504: Victor Davis Hanson—The Counter Revolution

What happens when a nation forgets the value of the people who make, build, fix, and grow things? Historian, classicist, farmer, and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson https://victorhanson.com/ joins Mike for a wide-ranging conversation about what America values—and what it may have forgotten. They explore the difference between the generalist and the specialist, the importance of the "muscular" trades, and why a strong middle class is essential to a healthy society. Hanson also discusses his new book, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement https://www.amazon.com/Counterrevolution-Fall-Donald-Trump-Movement/dp/1541607821/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0, which examines Trump's political comeback and argues that his return to power was part of a broader reaction to the political, cultural, and institutional forces that shaped the years between his two presidencies. Tip o' the hat to our excellent sponsors GoodRanchers.com/ROWE https://bit.ly/TWIHIxGoodRanchers—100% of their meat comes from American farms and ranches and delivered straight to your door. Start your plan and get a FREE Ground Beef Bundle with your firs order. EducationFreedom.org https://bit.ly/TWIHIxACEScholarships—Contribute to ACE Scholarships to give more children access to the right opportunities, resources and learning environments they need to thrive. In return, you'll receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit. BuildFreedom.us https://bit.ly/TWIHIxBuildFreedom—The best place to find a six-figure, AI-proof job. Build your future. Rebuild America.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Hello friends, Mike Rowe here with another episode of The Way I Heard It. Happy to see my old buddy Chuck all lit up here on my computer screen. How are you, pal?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm living the dream, Mike, living the dream.

• 0:15Mike Rowe?

  You know, it's weird, I think I've done seven of these without you over the last couple of months for various reasons, and it's just, it's just not the same.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Aw, I'm happy to hear that.

• 0:25Mike Rowe?

  I didn't say it was better or worse.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 0:28Mike Rowe?

  It's just not the same.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:32Mike Rowe?

  But you've been traveling, you've been vacationing, you've been relaxing, I hope?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  A little bit, all three of those, yes.

• 0:38Mike Rowe?

  Excellent. Well, welcome back. I'm glad you didn't miss this one, because I think you are probably as big a fan of Victor Davis Hanson as I am, and I hope you enjoyed the conversation you just produced.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, this guy is, he's a brainiac. He's smart, he's level-headed, and he's really calm, you know? He's not a guy who gets worked up. He's a guy who can argue convincingly, and it's not really arguing, it's just he makes such a persuasive case that you have to pay attention to it.

• 1:10Mike Rowe?

  Well, he's very experienced. I would never suggest he's old, but like all of us, he's older than he's ever been. I don't know how exactly, or when, I think I know how, but I don't know when precisely he came to occupy such a huge piece of real estate in the zeitgeist. But maybe it's a confirmation bias, maybe, you know, the brain finds what it looks for, and I started looking for Victor Davis Hanson seven, eight years ago, because every time I heard him speak, I heard what you just described. It was a mix of experience, common sense, but also a balance. I was really delighted to spend the first 30 minutes with him, talking about the importance

• 1:55Mike Rowe?

  of the generalist and our infatuation with the specialist.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00Mike Rowe?

  And, you know, he would never describe himself as a Renaissance man, but when I talked to him, I can never quite decide if he's a bigger fan of history, of the present day, of the skilled trades, of the true pursuit of knowledge, his time at Stanford, his hundreds of articles, his dozens of books, they all just really speak of a curious mind and a very brave guy, because he has taken it in the neck, I mean, from both sides for the last 10 years, and he just doesn't seem to care.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't, and partly it's because he bridges two worlds. He's a man of two separate places. He's an intellectual and an academic, you know, he's, I think, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, right, at Stanford? And yet he's also a raisin farmer. And, you know what I mean? It's like, he's a guy who could, kind of like Reagan, who could be mending a fence, you know, one day and negotiating a contract the next.

• 3:10Mike Rowe?

  I don't think he would disagree, I just don't think you would put him in that order. I honestly think he sees himself as a raisin farmer first, and the son, the grandson, the great-great-grandson of farmers. This guy has made his home in the Central Valley, here in California. He has not just passionate views about what's happening to California, but informed, logical, you just don't want to argue with this guy. And honestly, the reason I wanted to have him on, I so enjoyed talking to him a couple of years ago, when we did this, and he's written a book, it's called The Counter-Revolution. It's going to do what his last three or four books have done, which is inflame and inspire

• 3:56Mike Rowe?

  and confuse and challenge people on both sides of the aisle.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  And sell. It's gonna sell a lot.

• 4:03Mike Rowe?

  I'm sure it's already-

• 4:04Speaker 01

  It was number one on Amazon, yeah.

• 4:06Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, so it's a thick book, I'm about halfway through it. The way a B-list celebrity gets through a book when he's attempting to impersonate the impression of preparedness for an interview like this. I will finish it, cover to cover, before too long, but I didn't want to wait. I wanted to talk to him immediately, I do want to see his book sell out, I'm sure it will, but I also want people to arm themselves with it. It doesn't matter how you vote, if you can understand what's happened in the country vis a vis Trump over the last couple of, well, over the last decade, then you can probably start to understand what's happened to your own relationship with your friends and with your family.

• 4:50Mike Rowe?

  I don't want to speak for you, Chuck, but, you know, I've got members of my family who have very strong opinions on the other side of the aisle, I think you do as well.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:58Mike Rowe?

  And I say that not even knowing what side of the aisle I'm really on. I haven't even talked to you about my interview with Joe Manchin, wait till you hear that.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Oh, man, yeah.

• 5:07Mike Rowe?

  You're just gonna love it. But what you're about to hear are the well-articulated thoughts of a man who has mastered Greek studies and classic literature, and at the same time grows his raisins and writes his papers and earns the respect of anybody who genuinely gives a damn about our country and who is intellectually curious. I think, I think he's sui generis, man. I think he's unexampled in these times.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Agreed, and, you know, before we got on to do this preamble, you asked me what my favorite part is, and now I remember it. When you brought up California, there is a part in here where he makes a list, and he just pulls this off the top of his head, and this is not a very young guy, but he brings out a list with statistics and facts and numbers about what the state of California today, in what dire straits it is.

• 6:09Mike Rowe?

  He's a complete man to the facts, and to your point, he's older than he's ever been, and he's coming off a terrible fight with cancer, which he, at the moment, appears to be winning, and I'm so happy to report that as well. He's, I think, the most popular guest we've ever had historically. When you listen to this episode, I think you'll understand why we're calling this The Counter-Revolution, because that's the name of the book, his latest book, and it's worth your time, right after this.

• 6:43Mike Rowe?

  You ever wonder how meat got so expensive? I do, and I just asked the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, to explain it to me like I was a small child. She did, and I'll have that whole conversation for you in a week or two. It's an eye-opener. In the meantime, you should know that our government, in an effort to reduce the price of ground beef, has just allowed 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the US market. Here's a problem: in the grocery store, you'll have no way of knowing where the ground beef you're buying actually came from, and that makes it really difficult to support American ranchers, which I encourage all meat eaters to do.

• 7:25Mike Rowe?

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• 8:08Mike Rowe?

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• 8:22Mike Rowe?

  Well, before we dive in to the book, can you endure two quick compliments?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Mike Rowe?

  Or are you still in the stage where that makes you awkward and uncomfortable?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  In the book business, nothing makes the author uncomfortable. If it's positive, only negative things make the author uncomfortable.

• 8:39Mike Rowe?

  We just finished our 500th episode, and I was looking back at them, and the spontaneous conversation that you and I had a couple of years ago has generated, and continues to generate, more questions, more interest, over 5 million views, I don't know how many downloads and shares, but I only point that out because I would hate for you up there on your great-great-grandmother's farm to lose sight of the fact that you are adored and valued in ways that I want to ask you to explain in a moment. The second compliment happened earlier this year, I was invited to speak at the Independent

• 9:22Mike Rowe?

  Women's Forum, and they were honoring you in part, but you were recovering from your illness, and you zoomed in, you know, long distance, probably from where you're sitting now.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  I was, yeah, right here.

• 9:37Mike Rowe?

