David French: Vengeance and Rage

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Up next, our pal, my minister and counselor, David French. Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've made it through week one, barely, kind of, sort of.
And my guest today is a friend of the pod. He's opinion columnist for the New York Times, co-host of the legal podcast, Advisory Opinions.
He was an army lawyer in JAG Corps during the Iraq War. It's David French.
How are you doing, David? Tim, it's so good to see you. I can't believe this Denver Nuggets hat, active aggression against a Western conference rival.
I don't understand this. I thought we were friends, Tim.
I thought this was a safe place. me.
I do notice the John Morant dunk poster over your shoulder. And you were probably asleep last night, so you don't know why I had this hat on.
But around 11 o'clock Eastern time, Nikola Jokic hit a 70-foot shot at the end of the third quarter. Tim, Tim, I saw that.
I mean, he was like 35, 20, and 15 last night. It's unbelievable.
I mean, he's magnificent. And how dare you? What kind of NBA fan do you think I am? I've seen that shot 200 times, Tim.
I mean, come on. Yeah.
You woke up this morning and you went over, instead of getting to your news feed on Blue Sky, you went to the NBA one. I get it.
We have to find our joys where we can. All right.
Because what I'm transitioning to is not that joyful. Yeah.
Your recent column, Donald Trump is running riot, begins thusly, I have never been more concerned about the rule of law in the United States. Was that hyperbole? Was that an author? You're trying to draw us in? No, no, no.
That's legitimately. Now, I will not say that it's the rule of law has never been in a worse place in the United States.
I mean, we have had worse times in the past, but in my lifetime, so I was born in 1969, in my lifetime, which is entirely in the post-civil rights era, and my adult lifetime has been dominated by the post-Watergate reform era, good government reforms. and to see what we saw over the first week of the Trump presidency.

And it was really two things specifically, Tim. It was the pardons of the January 6 rioters and the commutations of the most violent of them and the most seditious combined with, and I don't think enough people are paying attention to this, quite frankly, the revocation of security clearances for John Bolton, Secretary Pompeo, and others.
And so what that does, you have to look at these things as a package. You can't break these things out.
What that said is, if you break the law on Trump's behalf, if you commit violence on Trump's behalf, if you harm police officers on Trump's behalf, you're good.

You're good. Because the key of all of that wasn't violence.
It wasn't rioting. It wasn't cracking heads of police officers.
It was on Trump's behalf. So if you're operating on Trump's behalf, you're good.
Now, if you oppose Trump, think about this. In 2022, a man was arrested, a member of the Iranian IRGC was

arrested for a murder plot on John Bolton, and he's withdrawing protection. Keep in mind also,

Tim, Iranians have been plotting to kill Trump. So he knows how dangerous Iranian plots are,

and he's lifting protection from people he perceives to be his political enemies.

