If Donald Trump Did What Obama Did, Media Would Cheer—So Why the Outrage Now? |
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If Donald Trump Did What Obama Did, Media Would Cheer—So Why the Outrage Now?
Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson
Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of "The Victor Davis Hanson Show." His website, The Blade of Perseus, features columns, lectures, and exclusive content for subscribers. Contact him at [email protected].
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 talked about the opposition to the Iran War that we are witnessing, but it’s a little bit more than opposition. I would call it the “hysterics.” What do I mean by that? I haven’t seen a—since I was a student—protests, as we saw in New York, where people are proudly waving communist flags with, you know, anti-war sentiment.
That used to be kind of a taboo. You were a communist or a socialist, but you didn’t wave the hammer and sickle, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, kind of, the articulation of the Communist Party in China to market capitalism.
But here we have a stronghold of communism who are proudly in New York and said, are they in enthused by the opposition to the war. Is it Mayor [Zohran] Mamdani? I don’t know, but it’s unusual.
I’ve never seen an anti-war protest like we just witnessed in Philadelphia, where most of the people seem to be either from the Middle East or hardcore socialist, communist, and the speaker, many of them had their identities masked, which is, kind of, ironic because the Left has told us that ICE, which has a real fear of being doxed as federal employees, were Gestapo-like for being masked.
The speaker was masked. He called for the defeat of America and Iran, but even more chilling, he cheered on coffins that came home with American dead.
This was right in Philadelphia. We had them in LA with the “No Kings” violence and what’s going on? Well, part of it is the media-generated war. Remember, we’ve mentioned it before, and we all know that if this bombing of Iran had been conducted by [Barack] Obama or [Joe] Biden, it would’ve been cheered on by the mainstream media, the network news, NPR-PBS, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA [Times], etc.
We know that because Obama conducted 500 drone assassinations over the Pakistani and Afghan border. No one objected. They thought that was fine. Killed an American citizen or two, you know, collateral damage. He bombed Libya for seven months without congressional authority for no given reason, and the result was chaos and American dead at the consulate in the annex of the CIA.
So the media is reporting as negatively as it can. CNN, with the permission of the theocratic government of Iran, is inside Iran. That would be almost like somebody going into Nazi Germany during World War II with the permission of Hitler. So all of that information is questionable. So the media is contributing to this hysteria.
Then there’s the Trump derangement syndrome. People call George W. Bush a Nazi, a brown shirt, people as diverse as John Glenn and Al Gore. But I don’t think anybody’s ever called for the president to be killed.
We’ve had major news people joke about killing Donald Trump. You look at the placards at these anti-war protests. They’re asking, they’re literally and openly and unambiguously calling for Trump to die.
James Carville said he’ll die in office. I’ve never quite seen that from the opposition, both the street opposition and the formal Democrat Party.
Again, this is a continuation of firebombing Tesla dealerships over the DOGE cuts, the “No Kings” mass protests. Nobody ever quite figured that out because Donald Trump was not only elected twice, but he was constitutionally impeached twice, and he’s had more audits, lawfare conducted against him than any president in modern memory.
So he’s hardly an autocrat or a monarch. And this is also an extension of the ICE hysteria, where ICE agents were doxed, were attacked for enforcing federal law.
It’s a continuation of the shutdowns. We’re into the third shutdown now and it’s coinciding with the bombing of Iran.
And it’s kind of ironic because we have had four naturalized citizens from the Middle East who have conducted terrorist operations in the United States. We’ve had mysterious drones go in the air.
Nobody knew where they were from, they couldn’t be jammed. They were military-grade drones above the B-52 base in Louisiana. And at the very time that we’re facing these suspect challenges, what has happened? The Democrats have denied funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
It doesn’t make sense unless you are hysterical, you want us to lose, and you want to destroy Donald Trump.
The shutdown, we know—the second shutdown—stalled the economy and made a readjustment in fourth-quarter 2025 GDP. I think they think the same thing is going to happen if they can create the hysteria with the war. They feel very confident that the midterms are theirs. So there’s only a four- or five-seat margin in the House and they feel that if they can gin up opposition to the Iranian 30-day bombing campaign, it can do for them what their agenda cannot do because they don’t have an alternate agenda.
