AI Analysis
Machine-generated analysis of the post above on 2026-09-07. Not written by the author of the post.
A low-arousal, high-grandiosity supply-consumption post: the second labeled installment of a serialized video reel amplifying Victor Davis Hanson and Mark Levin's characterization of the subject as "the Counter Revolution." Posted at 22:06 EDT as the fifth item in a same-evening cluster, three of which share this theme. Probably self-authored (0.72, medium confidence) on the strength of timing, clustering, real-time broadcast reaction, and self-curated serialization of praise media. Clinically, the interest is contextual rather than textual. The week's environment includes approval near 35% against 59% disapproval and Iran war-fatigue coverage; the response to that unfavorable comparison is not counterattack but immersion in and rebroadcast of a flattering historical narrative — grandiose-mode self-soothing. Defenses are idealization of the validating authorities and mild denial of the disconfirming environment. The parent post's "he understands me, perhaps better, than I understand myself" suggests porous self-concept boundaries, with external characterization imported as self-knowledge. Malignant-narcissism scoring is markedly asymmetric: narcissistic features high, antisocial, paranoid and sadistic components near floor. Archetypally this is Hero/Restorer, the ordered pole of the repertoire, with Trickster and Warrior modes absent. Danger level none — no target, no grievance-plus-action structure, no mobilization language. Cognitive assessment is not possible from seven words; session-level thematic repetition is better read as supply-seeking than impairment. Value here is longitudinal, as an instance of validation-seeking substituting for aggression under polling pressure.
- Posted 22:06 EDT (02:06 UTC), late-evening window associated with self-authored posts
- Fifth post in a rapid same-evening cluster, three on the identical Hanson/Levin theme
- Real-time broadcast-reaction pattern: clipping and serializing a TV/radio segment, with hosts named in the adjacent post
- Serial labeling ('Part 2:') of personally curated praise media — a self-promotional act rarely delegated
- Idiosyncratic trailing colon before attached video rather than professional caption formatting
Strongest facet: low modesty (immodesty by proxy)
Primary drive: validation
Trigger: Supply Seeking — Comparison (Mark Levin / Victor Davis Hanson broadcast segment on Hanson's book 'The Counter Revolution', amid a week of unfavorable approval polling)
Every element of this claim is confirmed by primary evidence.
The book exists. Publisher records show "The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement" by Victor Davis Hanson, published by Basic Books (Hachette Book Group), 496 pages, ISBNs 9781541607828 (hardcover) and 9781541607842. The publication date is September 8, 2026 — two days after this post, which is consistent with a pre-release publicity tour. The Hachette catalog description reads verbatim: "From the author of the New York Times best-selling The Case for Trump, the story of Trump's triumphant comeback and what his second term means for the future of our country." The Daily Signal's book page summarizes the thesis as Hanson pinpointing "how Trump regained power and came to lead an American counterrevolution," arguing that the aggressiveness of Trump's second-term agenda is best understood as a product of his four years out of office. Editions are listed at Rizzoli, Waterstones, Amazon, and Audible (narrated by Bob Souer).
The thesis is as described. Hanson states it in his own words in the interview itself: "I wanted to write a book about this counter revolution that I thought Donald Trump was waging and people had misunderstood... I wanted to explain that Donald Trump is not addressing the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years as he did in the first administration. But now he's looking at the causation, what makes them so powerful when they don't even have the White House or the Senate or the House or the Supreme Court." Fox News separately headlines a segment "President Trump is a counterrevolutionary, Victor Davis Hanson says," and Levin's own show archive carries an earlier October 20, 2025 item titled "Victor Davis Hanson: Trump's Waging A Counter Revolution."
The Levin discussion is real and is what is being serialized. The Mark Levin Show announced "One-on-One with Victor Davis Hanson, Sunday on Life, Liberty and Levin," airing Sunday, September 6, 2026 at 8pm Eastern on Fox. Decisive confirmation comes from the media transcript stored against this exact post in the trump.fm D1 archive: the mp4 attached to the companion "Part 1" post transcribes as Levin's cold open — "Hello America, I'm Mark Levin, and this is Life, Liberty, and Levin Labor Day Weekend... I call him America's Wise Man, Victor Davis Hanson... And this book, The Counter Revolution, really about Donald Trump and MAGA and our culture and our society, and our opposition, which in many ways is our enemy now, is so fantastic." The clip attached to the "Part 2" post being analyzed is a later portion of the same one-hour special. Post timing corroborates: the broadcast began 8pm ET and the cluster runs 9:06pm ET ("Wow! 'Donald Trump is the Counter Revolution.' Mark Levin and Victor Davis Hanson"), 9:49pm ET (book endorsement), 10:06pm ET ("Part 2"), 10:35pm ET ("Part 1"). Labor Day 2026 fell on September 7, so a "Labor Day Weekend" special airing Sunday September 6 is consistent.
