Victor Davis Hanson joins “The Tony Kinnett Cast” to highlight the critical controversies surrounding Gov. Tim Walz the media are currently being forced to reckon with. He outlines the key factors in turning any election around in less than 100 days, and cites the key moments in the late 20th century that “everything changed in an instant.” Does Vice President Kamala Harris have the ability or the discipline to stay away from cameras until stepping onto the debate stage? Will Walz make that avoidance better or worse?
Watch the interview above or read a lightly edited transcript below.
Tony Kinnett: Welcome back to “The Tony Kinnett Cast” here on 93 WIBC nationally syndicated with The Daily Signal. I’m pleased to be joined by the one and only Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, brilliant military U.S. historian, the guy’s just a mastermind, and that’s one step up above just well-read literate genius because a mastermind actually sees the causes and the effects of what’s going on.
And right now, in this political maelstrom, this hurricane of 2024, there’s a lot of people guessing what needs to be done for both campaigns. And there’s something that really should be pointed out, and that is the gift of Tim Walz. Mr. Hanson, thank you very much for joining us.
Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you for having me.
Kinnett: So, you made this post yesterday and it threw what I was planning to talk to you about kind of out the window, because this is not only more present and more prescient, but it’s downright essential to go over. [Vice President Kamala] Harris picks Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, and you say this is a huge gift to the Trump campaign with a little bit of an asterisk, if he uses it. Why do you qualify it in that way?
Hanson: Because this is a very strange election. We had that stress test debate that the Left put Joe Biden up to, and we’ve never had that before, before either nominee, likely nominee had been reified, and neither convention had been staged yet. And yet we had this debate, which was obviously to see if Joe Biden would continue. And when he didn’t, that set in a whole series of kind of Orwellian coups, if you will.
Suddenly he was decrepit. Everybody had sworn he was fit as a fiddle, [but] 24 hours later he was decrepit because he was tanking in the polls, maybe eight points down. And then all of a sudden he had made the argument, indeed the Left had made the argument that he couldn’t step down even if he was decrepit because Kamala Harris was inept. And then suddenly she was remanufactured as brilliant and she was then coronated, wiping out 15 million votes in the primary.
So, it was all a confused tumult. And out of that tumult, she emerged as young, brilliant—at least in the media. And she adopted the same methodology that Biden had found successful in 2020. She’s going to stay in the basement. She cannot speak extemporaneously, like Biden could not. They’re going to rely on 70% of the voters in the swing states not showing up on Election Day with earlier mail-in balloting, she will pose as a moderate and be rebranded the way Biden—good old Joe from Scranton.
And the result of all that was Donald Trump’s team was not equipped, they were kind of coasting, they were at ease. And they thought, given the Left had said that she was inept, that she was inept. So, they didn’t realize that there was this huge relief that Biden was no longer there, and the money then flipped back in, $300 million. And at that moment, it was very important for Donald Trump to focus on who this person was despite the effort to hide her and not let her out.
She’s a hardcore leftist, and there’s plenty of evidence in what she says and what she’s done in California, in the Senate, the most left-wing senator, according to GovTrack. And for some reason it was brave to go into the African American journalist, but not to get into the DNA of Kamala Harris. Or it was good to go to Georgia, and there were things that were problematic about Georgia, but Gov. [Brian] Kemp has endorsed Trump even though he’d been criticized. So, it didn’t make any sense to criticize Kemp when this candidate—you only have 90 days, it’s not like a normal race where you have a year and a half. So, every moment is ticking off.
Kinnett: Absolutely.
Hanson: So it looked like Trump was going to be in big trouble because Josh Shapiro was polling anywhere from 55% to 60% approval, 19 electoral votes. The election may be decided by the voters in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. And everybody thought that Josh Shapiro was young, he was dynamic. He was posing as a moderate, far more successfully than Biden or Harris was.
Kinnett: I mean, at least you had [Gov. Andy] Beshear or you had [Sen. Mark] Kelly, the astronaut from Arizona. Walz is down at the very bottom. That’s just, well—
Hanson: Yes.
Kinnett: … we’re considering him just to be nice, to say that we considered the young progressives.
Hanson: Yeah. So, when she picked Walz, there was no traditional, no unusual, no eccentric reason why he would be picked. Minnesota’s going to go blue. He doesn’t bring the Electoral College to that. He’s not well known. Seventy percent of the people have no idea who he is. He was not vetted.