That is extraordinarily chilling, extraordinarily chilling. If something happens to John Bolton, if something happens to him, a just nation would immediately impeach and convict Trump for that.
I mean, because this is nakedly political targeting of a political opponent. And so when you have a person who's willing to do that, willing to place his political opponent's lives at risk while pardoning people who engaged in gross acts of seditious violence against police officers on his behalf, what conclusion should we draw from that? I haven't even gotten to the Bolton revocation of security clearance on the pod this week because there's just, you know what mean like it has been just kind of overwhelming but you know put in that context I think you recognize how important it was and I was with Bolton in Austin at one of these trib fest I guess it was and um I kind of had missed the story about the Iranian plot and so I was I didn't understand you know why his security was so intense there and so I got into it and like I was asking him and went and did the back research on it.
This is not like, you know, why his security was so intense there. And so I got into it.
And like, I was asking him and did and went and did the back research on it. This is not like, you know, not to minimize any of this, but this is not like, asshole leaves you a mean message on your phone, like type of threats.
Like this was a very legitimate threat targeting him. And that didn't do anything to Trump.
Did Bolton even support Harris in the election? I don't think so. He just said mean things on TV.
He said mean things on TV, which is all, right? That's insane. And Pompeo has hardly been leading the anti-Trump charge since Trump lost in 2020.
I mean, the level of vindictiveness this man has, it's remarkable. And the thing that I was projecting forward onto this was, okay, wait a minute, we have a lot of executive orders, many of which are lawless.
They're just lawless. And while I hope, and I still kind of expect Trump to comply with Supreme Court rulings like he did in 2017 to 2019, we all remember 2020 and 2021 when he just blew through dozens of legal rulings, just blew through them to try to engineer the coup to stay in power in 2021.
And so the question I have is how much confidence should we have that if it's an issue that matters enough to Trump, that he would comply with the Supreme Court? We have a couple of pieces of evidence that you mentioned in your article that he won't this time. Number one is the TikTok ban, right? And the Supreme Court affirms that 9-0 right before he comes in.
And then, you know, he sort of just waves a magic wand and it's like, actually, we're going to delay this a few weeks, like a clearly lawless action in reaction to what the court did. And then you referenced this audio in your column from J.D.
Vance. I want to play it from everybody.
I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did did and say the chief justice has made his ruling.
Now let him enforce it. Because this is, I think, a constitutional level crisis.
That was J.D. Vance of 2021.
Yeah. I mean, when you hear that, that is now the sitting vice president of the United States.
And not just the sitting vice president of the United States. This is a bit chilling.
Still, there's some indication that he's more moderate than Trump.

Because remember, before the January 6th pardons, J.D. Vance was indicating, no, no, no, if you committed acts of violence against police officers, well, you know, there should be punishment for that.
And Trump just goes and exceeds J.D. Vance's vision.
And Vance is referring to a almost certainly apocryphal quote from

Andrew Jackson that the entire incident with the Indian Removal Act was more complicated than a lot of the popular histories. But the meaning that J.D.
Vance was communicating was very clear. It's very clear.
If they deem a matter, a constitutional crisis in their judgment, then they believe they can disregard the Supreme Court.

And they... deem a matter, a constitutional crisis in their judgment, then they believe they can disregard the Supreme Court.
And this is an extraordinarily dangerous assertion. And so, you know, Trump does not always do the things that he says, obviously.
You know, one of the things he said is he's going to solve the Ukraine war in 24 hours that elapsed days ago. He obviously doesn't do everything that he says.
He obviously doesn't do everything that he says he's going to do, even when it's in his power, unlike the Ukraine war. But sometimes he does, and he does it often enough that you still have to pay attention to his words, like the January 6th pardons.
This is something where I think even a lot of Trump supporters were in denial about this. No, he's not going to pardon the Proud Boys.
He's not going to pardon the Oath Keepers, just the folks who are kind of walking around and have the trespassing charges. How many times did he have to call them hostages before you believed what his intentions were? It is confusing sometimes that I feel like I understand Donald Trump better than like his vice president.
I don't understand why that is. I guess it's sort of a cope, I guess, that people have to use to rationalize.
There's so much to get into on the legal side of all these executive orders. I kind of want to give you a dealer's choice on where you want to go first.
And the birthright citizenship is plain text. The emergency on the border that is premised on essentially nothing, you know, the word invasion, I guess, is what they premised the emergency powers that they've declared on the border.
You know, I want to get into the DEI and civil service EOs. What of all of that on the executive order side have you found the most troubling? Yeah, I think I'm most troubled by the use of the invasion language.
We can talk about some of the others and we should, but I'll just tell you briefly why I'm concerned about the invasion language. The reason why I'm concerned about that is that that use of the term invasion unlocks, if there is an actual invasion, okay, unlocks a lot of power.
It unlocks a lot of power, commander in chief power for the president and unlocks a lot of power for state governors who in the constitution are actually authorized to wage war in the event of evasion. And so this is a word that unlocks a lot of power.
Now you might think, okay, well, okay, in theory it does, but in reality, this is not an invasion. You go back and you look at James Madison, and James Madison talks about an invasion as an operation of war.
It's not an economic migration, which is what many of these folks are. When he was president, or is that a Federalist paper? This is in 1800, so this is early.
And so the courts that have wrestled with this issue and who've looked at this issue have all decided that illegal immigration is not an invasion. I mean, this is very common sense.
But here is, Tim, what worries me. The open question legally, really, truly isn't whether or not this is invasion by any standard of international law, of American history, of American tradition, it's not an invasion and it's not close.
So you might think, David, why do you take this so seriously? Well, the reason I take this so seriously is because there is an open question as to whether the determination of whether it's an invasion or not is justiciable in court. In other words, historically, when it comes to national security, the court has delegated a lot of these determinations to the political branches.
That's why you've, for example, never seen the Supreme Court say, enjoin the Korean War, because there wasn't a declaration of war. They leave that to the political branches.
And so one of the live questions is, even if the court believes it's not an invasion, would they issue a determination to that effect? Or would they treat it like other national security decisions and leave it to the political branches? And if they did, if they did leave it to the political branches, we could see some chilling, chilling things, Tim. Like such as? Well, once you've unlocked war powers because again you know we're talking about war powers here then you're talking about the elimination of due process you're talking about the use and deployment of military grade force now there are some people in hypermaga ultra mag are like, fine, call in an airstrike on a convoy.