One trivial discrepancy, not material to the verdict: the published title is the single word "Counterrevolution," while Trump rendered it "THE COUNTER REVOLUTION" and Levin spoke it as two words on air. The claim's two-word rendering matches how the title was presented in the broadcast and in the post.
First, an attribution correction that the first-pass analysis got slightly wrong. The archive shows this framing is not drawn from the Hanson/Levin segment; it is the subject's own wording in the post 17 minutes earlier (2026-09-07 01:49 UTC): "From the brink of disaster, the U.S.A. is now the 'hottest' Country anywhere in the World, and it was MAGA, and a lot of Great American Patriots, that got us there." So the premise is accurately quoted as something being amplified in the cluster, but it originates with the subject rather than with the authorities he is idealizing. The transcripts of the attached clips contain no such claim.
On the substance, this is a recurring claim that fact-checkers have already adjudicated. The Associated Press addressed the near-identical formulation directly: Trump said at a January 20 White House briefing "We have the hottest country anywhere in the world," and the following day that a year earlier "we were a dead country." AP's finding was that the economy "was hardly 'dead'" when he returned to office — in 2024, US GDP grew 2.8% adjusted for inflation, faster than any wealthy country in the world except Spain, and it expanded at a healthy rate from 2021 through 2023. FactCheck.org's parallel review of the 2026 State of the Union rated the claim of inheriting "a stagnant economy" with "inflation at record levels" as false, citing real GDP growth of 6.2% (2021), 2.5% (2022), 2.9% (2023) and 2.8% (2024), unemployment falling from 6.4% to 4.0%, and inflation at 3% on inauguration versus a 9.1% peak in June 2022. The "brink of disaster" half of the premise is therefore contradicted by the record.
The "hottest country anywhere in the world" half has no defined metric and cuts both ways. In its favor: the IMF's April 2026 World Economic Outlook projects US growth of roughly 2.3–2.4% in 2026 against 1.1% in the eurozone, 0.8% in the UK and 0.7% in Japan — the highest among large developed economies — and the August 2026 jobs report released September 4 showed payrolls up 162,000 against a 53,000 consensus, with unemployment steady at 4.1% and upward revisions to June and July. Against it: the same IMF forecasts put China at 4.4% and India at 6.3%, so the global superlative fails on growth; and domestic conditions in the week of the post were deteriorating. CPI was running about 3.4% annually with the August reading due September 11; the Dallas Fed and Washington Times reported inflation gauges staying elevated on the Iran war and trade frictions; AAA had gasoline at about $4.10 a gallon, up from roughly $2.98 pre-war; CBS reported Brent at $105 and economists trimming 2026 GDP growth by about 0.3 points to 1.8%. University of Michigan consumer sentiment fell 8% in August, with year-ahead inflation expectations at 4.3% versus 3.4% pre-war and Republican sentiment 19% below its pre-strike level — its lowest since the 2024 election. Retail sales fell 0.6% in July, the largest drop since May 2025, and inflation-adjusted incomes were up only 0.2% year over year. NBC's coverage of the August jobs report was headlined on wage growth continuing to lag inflation. Earlier AP reporting by Josh Boak (March 8, 2026) found economic reality belying "roaring economy" claims, noting 92,000 job losses in February and 2025 annual GDP growth of 2.2%, below Biden's 2.8% in 2024.
Public opinion corroborates rather than contradicts this reading. Civiqs had approval at 34% against 59% disapproval through September 5, 2026; aggregators showed roughly 36–38% approval against 58–59% disapproval in early September; Forbes reported approval at or near record lows. A UMass Amherst national poll in August found over two-thirds of Americans disapproving of the handling of the Iran war and about four in five saying the war had increased food and gas prices.
Overall: the "brink of disaster" premise is affirmatively contradicted by the data, and the "hottest country" superlative is unmeasurable as stated, true only in the narrow sense of leading advanced-economy GDP growth, and inconsistent with prices, real incomes, sentiment and global growth rankings at the time of the post. A small kernel of defensible fact inside a claim whose principal assertions are wrong warrants mostly false rather than unverifiable.
