Victor Davis Hanson: “It was a coup attempt to destroy the presidency…”
Hanson on Trump, Mueller, Democrats, the media, and the deep state
Last week as the Mueller Report was about to drop, Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution and the National Review Institute was interviewed by The Epoch Times as part of their American Thought Leaders series. He offered his thoughts on the Mueller investigation, the Trump presidency, and much more.
Hanson takes us back to the earliest whispers of Russia and walks us through the maddening series of attempts to prevent Trump from becoming president, even after he won the election. You may have forgotten some of the crazier details, such as the effort to get copies of the Steele dossier to members of the Electoral College.
Hanson has forgotten nothing, and his analysis cuts like a knife despite his cool demeanor.
Hanson begins by summarizing how things got started.
The Epoch Times provides a transcript:
I think we’re gonna get the Mueller report today or tomorrow. But if you were to summarize the Mueller investigation, there’s a lot of ways to look at it, but I think the best is that there were people within the United States government–the director of the FBI, James Comey; the director of the CIA, John Brennan; the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper; the deputy director; and an array of others; and then NSC and the DOJ who felt A: that Hillary Clinton was going to win. They had followed the analytics and the polls–90 percent surety.
But they felt as an insurance policy that Donald Trump for a variety of reasons–culturally, politically, socially–was unacceptable as president. And the very thought that he could be president was so foreign and disruptive that they felt they had a higher duty, a higher loyalty to stop that. So what did they do? They started to surveil his campaign, and they put informants we know into his campaign.
Hanson suggests that when Trump won, actors in this conspiracy decided their only way out was to go deeper:
Then when Trump did the unthinkable, he won both in anger at that fact but also as a preemptive defense of their behavior. You see, because you’ve got to remember the dialectic would have been “President Clinton, look at all I did for you. I should be rewarded. I went beyond the call of duty.” And now the mentality went “My gosh, I’ve got legal exposure. So we’ve got to press further.”
So then it was a methodology of getting more FISA requests and disrupting the transition. And then finally the act that resulted in the Mueller commission, and then to dethrone. And then finally the larger context of this was when he was elected there was an effort to sue three states for the voting machines and nullify the election. There was a sustained effort to give the Steele dossier to the electors and to persuade the electors not to vote according to their constitutional mandates.
He eventually calls this what it was. An attempted coup:
This is in addition to the Stormy Daniels psychodrama, the Michael Cohen, the tax returns–so there’s been a sustained effort not to wait until 2020, but to remove the president of the United States under the idea that we are so moral and anointed unelected officials, we have a duty to somebody higher than the American people. And boil that down and it was a coup attempt to destroy the presidency before its tenure had expired.
And that’s just the first ten minutes. The full interview lasts 49 minutes, and I highly recommend watching the whole thing. If you prefer, you can read the entire transcript here.
Featured image via YouTube.
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If not already done, should also watch his address here:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273514/victor-davis-hanson-presents-case-trump-frontpagemagcom
The Epoch Times does real journalism.
So what can we do about it?
We’re doing it:
-Starving the GOP (that is, giving only to individual candidates)
-unequivocally standing by Donald Trump
-voting with your pocketbook
-not accepting anyone’s political b.s. in our everyday lives
VDH = sober-rational. I have always respected his opinion as a result. When he uses a word like “coup”, it carries weight. It is the accurate word to use.
The question above me from snopercod is pertinet. I hope AG Barr holds people accountable. If not, our nation as we know it, built on freedom and liberty, is lost.
Barr is going to do no more than huff and puff and then determine that no reasonable prosecutor………….!, or maybe for the sake of originality, he’ll use his favorite new word,”predicate” to try and convince us that all is welt at the DOJ
Extraordinary interview
“Hope” is not a plan. Barr cannot do it alone. Trump cannot do it alone. Each and every one of us must summon up the courage to fight, in whatever way we can. We can start with the “friends” and relatives who we have, out of reluctance to upset them, avoided confronting. Confront them with the outrageous and dangerous refusal of the Left to acknowledge the Rule of Law. Make them answer.
All because the smartest woman in the world lost a rigged election to a person who never held elected office.
Bless her fat ankles. May they kill her slowly.
I thought that her sore loser tantrum was rather dumb. Sore loser is now her place in history.
Going forward, any Republican that doesn’t fire the director and deputy directors of the FBI, CIA, and NI on day 1 of their administration is an idiot.
Or a romney.
You’re being redundant, but in addition to being an idiot, Romney is also a mean-spirited pretend-virtue signaler. He wanted to be Trump’s AG – Can you just imagine the mischief he would have done if Trump had given him the job?
But they felt as an insurance policy that Donald Trump for a variety of reasons–culturally, politically, socially–was unacceptable as president.
