Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’ve been a big supporter—as all of you have, in most cases—of what we’ve seen the first eight or nine months of the Trump administration. But we’re heading up with about a year—a little over a year—until the midterms. And although the Trump positives are still pretty good, I’d just like to outline two or three things the president, if he wanted to take my humble advice or your advice, might wanna watch out for.
The first is tariffs. What everybody said would happen didn’t happen. That we would have a stock market collapse. We’d be in a recession. Hyperinflation. But one of the strengths of his argument for tariffs was that there was a moral argument, that certain countries had asymmetrical—I shouldn’t say certain countries, the majority of countries were using the United States to expand their economies, while we offshored and outsourced. And the result was an unsustainable $1.2 trillion annual trade deficit that hemorrhaged a lot of jobs.
But there were some countries, not very many, that ran sizable surpluses. One was the U.K., one of our closest allies. Another was President [Javier] Milei of Argentina. We have a surplus in trade with Argentina. We have a surplus in trade with Brazil. And we have a surplus in trade with Australia. They’re not big surpluses, but they’re not deficits.
So, it would be wise, I think, to recalibrate our trade policies with our close friends that we are running surpluses with and they have small deficits with us. In other words, their systems are not manipulating the so-called free-trade protocols of the world in a way that China is, or Germany is, or Canada, or Mexico. I think that would help the president a great deal.
The second is that I don’t think it’s wise to go into Chicago. And I’ll tell you why. Everybody mourns for the loss of life, the hundreds of people who are slaughtered there every year, the inability of democratic-elected city councils, Mayor [Brandon] Johnson, etc. But if you go into Chicago, then the argument goes, you’ll go into Los Angeles, then you’ll go into Baltimore, or you’ll go into Detroit.
And there’s a logic to it that President Donald Trump has had phenomenal success in Washington, D.C., but here’s my concerns for the Trump administration. You have a federal mandate because Washington is not in a state. It’s in the District of Columbia, and it’s outlined as such in the Constitution. So, the president has a 30-day legal authorization.
And by placing the National Guard and federal troops there, he’s radically decreased crime and he has won over, sort of, a very liberal mayor, not the City Council. But he can expand on that in various ways and show everybody in the country what an activist president who’s worried about the loss of life can do for a city. And he has legal jurisdiction.
But I’m afraid that if he goes into Chicago, he is going to be ambushed by the City Council. He’s going to be ambushed by the mayor. He’s going to have all of this opposition. And I don’t think anybody is going to work with him. Even the police—while they would secretly side with Trump to stop the violence—they know that he might not be there. “He” being federal troops. And therefore, they would face retaliation when he left.
And so, I think it would be wiser to use Washington as an iconic example of what these other cities should do as they watch the effect of federal troops to lower these horrendous violence and murder rates.
And finally, there’s a third concern I have. And that is, while I think it’s important to stop all of the importation from Latin America into the United States—and Donald Trump has blown up a trafficker’s boat in international waters that killed 11 people. But they were obviously intent on bringing toxic fentanyl and other types of opiate drugs into the United States. He’s been doing a great job in jawboning China not to send fentanyl products into Mexico. He’s threatened the cartels. But we don’t have a good history, necessarily, of going into Latin America.
And again, it’s kind of a quagmire that if we go in to try to chase down narcotraffickers, most of them, not all, but most of them are synonymous with the governments there. And we’re not gonna get a lot of help. And they may say they will help us, but it’s a headache that he does not need right before the midterm.
Just let me recap. I’m not criticizing the administration. I’m just suggesting there’s two or three areas that I’d be very cautious. One is losing the moral argument for tariffs. Let’s not put tariffs on countries that run surpluses in our favor.
Let’s not, necessarily, go into these big cities—especially the Chicago of Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Mayor Johnson, an 80% left-wing city that is not going to cooperate and will resist, and a Democratic Party that would rather see crime increase rather than work with or support federal intervention by Donald Trump.
And finally, I think, while it’s wise to interdict drugs coming into the country, even in international waters, let’s not put U.S. troops anywhere in Latin America. We don’t have a good history there, and we don’t need an optional foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere at this particular time.
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