What the ICE raids did not do, what the “No Kings” protest did not do, what the Tesla protest did not do, this will be the final magic bullet that will take down Donald Trump.
And so is that true? Well, most presidents do in fact lose their first midterms in their first administration. This is a continuation of that. Donald Trump historically should lose the House and maybe the Senate. But when you actually look at the seats involved and you look at the gerrymandering on Left and Right, out of those 435 House races, there’s only about 17 that are actually up for a reasonable contest.
The rest are more either leaning, the Republican seats that they have in the House are either solidly Republican in November or they’re leaning Republican. So it’s a matter, can the Democrats win 15 of 17 or 18 seats that are open that will have legitimate contested elections? And I’m not sure that’s true, but more importantly, I don’t think they think it’s true.
So a lot of this opposition is paranoia that they’re expected to win the House as everybody would expect of the opposition party in a midterm, but they’re not confident they can do that.
They’re not confident bcause they don’t have the agenda. They’re not confident about the effects of the Iranian war. They’re not confident that the economy won’t boom. It may well boom even after the war.
So this shows a lot of suspicion, hysteria, anger, but mostly uncertainty that they’re not convinced they can win the midterms when they should.
And finally, there’s one other element that contributes to this hysteria. It’s more at the elite level. I don’t know how to call it, maybe envy or jealousy. What I mean by that is Donald Trump removed this communist narco dictator [Nicolas] Maduro in Venezuela at no U.S. fatalities. We had some wounded but no fatalities, and at almost no extended war.
And the government that’s in there is nothing to be proud of, but at least it’s maintaining order and it’s not shipping drugs and illegal aliens to the United States. And it’s under notice that it will not be exporting as it has been through Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia its communist message. Donald Trump did that. He flipped that and he took away a Chinese oil supplier.
And now that oil will be back on a free-market architecture in the world global trade.
Second, it looks like Cuba. It has been so isolated by Trump, and it’s been embargoed and sanctioned that the people are restive and the government has lost control of its own narrative that communism works and there’s nobody to bail it out.
There’s not China, there’s not Russia. Now, there’s not Venezuela. Nobody in Latin America wants to bail them out. In fact, privately they despise that government as much as the people of Cuba despise that government.
Does Donald Trump want to invade and have regime change? No. All he’s doing is pressuring it and pressuring it until this nut cracks.
And then what would happen? They would agree to let Cuban exiles, Americans in general, come back and invest in that island, and maybe under an autocratic government, who knows? But there would be a transition away from communism and Cuba would be open and transparent and rich again.
And then finally, there’s Iran. Every one of the last seven presidents promised to deal with Iran. None of them did. None of them, not Jimmy Carter. Even Ronald Reagan did not deal with Iran. George H.W. Bush did not. Bill Clinton did not. George W. Bush did not. Barack Obama did not. Joe Biden did not.
Donald Trump did, and he may, we don’t know the complete number yet, but he may ensure that Iran is no longer on the edge or virtually a nuclear power, that it doesn’t have ballistic missile capability to hit Europe or the United States, that it is neutered, that he’s done a trillion dollars in damage to its military, and he’s going to let them stew in their own juice.
And they’re going to have a restive population who’s going to say, “You gave money to terrorists. You spent a trillion dollars on all of these weapons that are now up in smoke at our expense, and we’ve had it with you.”
If that should happen, Donald Trump would have created the greatest geo-strategic change in our lifetime. He would’ve weakened China. He would’ve weakened Russia. He would’ve weakened radical Islam. He would’ve had a convergence of moderate Arabs and Israel in the Middle East. He would punish the country that’s killed more Americans than any other terrorist entity.
He would’ve solved the problem of Cuba since 1959 that no president has, and he’d all done it in about a year. And that creates a lot of jealousy and a lot of anger, and a lot of effort to make sure it doesn’t happen.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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