea that some of the candidates on the Republican side were very weak, especially Ken Paxton in Texas. I could go on, but it doesn’t serve any purpose other than just to say they were weak, and I think people agree with them.  

There was also anger that the United States—there was anger with the, I don’t know how you call, the Tucker Carlson base that they had defined no optional wars: not as [Qasem] Soleimani, not as taking out [Abu Bakr al] Baghdadi, not in the first term destroying ISIS, not destroying the Wagner Group, not last year’s necessarily bombing for 25 hours and eliminating most of the nuclear capability—not all, but a lot of it—or the Maduro raid, but a 38-day bombing.  

And most importantly, the war is gonna be over next week. No, two weeks, three weeks, the stopping and the bombing. They don’t say that, but if you look at the polls, they say people oppose the war from the beginning. No, the Republicans did not. They did not. They did not oppose the Iran war until we got into a talk, talk, talk, talk, talk for six months with people who cannot be trusted.  

What am I trying to say? The economy is just about to boom. All of the indicators say that. A Dr. Furman, one of the chief Obama economists, what did he say yesterday? He’s a staunch Democrat, partisan, no fan of market, the free market, libertarian economics. What did he say? He says, “An economy doesn’t get much better than this.” He was amazed at what’s going on.  

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but one of two things I think could happen. One, as this economy starts to boom, there will be people who will fall in line and say Donald Trump brought amazing prosperity, and the usual time it takes to rectify a huge tsunami, as we saw in the midterms, is usually three election cycles. But it could be reversed as quickly as two years if we go into the 2028 presidential elections with 4.0 GDP and 2% inflation and 2 or 3% unemployment. And so that’s a likelihood.  

There’s also a likelihood that there’s going to be people in the Democratic Party that are not completely crazy, and they are going to try to tell the Islamicist, socialist wing, just be quiet and let’s take credit.  

Let’s say as we go into 2027, it was all because of us that we got inaugurated on Jan. 3, even though they hadn’t done anything, and they will try to push the Green New Deal, more regulation, more taxes, but they will try to leapfrog and claim as they go into the 2028 that the Congress brought us a reprieve.  

That’s not true, and it probably won’t happen, but there are people in the Democratic Party that see that possibility.

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

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org