Victor Davis Hanson is back with us. He is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and

emeritus professor of classics at Cal State Fresno. His many books include the Second World Wars,

the dying citizen, which I think we covered a couple of years ago, and the case for Trump,

which came out in 2019. That volume has been updated with material on events since then,

and is published in a new 2024 edition,

and that is our topic today. Welcome, Professor Hansen.

Thank you for having me more.

There is much to discuss in the book, of course, and I will focus on the, really the added

commentary that brings us to the present. At the start, just say,

you cast Donald Trump as a, quote, tragic hero. Now, I can imagine a lot of liberals reading that

or leftist reading that and either laughing at, what are you talking about, such a characterization?

How does Trump fit that role?

Well, whether it's esophically in tragedy like Ajax or Philatides all the way through the Western

tradition to the John Ford movie, say the searchers or maybe George

Stevens chain.

There's this figure in Western popular culture and literature of an outsider that has certain

particular skills that usually are incompatible with normal society, but when societies get into an impasse

and their normal way of addressing problems doesn't work, they call on these people to come

in to deal with the existential threat or the chaos or their own inability or degeneration in the sense of things are not going well and getting worse.

And after this outsider, whether he's Shane or the Magnificent Seven, or Ethan Edwards and the Searcher,

or as I said, Philictetes at Troy, Once they start to be effective and we leave and start to

solve the problem, then people recalibrate their focus and look at the person, not maybe in the case

...