Via VigilantFox.com
Yes, they were all wrong.
In spectacular fashion.
Victor Davis Hanson just DISMANTLED the so-called “experts” who’ve been wrong about Trump’s policies at every turn.
He dropped three brutal examples that leave no room for doubt—and ended with this warning to the media elites:
“You should try to shed your Trump Derangement Syndrome, because it’s really affecting your powers of judgment and analysis, and you’re going to lose readers.”
Victor Davis Hanson has a message for the media and the self-anointed “experts” who’ve spent years forecasting disaster under Trump: look at the record.
In his eyes, their failures weren’t honest miscalculations but an unwillingness to admit they simply didn’t understand the country, or the president that they were so eager to condemn.
“I want to talk about our so-called experts,” he began, setting the tone for his argument with a reference to the infamous letter signed by intelligence veterans.
“We know they’ve been wrong when they sign these collective letters, 51 intelligence authorities assured us Hunter’s laptop was pretty much made up in Russia.”
It wasn’t, he argued, an isolated misfire.
Hanson accused major outlets of embracing analyses that fell apart under the weight of real events.
“Recently, in some of the marquee newspaper sites, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, of course, the New York Times, they made a series of statements by so-called experts that are absolutely confounded by reality.”
He was setting the stage for a bigger argument: that these repeated failures weren’t simply about being wrong.
They were about refusing to see what was right in front of their own eyes.
That stubbornness, Hanson argued, was especially obvious when it came to Iran.
The recent strikes on uranium enrichment facilities provided a textbook case of the media seizing on convenient narratives while ignoring evidence that didn’t fit.
“Let’s take Iran,” he said, describing how reports downplayed the strikes’ effectiveness.
“We get all of these stories that the combined Israel and the later United States strikes on the three key sites of uranium enrichment and around may not have done very much.”
Much of that spin, he claimed, came from a single Pentagon leak describing “marginal damage”—a version of events many outlets picked up without question.
But the reality, he insisted, was harder to deny for anyone who looked at the photos.
“Anybody who looked at the post operation panel, photographs could see that there was substantial damage.”
It wasn’t just his opinion.
“David Albright, one of the most prestigious, an analyst of nuclear proliferation. He said there was serious damage.”
He cited similar assessments from the IAEA’s Mr. Grossi and Israeli intelligence, while the press clung to the one leak that fit their angle.
And the real twist? Hanson highlighted what he saw as absurd hypocrisy in how the threat was framed before and after the strikes.
“The left told us before there was no need to strike Iran because they were months or years away from developing a bomb,” he said.
Yet once the facilities were hit, the same voices panicked about the danger of rapid enrichment.
“They said, oh my gosh, there might be uranium that could be quickly enriched.”
Even some of Trump’s own supporters, Hanson argued, weren’t immune to overreaction.
“The same thing, the same inexactitude, is true of the reaction to the, around war,” he said, recalling grim forecasts of “30,000 people killed, could cause World War Three.”
But the real story was anticlimactic in a way no one seemed eager to admit.
“We were in Iranian airspace for about 25 minutes. No Americans were killed. Probably very few if any Iranians were killed.”
Trump negotiated a ceasefire almost immediately.
And when Iran retaliated by launching missiles at a US base in Qatar, Hanson noted it was “22 year old, 23 year old skeleton crews” manning Patriot batteries who intercepted them without issue.
“Trump did not reply. End of story. No World War Three, no 30,000 killed, no endless wars.”
If the coverage of Iran revealed one kind of expert failure, the border crisis showed another—one that was more about stubborn dogma than leaked intelligence.
“Then we get to the border, and, we were told that there’s only one solution for the border, and that was comprehensive immigration reform.”
For years, the refrain was the same: without sweeping new laws, nothing could change.
Even Trump, they argued, couldn’t hope to make a real dent in illegal crossings.
But Hanson said those dire predictions met an inconvenient reality.
“We were said even Donald Trump should come in and get everything he wants. There’s no way you can reduce 10,000 people a day to zero,” he noted.
Then, with understated finality: “He did that. He did that.”
He revisited the idea of “self-deportation,” mocked for years as unworkable or even offensive.
Trump’s team, Hanson said, turned it into a policy with clear rules and real consequences.
“If you self-deport and you go back and you ever want to come back, you can legally you can reapply. But if you’re apprehended in the United States illegally, you can’t come back at least for ten years.”
They didn’t just make threats. They offered practical incentives.
“We will give you $1,000 to go back, and we will pay your air ticket deep into your country.”
According to Hanson, it worked on a scale the experts refused to believe possible.
“Almost a million people have self-deported,” he said, arguing the real border crisis today is largely about those who entered under Biden.
“They’re not coming because of these deterrents.”
With that, Hanson turned to the final example where he felt the expert class had shown stunning overconfidence: the economy.
“Finally, the Wall Street Journal told us that the tariffs in March and April, they were going to crash the stock market. They were going to raise prices. We would have a hyperinflation. We were going to have a recession,” he recalled.
The predictions were dire, and they extended to fears that deporting hundreds of thousands of workers would gut industries and kill jobs.
But Hanson said the actual numbers tell a different story.
“Here we are in June and the stock market is at a record high. The Japanese, the Chinese, their prices for their products, despite the tariffs that they were paying, are the same, if not lower. Job creation is good.”
He argued Trump’s approach was less about ideology and more about pragmatism.
“Donald Trump is pretty common sensical.”
For Hanson, the logic was simple: remove the shadow workforce that suppressed wages and confront trade partners who benefited from asymmetric tariffs.
Instead of collapse, he said, the US economy proved resilient…and even thrived.
“You can have an economic renaissance,” he said, if you were willing to challenge the accepted wisdom.
In the end, Hanson’s critique was less about individual mistakes than a culture of certainty that refused to learn.
He closed by listing, point by point, the predictions he believed had been definitively disproven.
These cut like a dagger.
“So just to conclude,” he said, “on nuclear proliferation—WRONG.”
“On a forever war following the bombing of the uranium enrichment plants in Iran—WRONG.”
“Wrong on the border that couldn’t be defended, that you couldn’t stop illegal immigration, you couldn’t self-deport people.”
“Wrong on tariffs, wrong on the so-called trade war. No recession, no inflation, no sudden loss of jobs.”
But for Hanson, it wasn’t just about being wrong, it was about the refusal to admit it.
That’s when he dropped his BRUTAL warning to media elites:
“You should try to shed your Trump Derangement Syndrome, because it’s really affecting your powers of judgment and analysis, and you’re going to lose readers.”
He insisted that the real solutions were never complicated or extreme but rooted in common sense.
“Close the border. Tell people to leave who are here illegally. Tell countries not to put tariffs on our goods unless they want tariffs on theirs. And don’t ever underestimate the US Air Force when it flies into an undefended airspace.”
And while he didn’t expect the media to change course, he offered a final promise to his audience.
“Most of the criticism of Donald Trump was not based on reality. Is this going to stop that fraudulent reporting? No, it’s going to continue.”
“But we’re going to be astute and awake before their inconsistencies.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.
