Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson evaluates President Donald Trump compared to other Republicans on FOX News Channel’s “Life, Liberty & Levin.”

MARK LEVIN: Well, we’re with a man who I call America’s Wise Man, Victor Davis Hanson. We’re good friends. I really appreciate everything Victor writes and says. It’s so important. So Victor Davis Hanson, my question to you is this. You’re familiar with the long list of presidents that we’ve had, the great ones, sort of the average ones and the worst. At this time, in his second term of his presidency, where would you put Donald Trump? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION: Well, I think he’s in the top five because he’s waging — he’s not waging a revolution, as he’s accused, he is waging a counter revolution. He’s trying to — it is just not politics, Mark. It’s the border, it’s the economy, it’s the culture. It’s the Smithsonian. It’s PBS, it’s NPR, it’s the universities. I don’t think we’ve ever had a president that looked at 360 degrees and said the country needs to be brought back radically to the middle or it’s going to be destroyed, and he has done that in the first 10 months in an extraordinary way. Part of it is he learned from his first term that — he didn’t look at the resumes, he said himself, he came to Washington, he wasn’t familiar with it. He was given a lot of illustrious names, and many people in his administration thwarted him. He had four years to ponder that, why he was a victim of this lawfare and other things. And this time he said, I have to have people who are force multipliers. So he is consciously, deliberately, carefully, trying to redirect almost everything about American life that the progressives had altered radically the last 30 years. And the thing about it, no other Republican tried it. The Bushes didn’t do it, and John McCain wouldn’t have done it. Mitt Romney wouldn’t have done it. Bob Dole wouldn’t have done it. I can’t think of any other major Republican candidate or president who would have taken on that task to say that we have gone way beyond what the founders envisioned, and we’re a neo-socialist state, and Republicans said, well, we can alter it, we can slow down the progressive project. But no one said that we can stop it. He did. LEVIN: I think that’s so important what you’re saying, and isn’t that why the resistance is more aggressive than anything we might otherwise imagine? That is the fight over deportation. The Democrats thought they had that nailed down. Could create more congressional seats, can get birthright citizens and be the — really a one-party system, pretty much for the rest of time, like they’ve done to California, they’ve done to Illinois, and they’ve done to other states, and he put his foot down and said, no. You look at across the board how he has pushed back, but he is — as you point out, he’s gone into the culture. He’s gone into the society itself, where the Democrats are, where the Democrats play almost with monopoly authorities. He has gone into the bureaucracy, which you never would do. They own the bureaucracy. It’s not that he’s turning things upside down and inside out. He’s pushing things back, as you say, through a counter revolution for normalcy, right? HANSON: Yes, he is saying it’s not enough just to address the political revolution that the Democrats and the left wage. He asked a more fundamental question, where do they get this power to do this? Because the issues that they’re running on and they champion do not have public support. Open borders don’t have public support. Transgenderism doesn’t have — male in female sports doesn’t. How did they get this power? And he said, I know how they got this power. They got it with the indoctrination of K through 12, higher education, as you said, changing the demography with an open border, weaponizing the bureaucracy — FBI CIA or IRS. So he said, it doesn’t do any good to deal with the effects unless you go to the causes. And that’s why the left went crazy. They said, well, we don’t have any power in the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and The White House, but we have all this other power that will regenerate that political power as soon as — you know, when we kick in in two years. And now, all of a sudden, they said, oh my gosh, Donald Trump is addressing how we form propaganda, how we create bias, how we create all of these dogmas that the people don’t want, and we push it down their throat to these institutions. He is addressing the root causes, and that’s why I don’t blame them, because they understand that if he’s successful, they’re going to be neutered for a long time, so that’s why they’re furious about him.

RealClearPolitics Videos