  And you spoke for about a half hour, and I know how disconnected it feels to do things like that this way, and I was sitting there in the audience, and I just have to tell you, when the signal was gone, the emcee walked out, and it took about 20 seconds for people to stop talking in response to what you had said. The entire crowd was hanging on to your every word in a way that, I don't mean it as cheap flattery, I just mean to say that you're out there today with a message and a voice and a resume and some gravitas, and what you're speaking is resonating, like some sort

• 10:21Mike Rowe?

  of tuning fork, and I just wanted to get that out of the way before we start.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Well, I appreciate that, because I had no idea, because you were exactly right, when you give a talk like that on Zoom, and then it says, you're done, so you just get done, so you have, so I remember saying to my wife, I have no idea how that went over, and she said, well, that's because you didn't stay on, they may have really liked it. And I said, well, they didn't clap, I was kidding her, but-

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and today, I really like your show, Mike, and what you've been doing the last thirty years, because here I am in a hundred and fifty year old home that my great great grandmother and almost every day, something goes wrong and I've tried to redo the, when my grandfather died, he said someday, this place is gonna fall apart. I was twenty and he said, could you, he just appointed me the custodian, he said, I want you to redo everything. So I have not touched the architect, it's an old Victorian two story farmhouse, but I've had rewired, replumbed, and today, we're doing foundation work. And for thirty years,

• 11:30Speaker 02

  I crawled under there until a guy called me, one of the listeners, I mentioned it and he said, you know, these companies will come in, and I'm sure you know about them, I didn't know about them, they'll clean your crawl space and then they'll put a damp, I mean, a waterproof mat and then plastic over it. And they did the whole thing. And then I asked, a friend of mine, it's a good electrician, could you put twelve lights in there? And I went under there and I didn't want to leave. It was, it was like a complete different experience. I thought, wow, this is like a house under here, because it's, you know, it's, and I hadn't, I didn't know that people were doing that.

• 12:07Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's probably the perfect metaphor from which to leap into the country and, you know, the things that occur out of sight and out of mind, and the muscular trades that you've referred to so eloquently over the years, really are embodied in the business of crawl space encapsulation, waterproofing, foundation raising, these things, they're so primal and they're so fundamental, and they're so easy to overlook. And it's interesting, it's the same sort of disconnect we were just talking about. We've become technologically

• 12:46Mike Rowe?

  advanced, at the same time, our ignorance multiplies, and we just seem to be profoundly disconnected as a country from these primal things. And maybe that's a place to start.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  I wrote an article too about those of us who had grandparents out of the nineteen, that were born in the nineteenth century. And that was a really great thing for me. Their whole accent, their expressions, you know, don't catch cold, don't go out yonder, I'll give you the Dickens, taint funny McGee, all that stuff I grew up with. And they were before cell phones, they were before phones, they grew up without toilets and, and electricity. And it's funny, because when I work on the house, every once in a while, I bump into them, you know, I'll take out a wall and I'll see, the first iteration was newspaper

• 13:41Speaker 02

  for insulation, eighteen ninety-eight. Or I'll be out doing yard work and I'll see horseshoes. And this place I'm having right here was a manger, this was, it has a sloped roof, when I grew up, this was where the horses came in, even though they weren't used to plow anymore, we had some. And they ate, they stuck their heads right where I am right here. And we put straw here, hay, and then they would eat. And I gutted it about four years, I kept the outside exactly the same, but I made it into a studio. But it was really, it was like archaeology, going through the roofs and the, everything about it and seeing things.

• 14:21Mike Rowe?

  As a classicist, when you, and a, and a political observer, I'm guessing it's important on a personal level, to have that kind of connection to your own past. Do you worry today, that as a country, we're just missing something, it's hard to articulate, but it, it feels like a generation ago, we were better connected to the kinds of things you're talking about on a grander level. And I, I just don't know how we become, how we became untethered.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  I, I think part of it was, that generation that came out of World War Two had largely, their parents had not gone to college, and they were offered the GI Bill, twelve and a half million people were in the military. And that was the entree to the new type of economy. If you were certified, or you had a BA, or a Masters of Public Poli, whatever it was. And they did get good salaries, but the difference was, the college experience that they had, although the professors were liberal, they were disinterested. My professors in college were disinterested. I mean, they would make fun about Nixon once in a while,

• 15:36Speaker 02

  but they didn't hate him. And there were no conservatives that I knew, but I didn't even care whether there were, because they were, but now, that's not the case. And it's a sin of commission and omission, when you invest that much time in trying to indoctrinate people, whether it's DEI, or woke, or green, or all of these isms and ologies, you miss out. So for the first time in my life, I can tell you that I don't see a big difference between people with a bachelor's degree, as far as their knowledge, and people like, two people here today are working with a water pressure, Mexican-American guys. And I see students a lot, and I don't see any difference in their vocabulary, their way

• 16:20Speaker 02

  of, but I do see a big difference. If I were to ask these two guys out the door right now, oh, by the way, could you seal the tile balcony? Or by the way, the electricians forgot to do the junction box? Or by the way, my own pressure washer has a seal, they could do all of that. But the people with college educations can't. And then they would say, well, we can always hire somebody. Well, I'm not sure that's true. But more importantly, the ability and the experience of acquiring that knowledge is kind of like anthropology. You meet so many different people in the process of mastering these physical muscular

• 16:59Speaker 02

  trades. It's very important, I think, for the elite class, the people with all the letters after their name, to be not removed from the middle class, and that they feel comfortable. Problem today is, a lot of the people who are very elite, they adopt these very radical ideologies, psychologically, to, to square the circle that they do not feel comfortable with the working class. They either feel that the working class doesn't trust them, or doesn't like them, or is suspicious, or they have contempt for the world. But out of that distance, they talk about, you know, we're gonna do this for you, and we're

• 17:41Speaker 02

  gonna do, give you this program. And it's an artificiality, it really grounds, when I went to Stanford as a graduate student, my, the first year, we lost the whole raisin crop. And my grandfather was eighty-five, and he would call me in my dorm, and he would say, now Victor, there's some music there. I'm not saying there's something going wrong there, but every time I call you on the hall, that, you said it's on your hall, I hear people saying language that I cannot believe. And I said, well, I can't either, but I'm here. And he said, now, would you just, if, if you could just drive down on Friday night,

• 18:22Speaker 02

  and take us to Eastern Star and the Masonic Temple, and then I've got all the tarps out for the raisins, and you and I can, we can cover all the bins. And I said, well, I have my French PhD exam. And he said, is it as important, is it that important? I said, actually, it is. But you know what? I will be there in three and a half hours if the truck doesn't break down. So I drove, and I would do that almost every other, and then it was schizophrenic, because I never moved in that area. Even today, I've been at the Hoover Institution at Stanford for twenty-one years, but I live here, so I have a four hundred mile round trip.

• 18:59Mike Rowe?

  What I find so interesting, given the complexity of your curriculum vitae, is how often the Intelligentsia will introduce you as a, you know, as a teacher up at Fresno State and a raisin farmer. And it's like, but dude, the guy wrote twenty-two books.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  I know, I don't know if you ever remember that, he was kind of an, I knew him, but it was, Tarkanian was our basketball player, coach, and he was very controversial. And Fresno State, for a brief period, enjoyed two things about him. They won a lot of basketball games, but they were always under censure by the NCAA for recruitment violations. And I, you know, raisin, I don't know why it was, but they couldn't say that we had tree fruit. You know, they never said, he's a grower of tree fruit. But every time I went to a university campus, it was, here's Victor Hanson, I never said Cal State Fresno, I thought I could get a little shred of dignity if they said Cal State. But they always wanted

• 20:02Speaker 02

  to put the location of the particular branch in Fresno. And I remember being at Princeton, giving a talk, and so this is Victor, and I, these were by classicists. Victor Hanson, he's a raisin farmer from Fresno State, and I don't know much about it, but I remember Jerry Tarkanian is there. And, and then even the guy at the Hoover would introduce, one of my close friends was a director, who said, you know, we don't have affirmative action at Hoover, but we don't hire people from Fresno very often. In fact, we've never done it. Cal State Fresno, so Victor is an affirmative, he was, he was making a joke, but I've heard that my entire life, you know.

• 20:45Mike Rowe?

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• 21:26Mike Rowe?

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• 22:10Mike Rowe?

