(DCNF)—Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson explained on Friday how Democratic senators’ attacks on President Donald Trump’s nominees during confirmation hearings are backfiring politically because of conservatives’ current ability to push their messages more effectively online.
Many Democratic senators have taken adversarial approaches to Trump’s cabinet nominees, including screaming at them, interrupting them and hurling accusations against them. Hanson, on “Victor Davis Hanson Show,” said that Trump’s nominees have all excelled at their hearings as they have come under fire from Democrats.
“The funny thing about all these nominees that some of the RINOs [Republicans in name only] in the party deprecated: Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, man when they go before those people— Sean Duffy — they have all of the answers,” Hanson said. “They’re really impressive people and they go head-to-head. It’s kind of they have a wink and a nod, and I think their logic, I’m just suggesting this, I don’t have any confirmation, but their attitude — they go in very confident.”
“So, their attitude is basically, ‘I have 53 senator votes and you have none to stop me. You can’t stop me. Now you think you’re going to get [Republican senators Lisa] Murkowski and [Susan] Collins and maybe Mitch [McConnel]? I can still get confirmed,’” he continued. “‘So, I’m not going to kiss up to you in any way possible. In fact, the only thing I worry about is not getting 50 senators. And the only way I would not get 50 senators is to sell out Donald Trump, and I’m not going to do that. I’m not stupid, and I don’t want to anyway.’ And that gives them a lot of confidence.”
McConnell, Murkowski and Collins all voted against Hegseth’s confirmation to be secretary of defense, but Vice President J.D. Vance broke the tie to confirm him on Jan. 24. His confirmation followed a hearing that included Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine accusing him of infidelity and Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand lecturing him for eight minutes about women serving in the military.
“And then you get these people frustrated, like [Democratic Massachusetts Sen.] Elizabeth Warren. She’s come off as completely unhinged. And then they don’t understand the media that the left — polling right now — 37% — and I guess it was the latest Emerson poll, 37% said they approve of the Democratic Party,” Hanson added. “Do they understand how they drive that down when somebody like Elizabeth Warren just cuts off [Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] RFK, won’t let him answer a question, screams and yells.”
Hanson referenced how Warren pressed Kennedy to “commit” to not accepting compensation for any lawsuits against drug companies during his potential tenure at HHS and for four years after, which prompted a heated exchange. He asserted that immediately after the clash, “the right-wing blogosphere” noted that Warren and Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders were the two senators who raised the most money in pharmaceutical contributions.
Senators on both sides of the aisle who critically questioned Kennedy at his Wednesday and Thursday hearings found their contributions from the healthcare industry and their personal investments in the pharmaceutical industry and companies that make highly processed food being highlighted on X, receiving millions of views.
The Democratic Party’s approval rating plunged to 31% among registered voters, according to Quinnipiac polling released Wednesday.
Sanders exploded at Kennedy during his Thursday confirmation hearing after the nominee accused him of corruption for accepting pharmaceutical industry donations. Hanson suggested Warren and Sanders are examples of “hypocrites that are defending big pharma against RFK,” saying “that doesn’t work” because of conservatives’ ability to push their agenda in part because of how billionaire Elon Musk has run social media platform X.
Hanson also said Democrats wrongly assumed attorney general nominee Pam Bondi was “just a blonde bimbo” and that they could “tear her apart.” He said that she instead “t[ore] them apart.” He similarly said they underestimated Hegseth.
“And then they see Pete Hegseth. And they go, ‘This guy is weird. He’s got the Jerusalem cross, you know, and he’s been married three times. And we’re just going to slice him up because I’m Senator Sanders and I’m Senator [Chuck] Schumer, I’m Senator Warren, I’m Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.’ And then he just destroys them,” Hanson said.
He also said Kennedy “destroyed” the Democratic senators while FBI Director nominee Kash Patel dealt with them “like carving a Christmas turkey.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