They don't care.

But just think of the unrestrained power that exists when you unlock war powers. You're not in a world, a traditional world of law enforcement at that time.
And so you combine war powers with the Insurrection Act, which gives the president really at his discretion, the ability to call out active duty troops or to federalize the National Guard and put them under his command for domestic purposes. That creates a situation where he could deploy the military in ways that we've not previously seen.
Yeah. And just listening to you talk about this, I kind of haven't thought through it all that deeply.
But when I'm looking at the Supreme Court right now, you know, there's kind of a left progressive view that is that's like, well, these guys are going to do whatever Trump wants, right? Which there's not like a ton of evidence for like they've, they've certainly been very more friendly to Trump and some controversial rulings. And, you know, there are certain reasons to be critical of some of the rulings, particularly related to immunity.
but you know i do think that the instinct that like they're not going to want to pick fights with him unless they have to it might there might be something to that right like the birthright citizenship thing like this is right on its face right i like this is a plain court is going to decide that yeah yeah i mean it's just this is the this the Trump administration saying, we reject the plain text of the. Given what you just said about this situation, right? It is a little harder to kind of imagine them intervening with regards to the border security powers.
I do wonder about that, Tim, honestly, and I'm with you. I am not one of these people who says the Supreme Court's rubber stamping Trump.
In fact, there was a study in 2023 that said that the Supreme Court rebuked Trump in his one term between 2017 and 2021, more than other presidents. So it had rejected Trump's arguments.
He was the most lawless, so that would make sense. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons for that but if they if in fact

he was the president the supreme court has ruled against the most that's a strong indicator they don't just roll over and then even in the period there were two bad rulings in my view in the interim the biden administration one was the 14th amendment section three the insurrection ruling and the other one was the immunity ruling.

