Victor David Hanson on the Future of Trump's Counterrevolution: "Get Real" With David DesRosiers
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/09/28/get_real_w_david_desrosiers_victor_david_hanson_explains_trumps_counterrevolution.html

Author Victor Davis Hanson sits down with David DesRosiers on "Get Real" to discuss the question hanging over 2026: can the MAGA revolution last?

Hanson's latest book, "The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement," (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GF1K43WM?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback) maps the 2020 fall, the wilderness lawfare years, and the roaring 2024 return of Donald Trump. The president's reaction to the book was a comment that Hanson understood him better than he understood himself.

DesRosiers and Hanson take on how MAGA survived impeachment, prosecutions, media blackout, and political exile-and what the second term is now trying to lock in: borders, trade, energy, and a rollback of the progressive establishment. Why does he call the Trump movement a "counter-revolution"?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I use that term because it assumes a revolution, and that's what's happened the last 50 years: a march through the institutions.

So I think Trump basically said, how do these people have power to tell us there's three genders, or to suddenly have 53 million people in the United States that weren't born here and 17% of the population? Or how can it be that somebody's going into a store and he robs $949 worth of merchandise and it's basically a civil infraction? How do they do that when they don't have the House, they don't have the Supreme Court, they don't have the presidency?

And he thought about that, and he said, "They have taken over the K-12 institutions, academia, media, entertainment, professional sports, corporate boardrooms, both social media and traditional media, as I said, and they exercise insidious power, and I've got to address that."

So I think after the debacle of his so-called fall-that's where I start the book, with January 6. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said it couldn't happen to a nicer blank-blank. And DeSantis had not declared a candidacy, but he was coming off a spectacular gubernatorial win in Florida. He was ahead by 30 points in a putative poll.

But Trump, I think, fooled everybody. He was thinking that in these four wilderness years-because I think he thought he was going to run from the very beginning-there were three things.

Hanson outlines Trump's three-part comeback plan during his "wilderness" inter-term years:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Number one, he had addressed the symptoms of the progressive revolution, but he hadn't addressed the causes. So he brought in people who were not equipped to do that. Good people, nice people: Jim Mattis, John Kelly, John Bolton at one point, H.R. McMaster, Steve Mnuchin, Rex Tillerson. But they weren't on the MAGA agenda. And so they were just sort of putting their fingers in the dike at best, and at worst they were using their knowledge of Washington maybe to adapt, translate, warp his directives.

So he said, "That's not going to happen. Next time I'm going to address the symptoms, and I'm going to get MAGA loyalists, and we're going to hit the ground and we're going to say: Media-well, why do we fund PBS and NPR or Voice of America or USAID? Border-why do we just talk about a wall? We're talking about deporting everyone who came here illegally, especially with a crime. We're going to get into refugee status. Universities-yeah, they all complain about it. I'm going after taxing the endowment. I'm going to enforce civil rights legislation. I'm going after antisemitism. I'm going after them."

If I get back in, I'm going to deal with the causes of their power, not just the expressions of it.