Biden Is Not Like Ike, He Gave Soros the Medal of Freedom but Warns of Oligarchs

Victor Davis Hanson, the renowned American historian and political commentator, has joined The Daily Signal as a senior contributor. This transcript has been lightly edited.

The word “oligarchs” is in the news lately. I think all of you may have heard or tuned in to Joe Biden’s farewell address, where he warned about a new oligarchy, or multibillionaires that have undue influence in the United States. It’s kind of strange because it’s at the end of his four-year tenure so he’s obviously alluding to Donald Trump.

A couple of things to think about when he brings up this topic of oligarchy, he’s trying to resonate—in his farewell address—“Ike” Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech, some 64 years earlier, warning about a military industrial complex—that we’re going to perpetuate huge government bureaucracies, build platforms of bureaucracy, munitions that we might not need.

And he was worried about the stifling of the citizen. But remember Joe Biden is no Dwight Eisenhower. He had credibility. He was a two-term president. He was the hero of what he called the American crusade in Europe, from the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, all the way into the interior of Germany.

So people believed him. Unfortunately, Joe Biden has no such credibility. 

The second thing is it’s hypocritical. Joe Biden gave the Medal of Freedom to George Soros. He’s a billionaire, yes. He’s an oligarch, but he broke the Bank of England, at one point. He was convicted of a felony in France. He was the one that bankrolled all of these destructive, needless prosecutors here in California—the Gascons, the Boudins, Kim Foxx, Alvin Bragg. He put people in that believed in critical legal and critical race theory and kind of destroyed the sanctity of jurisprudence. Joe Biden was a beneficiary of $419 million from Mark Zuckerberg in the 2020 election, who absorbed the work of the registrars in key states. Remember that.

He was hand in glove working with Facebook to suppress the news of the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop, right before the last debate, and just weeks before the 2020 election. So, he should not talk about “oligarchs.” What he’s really angry about is that very wealthy, powerful people have flipped from the Democratic Party in some cases to the Trump cause.

The third thing to remember is that these are not just oligarchs—in the sense of very wealthy people—people who made their fortunes in insurance, investment, hedge funds. Those people are very important to the economy. But there’s also a different type of billionaire, multi-billionaire. And those are the people who make things.

And Elon Musk broke into the big three automobile. He saved the whole idea of electric vehicles. You can see his SpaceX with that mysterious arm that catches the booster upon recovery. He created Starlink—what I’m doing right now on my farm is using Starlink to get to you via Elon Musk. He reinvented social media.

Whatever people think about Jeff Bezos—one of the people who, I think, Joe Biden is angry at—he reinvented the way we merchandise. He brought back the idea you could stay at home and people could deliver to you. That was discredited in the 1960s and 70s, but he revolutionized the idea that the world market was at your fingertips.

I’m not a big fan of Mark Zuckerberg, and he was a hostile opponent of Donald Trump, but whether you like him or not, he revolutionized Facebook. So, these so-called oligarchs, David Sacks, or Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos, they are ”can-do” people. And Trump has them around him now they’re making kind of a hajj to Mar-a-Lago, not because he wants to have some consortium and rig the market or punish his enemies, but because they make things. They’re very similar to the captains of industry, the “dollar-a-day” men, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt enlisted to win World War II. 

He didn’t like William Knudsen. William Knudsen was the head of General Motors Co., and he was a capitalist conservative. He could not stand Henry Ford, of Ford Motor Co., and he didn’t like Henry Kaiser, the ship builder. But he brought all three of them together and he said, “We’ve gotta win the war. You people have the ability. I’m going to partner with you to help America survive.”

And the result was, Henry Ford was producing a B-24 bomber per hour, at the Willow Run plant in Michigan. Henry Kaiser created the entire fleet, in just two years, of Liberty and Freedom ships. And William Knudsen marshaled the automobile industry to make Jeeps and trucks, and we exported 400,000 of the Soviet Union.

Those were so called oligarchs. They were also the people that saved us in World War II. Donald Trump is trying to enlist that talent to save us again. 

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