Victor David Hanson: Thank you very much for having me. I thought I would talk about the mythologies of the election if I could. But before we go, I know you all have had this experience. People have come up to you and said, “Did you have any idea that Trump could win?” Now, everybody lies and said, of course I did. I thought he would be even, but I wasn’t sure. But I had these conversations a lot with Bruce Thornton, and we’d always come to the same conclusion. I don’t know, but there’s something strange out there going on.
And what I meant by that was, when I would walk across the Hoover Institution grounds, anybody who I thought would be voting for Donald Trump would do this. And anybody who wanted to be labeled the maverick, brave, independent scholar, the “go-to” person for the Washington Post, would say, “I’m for Hillary.” And I thought this is really an accurate barometer of what people are thinking, and so I said to my wife Jennifer, “You know every time we have somebody on the farm or we talk to a guy on a tractor, if he speaks English” — and these are all Mexican-American people — “he’s for Trump.” Can’t believe it. People who are not for Trump don’t speak English. And she said, well I have a class with 40 people and there are 38 Hispanics. I said well ask them. You don’t have tenure, but be careful how you ask them. Do it this way: is there anybody in their right mind that would vote for Trump? Seventeen people held their hand up in front of people, and then you saw the statistics that he had two to three points higher minority representation among minority communities than did Romney or McCain. And it was just striking.
The other thing that I think has happened in this election, unfortunately, is — I know I’m not quite unbiased — is that we’ve lost friends and family, relationships. I know that I thought I knew people at the National Review. I’ve been writing there for 14 years, and then I would read things, and I could not believe it. It wasn’t that I disagreed with them or they disagreed with me, it was the level of venom and condescension. I would pick up the Wall Street Journal and read Bret Stephens. I talked to George Will and I could not believe it. And then I talked to people in my family, and the same thing.
But there was one commonality that you may have experienced. That the people who were voting for Hillary or not voting wanted to provoke something. So every time I would see my brother or other brother, they wanted to talk about it. They wanted to put you on the spot. At Hoover when I saw somebody, they wanted to say, “How dare you.” Nobody in this room went up to somebody who they’ve known for a long time and say, “How dare you vote for Hillary.” They may have thought that, but –and it’s thematic of this whole election that Trump’s rallies were supposedly violent, rigged, we know now, by the DNC, and now we see the real violence in the post election. So there were all these bizarre emotions.
One of the things, one other statement before I go into mythologies: This had a lot to do with class. I know people said, “Well how can Trump be a populist. He’s a billionaire.” But he was a billionaire in a way that offended the sensibilities of the coastal corridors. Maybe it was the orange hair or skin or the queen’s accent or his personal tastes and appetites, but whatever it was, people of the elite did not like him for class reasons because he would talk to conservatives and you would look at his agenda and it was pretty conservative, and they’d say, “Well, he doesn’t believe it” or “he was a Democrat.” But they applied a different standard to him that was inexplicable other than they had a class disdain for what he represented.
I thought something was going wrong when I would go up to Palo Alto. I had this unique experience in my life where I live in the second poorest county in the United States, southern Tulare Fresno County, and then I work in one of the most affluent in Stanford-Palo Alto-Menlo Park, and it’s two different worlds. And people up there were convinced that Trump would not only lose but lose in a landslide, and then people out in the foothills of California really thought that he might win in California. I would ride a bike in the month of Michigan, in the month of September in Michigan. I was teaching at Hillsdale. Everybody had a Trump sign, and you would stop and talk to them, and they were just certain he was going to win. I thought this doesn’t make sense. And so I think a lot of you were not as surprised as we otherwise should have been. Because after all, he had no money comparatively speaking. He did not have a ground game. He did not have opposition research. He did not have bundlers. He did not have celebrity endorsements. He did not have establishment. He did not have the media. He had everybody against him. So they say, “Well Hillary won the popular vote.” Yeah, but it’s astounding that he was even close because he had nothing in conventional terms for him other than a message that resonated.
One of the big mythologies of the election was it’s unusual we’ve never had anything this vulgar, this crude in American history. By the standards of American election it was pretty tame. In 1824 basically John Quincy Adams stole the election from Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson got it back in 1828, but if you go back and look at what they called one another. Jackson was supposedly an assassin, a bigamist, his wife was a prostitute supposedly. It reminded me of the Athenian democratic elections and politics where Demosthenes stands up in the De Corona and says, “My opponent, Aeschines, I will not mention the fact that his mother ran a house of prostitution from a cemetery.”
George McGovern called Richard Nixon 12 times in public a Nazi in the 1972 election. 1944, right in the middle of the battles in the Pacific at Leyte Gulf, Franklin Roosevelt said of Thomas Dewey we don’t fight Nazism and fascism overseas just to turn it over to the same people here in the United States. Think of that.
The last time we have seen a Republican fight was Lee Atwater in the ’88 Bush election. Last time somebody wanted to win rather than to lose nobly, and when he got done with Michael Dukakis, he was a wimp and a tank, he had polluted Boston Harbor and he let Willie Horton out thousands of times over again. And that was the last time Republicans said that they were going to do that, and then they stopped so that John McCain wanted to lose nobly like old Ajax, I suppose. Never mentioned Reverend Wright, Jeremiah Wright. You get the impression had Trump run in 2008 we would have never heard the end of Reverend Wright. Had he run in 2012 he would have jumped out and grabbed Candy Crowley’s, I hope, microphone, and he would have reacted.
And I’m mentioning that because that was very important. People you talk to said I’m tired of losing. For people who are wealthy and have connections and influence, losing nobly is an option. But for people at the end of things, a worker out of a job, or somebody who can’t afford to get his teeth fixed, losing is bad. They don’t want to lose. And as one person said to me, if he’s going to lose at least I like him to screw things up. And I think what he meant was we got a Samson now and he’s got his arms around the Philistine pillar, and if he loses, he’s going to tear down the whole damn temple with him. Like that Apple commercial where you run and throw the ball and chain into the screen and smash it. That was a sense of anger that people had over Trump.