But numerous other Supreme Court rulings rejected MAGA arguments. There were multiple MAGA losses at the Supreme Court during the Biden term, and that's with the 6-3 court.
And so, you know, even the TikTok ruling, the recent 9-0 TikTok ruling was directly contradictory of Trump's wishes. Trump filed a brief saying, let me handle this.
And the Supreme Court said, 9-0, ban upheld. Now, the Supreme Court ruling didn't compel Trump to enforce the ban.
That wasn't part of the Supreme Court's ruling, but it upheld the ban. And that's directly contrary to Trump's position.
So I'm with you, Tim. I do believe they're going to check Trump in a number of ways.
It's just that Trump is going to be so freaking relentless in his lawlessness that we can't count on the Supreme Court to check him every time. And one of the areas where I do have worries is this invasion language.
While we're talking about immigration, there was another story yesterday. This is a statement from the mayor of Newark.
This is all alleged based on what the local government officials are saying, but ICE agents raided a local establishment detaining undocumented residents as well as citizens without producing a warrant. One of the detainees is a U.S.
military veteran who had the legitimacy of his military documentation question. This is the mayor saying that this is an egregious act in plain violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution, which guarantees the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. We're in the very early days of this.
I'm wondering what your thoughts are on what we've been seeing so far. Yeah, we're going to see a lot of reports from a lot of different places, and some of them are going to be really troubling.
Some of them are not going to be accurate. We're going to be in a kind of fog of war type situation for a bit, Tim, until things sort of shake out and we have greater visibility on exactly what is happening.
Because look, everything that you hear about a deportation rate is not a Trump thing. You know, Biden deported a lot of people.
Deportations happened a lot under Obama. Is that true? Did you see any reporting on that on Fox? I don't recall.
About deportations? I don't recall seeing that on Fox, but Obama deported more people than Trump did. So, deportations do happen and should happen in a nation that has laws regulating the border.
So, don't look at every deportation story and think think there's Trump. No, deportations happen and should happen in a responsible and reasonable way.
The question that we have and the question that I have is, will he conduct immigration enforcement internally in a responsible and reasonable way? Because we do need immigration enforcement, but massive dragnets It's designed to sweep up millions of people invariably and inevitably violate the civil liberties of other people at scale. And so this is what I'm looking for.
How big of a dragnet is being deployed? How many innocents are being swept up in it? What is happening with dreamers, for example? These are all questions that I have. Yeah, I think this is the thing about the New York rate.
And I agree with you about the fog of war element of all this. But, you know, when people would ask me about my immigration concerns before he won, you know, I went back to the first administration and, you know, there were like, obviously the child separation, there are all the things that got a ton of attention.
There's one element of it that I think will be supercharged this time, which is ICE officials, border officials, local sheriffs, local officials feel unchained. Right.
To be able to kind of hassle people and use aggressive tactics because they know there's not going to be some lawyer from DHS or from wherever over their shoulder. Right.
And, and like, there was a situation that I wrote about, about the young, a kid named Francisco Galicia back in, I guess it's probably 2018, 19, maybe, you know, whose brother was undocumented. He was legal and he was detained for like three weeks.
He was held. Right.
And he, but he was an American citizen and he was just held because his brother was undocumented and they didn't believe it. He showed papers, but they didn't believe.
Right. And so like, I think we're going to see a lot of these types of situations.
And it's very concerning to me that the administration is already signaling. They really don't give an F if a couple of people get a couple of American citizens get treated as if, you know, without the basic rights that they have.
Right. I mean, that's what I mean by the dragnet approach.
You know, we do need deportations. We do need deportations that begin with the most dangerous people and work down from there.
But we do not need mass scale dragnets that violate civil liberties. And also we need deportations to be undertaken carefully because there's economic disruptions attached to this you know trump is treating all of this as if he can just kind of come in and order inflation to go away order order immigrants to get out of the country i mean as if he can just come in and start declaring things and he can't we saw the the birthright citizenship order has already been blocked like it's's already not in effect unless Trump chooses to defy it.