And so, almost immediately, it took all the attention off what Trump had said, or his campaign was plateauing, and it put it on both his hard-left record, basically greenlighting for four days rioting in Minnesota, the tampons for boys’ restrooms, open borders, illegal alien subsidies, canceling pipeline—I mean, it was more extreme than hers.
And then, personally, all these things started to come out and he kind of asked for it. His first introduction to the American people, he said, he mentioned the completely refuted lie and smear about the couch. And he said, “Couch,” and then he turned to Kamala Harris and he said, “How’d you like that?” Well, she kind of even, “How do you like me lying about the vice president?” It didn’t work.
And then, of course, the only person who was really in a position to question his military record was somebody who went to Iraq and in the Marines. So then that elevated JD Vance. He said, “They’ll go after Trump and say he wasn’t in the military, or maybe they would’ve gone after … but they won’t go after me.”
So, then he in the last 72 hours has said, “This man’s record does not add up. When you get called to Iraq, you go like I did.” He didn’t go. He lied about his rank. He lied and said that he carried a weapon into war, and they just kept bleeding. And then there were peripheral things, people get tickets for 55 in a 35-mile zone, but 95 miles an hour, come on.
Kinnett: And then telling a cop that you’re deaf, that’s icing on that particular drunken cake.
Hanson: Exactly. And then it comes out that his wife has said that she deliberately opened the window so she could smell the scent of burning. And as soon as she said that a lot of people thought, “Well, who was burning up, small businesses? Is that what you wanted to smell? People’s lifetime investment that was lost?” And then the daughter, comes out that she basically gave inside information to rioters and said, “Don’t worry, the National Guard is not going to be called up tonight, i.e., dad is not going to do it.”
So, the whole thing is in utter free fall and that gave Trump an enormous reboot, and it really showed you that the traditional calculus about JD Vance was wrong. Everybody said, “Well, he’s a white male like Trump, and he just reverberates the bag of message and maybe Ohio was a safe state anyway.” But if you start to think about it, he is very quick on his feet and he’s very well-spoken, and he is even better at extemporary repartee than he is on the teleprompter.
So, all of the sudden he’s everywhere and he’s really good at it. He’s going up to the press pool and saying, “How come you don’t want to talk to Kamala Harris? Why don’t you want to talk to Walz?”
Kinnett: His articulation is incredible.
Hanson: It is.
Kinnett: I’ve never seen anything like that on the campaign stump. And this leads me to where I really need your expertise, not in a way that I’m writing an article and I want a statement that outlines my position, I do kind of want some insight here.
This is the most target-rich environment, this is the most open field where this should be like the Harlem Globetrotters against the Washington Generals in this election. You should see Trump—I mean, Kamala is like Hillary [Clinton], but worse, with more baggage somehow. And then Tim Walz is one of the worst vice-presidential candidates the Democrats have ever thrown out into the public.
And it’s all policy-based. None of it’s hearsay. None of it is goofy stuff. Why are we not seeing any major just all-out attack? I feel like I’ve only seen one, maybe two ads at this point that’s just talking about the “defund the police” movement that Kamala was associated with.
Hanson: Yeah, I think that has changed the last 48 hours. I think it took them a while to digest. I think their attitude was, “Are they kidding me? They’re going to serve this up on a plate for me.” And I think people went to—
Kinnett: You really think so? You think it was a kid too excited to know where to start on Christmas morning and that’s been the delay?
Hanson: Yes. Well, part of it was, but part of it was like turning an ocean liner around. They were so complacent. They said, “We’ve got Biden.” And I wrote three or four columns. I kept saying, “Biden is a nerd. Don’t worry about him, he’s decrepit.” Bragging that you beat him in a debate or he’s the worst president in history, who cares? He’s gone, zilch. Don’t mention him, and do not mention her race or her IQ, or don’t use colorless, vague, bombastic, “Terrible, horrible person,” just forget all that. Just focus on—
Kinnett: Yeah, that’s the parsley, go after the steak on the plate.
Hanson: Exactly. Just focus on, they have nominated two neo-Marxists who are openly proud of what they have done. Here’s the record, here’s what I did in the past, here’s what I’ll do in the future. You couldn’t have a starker choice. And if he does that, he’s got about 88 days to do it, he will win. He still has time.