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• 22:22Speaker 02

  The funniest story, I'll end with this. I was a professor, and in 2002, John Raisin was a wonderful guy, called me up and said, "We'd like you to come to the Hoover Institution." So I went up there, and one of the assistant directors, who was actually from Ohio State, he tells me about the Hoover, and he has no idea that I was a graduate student at Stanford for four years. He has no idea that my mother got a BA and a JD at Stanford in 1944. She was one of the first women in the law school. She had no idea that my aunt, my cousins, all went to Stanford and didn't really make a big thing about it. So he says, "You know, you're in the big leagues now, Victor. I had written 15 books,

• 23:06Speaker 02

  and it's gonna be a very different environment from you." And I said, "Well, where did you go to school? Why, it doesn't matter. But you're in the big leagues, and you're gonna have to get reacquainted. It's gonna be a very stressful..." And I said, "You're the one that's stressed. I'm not stressed at all. I know this place by the back of my hand. And I was also a visiting professor of Greek and Latin for two years at the classics department. So I said, "I've never quite been impressed with it." And he said, "Well, why? Did it intimidate you?" And I said, "No, just the caliber of people seems so one-dimensional. And I haven't really been impressed with a lot of the faculty, more so as I get older." When I was there, they had German, French philologists.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  But today, I think what's happening, why we have this questioning of the... It's not just that they overcharge on federal grants. It's not just that Stanford lets in 9% white males out of... even though the Supreme Court is suing them, I guess. Or, I mean, the government isn't because of the violation of the Supreme Court. It's not just the DI, the separate racial graduations, the theme houses that are racially segregated. It's what they claim they did better than anybody, these Harvard, is not true. They have remedial math now at Princeton, Yale, Stanford. 80% of the grades are As. And I was thinking I was gonna really shock

• 24:35Speaker 02

  some Silicon Valley people about a year ago, and I saw them at a donor's conference for Hoover. And I said, "You know, I'm getting to the point. You know, I meet these Stanford students. They don't know anything. They have no SAT scores. And they come in, and they're taking remedial math. And when you talk to them, the faculty, they either have to inflate the grades or downsize the course or invent new courses. And I wonder, someday, at some point, you people will find out that that brand, that cattle brand Stanford is not going to impress you." This guy just said, "Where in the blank have you been?" Victor, we surmised this two years ago,

• 25:19Speaker 02

  when we prefer the Georgia Tech or the Texas A&M graduate because, A, they come from a different environment, and they have none of the therapeutic curriculum. So they can concentrate on mathematics, physics, engineering, and they don't go to HR the first moment they have a psychodrama. And the Stanford students do that. And that was a shock to me. And I think that's... all of higher education is under... The 18-year-old cohort is shrinking, as we all know. The fertility rate's going down. And this comes at the same time we're in this manufacturing, assembly boom where we need these skilled people. I know so many parents that are doing one of two things.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  They're either telling their children, and these are people who went to these schools, they're telling them to go to schools in the South or the Midwest very carefully. They, you know, they always say Hillsdale, and that's a great choice. But Hillsdale can't accommodate everybody. But basically, things like Vanderbilt or Rice or something like that. They would never have said that earlier. And then the second thing they do, they always have one nephew or cousin that is a master electrician. Or he is a horticulture engineer or a landscape architect or something like that, where he actually does stuff. And they're making more money than the kids that are the college graduates,

• 26:47Speaker 02

  at least initially. And that's new. I didn't think that would ever happen. But you probably... you know more about than I do, but I think it's a good sign.

• 26:55Mike Rowe?

  I'm wondering, in the most general way, if you think it's possible for higher ed and trade schools to somehow come together. Everything you just said about grade inflation and just the hollowing out of the brand that is the Ivy League is super concerning. I wonder if one way through... And I've talked to the guys at Carnegie Mellon and MIT about this. Why isn't there some sort of trade certification under that rubric? Or, to be fair, why aren't the leading trade schools in the country...

• 27:36Mike Rowe?

  Why don't they have some sort of adjunct where a classicist... If we want our kids to think logically, surely we must expose them to the Stoics and to Aristotle and down the list. And I just wonder, again, back to your resume, a raisin farmer, a classicist. I think the reason you're vibrating like a tuning fork in pop culture is because you have the Renaissance brain. And frankly, the courage to speak the truth to your own tribe.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  I think also, my father grew up very poor. And he and his... he had a first cousin whose parents died, so he adopted him. So there were two big Swedes. One of them, they joined the Marines. I don't know what happened. One of them hit an officer. They told the other guy he's gonna take the... Who wanted to take the rap? My dad took the rap, and they thought it would... They basically sentenced him to fly... to be on a B-29 experiment, you know, when they first came out. They were very dangerous. So he went to Nebraska. I think he had three crashes. And then he ended up 40 missions over Tokyo as a central fire control. And he had five, you know, I don't like to use the word, kills. He was a top gunner almost on all of Tinian.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  And then his...

• 29:01Mike Rowe?

  Tail gunner, ball gunner?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Central for... yeah. That had a computerized system, so the top bubble gummer in that blister, he could override all of the other 11 machine guns and point them at one target. And you had to be very careful, because if you did too much, people would be robbed of their ability to, you know... And the Japanese knew that, so they would always dive down at that gunner. And they had a lot of problems with people that cracked up doing it. And then Victor went in the 6th Marine Division. He was killed on Okinawa, so I was named after him. But that was the first college people. And so he came back, and then he farmed. And he was a JC teacher, then a JC admin.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  But he never... he would come home, and he'd say, "Hey, Victor, would you help me correct my papers? I gotta do some welding." So my whole family... My brother got a master's in biology. He was in a PhD program, and he didn't like it. But it was just second knowledge that there was no distinction between... You were not an elite to study philosophy or history. Or when we would prune vines, we would talk about... I had a cousin who farmed with us, and he was into Indian philosophy. And he and I would argue about which inductive method, the Greek or the Indian model, was more sophisticated. That's why we were pruning trees.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  But that seems to be lost, that somehow it's antithetical. And I think the thing that really helped me, and I don't think I would have turned out very well if I had have gone up there and been impressed with all the academics and all of that stuff if I didn't have parents and family and friends that always reminded me. You know, I came home... I can remember when I said to my father, "Well, I got my PhD. There's no jobs. But Dad, I'm 25." And he said, "Well, I feel bad I didn't go to your graduation, but we had the crop to worry about." And I said, "I didn't go either." And then he said, "Well, you have a PhD. Can you go down to the dehydrator?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  We're going to... we're wiring a 220, and you're not very good electrician. So you go down there, and Miguel and you figure it out." And then my older brother was very witty. He quoted a quote from Samuel Johnson. And he said, "Dad, he's... he's kinda like what's... He's a master. He can read." I looked at him. He did very well. He was one of the top students in the PhD program. He finished faster. But it's kinda like a dog with two legs. It's impressive, but nobody knows why you'd wanna do it.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  It was a good childhood, a middle class. And my mom was a second appellate court judge in California that was a female. She'd have a Stanford degree, it was very rare, but we always went on Saturdays to pedal farmers market. So here she was out in jeans and a T-shirt in her 60s with my dad and all of us. And we had a big table at Monterey or Santa Cruz and we're all, that was what we did with our overripe plums, peaches and nectarines. We'd drive it over 200 minnows. And she would be in this used, um, she was 64, one of the top judges in California. And she was sitting in a used Bell, then when Bell telephone sold all of their vans off, we bought one. It was terrible, no air conditioning and we'd drive over Pacheco Pass.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  It was, and my kids did this, they had to, that's why I really get along with my children. They, they grew up that way and they're not impressed. In fact, my thought, my son, a year ago, he said to me something that was striking. He said, hey dad, his heroes are people like Joe Rogan and all the podcasters. And he said, one of them mentioned your name the other day. I said, really? He said, yeah, do you do podcasts? I said, I do. And he said, you never told me that. And I said, you never ask. And he's, he's 42 and he's a high school teacher and he's a master mechanic. We took the boat up and I was, I thought, he took the engine and all apart and he, he's,

• 33:07Speaker 02

  I said, I can't go, I've had this surgery and he backs up the boat by himself, nobody helps him into the lake with his truck. And then he launches it and then when he's done, he alone goes in the water. I don't know how he does it. And he alone gets this 26 foot houseboat back on the trailer and attach and drives out himself. Nobody helps him. So I don't know where he got all that, but I do know that he was told that he should read as much as possible, but there was no correlation necessarily between wisdom and degrees and that he had to be skilled in getting along with people of different classes.

• 33:49Mike Rowe?

  Well, what you've just described is heroic and I think we used to see it as heroic and we used to, we used to magnify the individuality, the skill, the self-directedness, all of that stuff. I want to stay with it for a minute because the Mexican gentleman you referred to outside your home, he's the generalist, right? He's the guy that can basically get it done, whatever it is. And the academics that you were describing earlier at Stanford and other places, they're

• 34:28Mike Rowe?

  the specialists and they're very good, I guess, at doing whatever it is they do. But the resentment that they have or the relationship that they have with the first guy you were describing, whether he's encapsulating your house or putting in a spring cellar or whatever it is, do you think that that disconnect could be rooted in the fact that they're painfully aware of what they can't do and they have to rely on someone else to do it for them? And that just cuts them to the quick?

• 35:10Mike Rowe?

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• 35:55Mike Rowe?