So it is not the case. Although I will say, Tim, this is one of the ways, and I've been saying this in interviews over the last couple of days, this is a way that Trump exploits civic ignorance, is that he comes in and he issues all of these big sweeping declarations.
And a lot of people in MAG are like, look what Trump did. He fixed things.
No, most of what he did was declare bankruptcy like Michael Scott did in the office. He's just declaring stuff.
He's not actually changing stuff. And some of the executive orders will actually change things.
Some will actually be lawful. Others are not going to do one darn thing.
Some of the executive orders that do change things are only going to change things on the margins. He really hasn't done, Tim, that much that's truly significant yet, aside from the concrete actions that are in his power, like the pardon, like the removal of security clearance.
I've been curious what your take is on this, because I know there's going to be some elements of this that you're sympathetic to, but there is one other area where we're seeing concrete actions right now, which is government employment. Yeah.
And the DEI executive order, as well as the hiring freeze. So we talked about this on the pod yesterday.
This email went out to, it seems like everybody in the federal federal government. I had so many people forward it to me.
That was basically like snitch on your on your government contractors or your fellow government employee if they had a DEI related job, but they'd changed their title to try to protect themselves. We had Dan Crenshaw, congressman from Texas yesterday, tweets out a picture of Lisa Boykin, a black woman who is the chief diversity officer for ATF.
I guess she'd changed her title on the website to senior executive. And Dan Crenshaw screenshots that with nice try, got to be more creative than that.
I guess he would like to see this woman fired. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the approach on the DEI and then I'm going to get in the hiring freeze next.
Yeah. So I have really mixed feelings about this, Tim, because there is no question that elements of DEI have been in higher education, in the government have been toxic and destructive and unlawful in their own ways by creating race-based classifications of employees that contradict the constitution, contradict Supreme Court case law.
So there is very little question that you can point to incident after incident in the broader DEI world that is illiberal, that is oppressive, that is unconstitutional, that is discriminatory on the basis of race, ironically enough. Now, this isn't the federal government, but if you look at Michigan, the Times had this incredible reporting not long ago that the University of Michigan spent $250 million on DEI initiatives, didn't increase the percentage of Black students.
And then it was so incompetently done that when October 7 kicked off, the Biden administration had to come in and rebuke Michigan for failing to uphold its Title VI requirements with Jewish students. So you spend $250 million and what you get out of it is no improvement in black enrollment and a lot of anti-Semitism.
That is unacceptable. So there are elements of DEI that are absolutely toxic.
There is no question. But at the same time, there are elements of DEI that I don't think are that are not only not toxic, but I think important and prudent for a country that is wrestling with centuries of racial discrimination.
So, for example, I was talking to somebody the other day who said, all DEI is horrible. And I said, I hear you on the race discrimination.
I hear you on, say, for example, discrimination against Asian Americans in higher education to really in a way that just ended up making more room for white students a lot of the time. I hear you on that, but what about, say, the Texas 10% rule that says if you graduate in the top 10% of your class in high school in Texas, you can go to a Texas public school.
And the person thought about that for a minute. He said, that sounds good.
I said, that's a DEI initiative. It's just one that's lawful and much more prudent than blunt race-based classification.
And so, there is a difference between bad diversity efforts and good and necessary and proper diversity efforts. And what Trump does is he doesn't say there's anything bad or good, It's all bad and sweeps it all out the door and then initiates on top of that a witch hunt.
Now, the question that I have is, while he has a lot of authority over the federal government, he can't repeal Title VII. He can't repeal protections for disability.
He can't repeal protections for age discrimination. Those are all statutory and apply to the federal government.
What's he going to say that if somebody's responding to an age discrimination complaint, that's a DEI and has to go or responding to a race discrimination complaint that that's a DEI and it has to go? I think so. There's the other thing, Tim, that is hovering all over all this that is just gross.
And you've seen this, I've seen this. If there's a bunch