I mean, in 1988, the Republicans got a similar gift. All of a sudden they nominated Mike Dukakis and he knew his problem because he was from Massachusetts. So he said, “It’s not about ideology. I’ve never been … Competence, I’m more competent than Bush. It’s all about what I’ve done.” And he left the Aug. 1 convention 17 points ahead, and the Bush campaign went into panic. And they asked [Ronald] Reagan and Reagan said, “You know what? It’s bad. I don’t know what I can do to help you.”
And then they got this guy, Lee Atwater, who was an authentic hit man, but also a genius. And as you remember, it was Willie Horton and the revolving door out of prison, the Boston pollution ad, the tank ad with the Bobblehead Dukakis.
And when he got done in 30 days, they had redefined him as, “Don’t believe him. Massachusetts is not fiscally sound. It’s broke. It’s the most liberal place in the country. People are fleeing to New Hampshire. Boston is a mess.” And Bush beat him by eight points, and they can do the same thing.
And every time the Democrats do this—and it’s very rare that they are that stupid, they did it in ’72 with [George] McGovern and Thomas Eagleton, and then he was replaced … and [Richard] Nixon slaughtered him. When they got done with McGovern, you would not want him in your room. He actually was a much nicer guy than Harris. He was better spoken, but they destroyed him. And they just did the same thing to Dukakis, who was a fine person, well-spoken, a much more serious person than Harris.
And then Reagan had done it in between in 1980 with Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale on the reelection bid. Reagan was behind. If you go back to that 1980, in July, Reagan was in the Gallup poll, six or seven points. The Gallup, even more mysteriously, had Reagan down 10 days before the election by six, and he won by nine. And again, they had the bear commercial, the bear was on the prowl, Afghanistan hostages. They showed Carter, “I have no inordinate fear of communism.” They did all of that and they did it in 30 or 40 days.
So, I’m not completely depressed. I just hope that there’s somebody around them who says, “We’re going to win ugly. And we don’t want to lose nobly like [Mitt] Romney and [John] McCain and [Bob] Dole. We’re going to do whatever it takes.”
And I think they can do—Trump has that combative, but he’s got to suppress his ego and say, you want to grab Trump and say, “Mr. Trump, President Trump, it’s not about maybe being cheated in Georgia or mysterious vote counting, we can handle that. We got people working on it. It’s not about you beat Joe Biden in the debate. We know that. It’s not even about being shot, that was heroic. What you did, what you need to do right now absolutely is prep, prep, prep, prep.
“Just don’t say, ‘I’m going to debate.’ Just say, ‘If she wants a debate and she insists on ABC, I will debate her on ABC with her rules if she debates me as well on Fox with my rules. … So, we’ll have two big debates, and I’ll compromise. I’m magnanimous. You get your rules and your network. I get my rules and my network, and we go to it. How’s that?'” And he needs to get her out and then talk.
And then, he can’t just do what he did with Biden. He didn’t prepare for that debate, he kind of listened. He didn’t do a bad job, but he needs to say, “No, you’re horrible.” He needs to say, “Kamala, your state is No. 4 in gas and oil reserves. You are importing $25 billion from Saudi Arabia, from Russia, from illiberal regimes. And you, why? Because you as attorney general said, ‘No fracking, no horizontal billing, no more federal leases we’re going to accept.'” And then just hit her with detail after detail after. “Your border—don’t say that there was a border compromise. That border compromise was going to let millions more people in, and that’s why they voted against it. And don’t lie to us.” And he can do it, but he has to have the details.
Kinnett: That requires very specific targeted policy stuff.
Hanson: It does.
Kinnett: Right, the details. And my concern is, and again, it’s not a snippy concern, it’s a wholehearted concern because I want him to do well as much as you and anyone does, are we going to see him bring those specific targeted policies again like he did in the Hillary debates, or is he going to kind of meander just talking over and over and over about illegal immigration in vague terms? Which, by the way, is still important. It’s a major policy Americans are concerned about. But Kamala’s got so many target-rich environments to hit, you’ve got to do more than just vaguely discuss the millions and millions coming over the border. Can he do it?
Hanson: I hope. They have to say to him, “You cannot be repetitive. Don’t say just ‘horrible, worst disaster, catastrophe.’ We know that. And move on from that one topic to energy, to the crime wave doubled in the big cities under them, to the prosecutors like her and others that let people off, to the border, the 10 million illegal aliens, the $50 billion.”
