Senior Fellow @HooverInst. Classics and military history. Opinions are my own.
Stanford University
Joined May 2010
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On January 7, 2021 the media pronounced President Trump inert, kaput, zapped.
He was soon to be impeached a second time, and tried in the Senate as a private citizen.
Trump was written off by many grandees in his own party, libeled as a neo-Confederate insurrectionist, crashing in the Republican polls, and within months the target of 91 lawfare indictments in five civil and criminal courtrooms, and facing half-a-billion dollars in fines and a possible lengthy prison sentence.
Yet within two years, Trump was defiant as ever. He began criss-crossing the countries to massive rallies—between court appearances. He was soon crushing his Republican primary opponents, and convinced he could regain the presidency, despite two assassination attempts, the hatred of the frenzied Left, and loathed by the media, the universities, the corporate board rooms, celebrities, and most of the donor class.
No matter. Donald Trump staged the greatest comeback in American presidential history, won back the White House, and began launching the most sweeping counter-revolution in a century. Almost alone, Trump was determined to undo 100 years of the progressive take-over of our institutions, to marginalize the gloomy declinists, and to reboot the U.S. as the greatest economic, military, and political power in the world
How he arose from the ashes, crushed his opponents, and sought to restore America is the story of Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement—a carefully documented account and analysis of what Trump’s adversaries did to him, why he survived, and how he has become one of our nation's most consequential and controversial presidents.
Pre-Order now
The Midterm is Not the Endterm
It is too soon to calibrate the direction of the post midterm Democratic and Republican Parties.
But if the first 72 hours are any indication—and despite the soon to be Speaker’s denials—the Left is already bragging about subpoenas, and it is intoxicated by the notion of investigations and impeachments.
Heady Democrats have entirely forgotten the politically suicidal fashion of the 2021-4 five civil and criminal courtroom circuses, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and the blue state deballoting efforts.
All that and more fueled the Trump recovery.
Wild talk of multi-trillion-dollar new agendas grows, like socializing the health care system, a renewed Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness, and illegal alien amnesties, along with new punitive income and estate regulations and taxes.
This socialist dream is reminiscent of the 2021 giddy splurging that gave the country a 9.1% inflation rate by midterm year 2022.
Along with the Afghanistan disaster (the Left’s correction for a Middle East ‘forever war”) the inflation would ensure Biden a 40% popularity.
The idea that the Left, which cannot do much real lawmaking without a veto-proof Congress, will try to reach deals with the White House, adopt a 1995 Clinton-like realist agenda, simply claim credit for the growing Trump economy, or moderate its rhetoric is highly unlikely.
Instead, we hear crazy talk of confiscations, new billionaire and millionaire punitive taxes, imprisonments, changing the Constitution—all in full suicidal 1972 McGovern style.
Republicans are blame-gaming each other, which can be constructive if over issues and reforms rather than social media ad hominem. But they need to message far better, about both the administration’s successes and the dangers of a socialist future.
There will be likely be no planned presidential succession, or gentlemanly agreement on a front runner. That’s likely good news. More likely as of now a triangular race between front-runners De Santis, Rubio, and Vance emerges—all of whom are far preferable to any ticket with a Newsom, Harris, AOC, Mamdani, or el-Sayed.
If the Republicans can stay reasonably united, they can ensure permanent presidential vetoes of crazy leftwing legislation, fight back on the Democratic committee inquisitions, and see the economy in the final two years become an asset in recovering their popularity.
Absent in all conversations is that there is increasing evidence that the economy is actually expanding and has the potential to boom in 2027, or at least the data indicate such potential.
The jobs report came out yesterday with a stunning 165,000 jobs created in October (accompanied by the usual journalists’ adverb “unexpectantly”), dropping unemployment to 4.1%.
Revised 3rd GDP stats now show a robust 3.4% growth—likely ensuring at least 3%+ growth for the year.
Third Quarter consumer spending soared 3.8%.
Private domestic investment surged with 19.4% growth.
Just reported last week: median family income in 2025 hit a new record ($87,460)—the highest in 60 years adjusted for inflation. And poverty dipped to its lowest rate (ever 10.2%).
In October manufacturing activity grew faster than at any time in the past five years.
Yes, prices are too high, and final 2026 inflation, given gas hikes, is scheduled to increase by one point (3.7%) from last year’s (2.7%). But it is still lower than the pan-European average (ca. 4+%)—and much lower than the Biden average over four years of 5.1%.
