Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Managed to Expose the Left’s Neo-Confederate Policies

Victor Davis Hanson argues that sanctuary cities are not merely a policy disagreement but a fundamental constitutional crisis. He calls them a “neo-Confederate” idea, one that resurrects the pre-Civil War doctrine of nullification, where local jurisdictions declare themselves exempt from federal law. The organizing question of the episode is whether a state or city can selectively ignore federal statutes it disagrees with, and Hanson’s answer is an emphatic no—rooted in constitutional text, historical precedent, and personal experience.

The Sanctuary City Framework: Selective Nullification

Hanson frames sanctuary city policies as a direct inversion of the constitutional hierarchy. Federal law, he argues, is supposed to trump state law on matters like immigration, just as it does on endangered species, gun registration, or highway speed limits. He recalls that in the 1970s, the federal government threatened to withhold highway funds from states that refused to adopt a 55 mph speed limit—and they complied. “I don't know why we can't do that again,” he says. The mechanism, then, is simple: the federal government has the power to condition funding on compliance with federal law, but lower courts have blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to do so. The result is a patchwork of over 600 jurisdictions—counties, cities, and entire states like California—that have declared t