No contradictions with other posts detected yet.
He posted 51 times — a Sunday-night run of links and praise for a new book about him, then roughly two dozen posts in a single hour on Labor Day morning. The strangest stretch was about five minutes in which he pushed out more than a dozen wordless images, including seven maps that rename New Mexico...
Post Analysis: "Part 2: Donald Trump is the Counter Revolution:" (Truth Social, 2026-09-07, 02:06 UTC)
0. Context and Post Type
This is the fifth in a same-session cluster of posts and the second explicitly labeled installment of a video series amplifying a Mark Levin / Victor Davis Hanson discussion of Hanson's book The Counter Revolution. The immediately preceding posts include an unlabeled "Wow!" framing of the same quote and a lengthy first-person endorsement of the book containing the key line: "he understands me, perhaps better, than I understand myself."
The post itself is a near-empty container — a serial label plus a colon plus a video. Its psychological content lies almost entirely in what is being serialized: third-party validation of the subject as a world-historical force. Analytically, the unit of interest is the behavior (sequential redistribution of praise media at 10 PM local time), not the seven words of text.
1. Authorship Attribution
Local time: 02:06 UTC on 2026-09-07 corresponds to 22:06 EDT on 2026-09-06 (Eastern daylight time, consistent with New York / New Jersey / Washington / Palm Beach residence). This falls in the late-evening window associated with self-authored posting.
Indicators of authentic authorship (medium-high confidence):
- Late-night local timing, well outside staff business hours.
- Rapid-fire clustering with four other posts on the same evening, including a long, syntactically loose first-person endorsement in the same thread — a signature of a personal posting session rather than a scheduled comms push.
- Real-time media-reaction pattern: clipping and serializing a broadcast segment ("Part 2") as it airs or immediately after, naming the hosts in the prior post.
- The idiosyncratic trailing colon before an attached video — a formatting habit rather than professional formatting.
- Content is pure self-referential amplification, a category rarely delegated.
Countervailing indicators: the text is short, correctly spelled, and error-free; several adjacent posts are bare link-drops of Just the News headlines, which is a documented staff-assisted pattern. However, per baseline guidance, absence of error is not itself evidence of aide authorship, and the serial-labeling behavior ("Part 2") of a personally selected clip is more consistent with the subject curating his own praise reel.
Score: 0.72 (probably self-authored), confidence medium.
2. Level 1 — Dispositional Traits
- Extraversion (high-salient facets: excitement-seeking, positive affect): the evening reflects high-tempo broadcast engagement and appetite for audience contact.
- Agreeableness (low, facet: modesty): the content being promoted is a claim of personal historical singularity. Immodesty here is outsourced — the grandiose proposition is spoken by others and merely re-broadcast, which is a lower-cost form of self-elevation.
- Conscientiousness (mixed): the serialization impulse ("Part 1 / Part 2") shows a minimal ordering behavior, but the surrounding cluster is unstructured.
- Neuroticism (low in this post): no hostility, vulnerability, or grievance affect. This is notable given the same week's polling environment.
- Openness (low-moderate): engagement is with ideas about himself; the intellectual frame (a historian's counter-revolution thesis) is instrumental rather than explored.
3. Level 2 — Characteristic Adaptations
Dominant motive: validation, secondary status/legacy. The behavior is textbook narcissistic supply curation and redistribution — praise received is not merely accepted but repackaged for the audience in numbered installments, converting external admiration into a broadcastable asset.
Schemas revealed:
- Self: historically significant, the embodiment of a movement rather than a participant in one. The identity claim is metonymic: not "I lead the counter-revolution" but "is the Counter Revolution."
- Others: sorted into interpreters/validators (Hanson, Levin) and, implicitly, the revolution being countered.
- World: an arena in which the correct chroniclers have finally arrived at the correct verdict.
4. Level 3 — Narrative Identity
- Protagonist role: the Restorer / world-historical hero. The framing borrows a historian's authority to place the subject inside a mythic-historical category.
- Narrative sequence: redemption. The parent post makes this explicit — "From the brink of disaster, the U.S.A. is now the 'hottest' Country anywhere in the World." Ruin → rescue, with the self as the pivot.
- Contrasting other: "the Revolution" — an unnamed, abstracted opposition (progressive institutions, the prior order). Notably diffuse rather than personal, which lowers the danger profile.
- Identity claims: embodiment of a historical corrective force; subject of serious scholarly attention; validated by a "New York Times Bestselling Author."