  So I have the money at MicroWorks to pay for the training you need to get a job in the defense industrial base right now. Go to buildfreedom.us, poke around, click on the links, apply for a scholarship, land a job that'll build freedom for yourself and our country. Buildfreedom.us.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the word, when you were describing that phenomenon, I was thinking, I was trying to remember why that, you described it perfectly and I, I would call it fear. They have a great fear of the middle class of being found out. When I was a graduate student, we had a very small stipend for teaching, but the way I supported myself was I had an old truck and we did, I went to the faculty, all nine of them and said, they all had Japanese, and that, in those days in Menlo Park and Atherton, a Japanese, they all lived in very nice homes. A Japanese gardener was the prestige item because he would prune, but he didn't want to take away all the trash or the, you know, the cement or whatever they were working on.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  So my job was to go in to all these homes after the exotic gardener left and then I would take out all of his clippings or, I grew up pruning and if there was a tree he wouldn't prune, I would shimmy up and do a redwood tree or whatever. And then I would fill it in the truck and it was just amazing that they didn't know anything and they'd always ask me questions like, um, Mr. Smith came in and he replaced the 220 plug. He said, I don't know what a 220 plug on my dryer and I paid him this much, is that reasonable? I said, yeah, that's reasonable. Or my roof is leaking.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  He asked me on the phone if I had a composition or a shake or, do you know what that meant? I said, yes. And, but it was a fear that there was people out that knew all these things and they knew nothing about it. They were afraid they were going to be taken or they would be made fun of. And this is a wordy explanation. It didn't work in reverse. And by that, I mean, when I would meet the middle class people or the working classes, I would say in the last 30 years, I've had some pretty well-known people, for some reason, when they're driving to LA or San Francisco, they'll stop and see me. PhDs, people in government.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  And when, I'll always have somebody here because we have a kind of a big farmhouse and where we have a lot of neighbors and they drop in. And every time they've seen somebody who's a tractor driver or another farmer, I had one, um, Bibi Netanyahu's brother, Ido Netanyahu came, he called me, he wanted to come by and I didn't know what, exactly what moment he would come by, so I asked a couple of farmers to come over. He was fascinated by them because he was talking about, because we had the same type of agricultural problems that Israel did. He's kind of a, he's a playwright, he's a radiologist, but he also has a little house

• 39:08Speaker 02

  near the Sea of Galilee with farming. So he was, but my point is they were not awed at all about it. And I think what I'm getting at is there is something to the idea that if you have some mechanical aptitude or you can use your hands in a way to construct or fix things, that gives you a different type of confidence. It's almost an apocalyptic content. You think, you know, if everything went wrong, if the electricity went out, if the water went out, I can still survive. But the people who can't do that, and I'm not saying they're not important, they're vital. I think classics is one of the most wonderful or English literature or any of the professor, the disciplines in the academic, but it does mean that you're absolutely, you're at the

• 39:50Speaker 02

  top of a pyramid, so to speak, and there's this, and you don't know what's going on and you would not know how to survive one day. And the same thing about arms, they were terrified of, I think in the upstairs, I must have, I don't know, 15 guns and I haven't bought one of them. They were all inherited, you know, 1898 double barrel shotgun, 1888.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Uh, thirty thirty, things like that. And they don't know anything about, they never knew anything about firearms. They just suspected people. But then I would, I'd say, I have to use them sometimes. And they say, why? And I said, have you ever been in your yard when a rabid coyote came near the, the house? And your dogs are going crazy? Or your child is out there? When somebody's dumped a pit bull right at, you know, pulled up to your house, kicked out two pit bulls and they're in, coming in your yard? And things like that. And I said, you ever have a neighbor when you have a consolidated ditch and you're out of water and you had your turn and he had his turn? Then he took two turns and you don't have any water? And if you don't have any water, you're, you're gonna lose your Santa Rosa plum crop?

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And he says, if you want your water, you stop me. What do you do? You go to the ditch tenor, the ditch tenor says, I'm not gonna intervene. He's crazy. So what do you do? You confront him. If you confront him, you have to be armed sometime. And it's, they understand that, that they're very vulnerable is what I'm trying to say. And that the middle classes are very, American middle classes, I've been all over the world. I'm just always amazed at the American middle class. It's different than the French middle class, the British middle class. They're just, they have a can do confidence about them.

• 41:33Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  I don't know where that came from. The frontier or World War Two?

• 41:38Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's too bad, cuz that was gonna be my next question. Where did that sensibility come from? Because it is so clearly not Jacobean, it's not French, it's not, it's.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  No, I think it has something to do with the front. Tocqueville said that he thought America, when he wrote Democracy in, in America in eighteen thirty-two, he said, I think they have a chance to make it in a way that we don't in Europe, because they don't have an indentured peasant class. They have a middle and lower middle class that own property and they're self-sufficient. And he says, the problem in Europe is that most people of the middle and lower classes would rather be equal and all poor than all better off, but have some very much better off. Because of the, what he said, the, the bad sort of envy, the worst kind of envy, not the envy of emulation, but of envy of resentment.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  But Americans were always, uh, I think the frontier did a lot of it and they were a mechanical people. George Patton was saying, was, people came to him once and said, the German Panther and the German Tiger tank, uh, we think are better. And he said, there's nothing better than a Sherman tank. And he went on to explain that the Sherman tanks transmission could be taken out in two hours, not sent back to the factory. And the hours necessary for maintenance. But what he was getting at, he said, my guys fix everything. They grew up fixing cars. They can get a Sherman track back on in two hours. They're not, and the Russians and the, the Germans can't do it.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Cuz they all grew up on their own family farms and they were mechanics and they're Model As and Model Ts. And he, he thought that was one of the reasons we won the war. That we had so many people that could fix things and, and had that confidence from fixing things. And I think the war, the, yes, out in the field, in real time. That's the difference. The Germans, most of their heavy equipment had to be sent by rail back. It was so, the dement, the specifications between the pistons and the cylinder, it was so exact and it was so intricate. They were wonderful machines, but you really couldn't fix them in the field. But the Sherman and all of our weapons, the M1s were all designed for mass production,

• 44:00Speaker 02

  pretty good stuff, doesn't have to be perfect. And we're going to flood the zone and have more tanks than they do, more shells, more bullets, more guns. And everybody's gonna know how to maintain them. And they did.

• 44:14Mike Rowe?

  Isn't that the difference fundamentally between maybe effectiveness and efficiency? Like, the Germans were so efficient and their guns were so tight that, from what I read, they froze at Stalingrad. Meanwhile, right? The Russians got these clunky old ancient bolt actions that were loose and not perfect, but they worked.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Same thing with their T-34 tanks. They, they didn't have very close specification, but they had an aluminum diesel engine that was pretty reliable and they had more armor and they had, they had an American suspension, the Christie's suspension system. But it was the idea, I think it comes from the frontier and that you have to be able to be independent, autonomous. And there's also the idea that the people who created our machines or the people in the business class, at least until recently, they weren't part of a class system. There were people like Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford, William Newt, all of these guys, may,

• 45:22Speaker 02

  you know, Carnegie, they were all self-made people and they knew, were very practical people. And they had some kind of affinity. As crazy as Henry Ford was and some of his ideas, he had an affinity for the middle class. And he paid more than the unions did, just because he wanted to empower the middle class.

• 45:42Mike Rowe?

  There's our bridge to the counter-revolution. For all his ideas, for all his appearances, Donald Trump has a relationship with the middle class that I think bedevils people to this day. It just seems so counterintuitive. I'll never forget, and this is when you first came across my transom. I rarely mouth off about politics, but in twenty sixteen, that's all anybody was talking about. And I somewhat cheekily predicted that I, I thought Trump would likely win. And two weeks later, I was on Meet the Press trying to explain why that happened. You, of course, did a much better job. But this is the guts of your book.

• 46:27Mike Rowe?

