Victor Davis Hanson

speaker

2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show · Overexposed: The Truth and Troubles of Left Politics · 25 Feb 2025 podcast

The United States, under Biden, gave enough money to save Ukraine, but not to win. And it's just a death thing. So I'm going to stop it. Zelensky then said he wanted to be in on talks and everybody said, you can't talk to Putin. And basically, J.D. Vance and I'm paraphrasing. And Trump said, we talked to Stalin. We talked to Mao. We talked to everybody.

How do you have a stop a war unless you talk to even if it is a monster? So then Zelensky said, I want to be on this and you're going to sell me out. And basically they said, listen, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You don't tell us what you're going to do. I know this is your country, but your country wouldn't exist if you count on your beloved European friends.

They talk a great game, but they do not give you enough. It came from us. And then Trump said some things. He said, by the way, he's a dictator. And he started it. Well, that got everybody upset because he didn't start the war. And I say that with all deference to Donald Trump because Donald Trump knows he didn't. Because Donald Trump campaigned correctly by saying the following.

That war would have never started if I were president because Putin did not invade on my people. He invaded in 2008 when he went into Osatia in Georgia on George W. Bush's watch. He went into Crimea and Donbass on Barack Obama's watch. He tried to take Kiev and more borderlands on Biden, but not mine. So what did he mean by that? Well, I think what he meant was.

that there were periods that this thing could have been prevented, and Ukraine acted in a way that might have precipitated. I don't know if I agree with that or not, but here's what he was trying to say very quickly. In 2014, there had been an elected pro-Russian Yanukovych, And he was overthrown. He was unpopular. He was corrupt. But they all are.

And then a pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-European, pro-American person. And the controversy lies with what did John McCain do when he flew over there? What did Victoria Nuland, what did the Obama, did they encourage this coup? Because he abdicated. And at that point, you had a government in Ukraine that was pro-NATO.

And Vladimir Putin warned that we're not we lost the Eastern Europe, but we're not going to put a former Soviet republic as a NATO EU power right on our frontier. And they didn't believe him. And then he looked at the Obama administration and he said, wow, they are appeasing, appeasing, appeasing me this this. Oh, wow. We want reset, reset, reset, Hillary, reset, reset, and then the hot mic.

Tell Vladimir, Mr. Medvedev, tell Vladimir that if you'll just give me some space, i.e. don't invade until I get re-elected in 2012, I'll be flexible on missile defense, i.e. I will destroy missile defense and disband it. And they both kept their bargain, and then he invaded after Obama was elected, and Obama did nothing. Okay. Trump is angry about that.

So then, after they invaded on the 24th, and Trump, by the way, had said, you know what, I meant, I didn't mean that. I know that Russia invaded. He said that yesterday. But why did he call him a dictator? Well, everybody said... Well, he hasn't held elections, but Churchill didn't for a decade from 1935 to 1945. And that's very disingenuous.

Right. Yes. And he brought people in that he did like, and he liked people that – he brought people like Halifax, who was all over the place politically. And he brought loyalists like Anthony Eden in, he brought Bette Bevin in, he brought all sorts of people. And the point I'm making is he had a wartime Israeli-type coalition government.

And he censored the news that he thought was pro-German, but he did not hound his political opponents. Zelensky has suspended a lot of habeas corpus. He's suspended opposition parties. He's suspended opposition media. He has canceled elections. And I don't think he's a dictator like Putin, but he is a soft dictator. Okay, so that's what got everybody angry.

And then the left said that Donald Trump is pro-Russian because he lied and said that Russia didn't invade. Well, the other thing that he was very angry about is in March, just... So this time three years ago, Zelensky's a hero because after 10 days or 12 days, that column we watched every day was blown apart.

And Kiev was saved and he had a little t-shirt on, he was an ex-comedian, he was going all over the world, he was a rock star. And they said, the war is over. They lost. This man said, and it wasn't over. And then things started to happen. He kept making demands on the United States, and we thought Europe was going to shoulder it. Europe was not meeting their 2%, even though they'd been hector.

There were still 9 or 10 countries in NATO that would not invest 2% of their GDP. And then things started to get very weird. The Ukrainian ambassador in 2016 had written an op-ed during the election attacking Trump, candidate Trump. We all remember Alexander Vindman, the U.S. dual citizen. He was U.S. and Ukrainian citizen that was offered the Ministry of Defense.

He engineered, he broke the rules and disclosed a classified private call between Zelensky and Trump, magnified it, got Mr. Saramella, the person who never heard the call, cooked it up with Adam Schiff and impeached Trump. If that wasn't enough... In September, right at the height of the campaign, Pennsylvania is a swing state.

Joe Biden, who is now abdicated for Kamala Harris, tries to get her elected by flying in on a C-17, Mr. Voldemort Zelensky. And where does he go? He goes to old Joe Biden's hangout in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And where does he go? He goes to a munitions plant. And with whom is he with? Josh Shapiro and the Democratic cadre. And what does he say? That these jobs are essential, i.e. be making shells.

And the subtext is, if you vote for Trump, he'll cut off aid and you'll be out of a job. He was interfering in U.S. elections. So he had no goodwill from Trump. take a pause. And then we had a recent controversy. Um, I'll be very quick. And I was, I was in a car and the editors at free press asked me to comment on it. So I wrote the, I stayed up till 1230 that night and wrote the first draft.

But, um, This was this past week. J.D. Vance. So, Neil Ferguson, my colleague, a good friend, a wonderful historian, he tweeted when Donald Trump... said that Zelensky was a dictator and then wrongly said that – he didn't say invade. He said that Zelensky started the war, and I explained why he said that. I would go back just for a second.

In March, two months after the salvation, the saving of Kiev, there was a peace agreement, peace negotiation. And word leaked out that the Russians might have been willing – to cut a deal on circumstances that today look pretty good.

But at the time, Zelensky thought he was going to be in NATO and they were going to get him out of Crimea and the Donbas, in which they had been there for, at that time, about eight years. And so Trump's view as well, you started it because you could have ended it with a negotiation. I don't know if that's true or not. But my point is this is then Neil Ferguson wrote, how dare Trump?

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