5. Level 4 — Clinical Indicators
Narcissistic state: grandiose, but in a regulated, supply-consuming mode rather than an inflamed one. There is no injury response here. The interesting clinical observation is the contrast with the environment: the week's context includes approval near 35% against 59% disapproval and war-fatigue coverage. The response to that unfavorable comparison is not counterattack but immersion in a countervailing validating narrative — a self-soothing operation. The reflexive amplification of "he understands me, perhaps better, than I understand myself" indicates unusually porous self-concept boundaries: external characterization is imported as self-knowledge.
Malignant narcissism components:
- Narcissistic features: high (0.72) — grandiosity by proxy, need for admiration, identification with historical greatness.
- Antisocial features: minimal (0.10) in this post.
- Paranoid features: low (0.20) — only the implicit "revolution" adversary.
- Sadism: absent (0.03).
This is a low-toxicity, high-grandiosity specimen: clinically informative about self-regulation strategy, not about aggression.
Defenses: primarily idealization (of Hanson and Levin as authoritative validators, and reciprocally of the self through their words); mild denial of the disconfirming political environment via selective attention to affirming media.
6. Rhetorical & Propaganda Analysis
- Serialization / drip release ("Part 2:") — an engagement technique that extends dwell time and creates anticipation for a subsequent installment.
- Appeal to authority — the argumentative work is delegated to a credentialed historian and a talk-radio host.
- Testimonial (classic Institute for Propaganda Analysis category) — a respected figure vouches for the subject.
- Metonymic identification — collapsing person and movement, a rhetorical device with well-documented authoritarian pedigree ("I am the movement"), though here it is voiced by a third party, which softens it.
- Glittering generality — "Counter Revolution" as an unbounded honorific.
No dehumanizing language, no violent imagery, no target identification.
7. Gaslighting / Reality Distortion
None operative in this post. The implicit distortion is soft and second-hand: an "America saved from the brink" frame that sits awkwardly against contemporaneous polling and ongoing Iran conflict coverage. That is optimistic narrative construction rather than assertion of counterfactual fact.
8. Danger Assessment
None. No target, no grievance-plus-action structure, no mobilization language. The "revolution" adversary is abstract. Flagging this post at any elevated level would degrade the calibration of the danger scale.
9. Cognitive Status
Insufficient linguistic material for assessment — seven words plus a colon. No word-finding difficulty, paraphasia, perseveration, or temporal confusion observable. The evening's longer companion post shows the familiar loose appositive-heavy syntax ("he understands me, perhaps better, than I understand myself") with idiosyncratic comma placement, which is on baseline for the subject and not a deviation marker. Complexity score reported reflects this post's minimal sample and should not be treated as a longitudinal data point.
The one mild behavioral marker worth logging longitudinally is thematic perseveration at the cluster level: five posts in one evening, three on the identical Hanson/Levin theme. Repetition of an affirming stimulus across a session is characteristic of supply-seeking rather than of cognitive impairment, but the two can present similarly and the distinction requires trend data.
10. Archetypal and Order/Chaos Reading
Archetype: Hero/Savior with King overtones. "Counter Revolution" invokes the restorer of a violated legitimate order — mythologically, the returning rightful king who reverses usurpation. This is the ordered pole of the subject's archetypal repertoire; the Trickster and Warrior modes are absent here.
Order/chaos positioning: order restorer. The post's implicit claim is that chaos was imposed by a prior revolution and that the subject reverses it. Order is promised to the national in-group ("Great American Patriots," MAGA); the disorder is assigned to the unnamed revolutionary class. Hierarchy dynamics: elevates the subject to historical-actor status and elevates the two commentators as credentialed witnesses; diminishes no one by name.
11. Confidence and Limitations
- Authorship: medium confidence; short text limits stylometric leverage.
- Motivational read: medium-high confidence, supported strongly by the same-session parent post.
- Cognitive: no assessment possible; insufficient sample.
- The attached video was not analyzed; its content could materially alter the rhetorical reading.
Overall
A low-intensity, high-grandiosity supply-consumption post. Its analytic value is as the second beat of a serialized self-mythologizing sequence occurring during a documented period of unfavorable polling — an instance of the subject managing an unfavorable external comparison by immersing in and re-broadcasting a flattering historical narrative rather than by attacking. Not clinically alarming in isolation; useful as longitudinal evidence of grandiose-mode self-regulation.