of white dudes in a room, there's no DEI, right? And that's a meritocracy. That's the meritocracy.
But anytime they see a black public official, an LGBT public official or anything, well, that's DEI and it's not meritocracy. That direct, blunt, gross assumption that any person who is in the category of not white or mainly not white and male is sort of evidence of the failure of meritocracy isn't just subtly racist, Tim.
It's really racist. It's really racist.
It is indeed. It is also, you know, kind of rankles a little bit that the people arguing for the meritocracy are putting a weekend talk show host in charge of the military, for example.
Yeah. Yeah.
Replacing DEI with something that looks more like a Gilded Age spoil system is not an upgrade. It's not an upgrade.
And also the Dan Crenshaw thing, I just, it's impossible to imagine a situation where a conservative got targeted by the left over something political, right? Or somebody, I don't know, there was like a vax mandate or something. And there was a white guy in the military that was getting pushed out that you could imagine Dan Crenshaw posting a screenshot of a picture of like a white conservative guy and being like, nice try, buddy.
You're out. You know what I mean? Like the whole thing, like just the attitude to it, the cruelty, right? The fact that like we're targeting these officials without any knowledge, like he doesn't know Lisa Boykin.
He doesn't know what her job was. Maybe her job was frivolous.
I don't know. There are some frivolous jobs in the government, right? There are a lot of frivolous jobs that white guys have in the government or public affairs or frivolous jobs in the military, right? Like, you know, just this blanket sense that if you're like working on diversity or inclusiveness, that you're bad, you can be mocked, you can get a pile on, you know, I as a congressman can start a pile on on you on the internet.
It's gross and disgusting. And particularly in these law enforcement areas, you know, I'm not for quotas, but like there is some advantage to saying, hey, as the FBI, we probably should be making sure we're bringing in people from black communities and people from Muslim communities.
You know, like people that can source up, right? There is some value to this, right? Like to this program. You can't just say across the board, everybody's fired.
What we're beginning to get to, Tim, is this point where there was a broad agreement you would have, I really from center left over to center right to definitely right, that there were problems in the DEI superstructure. I think there's a lot of agreement on that point.
You're going to get people who voted for Kamala Harris who are to say that you're going to get a lot of people who are going to say that. But then that is a different thing than saying diversity efforts, period, of any kind are out, are done.
Let's say you have the same standard for everybody, but is it DEI to go and affirmatively recruit in historically black colleges and universities?