  How was he so underestimated? How did he manage to come back? And really, maybe the better question, Victor, is, since I think you just coined the phrase envy of resentment, what can Trump do for the country broadly, in the context of the conversation we're having right now, to reinvigorate somehow the Renaissance sensibility of not blue or white collar, not Ivy League or trade? But somehow, is it possible that he could pull us back together in some general way?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  I think that question can't be answered till he's finished, but he did do something that I, and that's one of the themes of this new book, The Counter. He did substitute, or he tried to substitute class for race. In other words, he was really making the argument that the black truck driver, the Hispanic electrician and the white plumber had more in common than each did with one of their newscasters or professors or the elite. And that they were part of the middle class. And I think that's one reason. He won twenty-six percent of the black male vote, maybe thirteen or fourteen overall. And he won fifty-six percent of the Hispanic vote.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  I've noticed, cuz I live in a ninety-five percent Hispanic neighborhood, Southern Central Valley. When I talk to Hispanic people, which is pretty much the only people I see every day, if they have children in school and at Cal State Fresno, they're pretty liberal. But the parents are not. And they're all independent contractors. That's the ethos of the community. I wanna have a roadside canteen. I wanna be a plumber. I wanna be like the guys out here, they'll pressure washer, anything you need's pressure washer, they'll touch up any paint job, they'll fix anything. They come to your house and they just say, you know, hey, big there, I'm here every

• 48:27Speaker 02

  year, I'm just gonna go through and I'll see anything I, I can fix it for you. I said, fine, just go do it. And he tried to create a solidarity. That's what was all behind, I don't think, I cannot imagine, and I have nothing, I like Mitt Romney, I like John McCain, I can't think of McCain or Romney or the Bushes or Bob Dole, all presidential candidates are present, who would say, we gotta get the tax off tips. Tips. I mean, it was all capital gains. We gotta reduce the capital gains tax. But nobody in their, I never heard any politician say that. I've never heard any, he was on TV this morning and he was talking about the trade dispute with Canada.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  And he said, hey, you farmers, my farmers, our farmers, we got, I'm gonna get that trade thing, it's almost done. We're not gonna have any tariffs in Canada. Our farm, he always uses the term our, our farmers, our, I love our workers. I was very interested about this question. It's interesting you ask. In two thousand sixteen, I was very skeptical at first, uh, cuz I was working at National Review and it was an echo chamber, but I was, I think Jack Fowler and I were the only ones that thought that he could win. Jack's a wonderful guy and, uh, we left at the same time, but.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  I called a person that I knew in New York, who was, I would call him in the near billionaire class, finance. And I said, what is it about this Trump guy? And he said, well, you know, he has all these shady deals and you can't trust in all, but he did say this. I said, well, he seems to, he's got the old Tea Party people, he's got the Buchanan people, but he's got a different message. It's a populist nationalist message that empowers the middle class and says that they're more important than investing in China. And he said, well, I'll tell you something. I had a office when he had a building down the road. Nobody ever saw him. And he came by in a limo and he was not dressed

• 50:30Speaker 02

  to go out and see the workers. He had wingtips, it looked like. And every other morning, he stopped and he went out and he shook hands with the concrete, the riveters. He walked all around. And he must have been pretty dirty in his suit when he got back in the car. And I said, was anybody watching it? And they said, no. And then the flip side of the coin was, that year, he came to Tulare, about 30 miles from here. And every time we have a election, the candidate, Democrat or Republican, puts on the puff, the sheepskin vest, they get the caterpillar hat, they get the blue faded jeans, they get the work boots.

• 51:11Mike Rowe?

  Get the Oklahoma draw.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yes, they do. Exactly. Because we have a lot of Oklahoma, the Asper here. And then they go there. So I couldn't go to this. And so I called a good friend, he went. So I said, what was Trump like? Did he have you all? No, he did not. And I said, did he have the jeans? Nope. I said, he didn't have the jeans, at least the caterpillar hat? No. I said, well, what did he look like? It was kind of weird, Victor. He had this blue suit, and he had a red tie, and he had wingtips, and it was 106. And he had no hay bales. He was just standing up the whole time. He had makeup on or something. He was sweating like a dog. And he had this grading

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Queens accent, or whatever. He said, Brooklyn Bronx. And I said, I think it's a Queens accent. And he said, and it just, we never heard a guy talk like that. And I said, so everybody thought he was out of place? He said, no, they loved him. They loved him because he was so authentic.

• 52:14Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn, instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately. I'm talking about AI-proof,

• 52:58Mike Rowe?

  six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path

• 53:39Mike Rowe?

  into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  I said, well, what did he say? He said, well, I don't know much about the water, but I know these guys are getting ripped off because we're feeding a bunch of fish. And all the fish people don't want to give you guys water. And without you guys, we don't eat. We can live without the Delta smell, but we can't eat. And that resonated. So there is authenticity about him. Where he got that, I don't know. But he does feel more comfortable. And that's why his, his stunts, like the McDonald stunt and the garbage stunt, any, Dukakis tried that. I think you remember in the

• 54:28Mike Rowe?

  Tank.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yes, the tank, the 98, the 88 election, the tank thing did not work. Most of the politicians who do that, when Gavin Newsom goes down and tries to pick up trash by LA rail yards, he uses a special little spike and he's all dressed up like he came out of Abercrombie and Fitch, you know. But he can pull it off. I think the iconic moment, I wrote that in the book, of the 2024 election, when he was, I understand that the people were screened, but when, there was a couple, I don't know if you remember that, Mike, he was at the window, and there was a couple from Indian immigrants. And he said, can I help you? What do you want? Do you want the Big Mac? And they said, we just want

• 55:10Speaker 02

  to thank you for, we want to thank you for caring. And he said, well, I, who, what? He said, we're nobody. And he said, no, no, no, you're somebody. Don't tell me that. Everybody is somebody. You're somebody. And then he said, I guess we are. And that was not scripted. So for all the crudity and the anger and the spontaneity, the reason that he recovered was he had a large group of people who did believe he cared about people that were not rich or privileged. And he had admiration for people who worked with their hands. He was a builder. And I, and he always says that, I'm a builder. That

• 55:50Speaker 02

  was one of the keys to his success. The other was, he was a Nietzschean figure. Anything that didn't kill him made him stronger. He was like 78, 77 at that time. He was sleeping three or four hours. Anything, what was being said at him was so venomous, some of it earned, some of it not, that anybody would have had a psychological episode. But they were trying to destroy him physically, psychologically, financially, materially. And every time they did it, he got stronger. And he went up in the polls. I would chart it in the book. He went up one point, two points. Mugshot, two points. Goes to a bodega in between court

• 56:35Speaker 02

  appearances, talks to the Hispanic people, up one or two points. It was really kind of unfair for DeSantis and Nikki Haley. They were both were seasoned politicians. But you'd see them and you'd say, it's not going to work, you guys, because if you come out, you have two choices, and they're both bad. If you come out and say, well, Trump got himself with all the classified files, so I can see why they went to Mar-a-Lago, then you're siding with the people who are conducting lawfare in a primary that Republicans won't like. Because they all didn't like what was going on. They may not have all liked Trump, but they didn't like what they were doing to Trump. But if you sided with Trump, then you were just aiding and fueling his candidacy. And they couldn't, there was no way to square

• 57:19Speaker 02

  that. So, and he was out, the last 150 days of the campaign, I looked at when I was reading the book, she spent $1.6 billion. It was three times what he had. I can't imagine Donald Trump paying money, say if he had Oprah, to Oprah's media company, a million dollars, or Beyonce's company, to do that. I don't think he paid, he would never pay anybody to appear with him. That's why he doesn't lose the base. They always stay with him because, you know, they think he's at least authentic.

• 57:51Mike Rowe?

  What do you think has happened to the people on the right side of the aisle who he has lost? I don't know how personal we should get.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  I have a theory about that.

• 58:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  So I'm not talking about Nick Fuentes. I don't think Trump really knew him at all. But people like Candace Owens, Tucker, to a lesser extent, Steve Bannon. I don't think he's really divorced himself from Trump. But let's just say, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massey, those guys. Ostensibly, they say, Tucker, I think yesterday said, Trump should be put in jail, or he should, I think it was either jail, or he should be removed immediately. And he's going to, I think he's going to endorse El Said. Which is interesting because it's an, it's an antithesis to everything he's said for his entire life. But this is

• 58:46Speaker 02

  not like the never Trumpers of 2016, the Bill Crystals, the David Frums, the George Wills, all those guys. They bolted because either they were free market guys, or they thought, but most of it was his crudity, they felt. They felt, not in my name, I don't want him to represent. This is different. Ostensibly, it's two issues, that what they call forever are endless wars, even though tragically, we've lost 18, but we spent 70 billion. But compared to wars, that can't be qualified as an endless war. Second is the, I don't know how to put it. I don't want to make accusations, but there is something that

• 59:29Speaker 02

  resonates in all, when Thomas Massey said, my opponent is in Israel now, or when Marjorie Taylor Greene kept saying, the Epstein file, Epstein files, Epstein files, or when Tucker has people on there that says, basically, the Jews started World War II, and it was, and Churchill was a dupe. So there is this strong antisemitism there. And the cloak is, well, I'm just, I'm just, I just don't like Israel. But they don't just like, it wasn't just Israel, it's Jews. So why did they do that? Because that, those things,

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  I mean, his first term, he bombed Baghdad, he killed Baghdad, he waged war with a Wagner group, attacked her, and he obliterated them. He took three months to bomb the blank blank out of ISIS, he said. And he did. There was no criticism. So I think what it is, is they're developed, in all of those people, a sense of over familiarity. In other words, they were going to Mar-a-Lago, they were being on Air Force One, they were going to the White House. They felt a sense of importance, but control. Anybody knows anything about Donald Trump, nobody controls Donald Trump. So when that war started, or when the Epstein

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  files, Trump said publicly, I got tired of her because Marjorie Taylor Greene called me six or seven times a day. And Tucker was going out there on air. Tucker said, I campaigned for him. Every once in a while, he had called me, but I

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  I don't want to say what he said, or that would be impolite. But I can tell you that I have never been to the White House. And I wouldn't go because if you're writing about somebody, you want to be objectively for their sake and your sake. And then I would always think you can't do that. You can maybe visit for an hour. George Bush used to have historians, six or seven of them. But you weren't talking about politics. It was just history of war and stuff. But I think they merged. You should have critical distance. They merged that. And that gave them a self, a sense of self-importance and control. And they felt they were some of the most influential people in the world.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  And that he had not listened to them on the Epstein piles, on Iran, on Israel, on the Jews. And they really did think that he had called them and been so nice to them and accommodated them that he would snap to it.