Fact Verification
| Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| "Victor Davis Hanson authored a book titled 'The Counter Revolution' whose thesis is that Donald Trump embodies a counter-revolution, discussed with Mark Levin in the segment being serialized here." | True | Every element of this claim is confirmed by primary evidence. |
The book exists. Publisher records show "The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement" by Victor Davis Hanson, published by Basic Books (Hachette Book Group), 496 pages, ISBNs 9781541607828 (hardcover) and 9781541607842. The publication date is September 8, 2026 — two days after this post, which is consistent with a pre-release publicity tour. The Hachette catalog description reads verbatim: "From the author of the New York Times best-selling The Case for Trump, the story of Trump's triumphant comeback and what his second term means for the future of our country." The Daily Signal's book page summarizes the thesis as Hanson pinpointing "how Trump regained power and came to lead an American counterrevolution," arguing that the aggressiveness of Trump's second-term agenda is best understood as a product of his four years out of office. Editions are listed at Rizzoli, Waterstones, Amazon, and Audible (narrated by Bob Souer).
The thesis is as described. Hanson states it in his own words in the interview itself: "I wanted to write a book about this counter revolution that I thought Donald Trump was waging and people had misunderstood... I wanted to explain that Donald Trump is not addressing the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years as he did in the first administration. But now he's looking at the causation, what makes them so powerful when they don't even have the White House or the Senate or the House or the Supreme Court." Fox News separately headlines a segment "President Trump is a counterrevolutionary, Victor Davis Hanson says," and Levin's own show archive carries an earlier October 20, 2025 item titled "Victor Davis Hanson: Trump's Waging A Counter Revolution."
The Levin discussion is real and is what is being serialized. The Mark Levin Show announced "One-on-One with Victor Davis Hanson, Sunday on Life, Liberty and Levin," airing Sunday, September 6, 2026 at 8pm Eastern on Fox. Decisive confirmation comes from the media transcript stored against this exact post in the trump.fm D1 archive: the mp4 attached to the companion "Part 1" post transcribes as Levin's cold open — "Hello America, I'm Mark Levin, and this is Life, Liberty, and Levin Labor Day Weekend... I call him America's Wise Man, Victor Davis Hanson... And this book, The Counter Revolution, really about Donald Trump and MAGA and our culture and our society, and our opposition, which in many ways is our enemy now, is so fantastic." The clip attached to the "Part 2" post being analyzed is a later portion of the same one-hour special. Post timing corroborates: the broadcast began 8pm ET and the cluster runs 9:06pm ET ("Wow! 'Donald Trump is the Counter Revolution.' Mark Levin and Victor Davis Hanson"), 9:49pm ET (book endorsement), 10:06pm ET ("Part 2"), 10:35pm ET ("Part 1"). Labor Day 2026 fell on September 7, so a "Labor Day Weekend" special airing Sunday September 6 is consistent.
One trivial discrepancy, not material to the verdict: the published title is the single word "Counterrevolution," while Trump rendered it "THE COUNTER REVOLUTION" and Levin spoke it as two words on air. The claim's two-word rendering matches how the title was presented in the broadcast and in the post. | | "The premise being amplified — that the United States went 'from the brink of disaster' to being the 'hottest' country in the world under the subject's leadership." | Mostly False | First, an attribution correction that the first-pass analysis got slightly wrong. The archive shows this framing is not drawn from the Hanson/Levin segment; it is the subject's own wording in the post 17 minutes earlier (2026-09-07 01:49 UTC): "From the brink of disaster, the U.S.A. is now the 'hottest' Country anywhere in the World, and it was MAGA, and a lot of Great American Patriots, that got us there." So the premise is accurately quoted as something being amplified in the cluster, but it originates with the subject rather than with the authorities he is idealizing. The transcripts of the attached clips contain no such claim.
On the substance, this is a recurring claim that fact-checkers have already adjudicated. The Associated Press addressed the near-identical formulation directly: Trump said at a January 20 White House briefing "We have the hottest country anywhere in the world," and the following day that a year earlier "we were a dead country." AP's finding was that the economy "was hardly 'dead'" when he returned to office — in 2024, US GDP grew 2.8% adjusted for inflation, faster than any wealthy country in the world except Spain, and it expanded at a healthy rate from 2021 through 2023. FactCheck.org's parallel review of the 2026 State of the Union rated the claim of inheriting "a stagnant economy" with "inflation at record levels" as false, citing real GDP growth of 6.2% (2021), 2.5% (2022), 2.9% (2023) and 2.8% (2024), unemployment falling from 6.4% to 4.0%, and inflation at 3% on inauguration versus a 9.1% peak in June 2022. The "brink of disaster" half of the premise is therefore contradicted by the record.