Is that DEI?

Yes. Yeah.
I mean, to these guys it is for sure. Right.
Exactly. That's what I'm talking about because essentially their vision of meritocracy is really, I see lots of white faces.
They then start to worry if there's no meritocracy, if it's not all a bunch of white faces. And that's what's happening here.
And you see it time and time again. If a person is coming forward and they're a police chief and there's just been a big shooting or something like that, and they're black, you see all the usual suspects online saying DEI, woke.
But if it's a white person getting up there, crickets, silence, because that's the default acceptable evidence of meritocracy. And as I said, it's not just a little racist, it's really racist to make those kinds of assumptions.
One more that I think that temperamentally, both of us are probably sympathetic to, which is that there should be a hiring freeze at the government or that there are too many employees in the federal government. There should be ways to make the federal government more efficient.
But the EO that this administration has put in in the first week is a blanket hiring freeze for every job except for military and border enforcement. In yesterday's pod, I read about a MAGA supporter whose wife was planning for his wife to get a job, I think as a nurse at the VA, who said that the job offer was revoked.
I had somebody very close to me yesterday who had a job offer that was revoked. They were also planning a move.
It was a job in law enforcement. It's the type of person you really want in public service.
Like this, this sucks, right? Like this blanket, you know, kind of treatment of federal employees. It'd be okay with me if I thought, okay, this is really a 90 day freeze and they're just trying to get their ducks in a row.
But to me, this feels like a Russ vote plot that if you, if we just stop bringing in new people and we start to get some people to self-dep deport from the government, because they don't want to work for Pete Hegseth or RFK or whatever. And then we get some people fired because of our new powers that we've taken with schedule F, you know, then we can only bring in people that are sycophants, and that we can really remake the government away from people who are there to do public service and towards people who can serve Trump.
So I'm wondering what you think about all that. Yeah.
I mean, look, again, you said it well. I mean, on the idea that there are some limitations to the growth of the government or targeted hiring freezes.
Yeah. And that's something that intelligent hiring freezes, intelligent pauses, I would absolutely be in favor of.
There is bloat in the government. But to actually do something about it in a way that's constructive requires nuance, requires knowledge, requires understanding that some jobs are really truly important, have to be filled.
Some jobs are redundant and don't necessarily need to exist. That requires an intelligent, thoughtful approach, not this sledgehammer.
I'm constantly reminded by this. Did you ever see the John Mulvaney skit? There's a horse in the hospital.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, really.
This guy being the president, it's like there's a horse loose in a hospital. It's like there's a horse loose in a hospital.
I think eventually everything's going to be okay, but I have no idea what's going to happen next. And neither do any of you, and neither do your parents, because there's a horse loose in the hospital.
It's never happened before. No one knows what the horse is going to do next.
least of all the horse. it's never happened before no one knows what the horse is gonna do next least of all the horse he's never been in a hospital before he's as confused as you are if the horse is back in the hospital man you know it's it's funny because there's this thing that happens where maga maga really has boxed in a lot of people who are critics of the status quo, but realize that MAGA is the wrong answer for it.
So in other words, if you say the government is too large and inefficient, well, then why aren't you supporting MAGA? Well, because that MAGA answer to that would make the problem worse. So we have to be careful to sort of say, well, I'm not defending the status quo.
There are things that need to be done in the government, or there are things that need to be done about DEI, but this is not the answer. This is, in many ways, will be worse than the problem you're attempting to solve.
And what MAGA is very clever about doing, and I think this is one of the reasons why Trump won is when you oppose their solution they cast it as you're denying the problem and those are not the same thing you know just in these two examples I'm talking about in the one case you have somebody that was going to be going after criminals and in the other case you have a woman that was going to be a nurse for veterans. Right.
You know what I mean? Like, even if you ask MAGA folks, like, you know, I think there'd be overwhelming opposition to that, right? Like if you gave them the specific examples, you know, and I do think that the, this gets back into the political side of things, but like the Democrats can be smart as you look through all of this about what you're elevating, you know, as far as some of these roles. And sometimes you might have to be, you know, a little bit strategic about that and maybe ruffle some feelings about that because there are certain jobs that aren't going to be that particularly sympathetic broadly, you know, that are lost within the government.
But like, I think this is broadly unpopular if it continues in its frame such as this, right? Like that the VA is going to be losing nurses, that we're going to be losing prosecutors, losing FBI officials, losing people going after criminals. Nobody is actually for that, but it's being obscured by kind of the broader MAGA argument.
Well, and another thing, when you think about why did Trump win, what he's doing right now is fan service for MAGA. Right.
This is everything MAGA dreams about. This is Twitter's fever dream right now.
This is Trump. David French is crying.
Just bathing in our tears. Anytime that David French is like, that's unconstitutional.
That's a win. That's a win.
They're just swimming in our tears and loving it. So this is all MAGA fan service.
But this is not why Trump won. If you looked at, I think it's fascinating, the difference between Trump's rallies and Trump's commercials.
Trump's rallies were, Tim, you know, you've probably been to about as many as anybody suffered throne it is

