Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. What are the sources, the causes of Democratic rage? We see the manifestations everywhere.

We have House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., holding a bat, as if he’s gonna club somebody. And then, he spoke for no reason for eight hours in the House. That didn’t compare with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. He did a pseudo-filibuster for 25 hours.

Almost weekly, there’s a video cut by representatives and senators on the Democratic side with the S-word or the F-word. And then we have Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., going to these oligarch rallies on private jets, damning the oligarchical class, when they are the people who fund the Democratic Party.

That’s one level of leftist outrage.

Then we have the internet mob. And they do everything from canonize and glorify the assassin Luigi Mangione—who killed the UnitedHealthcare executive—to even more grotesquely and ghoulishly, now they’re on the internet suggesting that the over a hundred people who were killed, many of them children, deserved what they got for, A, they didn’t believe in climate change. This had nothing to do with climate change. B, they’re from red-state Texas that believes in small government. So, they got small government. The National Weather Service had given prior warning with plenty of time to evacuate, had they done so. And third, they believe in the Department of Government Efficiency. So, they deserve what they get. I’m being literal.

Can you imagine people going on there? One internet person, Sade Perkins, basically said they were white and Christian and they deserve what they got.

That’s the second level of leftist outrage.

Then we come to what I would call the dregs. These are the mobs. These are the people who firebombed Tesla dealerships. These are the people who tried to run off the road Tesla drivers. These are the people who, in Los Angeles, waved Mexican flags and spat on and burned American flags. They destroyed patrol cars. They looted stores.

They tried to swarm Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Two groups of them, one a single shooter and another 10 arrested suspects, tried to kill ICE officers. These are the people that the Democratic Party either cannot or will not censor.

In fact, there’s a bill in the Congress, on the part of Democrats, to disallow masks on ICE officers and to make them wear a badge, so they and their families can be ready targets.

I could go on with these examples, but what is going on? Why are they so angry? Why isn’t this the old party of President Bill Clinton? Or even the party of President Barack Obama?

One: They have no institutional power. They do not have the House. They do not have the Senate. They do not have the White House. They do not have the Supreme Court. They do not have the issues. There are 30/70, 20/80 issues. And they’re on the wrong side.

They can’t have a plebiscite because the people would vote against men in women’s sports. People would vote against “defund the police.” People would vote against the Green New Deal. People would vote against the foreign policy that we’ve seen from Afghanistan to the Middle East.

So, they’re angry. They have no power.

Two: This time President Donald Trump is not looking at symptoms or manifestations of the progressive project. No, no, no. He’s not just saying, “We’re gonna address the border.” He’s not just saying, “We have to deal with crime or the economy.” He’s trying to say how things got out of control the last 50 years.

How did we get to a point where people actually believe biological men should compete in women’s sports? How do they actually believe you could let in 12,000 people a day? How did you actually believe that you could let people loot stores with no consequences?

And he came up with a solution.

What are the sources of Democratic power? It’s the universities. That’s where people are indoctrinated. Ninety-five percent of the faculty are hard left. It’s the foundations that fund all of these groups. It’s the media: CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, NPR. It’s the corporate boardroom.

And so, Donald Trump decided that he was going to go after the universities and hold them to account. Their endowments taxed. Federal grants reduced to 15% overcharges. Follow the civil rights rules or lose all of your federal money. No separation by race in graduations, themes, etc.

His two lawsuits have been settled with CBS and ABC about the media. They’re very wary now of simply smearing and slandering and tell beyond truths.

There’s a third reason, a third source of the anger of the Democratic Party and the Left in general. Donald Trump is successful. Had The Wall Street Journal and the other prognosticators been correct in March, we wouldn’t have this violence.

They said Donald Trump would cause a recession. They said that his trade talk and tariff wars would cause the stock market to permanently—or at least this year—crash. They said we were gonna have a recession.

What happened? Jobs are up. Inflation’s low. Tariff income is increased. The economy, gross domestic product is growing. It didn’t happen.

They said that if Donald Trump bombed the installations in Iran, we would have a theater-wide war. Twenty-five minutes and a ceasefire the next day.

I could go on, but Donald Trump is having an amazing success. He stopped all illegal immigration at the border. There’s zero. We were told you could not get 50,000 missing recruits back into the military. He did that. They’re already back.

And so, to review, the Left is going crazy because they can’t enact their progressive agenda through any political method. There’s no avenue for them to pass a law or an executive order or a Supreme Court decision.

They’re angry because they thought that even though they didn’t have these levers of power, they could use these other institutions—cultural, social, economic, political foundations, universities, K-12, media, sports. And now Donald Trump is going after them.

And third, they thought Donald Trump would fail and he’d be a buffoon. And he succeeded in a more dramatic fashion than any president in the last 50 years in his first six months.

Put it all together and they’re mad, mad, mad. And they should be because Donald Trump threatens not just to take their power away, but the sources of their power.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Trump Broke the Left and Exposed Its Dirty Playbook appeared first on The Daily Signal.