Gas prices are already falling. On November 6 prices fell to a $4.06 average—as global oil transit is mostly back to prewar levels and refineries scramble to handle the increased deliveries.
U.S. companies are dominating all the top 10 rankings in market capitalization/usage in key area such as software, AI, digital media, space, satellite launches, and bio/genetic engineering.
Note that today gas prices are not that much higher than 4 years ago at the 2022 midterm time ($4.06 vs. ca. $3.80), and haven’t once spiked to $5 a gallon as they did in 2022, just four months before the Biden midterms.
Yet oddly, the red wave sputtered in 2022 when the U.S. was in far worse economic shape than this week when the blue wave became a tsunami.
Messaging, media, and communication count, so note:
Four years ago GDP growth was lower than today—even though the pandemic was about over and there was a dramatic return to work and spending.
The inflation rate was almost three times higher in 2022 than now.
Median family income was $14,000 lower than now. The poverty rate was higher in 2022.
The Dow was 20,000 points lower. Foreign investment will likely end the year 30-40% higher than in 2022.
Real wage growth (nominal wages minus inflation) while not great in 2026 is likely to end the year far better than in 2022 (when real wage growth fell 2-3%).
So why would “affordability” have been decisive in the 2026 midterms when it was not in 2022?
The 21% aggregate inflation rate Trump inherited force-multiplied the average 3.15% Trump inflation rate of 2025-6— yet in a way the aggregate first-term Trump inflation rate (7.7% just a third of the Biden total) did not exaggerate all that much the 9.1% inflation rate in 2022.
Messaging, however, matters. The administration did not explain adequately that a 21% rise in prices cannot be lowered without radical deflation or recession, but only ameliorated by medium family income growth and lowering the inflation rate from the Biden 2021-5 averages, both of which occurred in 2025-6, but were forgotten.
Media coverage of the Biden 2022 weak economy were muted, while Trump’s 2-year inflation rate was exaggerated during 2026.
The Iran war became the culprit as a war of choice that made the inherited Biden 21% high prices and the inability to lower were them solely Trump’s fault. Again, there was inadequate explanation of either the economic reality or why the gamble to denuclearize Iran was defensible–with the caveat that stopping the bombing at day 38 and talking with theocrats for seven months was an unfortunate mistake.
The domestic and foreign policy activism of the lame-duck Clinton (1998-2000} and Obama (2014-2016) presidencies increased after their loss of Congress. Indeed, their popularity climbed from a once nadir of below forty to sixty percent approval or above.
There is no reason why the Trump administration cannot have a successful last two years. The economy is growing.
The crime rate is at historic lows.
The border is closed shut. The radical pro-Western political transformation of South and Central America has remade the entire Western Hemisphere.
European NATO is rearming.
Oil and gas production is at highest levels of any nation in history.
The bloated federal work force has been trimmed by over 270,000 jobs.
There is no longer a 40,000-50,000 shortfall in military recruitment. The forced reforms in higher education were long overdue.
The verdict on Iran is still out.
If it is denuclearized, the crippling sanctions continued, the Strait kept open, the provincial opposition armed—and our military gone home— the regime will face an increasingly restive population
2026 was an unequivocal defeat, but 2028 need not be.
If the administration and Congress stay disciplined and united, and can message better, while the Left goes utterly berserk, drunk on their midterm successes, socialism/Islamism, and Trump Derangement Syndrome 2.0, the tide will soon radically turn— as the economy already has.
As the midterms approach, the Left has gone nearly berserk in its hatred of trillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Yet its escalating venom would have been almost inconceivable before 2022, when Musk publicly declared that he would be voting Republican.
victorhanson.com/why-do-they…
The Ukraine war may be our Gordian knot, but—in our current nuclear age—it is dangerous to cut rather than unravel it.
victorhanson.com/the-ukraini…
There are two ways of looking at the midterms, now less than three weeks away.
One is as a simple referendum on the issues and politicians of the day. The other involves a far deeper conflict of visions (as Thomas Sowell puts it): socialism versus capitalism, intrusive versus limited government, and the destruction of time-honored institutions and traditions versus their preservation and renewal.
Rarely in American history have the two parties been so far apart or the choice between them so stark. In brief, Islamist-sympathizing socialism is on the ballot against free-market capitalism and American exceptionalism.
victorhanson.com/the-deep-mi…
Europeans blame the Trump administration for the usual things—a lack of cordiality and bombastic threats.
But two truths, rarely spoken, characterize all these spats.