• 1:02:07Mike Rowe?

  Maybe they just forgot he was president.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  That's what they did. That's exactly what they did. They forgot that there's 20,000 other people he probably talks to in any given year. And no one's much important. That was kind of what this, the, uh, the Never Trumpers. I had a very prominent Never Trumper that came to Hoover. And he, he said, I got to, uh, I'll have lunch with you. And he went on and on about a horrible person Donald Trump was. He was not going to vote for him. He was one of the architects of the Never Trump movement. And then he said something when he got up, which I'll never forget. He said, these people don't know what they're doing. And because that you have said he's going to win and you've written, you know, favorably of him, he'll call you at some point. And if he does, just mention my name. That's all.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  That I will be willing to offer my services to help him get out of the mess that he'll create. And I said, that's a very, I said, are you serious? He said, no, I, I'd like to get back in the White House. And I think a lot of that is with the Never Trumpers, that was one. But with these apostates on the right, because they haven't really developed a coherent, anti-MAGA agenda. 90% of the stuff that he's doing, they're still for. They won't admit it. They want the border closed. They want illegal immigration stopped. They like the reduction in crime. They don't like the radical Green New Deal. Uh, they don't like DEI.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  But it's the Iran war and Jews, Israel, three issues. And out of those three issues, they have created a intense dislike of Donald Trump. And I think it has something they feel betrayed because they, they in a fantasy fashion, imagine that they were the kitchen cabinet, so to speak, that were running the country, and they weren't. And anybody who knows anything about Trump, whether through firsthand dealings with him is that he is very magnanimous and friendly, but that is, should be cautionary that you do not,

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  and you don't interpret his magnanimity that you are reciprocal or you're symmetric with him. He is the President of the United States. And you do not want to, I don't think you want to follow up because he's so busy doing these things for the country. He doesn't have time to, you know, to say, come by for coffee or stop by. I think he genuinely means that when he says that to people. But if you take him up on it, you'll very soon find that you're bothersome. And I don't think that ever occurred to them. And there, that's what happened.

• 1:04:51Mike Rowe?

  Here's something that happened, and this came up on Meet the Press, I think, as I'm in violent agreement with everything you've just said. It makes perfect sense to my brain. But in 2015, Jeff Zucker, who was running CNN.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:08Mike Rowe?

  Called to tell me that I had a show on at the same time. It was a companion show with Anthony Bourdain's. And it was constantly being preempted because, you know, a news-ish network would preempt it. And it was getting frustrating. And Jeff called to tell me, look, I'm going to give you the show back because you're going to be preempted every week. I'm, I'm going into the Donald Trump business. The exact quote. And I said, okay. It was nice of him to give it back. It was a licensed show, and so I had a chance to sell it elsewhere. But the point is, I wrote a pretty cheeky post the next day, essentially blaming Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump for getting my show canceled. Right?

• 1:05:50Mike Rowe?

  And I said, to make up for it, you're all invited to donate a personal item that I can auction off to raise some money for my work ethic scholarships. I asked for Bernie's, you know, one of his rumpled blazers. And I thought Hillary could give up one of her pantsuits, maybe autograph it. I said, Donald Trump, maybe, I don't know, a pair of slippers, a bathrobe from one of your hotels. Just sign it, we'll auction it off. Now, I knew I wasn't going to hear from anybody. Right? It was just a thing to do to let my fans know that the show was going to be moving someplace else. Three days later, what was I handed? Special delivery. It was a damn autographed bathrobe from Donald Trump, which I had no choice but to put on and make a videotape

• 1:06:35Mike Rowe?

  and offer it to the highest bidder for our scholarship program. I wound up getting $38,000 for the thing. Now, the moral of the story is, this is before he's even president. All the stuff you have said, I think, very, very germane. But as a marketer, as an opportunist, as a guy, like, why wouldn't the other two even consider it? And why did he so reflexively pick up the phone and say, hey, somebody, somewhere, get me a robe, send it to this guy? He's got 6 million people on a Facebook page. I'm trying to win an election.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  I think I would answer that with a phrase that they used of Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was supposed to be, you know, he, he killed a million Gauls and he enslaved a million over a 10-year campaign to conquer what's now modern Belgium and France. And he was known as vicious. But he was also unique. They called, he, in his mintage, his coins, they always said, clementia caesaris. The clemency of Caesar. Because he would forgive. He forgave Brutus and then Brutus turned around and killed him. Brutus was one of the revolutionaries against the anti-Cesareans. So have you noticed that when Steve Bannon said all those terrible things about him,

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  Steve Bannon is a close associate again with him? How many times did Elon Musk say that Trump was guilty of things? And he called him back. I guess it was Michael, was it Michael Cohen who was part of the, he was on TV with him the other day. And he killed the arch-terrorist of Iran, Soleimani. And then Iran called us up and said, i.e. Trump, the us Americans. And he said, well, we have to do something to save face. And they made a little deal that they could send six or seven rockets at our installations. They told us where they were going to land. It was widely reported.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  I think some people complained that some soldiers had a concussion or something from the blast. But basically, he did it. And then after he bombed last June, the next day, he said, I want to make Iran great again. And I thought, wow. For all the viciousness of his tweets, he does not have a Hillary Clinton old feud mean streak. He does not have, you know, I can remember when there was a clown in the Missouri State Fair who wore a mask of Obama. And he had worn other presidential masks as a rodeo clown. And the White House called and they banned that guy for life.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  So what I'm getting at, he calls people up, he screams and yells them, but he's transactional. And when I wrote the book, I read almost all of the art of the deal, art of the comeback. And he did say something that you never really insult somebody or hold a lasting grudge after a deal. You usually, you go in and you want 90% of the deal and he's not going to give it to you. And then you scream and yell. And when you get down to 53% advantage or 55, you cut a deal. But you don't go brag that you took that guy. You say, it was really tough. Because you never know when you're going to deal with him again, see him.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  And that is a theme that I wrote in the book. One of the reasons he came back was he can call Ron DeSantis all sorts of things, sanctimonious. But if Ron DeSantis calls him up and says, Mr. President, I got a good person for a federal judgeship in Florida, Trump will say, well, Ron, let's work on it. He is that way. And it doesn't make sense to a lot of people. They keep thinking he's vindictive. He's not a vindictive person. He can say terrible things, but the next moment, he's transactional with almost anyone.

• 1:10:35Mike Rowe?

  Some of you might recall the chaos that ensued last year, right around this time, when Pure Talk offered a very limited promotion called Unlimited Data for Life. Because that's exactly what it was. Unlimited talk, text, and data for $29.95 a month for life. Not your phone's life, your life. Anyhow, I announced this offer in a television commercial. And the offer was so popular, the commercial went viral. And unfortunately, lots of people saw it after the promotion had ended. And months later, people were still asking me if they could get in on the deal. Well, the answer is no. That deal came and went. But guess what? It's back. Unlimited Data for Life is back for a very limited time.

• 1:11:20Mike Rowe?

  Same deal as last year. No contracts, no commitments, just unlimited talk, text, and data, along with a 30 gig hotspot for just $29.95 a month for the rest of your life, which I'm betting will last a lot longer than this offer. It's the Unlimited Data Plan from Pure Talk, otherwise known as The Deal of a Lifetime. Taxes and fees not included. Some restrictions do apply. See puretalk.com for details. Offer ends 11/15/26. Unlimited data for the rest of your life. Go get some.

• 1:12:00Mike Rowe?

