Victor Davis Hanson, the renowned American historian and political commentator, has joined The Daily Signal as a senior contributor. This transcript has been lightly edited.
It’s Monday, Inauguration Day. It’s also Martin Luther King Day, and the two dates coincided this year. And Donald Trump has just finished his inaugural address. The reaction to it was varied. I scanned the mainstream media, the network news, some cable outlets, and there was sort of outrage, outrage at the ambition of the Trump revolution and outraged at the direct criticism of people in the audience that had engineered or were part of the Biden tenure.
But it was comprehensive as far as the agenda that, I think, is going to bother people. It was holistic, 360 degrees, 24/7.
We’re going to close the border. We’re not just going to close the border, we’re going to deport people who came here illegally. We’re going to change the idea that there is such a thing as “anchor babies,” or that just because you happen to be born here, that gives you full rights of citizenship. That’s a fundamental change.
He addressed crime in the cities. He address the problems of DEI and woke, and the end of meritocracy. He criticized the inability of the military to turn tactical success into strategic victory or resolution. He talked about energy, a lot, and that we were going to go full blast and he was going to overturn prior directives—Joe Biden was sitting in the audience, of course.
The point he was making is, he called it a golden age—that everything was on the table.
He only has four years. So he’s moving ahead very quickly. He only has two or three seats in the House, in the Republican majority. It doesn’t matter. He only has three Senate seats. It doesn’t matter—it doesn’t matter to him. He’s going full blast ahead.
He called this, as I said, “a golden age.” It reminded me of the great seal of the United States, “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” a new order for the ages or for the centuries.
That comes from Virgil’s Eclogues, the great Latin poet, when he was talking about the birth of a new Roman generation—in particular descendants of Augustus—that would change Rome forever. And our founders in 1776 put it on the seal. And you see it emblazoned on the $1 bill. And that’s the type of mood he’s trying to encourage.
But, at the same time this happened, the outgoing president pardoned—first of all, the same day, so there would be no coverage, really. It would be overshadowed by the inauguration accounts. He pardoned Gen. Milley, who we remember called his Chinese counterpart, to tip him off and warn him that he might have to have private conversations, if Trump gave Milley an order he disagreed with.
Anthony Fauci, he pardoned, who looked right into the television screens, under testimonies before Congress and said, that he did not help in any way or subsidize gain of function research. That was a lie.
And then he pardoned the entire Jan. 6th Committee. We know that, in the case of Liz Cheney, she may have unduly influenced a witness and coached her testimonies without a lawyer being there. And there are some records that are missing. These are all legitimate areas of inquiry for future prosecutors. And yet, he gave them a blanket pardon—Biden did.
And then just fifteen minutes before the speech, he pardoned the whole Biden family. For what? What did he pardon them for—for anything that turns up forever? Ten years, 20 years, two years, one month, anything we find about the Biden skullduggery that accounts for how they made $20 million from foreign sources, will be fruitless in vain.
Think about that.
And here’s my point: Trump was blunt, maybe even crude. He said he was going to eventually—we would have the Panama Canal. He was going to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the “Gulf of America,” and people were kind of hysterical, in their reactions.
But it’s the way he said it and his directness and his candor and his honesty that bothered them.
But they weren’t bothered to the same degree, if at all, that in sobering and judicious terms, Joe Biden did something that we’ve never seen before.
He has the greatest numbers of preemptive pardons we’ve ever seen by a departing president. And we’ve never seen a president pardon his own convicted felon son—much less give a blanket immunity to people who may have been involved with Joe himself—his family members. In what—scandals of unimaginable size.
So let me just conclude. One of the paradoxes of the entire Trump decade is that he speaks, often crudely, bluntly and truthfully about the problems confronting the country and his opponents.
Then others who oppose him speak carefully or not at all, or with media approval, with the proper vocabulary. And what they’re talking about or what they’re describing is egregious. It’s just astoundingly dangerous and detrimental to the country.
And we don’t seem to be bothered. It’s always style over substance. Trump gave a tough, substantive speech that ushers in a new age without worry about criticizing the people in the audience who brought us this disaster.
Biden stealthily, covertly, pardoned a number of potential criminals in a way we’ve never seen before. And that was deemed OK and that’s the secret to the entire Trump paradox.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
