Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Needs Unified, Focused Strategy in Election Battle

Zachary Stieber
Jan Jekielek
11/16/2020
Updated:
11/17/2020

President Donald Trump needs a unified strategy that includes daily, clear updates on what he and his team are doing as they engage in legal challenges to election results in battleground states, Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told The Epoch Times.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has claimed victory in the election, even with weeks to go before results are certified and amid a flurry of lawsuits launched by the Trump campaign and others alleging election fraud and irregularities in key states.

“Donald Trump has a legal problem to get a fair vote, but he also has a political problem. Every day that he doesn’t get massive evidence of a win in Georgia or Arizona, then the American public shrugs and says, I guess Biden is president,” Hanson told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders“ program.

“If he wants a chance, he’s got to speed up his pressure on these states to finish their voting and if there’s a recount necessary, find it and get his political, legal, and data teams coordinated,” he added.

Hanson recommended Trump pick a czar to be the public face of the battle in Pennsylvania and other states who can present clear, daily updates to the American public, similar to how the White House coronavirus task force updated the nation nearly every day on the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring and part of the summer.

President Donald Trump stands next to a U.S. map of reported CCP virus cases as he speaks about the administration's plan for reopening schools during a COVID-19 news briefing at the White House, on July 23, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
President Donald Trump stands next to a U.S. map of reported CCP virus cases as he speaks about the administration's plan for reopening schools during a COVID-19 news briefing at the White House, on July 23, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The czar would have a new chart at each briefing and explain key updates on what the team has found and is doing.

“So you have a czar, and he comes on every day, just like the COVID team, and he has a chart, and he says, ‘Here is what we’re doing in Wisconsin: we found that all of these anecdotes resulted in so many votes, we think they’re going to be here,’” Hanson said.

“And then you have the computer guy, who says, ‘You know what, this particular brand of automatic voting and this type of software has a problem here in Georgia or Wisconsin and it’s had a problem in these other states, and it’s not reliable, and we have data to prove it—and we have data to prove how many votes were miscounted.’

“And then you have a person who’s a political person and he says, ‘Joe Biden is violating not just the traditions that you cannot claim victory until the electors choose you’—and they have to be picked once the states have been certified; they haven’t even been certified yet, the accurate vote—‘but he’s violating what he said on his first campaign debate when people asked him directly, will you claim victory? When will you do it?’”

Biden said during the first presidential debate that he wouldn’t declare victory until the election was independently certified. Trump, on the other hand, told the audience that he couldn’t go along with the results if he saw “tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated.”

Trump has rarely appeared in public since Election Day and has different people leading the battles in different states.

“Trump needs that coordination and the czar and these grandees to get his strategy. And so far, it’s been outsourced and disjointed. It’s got to be unified, in focus,” Hanson added.