The "hottest country anywhere in the world" half has no defined metric and cuts both ways. In its favor: the IMF's April 2026 World Economic Outlook projects US growth of roughly 2.3–2.4% in 2026 against 1.1% in the eurozone, 0.8% in the UK and 0.7% in Japan — the highest among large developed economies — and the August 2026 jobs report released September 4 showed payrolls up 162,000 against a 53,000 consensus, with unemployment steady at 4.1% and upward revisions to June and July. Against it: the same IMF forecasts put China at 4.4% and India at 6.3%, so the global superlative fails on growth; and domestic conditions in the week of the post were deteriorating. CPI was running about 3.4% annually with the August reading due September 11; the Dallas Fed and Washington Times reported inflation gauges staying elevated on the Iran war and trade frictions; AAA had gasoline at about $4.10 a gallon, up from roughly $2.98 pre-war; CBS reported Brent at $105 and economists trimming 2026 GDP growth by about 0.3 points to 1.8%. University of Michigan consumer sentiment fell 8% in August, with year-ahead inflation expectations at 4.3% versus 3.4% pre-war and Republican sentiment 19% below its pre-strike level — its lowest since the 2024 election. Retail sales fell 0.6% in July, the largest drop since May 2025, and inflation-adjusted incomes were up only 0.2% year over year. NBC's coverage of the August jobs report was headlined on wage growth continuing to lag inflation. Earlier AP reporting by Josh Boak (March 8, 2026) found economic reality belying "roaring economy" claims, noting 92,000 job losses in February and 2025 annual GDP growth of 2.2%, below Biden's 2.8% in 2024.
Public opinion corroborates rather than contradicts this reading. Civiqs had approval at 34% against 59% disapproval through September 5, 2026; aggregators showed roughly 36–38% approval against 58–59% disapproval in early September; Forbes reported approval at or near record lows. A UMass Amherst national poll in August found over two-thirds of Americans disapproving of the handling of the Iran war and about four in five saying the war had increased food and gas prices.
Overall: the "brink of disaster" premise is affirmatively contradicted by the data, and the "hottest country" superlative is unmeasurable as stated, true only in the narrow sense of leading advanced-economy GDP growth, and inconsistent with prices, real incomes, sentiment and global growth rankings at the time of the post. A small kernel of defensible fact inside a claim whose principal assertions are wrong warrants mostly false rather than unverifiable. |
Overall Veracity: 60%
Post from Truth Social
Part 2: Donald Trump is the Counter Revolution:
Video transcript 16:12
welcome back America this is a man who is like super patriotic for this country and so forth and so on and understands the American people better than most people do what do you make of that I agree with you and when he does these things that are controversial but needed you it begs the question why didn't other presidents both Democrat Republican do things and what do I mean by that he why didn't somebody addressed the deterioration of monuments in Washington or the world's capital so to speak was not safe to walk in or the reflecting pool was a miasma or presidents had you know torn parts of the White House to put a bowling alley or basketball court or a swimming pool but they all said there's nowhere to there's nowhere to speak there's nowhere to hold a world class meeting and world-class banquet any of that lectures and he comes along and he does it but he doesn't do it I mean he doesn't do it in the sense that I'm going to be the first person to ever do it he does it because he says why hasn't this been done because we need it and so I think that's what's unusual about him he's always bragging about the US military he calls soldiers up he goes to the funerals he he wants the United States and this is what drives the left crazy because their idea was managed decline a globalist idea were just one of many or to paraphrase Barack Obama were no more exceptional in Greece or Great Britain is but he resented that idea he said we were always exceptional we have the only type of Constitution in the world where the freest people were the most powerful country how did that come across China has one China has four times the population that we do the EU has a hundred more p hundred million more people than we do and yet we have 10 trillion more of a GDP how's that possible so what his whole idea was we're going to be the first in space and they were and people said oh you know NASA is done with they haven't done anything in years he said no no no no we're going to get private enterprise and empower them and then the NASA will have to rise to the challenge and he really almost single-handedly reinvigorated the space race Elon Musk himself launched more missile satellites than the whole world combined last year and when you look at what he did with Silicon Valley he went to all these people who were left you know that the Andreessen's that sacks and all of these people the Elon Musk they all voted against him and he said to them we're in bad trouble we've got to rearm the United States we're short weapon we got to get into the drone racing race we've got to get satellite technology and use it to protect our country we need an iron dome sort of global dome over the United States and just like the war production board of World War Two Trump said I'm appealing to your patriotism not your politics if you will if I can enlist your talent I will protect you from EU censorship from Canadian digital media taxes with you neighbor I'm on your side as long as you're on our side and I define that as America side and it's really amazing when you look at these left-wing companies that opposed him I mean they