  When do you cringe, or do you?

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  I do, I do. I don't like it, especially the Romans. It's a very famous phrase in early church doctrine, but also among the Romans. "Di corae nulum nisi bonum dei mortui." Say nothing good, say nothing but good things, say nothing bad. It doesn't really, it translates better, "Say nothing unless it's good about the dead." And they mean that, the recent dead. So when he said that about Rob Reiner, I got very angry about that. And I said, "He shouldn't have done that." I know that Rob Reiner had been very vicious to him, but he had just died. He had died tragically by his own son.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  And then there was a very controversial, my, I'm very close to my oldest daughter, and she has a disabled child with a very severe genetic defect. And one of the manifestations of that defect, it's called Smith-McGuinness. It's a little bit worse than Downs. And she'll do this, grab her face, or she'll go like this. And he, I know you remember it so much, during that campaign, he did this to a reporter. And he, his supporters, and he said that he had done it to other people, just like this. But it came across that that person had a, and I thought, my daughter called me and was very upset. And I, I looked at it 20 times, and I never really knew,

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  but I don't think you even want to get in that situation where you make fun of someone. Those are the things that have made me cringe, when he makes fun of a person's, um...

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  He said the other day about the premier of Ontario, yes, Ontario, Ford, who's kind of heavy. And he said, "Well, he's known as a slob." You could say a thousand things, but you're gonna have to deal with him. So I didn't understand why he would call him a slob like that. So, and I think he, he understands that he does that sometimes. I know that he didn't continue that with Rob Reiner, he was defensive after that.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Some of the things he says are cruel, but we forget that they're, what he said about John McCain, I objected to when they said something, he was signing a book, and he said, "John McCain doesn't approve." "I would prefer our people were not taken prisoner," something to that effect. But he didn't, the subtext of that is John McCain had just said the day before that Trump brings out all the crazies, all the people who are Trump supporters. He called them crazy, and another time, I think he called them hobbits or something. So it was a tick, but still, that was an, and then a wrong thing to say. So I think everybody knows that. There's certain things that he does that I have an open mind, but I'm very skep-

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Promising people $5,000 before the midterms. If he had said that they were going to, that all Americans, regardless, if we hit certain financial targets, we'd get a $5,000 rebate. But my gosh, we're, we're $41 trillion in debt, and we're gonna run a trillion-dollar deficit again. And we're can't, Besse, who's a, I think, a fiscal genius, but I don't think we can grow our way out of that without controlling spending.

• 1:15:29Mike Rowe?

  So what then is your advice, if any, for people? Where do you put your disappointments? And how do you, A, acknowledge them, and then reconcile them with the larger issue? Are you able to do that because you're an historian who can quote really relevant Latin phrases? And it's all, I guess my question is, Trump reconciliation for dummies?

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  Well, I do it two ways. One, because of the nature of the media that does not feel that it's informative, but it really is part of a political movement. So I was with a member of my family who I will say despises Donald Trump. And by association, probably despises me. And we were talking, and I got very tired, so I said the following. "I agree with you. I can't believe he was in the White House, and his own daughter, Ivanka, was going down the hallway and arranging to have a mistress with him." His mistress, right in the White House. And then I said, and you know another thing that really bothered me?

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  There was an 18-year-old intern that he was having sexual relations with, and he kind of farmed her out to an aide.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  But even worse, he was on the toilet, every time he gets on the toilet, he waits until he has to have a bowel movement, and then he has a associate come in to take notes with the door open, and he humiliates them. And then I say, and this should have given it away, I said, "And then there was a very sick act he conducted in the Oval Office with an intern who was his subordinate, and he took advantage of that and destroyed her life, probably, but it was a very sick thing sexually to do." And she said, "I'm glad, I'm glad you finally agree." I said, "I just talked about FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Bill Clinton."

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  And she said, "Oh, that's not true." I said, "It's demonstrably true, every one of those incidents." And then, you know, she said, "Well, how about Stormy Daniels?" I said, "That is bad." I believe that he did have an affair with her, and it was bad. But then I also want to know why Tara Reid was destroyed, basically, when she had even better documented, and we don't associate that with. So part of it is that people focus on him. So when Hillary Clinton, you know, when he did the "Grab 'em by the P" expletive from 10 years ago, talking to, see, there was a context there.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  But when she got so sanctimonious, and then he brought in all of the former liaisons of Bill Clinton right in front of her at the debate, he really did expose that we have a double spanner. Then the other part, how I do, I just, the greater good, I'm not saying I justify it, but I say to myself, we were in big trouble, we had 50,000 recruits short. And there was a particular demographic of white males from rural areas that were not joining. There were, 85 of them had been kicked out for not getting vaccinated, when we were letting in 10,000 people a day not vaccinated.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  Part of it was DEI, but all of a sudden, he brought in, now we have no recruitment problem. Nobody talks about that. And when you look at workers' income, it's starting, in the first term, it went up. It's going up again. I think that this idea of emphasizing class rather than race was salutary. DEI, if DEI had continued, or if, I think it'll ruin the country, because it's a classical tribal mentality, and it's anti-American, and there's too many tribes that it won't work. And any big democracy in the world that has a tribal system like India, or Brazil,

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  or Indonesia, doesn't work very well. So I never thought that the United States, who was at the mercy of our exporters, I never thought that we would be the greatest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization, which we are now. I never thought that he ever would close the border. I didn't think it would be possible. I never thought we'd be at a 70-year-low in violent, so all of those benefit millions of people. There is a line where you can't support, but I haven't got there yet, where the things he says are so crude that it negates all of that.

• 1:20:27Mike Rowe?

  This morning Gavin Newsom said that he would tax 100% any $5,000 dividend that was sent to California.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I see Gavin Newsom, and I say-

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  California has the highest income tax. It has the fourth highest sales tax. It has the highest gas prices. It has the highest gas taxes. It ran a $70 billion deficit at the beginning of the fiscal year. It has one third of all welfare recipients. It has, I think now, more than West Virginia, 21% below the poverty line. 50% of all the births are on Medi-Cal. 40% of the people are on Medi-Cal. We've had three catastrophic fires. The Aspen Fire, the Paradise, and the Pacific Palisades. And they still look like they happened yesterday, almost. The high-speed rail shut down my road.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  It's five miles to the west from where I'm speaking for five years for one overpass. It's about $30 billion, and they haven't laid one foot of track yet. And when they do finish, it'll be how to get on the train one hour and 30 minutes quicker to go from Bakersfield to Merced than the Amtrak. And I look at all the things. The 99 freeway is, by 100 miles driven, the most dangerous in the world. And it's right here, and there are areas that have not changed in 70 years, two lanes each way. Gavin Newsom let 45,000 people on the road that did not have to have what we would call

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  the normal three-hour written exam. They had to be 21. They had to be US citizens. They had to have a physical. They had to have a two-hour in-person. I don't know how they did it, but I see them on the freeway when I drive to Stanford. They're in the left or middle lanes going 70. And they've killed people. All of those things. When I see Gavin Newsom, he looks great. He has a nice $9 million mansion. He knows all of the people. He knows the Pelosi's. He knows Barbara Boxer. He knew Dianne Feinstein. He knew the whole Bay area political establishment. He comes down to Stanford. He knows all of Silicon Valley. He dresses well.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Anytime he does use an expletive, it's contrived, but he pretty much is pretty elegant. He's smooth. But he's ruined a lot of lives in California. I was born, I'm the fifth generation in this house, and I have never seen the state in worse condition than what he's done. Yeah, it's hard to destroy California. It's so naturally rich. And we had such prior brilliant generations. Everybody, it seemed to me, in the United States, from 1920 to 1950, who was brilliant, came here.

• 1:23:27Mike Rowe?

  What is your hope for the book? I think it will be a time capsule. I think most of your stuff is, but do you have an affirmative hope?