I doubt it. We wouldn’t have so many going to such ridiculous ends solely because they think they’re answering a “higher calling”. Comey, Brennan, Clapper (perhaps the most sinister of all), McCabe, Strzok, Ohr—these are not “higher calling” types. These are sneaky gangsters. They’re afraid that something far bigger will be exposed if the man at the top isn’t a part of the American political cosa nostra (“our thing”).
What that “thing” might be, I don’t know, and apparently neither does VDH. But it must be pretty big. But not very complicated; these people aren’t “higher calling” types, but they aren’t towering intellectuals either. What are they after? Just money? Is the Hillary International Slush Fund the Holy Grail for all of them? Or is it the underage prostitutes who almost always turn up eventually? The puzzle persists.
Let us hope PDT moves forward with full investigations and does not wait until after the next election. Now is the time. Start by offering immunity or reduced charges for anyone that brings forth information within the next 30 days. After the grace period, it will be an all out full court press. Leak some news that many very high up people have come forward and their information is being processed. Rat v Rat.
We can expect every diversion that the Dims and msm can dig up to keep the public’s eye off of the sedition ball. There is simply no way to sweep it under the rug and Trump himself said that we have to get to the bottom of this mess to prevent it from EVER happening to another president. When you consider our most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold, he looks like a child compared to this bunch of traitors. They perverted many of the most powerful offices of our government for their own desires. This is totally off the charts and must be prosecuted.
My concern is the damage that has already been done that can’t be undone. As in, what other talented conservative businessman will EVER run for state or federal office after seeing what President Trump and his family have been through. In this the progressives have been enormously successful.
Does anyone know if it was ever definitively proven that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC computer?
No, because the DNC refused to allow the FBI to inspect its computers and instead had an outside contractor take a look and came to the the conclusion the DNC wanted
I have been meaning to look at the Mueller report on that matter to see if anything had changed. Previously the FBI accepted the assertion by DNC contractor CrowdStrike (with Ukrainian ties) that the exploit was done by a Russian state group. But the FBI, nor anyone else afaik, was not allowed to examine the server.
Have you searched for specifics on that?
Absolutely not proven. I’ll go further, the FBI and DNC know it was stolen and had nothing to do with the Russians. How do I know? Because the DNC will not let the FBI investigate and the FBI is just fine with it.
Does anyone know if it was ever definitively proven that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC computer?
AIUI the DNC did not allow the FBI experts to examine the computers. They had a private company analyze the computer and they announced that the private company said the computer had been hacked.
Wasserman Schultz should be standing on a gallows, rope around her neck, the lever pulled.
Comey, obama and clinton should be right up there with her.
I downloaded the Report and checked out the section on the DNC email exploit (page 38). There are many assertions of fact there claiming the GRU did both spearfishing and the DNC hack but nothing about how this was gathered. There is a large redacted section that might explain it though.
I suspect that, for now, it is best to accept that the GRU did perform the hack (using out of date malware, which is odd for a state actor) and subsequently released the information to wikileaks.
“…it is best to accept that the GRU did perform the hack…”
Why? I accept nothing without evidence, particularly when logic and available evidence suggests otherwise.
The attempt is to confine the hack to outside forces and not bring in the Democrat Party dirty linen of party faithful dissatisfaction with HRC. Watching Bernie get burned would anger many internally that did it understand the Party had its own plans. An outlet for dissatisfaction … Wikileaks .
To Complement VDH here: Pulling the strings behind the curtain: “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twentieth Century.” John Marini — an amazing book. Ch. 3 and 15 on PDT. His explanation of Trump’s win, and the protracted rabid reaction to is on the button. Especially though, Ch. 13 is a brilliant analog to Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals. I’ve never seen a complex diagnosis put so articulately yet succinctly. It may alter some your perspective of the politico-ideological landscape and reinforce Burke’s statement that “Ideas drive politics.”Best short presentation I’ve seen on: the leftist rejection of the Founding; scientism/progressivism in the U.S.; ositivist variants in academia; and related developments in this country covering the “intellectual” history Pre-Civil War on the infestation of the U.S. by the ideology of European Positivism.
To Complement VDH here: Pulling the strings behind the curtain: “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twentieth Century.” John Marini — an amazing book. Ch. 3 and 15 on PDT. His explanation of Trump’s win, and the protracted rabid reaction to is on the button. Especially though, Ch. 13 is a brilliant analog to Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals. I’ve never seen a complex diagnosis put so articulately yet succinctly. It may alter some your perspective of the politico-ideological landscape and reinforce Burke’s statement that “Ideas drive politics.”Best short presentation I’ve seen on: the leftist rejection of the Founding; scientism/progressivism in the U.S.; positivist variants in academia; and related developments in this country covering the “intellectual” history Pre-Civil War on the infestation of the U.S. by the ideology of European Positivism.
VDH needs to chair a powerhouse committee to reform and redesign higher education so it can be saved.