I would say to Kamala, “You want to take people’s guns, you want to force people who bought a legal semi-automatic weapon, and you want to force a buyback. But you know what you did, you and Joe Biden, you gave 400,000 of those to the Taliban. You just left them there, and then you gave them 60,000 machine guns. And you know what? We can’t afford trucks. None of our voters can afford a new truck. Under you, they’ve gone up 20,000. You gave them 50,000 trucks. You just hand it over to them. Why would you give them 50,000 and they’re terrorists, and you make it impossible for an American to buy a truck?” And I would just hit him with that all the time. And they can win. They really can.
If you look at it, he’s running dead even. And in the Electoral College, he’s still ahead and JD Vance, it’s been a big boon to JD Vance because when all this came out about Walz and he’s very vulnerable, he is the one person who’s articulate with a military record and in a combat zone, and he can do what another qualified candidate that people are lamenting, a Tim Scott, a Marco Rubio, a Glenn Youngkin, they’re all good and they all said, “Well, they would be doing better than JD.” Well, in this particular case, no, there’s no one better to call him out on the carpet. And he will, and he’s doing it.
Kinnett: Both of them. And other things that you’ve been suggesting that Trump should do, Vance has been doing, Vance has been using those particular lines. But I’ve kept you quite a bit here, and I just have one smaller question to bounce off of you.
We know that getting Kamala to the debate stage would get her off teleprompter, obviously, and get her in a position where she would be Kamala in front of the camera, in front of the country. Do you think that there’s a time before then, and if so, how long do you think it’s going to be before Kamala breaks? Kind of like she did with choosing Walz instead of Shapiro. She kind of goes against the campaign and she steps out in front of the camera. She gets off teleprompter. Do you think that—
Hanson: I don’t think she will because—
Kinnett: You don’t think, she thinks she’s that disciplined?
Hanson: Yeah, she did it—well, it’s not her, it’s her handler. She did it one time, if you remember, in the heyday and the exhilaration of the prisoner swap, she was on the tarmac with Biden.
Kinnett: Mm-hmm, standing next to him.
Hanson: And somebody snuck up there and asked her a question, and she said, The art of diplomacy is very important, and that’s why the art of the diplomacy is so important. And that’s why Joe Biden, who is the art— And it was a disaster.
Kinnett: The art and the strength, it’s like she was quoting Sun Tzu.
Hanson: Yes. And you looked at Biden, and Biden, when Biden can’t figure it out, he looked baffled.
Kinnett: He’s like trying to diagram the sentence next to her.
Hanson: Yes, it was horrible. So that’s not going to happen because at least with Joe Biden, he could plead cognitive decline because of age and infirmity, with her, it’s innate. And the problem with people like that is they know it. And so, the more they fixate on it, the more she thinks, “Oh my gosh, whether it’s school buses or Venn diagrams or—I can’t talk out, I just can’t do it.” And that becomes an obsession, compulsive fear.
And they know that. So, they’re not going to let her out until the media is so humiliated. And that’s why Vance is so brilliant when he walks over to the media pool and says, “My gosh, you guys kind of have nothing to do. There’s the plane where she is, you’re not even interviewing her.”
Kinnett: That’s so interesting.
Hanson: And he’s very brilliant about that and he’s hitting that home. … And they’re just starting to do it, on CNN of all places yesterday, one of their guests said, he didn’t want to say it, but he said, “I guess there’s no evidence that Walz ever carried a gun in war. I guess you could say that.” And that was something for CNN. But yeah, I don’t think they’re going to let her out in the way they didn’t let Biden out.
And the debate will be—she’ll be very scripted and they’ll tell her all the jokes and one-liners. And they need two debates, at least. And I don’t know why Trump doesn’t right now make her an offer that would be humiliating if she refused. He could just say, “Kamala, you get everything you want. You go first. You get your network, and then you give the same courtesy to me and we’ll call it even, and may the best person win.”
Kinnett: I will, just to your point, on CNN this morning, the analysis headline was, “Trump’s campaign cranked up pressure on Harris to do a major media interview hoping to goad her into a forum in which she’s historically been more vulnerable.” Wow.
Hanson: That’s a nice way of putting it, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s a euphemism for saying that SOB Trump is trying to trick her into revealing that she can’t speak in public, and this is mean and cruel to do that. That’s what the subtext of that is.
Kinnett: You know, I think I’d read that column. Victor Davis Hanson, thank you so much for joining us. I couldn’t help keeping you a little longer because it’s fun to get in the details of this.
Hanson: Thank you very much for having me, and I’ll see you again sometime.