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I do. I think the lesson is that you don't destroy institutions because you have fixated in your personal hatred, whether it's Warner or not. As the historian Thucydides says, "You don't do it because you never know when you're going to need them." Basically, the Left said to us, "It's now OK to raid a president's house," even though there was 0.001%. 101 files out of somewhere between 11,014. They went into Melania's drawer. They put their little stickers on things. They messed up the floor with all files.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  You don't, in five separate criminal, you know, you don't try him at the local level with Alvin Bragg, at the county level with Fannie Willis, at the state level with Letitia James, at the federal level with Jack Smith, with E. Jean Carroll, funded by a billionaire from Silicon Valley. You don't try to get a candidate off the ballot. 25 states tried to get him off the ballot. You don't have a level of vituperation you'd like to cut his head off, shoot him, blow him up, poison him, set him on fire, stab him. I have all of those in the book. If you're a retired general and you're sober and judicious, and we all love you, why do

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  you call the President of the United States, whoever it is, Mussolini, a pathological liar, a Nazi, similar to the architect of Auschwitz, quoting directly? So I wanted to chronicle all of that and say, we went in with the Steele dossier and Hunter's laptop and the 50. We went into a period of sheer hatred where the institutions, and I got into COVID and all of that, Fauci, they felt he was such an existential threat that any means necessary were justified to get that end. And the end was not to get him out of the office, but to destroy him, destroy what he represented and destroy him.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  And I wanted to chronicle all of that. And then I wanted to also explain that one of the great things about America is, and I have, we like people who have been destroyed and come back. Nixon is popular now. There's a whole cult on campus. We have these things called the Comeback of the Year Award. We like people who, Hunter Biden is all over TV for some reason, but it has something to do with he was the lowest of the low with his drugs and sex, and now he's pontificating about politics. That's why I started the book in the moments after January 6. And I thought, he is done. He was despised.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  And then what does it take to do that? And how does America allow that? And I think it's a good thing, too, that we like people who never give up. I wanted to do that.

• 1:26:42Mike Rowe?

  Well, you accomplished it. It's a terrific read. But I want to close with, since you invoke some Latin, I'm thinking of, oh, I'll get this wrong, but I think it's damnation memoria?

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  Yes, damnatio memoria.

• 1:26:57Mike Rowe?

  Yes. I thought of it years ago when we saw our statues coming down and so many attempts, whether it's the 1619 Project, you know, ways to revise history, expunge it in total, fabricate it from whole cloth. Do you think that somehow rhymes today? And is the fact that we love our phoenixes rising from the ashes in some counterintuitive way interesting to riff on with the Italian sentiment?

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  I do. I think people get very angry that in the year of our Lord, 2026, that people dare to go in and destroy the foundational date, 1776, and say it's 1619, or they want to tear down any confederate, even John James Longstreet, who regretted slavery, never owned a slave. He worked for the Union afterwards. But anybody who fought on the South, we're going to take his statue down. The Romans damned the prior emperor, and they were a lot more practical. They left the body of the statue there, and they just changed the face because they all looked the same.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  But, and that's what the French revolutionaries did. They came in and they renamed the days of the week. They renamed the days of the month. They renamed the year zero. So they started out at zero. They killed priests. They just tried to destroy the Catholic Church, and they got Napoleon as a result. I don't think people like what's going on. I'll just finish by saying, I'm no bigger supporter of legal immigration. I think it's been wonderful for this country. But when you bring in people from antithetical positions and, I should say, environments,

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  states, so we have Ms. Kuros comes in from Ethiopia and is lecturing us now, what's wrong with America? We have to have reparations. And then we have Mr. Said giving a full sail critique, Mr. Mondami, Ilhan Omar, and they're all blasting this system of this magnanimous host that took them in. They all come from wretched places, Egypt and Haiti and Puerto Rico and Ethiopia and Uganda. And they start doing this, and the American people just finally get, you know, they don't know anything about Iwo Jima. They've never heard of Bellewood.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  They've never heard of Chancellorsville. They've never heard of Thomas Edison or any of these people. They have no interest in learning about us, but either they are first or second, and they start giving, I have never seen immigrants do that. And then when you contrast, to finish, how vulnerable and exposed they are to their own indictment of us, you say, OK, settler colonialists. Mondami, you were from the Indian community in Uganda. That was the 1%. You own 65% of the GDP of Uganda. Your community did. Your community was placed there by the British Empire to herd the Ugandans, to watch over them, make them good imperial subjects.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Ilhan Omar, you're talking about the Israelis and us, and you use that term, and you say genocide. Your father was a colonel in Said Barry's army that killed 200,000 people. And he was very well-known, according to the people today in Somali land, that he helped slaughter. And I could go on with all of these groups. El Said giving this big, and I have been to Old Cairo, and I have been to Egypt. And when Hassan Parker says this, his family's from Turkey. They're very rich. Many of these people are very rich. They just took the greatest church and christened them for 1,000 years, Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, which had been a UN...

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  Designated landmark and they made it into a mosque, just as if it's 1453 again and they've taken it. And of course, Constantinople was the chief city of the Eastern Roman Empire and after 473, the chief city in the Christian Western world until it was taken by Islam at a very late date in its thousand-year history. But of course, we don't think like that. We think that's just tragedy, that's what history. But these people then start indicting us for things that happened years ago and we're supposed to say they're immigrants or they fit a category of DEI, so they're completely exempt. And I just don't think people are going to accept that anymore.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  It's nothing to do with race, it's just common hospitality that when you go to some, come into someone's house or you want to join someone, you say they don't have to be perfect to be good, or you say there were elements in that culture that wanted me to be a part of it.

• 1:32:11Mike Rowe?

  There's something about the, like, the rules of engagement and the impact of language. I know we're done, but I just want to say that you, you mentioned John McCain and I agreed, whatever Trump said, I prefer, I prefer my war heroes not to be captured or something like that.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what he said, yeah.

• 1:32:32Mike Rowe?

  Well, around the same time McCain corrected someone for referring to President Obama.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  That was at a radio, yes, that was at a Indiana rally and the person said Barack Hussein Obama.

• 1:32:48Mike Rowe?

  And McCain said, no, no, no, we don't play that game.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Yes, and that person, and the funny thing is that Barack Obama had been using as an, at an earlier iteration of his career. And one of the reasons that that whole birther nonsense grew up is because Barack Obama put on the jacket of his first book that he was born in Kenya. And that's what started all. You can still see it and if you get in the used book store, Barack Hussein Obama is a brilliant new state legislature and he's written a book, Dreams of My Father, and he has an insight as a Kenyan, born in Kenya. And that was not true, he probably, I don't think he was born, I know he was born in

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  the United States, but he thought that as literary publicists do, that would give it a little DEI boost.

• 1:33:38Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I know that, and that was why McCain lost and McCain and Romney too. They said, we play by the Marcus of Queensberry rules and we would rather lose nobly than win ugly. And Trump came along and said, that's what George H.W. Bush said, that's what Dole said, that's, and the only time you ever win is when you get a guy like Lee Atwater and he does the tank and the Boston Harbor and the Willie Horton, and then as soon as he wins for you and he uses their tactics, then you ridicule him and you don't ever want to do that again.

• 1:34:16Mike Rowe?

  That's going back to Dukakis. I don't think Dukakis was a bad guy.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  No, he's a wonderful person, but he was a lousy candidate and he was not truthful about his, his vulnerabilities. And Lee Atwater was kind of a mean, crass guy, but he was a brilliant tactician and he got George W. Bush, H.W. elected. And after that, the Republican aristocracy said, we don't play that game. And Bill Clinton, you know, he tore into Bush, he said it was the worst depression we've ever been in, it was a mild recession. Romney, they just destroyed him, they said he had, you know, put a dog on his roof, threw his wife, was an equestrian and all of this, he had MS. He didn't respond in the way that he should.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  And Reagan did. The last person to do it was Ronald Reagan, really, in that one little campaign of George H.W. Bush. And Trump said, well, I'm going to win ugly, but I'm going to win because if I don't win, the country's going to go to blank, blank. That was his message.

• 1:35:21Mike Rowe?

  Except he didn't say blank, blank, did he?

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  No, he didn't.

• 1:35:24Mike Rowe?

  Well, your gentleman, sir, your, your new book is thick and thoughtful, unlike all your others. I have no doubt it'll be remembered as important and maybe prophetic. I'll close with this, you tossed me a softball an hour and a half ago with that crawl space encapsulation and that's what this is. Our country is a big house and it's getting older and there are parts of it that need to be tended to and they're out of sight and they're out of mind. And you're heroic to me because you, you don't just pay homage to the people who tend to the infrastructure, you work with them, you live with them.

• 1:36:08Mike Rowe?

  You are their hero. And for so many other people, I'm telling you, Victor, it's, the headlines have caught up to your message.

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  I don't know how to explain it, I'll just finish with, I like them, I've always liked them. I like the American middle class. I've always liked them.

• 1:36:25Mike Rowe?

  I do too.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know you do.

• 1:36:27Mike Rowe?

  I like you.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  Well, thank you again. Take care.

• 1:36:31Mike Rowe?

  Of course. Thank you. When you leave a review, only five stars will do, not just one or just two or just three, we were hoping for more. As in, one more than the four. Oh, please, one more than four. Just a quick review with five stars too, from the you, five stars will do.

• 1:37:16Speaker 03

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• 1:37:46Speaker 04

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