One is hypocrisy; the other is insecurity.
victorhanson.com/the-same-ol…
The United States can neither entrust AI regulation to international bodies with dismal track records nor permit Communist China to monopolize the technology.
victorhanson.com/ai-and-the-…
Trump Bans the Fake News. So Obama Thunders Down from Olympus
The White House Press corps and the liberal media have gone ballistic over President Trump’s recent banning of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press room.
Apparently Trump had finally had it with their decade-long trail of “fake news” (e.g., CNN on the Steele dossier: the intelligence community had “corroborated all the details.”; MS(NBC): “All the supporting details in Steele's reports are checking out, even the really outrageous ones.”; and Politico (“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”).
Or maybe it was Trump’s weariness that CNN and MS never learned from their serial untruth.
The former for years put on their news shows the admitted liar (“least most untruthful”) James Clapper; The latter likewise hired the twice-admitted-liar John Brennan (on his demonstrable spying on Senate computers, Brennan thundered under oath: “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that.”)
So after witnessing the fake news’s spreading lies about the “walls are closing in on Trump” Mueller Investigation, ginning up the “mostly peaceful” 2020 riots, running with the Jussie Smollett farce, demonizing the Covington Kids, iconizing the assailant Trayvon Martin, and promulgating the “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson fable, and on and on—I suppose Trump finally had enough.
In reaction and as expected, a sanctimonious Barack Obama now has jetted out from one of his three mansions and into the expulsion controversy.
And also as his wont, Obama almost immediately on spec opened himself up to the usual charges of rank hypocrisy and empty, performance-art virtue-signaling.
So Obama thundered, “I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News? You’re out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.”
Actually, it’s not “unimaginable”, if Obama would just look into the mirror.
So wait a minute.
In 2009 the Obama Treasury Department tried to ban a Fox reporter from a press pool interview.
Earlier during the 2008 campaign, Obama kicked out New York Post and Washington Times reporters from his campaign plane.
But Obama was most notorious not for just excluding politically incorrect reporters but for surveilling and spying on them.
Even liberal watchdog foundations blasted Obama in 2012-13 for grabbing the private records of some twenty phone lines used at home and on the job by Associated Press reporters.
Most notoriously, it was finally revealed in 2013 that Obama’s State Department secretly had bird-dogged Fox Reporter James Rosen relentlessly— tracking his movements, obtaining a search warrant to examined two days’ worth of his private emails, and getting access to his private phone records.
If Obama is still “trying to think what would have happened” when he surveilled and spied on a Fox reporter relentlessly, he can stop—since nothing as usual happened to the always exempt Obama.
And Obama did not just at times eject reporters and surveille them.
He also threatened to prosecute eight reporters and their sources (more than any administration before or since, including Richard Nixon’s). But he backed down when the AP and Rosen scandals surfaced and cooled down his Inspector Javert alter ego.
The hammer/stiletto difference between a loud Trump and a smooth Obama?
Trump blows up publicly, rails, and earns furor from “shocked”, sober and judicious journalists” who covet their White House billets—while he also earns the damnation of the liberal legacy media for his antics.
But far more egregiously Obama used the powers of the administrative state, secretly and quietly, to surveille, follow, and spy on reporters and their sources, while threatening to prosecute and jail others—and he disguised his vindictiveness by his lofty tone and polished demeanor.
As he anticipated, Obama’s victims and the media itself largely kept still, afraid to concede that their messianic “constitutional lawyer” possessed an Orwellian mean streak and was a far greater danger to the First Amendment.
Or as the Left taught us, the fundamental threat to our Constitution is when “democracy dies in darkness.”
Postscript:
Obama also could not resist his “clingers” like demonization of Trump supporters, in the fashion of Hillary’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables”, and Biden’s “garbage”, “chumps”, “semi-fascists”, and “dregs”.
So he also blasted not just Trump for the expulsions, but returned to his accustomed stereotype putdown of Neanderthal-like Trump supporters who are supposedly under-developed (e.g., “what that means is that we’ve have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires”):
“If you have a certain cohort, let's call it 30 to 35 percent of the country right now, which thinks that's okay, well, what that means is we have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires, and we've got to shore that back up.”
I wonder how Obama would do that shoring up of a third of America? Surveilling, tracking, and spying on them?
Note finally, that even Hillary’s deplorables were only half of Trump’s half of the nation, “You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”) whereas Obama writes off a third of the entire country!
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one.
victorhanson.com/the-fantasy…