were censoring news accounts of the the laptop fiasco and almost and they contributed to his defeat Mark Zuckerberg gave over 450 million dollars in 2020 through various surrogates to change helped to change balloting and yet he went back to these people and said you're very talented I'm going to allow you I'm not going to pick winners and losers like Biden wanted to do I'm going to open up I'm going to deregulate I'm going to give you energy I'm going to promote data centers for good or evil but you have to do one thing you have to use those energies and talents for the promotion of the common good and the preeminence of the United States that was very we hadn't seen that in decades somebody take that that type of argument to the opposition and the results are they're undeniable all of a sudden the United States is the greatest producer of oil and gas in history its satellites are preeminent I just looked at the software digital media bioengineering AI companies in terms of market capitalization and things like downloads of the top 10 companies globally in each of those categories the United States has eight or nine corporations in the top ten almost dominates every this is a period when they said you know mark they were saying and just a decade ago that China would have a greater GDP by now than we did and we're ten trillion dollars greater so it's amazing the book is and it is a great book the counter-revolution the fall and rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement I encourage you to get it amazon.com come Tuesday when it's released any major bookstore look how he's leading in what I call the next Industrial Revolution data centers you have dime store politicians who are looking at polls for objecting to it and so forth and so on it's local governments that make a determination where they are and how these buildings look and so forth but the president knows this is the next Industrial Revolution every single thing we use is related to AI I just think that's another example of his of his foresight we'll be right back welcome back America we're here with America's wise man that's what I call him because that's what he is the counter-revolution is his brand new book and comes out Tuesday I would pre-order on amazon.com that's the way I roll the fall and rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement there is so much in here that is so compelling because the man himself is compelling and the author is compelling Victor Davis Hanson well let's get a little bit into national security and foreign policy let's dig right in to Iran and what the president's been doing in Iran we have people who said he campaigned against this kind of thing and we we call a lot of those isolationists and so forth and so on but did he not also say peace through strength again that is sort of a Reagan phrase peace through strength and hasn't he also demonstrated as you demonstrate in your book a hesitance to use military power but if he feels it's necessary he will use military power explain yeah he never ran as an isolationist he never ran as a nation builder he ran as a Jacksonian his idea was don't tread on the United States where you'll have no better friend but you'll have no worse enemy if you do that and to carry out that policy we had to be have a preeminent military so he really in the first term tried to rebuild it but when he looked at Iran there were two kind of contrast or antithetical positions he had to guide he had to navigate between them one was given the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq we don't do well when we put thousands of troops on the ground we if we don't win very quickly and winnings very hard in those societies because you have to change the government and they have no experience with consensual rule and then on the other hand he said well seven prior prior presidents have said this is intolerable that this huge country that was once so pro-western and so powerful under the Shaw and earlier rulers now is using that 93 million population and all of its traditions and its resources with oil fourth largest reserve or third in the world for nefarious purposes and most of the problems in the Middle East come from Iran they bully the Arab Gulf exporters they have a ring of fire of terrorist appendages around Israel they subsidize terrorism all over Europe and the Western world but nobody has done anything so I'm gonna do something with one caveat I am NOT going to invade this country and try to overthrow the government and rack up a decade and casually then he hasn't done that I think people don't realize that he knew something had to be done because every year they were getting closer and closer to nuclear weapons and once they got them with that lunatic attitude whether genuine or contrived they had deterrence and with deterrence they could do almost anything and they would dominate the entire Middle East and prior administrations like the Obama administration said well maybe we can balance Iran and the Shia crescent Syria Lebanon's taken over there's Iran the Houthis Hamas and then we'll kind of play them against Israel in the Gulf States and we'll adjudicate that was a crazy idea but that was kind of US policy under Biden but especially under Obama so he said no no it's intolerable time has run out but I've got to find a way to squeeze them and disarm them without invading them and without trying to nation-build and he thought that the popular popular revolt might happen right after the Berlin Wall it took two years with Soviet Union to fall but it did fall it took many months for Eastern European governments so I think it's kind of a Civil War Union anaconda strategy now we're squeezing them economically financially they can't import goods they can't export oil the people are getting restive and I think his big worry right now is at what point will things get so terrible in Iran I think we're getting there how do you ensure that the people are not hurt by this awful regime that doesn't care about their own people and that's a concern I think he has and that that explains why some of us were surprised that we thought maybe at 38 days he should not have stopped or 40 days or 45 but I think he was thinking that if I destroy the entire infrastructure that regime it'll take a year or two for the people to rise up and you'll get mass starvation or something disease or so much chaos it'll be counterproductive so it's kind of a strategy right now to just say we can we can continue with American problems and issues and policies without being obsessed with Iran they are frozen they can't do anything we've got them in a stranglehold and all time is not on their side it's on our side and that I think is that the strategy right now and I think it will eventually work but boy he's taken a lot of criticism from people say the war is lost on no evidence I can't believe people on the conservative side even have said this was a fight fiasco it's destroyed his presence it hasn't at all if people give it time you will see radical changes in Iran for the first time in 50 years very very well put when we come back really I want to address two issues what comes post-Trump and also the president's really bold condemnation of antisemitism of antisemites some who used to be friends of his and so forth and so on let's see if we can address both of those because I think he's been quite the leader in trying to deal with with that and in the future of the Republican Party and so forth depending on who is capable of picking up the mantle and getting elected as a Republican do you think that they will share his principles and his belief systems and have the guts to say the kind of things that he says we'll be right back welcome back America tour de force the counter-revolution written by a great author of Victor Davis Hanson so Victor Davis Hanson what do you see in the future in terms of MAGA and what do you see in the future in terms of a Republican MAGA type candidate fighting antisemitism or gaslighting antisemitism yes well I we know that pumps been trolling and kidding around he's not gonna run for a third term I don't think he wants to we couldn't I think easily and he doesn't want to so the question is what's the MAGA movement I think it's irreversible the idea that we're gonna go back and allow China to dump product here below the cost of production or we're going to semi embrace the green agenda or we're gonna have open borders again as many Republicans did in the past I don't think that's gonna happen he's created a workers a working class middle class party and as I said earlier race is incidental not essential so he's trying to say that the black truck driver the Hispanic electrician the white sheetrock person and the suburban people like them they all have more in common and they're their enemies are not themselves but the East Coast liberal progressive establishment and that's not going to change and the question is who's going to succeed him I mean can you have sunlight without the Sun as one person put it and I think we have kind of an arbitrary divide between the Vance and Rubio even though Marco Rubio quite magnanimous Lee said he wouldn't run if JD Vance did JD Vance was selected contrary to all popular wisdom they said it well he's from Ohio and that's a red state they're gonna get it win it anyway in 24 and he's so he's a white male no diversity and yet Trump said well he's a masterful debater he's great on repartee and you better watch out media he's gonna destroy you and he did but I think his problem right now is that this mega movement that which I was talking about there are elements within it that want to be sort of a nationalist party in the sense of isolationism and they feel that Israel is a pernicious influence is dragging us into the two wars that are not in our interest etc etc and I'll go a little further I think a lot of the people in that movement want to deliberately be provocative to force JD Vance to say try to disown me and see what happens in 2028 so he's he feels he's in a dilemma but at some point I think that he'll do the right thing and I think he's gonna have anybody who's going to run for the office in 2028 is going to have to do two things as far as foreign policy they're gonna have to say whether you like it or not Israel has been the best friend that we've had in the Middle East in every sense of the way it's the only oasis of democracy of liberality of compassion and humanity and we're going to support it and number two people that are Jewish have a natural right to have an affinity with Israel's the historical home of the Jews there's no conspiracy they reflect the majority of our party and we're going to stop trying to demonize them we're not the left the left is completely anti-semitic it's completely anti-israeli they'll pay a price for that so we're not going to go there and for all of you who want to draw me in I think JD Vance will say and draw me in and try to make an artificial divide I'm gonna have to come out and say you don't represent the Republican Party values you don't represent the magma movement and you don't represent the legacy of Donald Trump and I think he can do it if he's the candidate but it's not just a D Vance any candidate who's nominated is gonna have to do that well I sit on the edge of my chair waiting for that I look forward to that very very much this is a fantastic book by Victor Davis Hanson the counter-revolution you get it at amazon.com any major bookstore starting on Tuesday Victor God bless you my friend you look good and healthy and you've written a real fantastic book thank you mark
Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.