like going to comic con where it's all of the extended universe grievances right it's just

all of the mega grievances and the lover's texts you know you're going back to everything it's

wild and then the commercials low inflation low unemployment you know and so to the big huge public

Thank you. It's wild.
And then the commercials, low inflation, low unemployment, you know, and so to the big, huge public, he is broadcasting sort of good government to his MAGA people. He's broadcasting vengeance and rage.
So the first few days have been vengeance and rage, but he's going to have to deliver on these other things. And what I don't think MAGA understands or cares about, to be honest, is a lot of the things that he does in service of vengeance and rage are actually going to inhibit his ability to do that bigger job for which he was elected.
And look, you won't see his approval rating budge that much early on. there's just massive amounts of people check out.
If you took 100 people off the street and asked them about the pardons and they're honest, let's say they're in truth serum. How many do you think have even heard about the pardons? Who knows? 40% maybe.
40% maybe on the high end, right? So it takes a while for this stuff to kind of go through the system. but a lot of what he's doing right now by selecting incompetent people implementing big sledgehammer policies when scalpels are necessary all of that's going to inhibit his ability to do the main job and there will be a price to be paid for that all right i have one more serious policy i want to talk about then we can do a little bit of silliness.
There's a lot of both happening. There's a lot of things that are alarming and a lot of things that are silly happening in the first week.
You mentioned earlier that the Ukraine war has not ended within the first 24 hours of the Trump administration, but there have been some developments. Trump sent out a bleat basically threatening to tariff Russia if they did not stop.
Its ultimate weapon. When in doubt, threatened the tariff.
I don't know. Jamie, I'll put this in his newsletter yesterday.
And it's like, if you, if you wonder how much power tariff threats have from the U S over Russia, go around your house and try to find something that says made in Russia. So anyway, Russia brushed off the tariff threat from Trump saying, we do not see any particularly new elements here.
You know that Trump in the first iteration of his presidency most often resorted to sanctions methods. He likes these methods, or at least he liked them.
This is Peskov. And so we'll follow it closely, but it's not changing their stance.
And, you know, they basically said they have at least a year's worth of, you know, materials going forward, according to a Wall Street Journal report this morning. So I think that we might be at a bluff calling point here.
And the interesting thing about Trump is, I'll say this, the Trump people make this argument, like, he's so crazy. You don't know what he's going to do.
And that actually helps him. Because on the world stage, some bad actors don't call his bluff.
Maybe there's something to that. Maybe there's not.
I don't know. But he didn't have his bluff called a lot the first time around.
And it does seem like there's going to be a different attitude towards him this time. The way I would put it is I think that the world does not view Trump as unpredictable any longer, they view him as manipulable.
Okay, and so what's unpredictable about being manipulable is you don't know who's going to be better at manipulation. And so sometimes you don't know how a manipulation is going to turn out, but Trump is a manipulable person.
And I did this really interesting interview a few weeks ago. And the point in this, I was doing a Ukraine war update for the Times, and I was interviewing Fred and Kimberly Kagan from the Institute for the Study of War, who probably have more knowledge of the actual state of the conflict than anybody outside the Russian, Ukrainian, and American militaries.
I mean, they follow this very closely. And they were saying something really interesting, and that is the Ukrainians are actually quite good at engaging with autocrats and oligarchs.
That's what they've been doing for a long time. And then Putin, on the other hand, is a different Vladimir Putin than Trump's first term.
This is a Vladimir Putin. In Trump's first term, Vladimir Putin was considered sort of the master of the, for lack of a better term, sort of the master of manipulating the world stage through shrewd application of minimal force.
So in other words, it was the little green men in Crimea. It wasn't this giant, huge invasion that, you know, he'd been able to accomplish a lot in North Africa by shrewd deployments of Wagner.
He had been able to accomplish a lot in Syria without huge military investments. And so that Putin kind of considered to themselves a deft manipulator of world affairs.
And they were saying this Putin is now three years into a war where three quarters of a million people have been killed or maimed. He is a brutish, straight ahead, power politics Putin, and that he believes he has the advantage on the battlefield right now.
And that Trump is going to find him to be pretty intransigent. There's a lot of blood that has been spilled, Russian blood that's been spilled, and that Trump's going to find a different Vladimir Putin than that first term Putin.
And if one side is trying to manipulate Trump and appeal to Trump and stroke Trump's ego, and the other one is saying, nope, it's just war, man. We're just going to war.
How will this play out on Trump? We'll see. But it is interesting, you know, look, Tim, by threatening to impose tariffs on Russia, he's trading Russia almost as badly as he's treating Canada.
And so, he's getting serious. Almost.
It is true. I'm surprised that Vlad isn't kind of a dealmaker.
Trump was planning on deal filmmaker, Vlad, they were to come down, you know, they're going to the boardroom. You know, they're going to have cameras there.
It's going to be Gary Busey be there. You know, they just hash it all out out of the deal style.
I do think just going forward, there will be at some point if Ukraine is able to continue to resist as effectively as it has.

I mean, in the last year, it inflicted just extraordinary casualties on the Russian army. It lost ground, but it inflicted extraordinary casualties.
There may well come a time in the next year or so where there will be some bargaining. The Russian economy is, a lot of the sanctions that were initially implemented, The airX are really starting to take hold.
Inflation, interest rates, things like this are in a crisis state in Russia. So Russia isn't a vulnerable state.
There might be an ability to achieve some kind of deal. I'm not writing that off as a possibility, but I'll tell you this, how we posture our support for Ukraine between now and whenever that moment comes is going to be absolutely critical to determining the outcome of those negotiations.
We've got clown Congress stuff to get to really quick. Your friend, your congressman, probably not your actual congressman, but Andy Ogles there in Tennessee.
I know Andy. I know Andy.
He introduced a resolution to amend the 22nd Amendment to allow President Donald Trump to seek a third term. Notably, his amendment only allows for non-consecutive terms, which would prevent Trump from having to run against scary Barack Obama in 2028.
You know, obviously, this is just nonsense. But I do think there is going to be a lot of this to try to protect Trump from lame duckism.
What my concern is, is that there is kind of strategic clownishness to try to play the media, to try to give Trump a veneer of maybe he's not a lame duck that happens from now until 2027. And then I worry a little bit, just a little bit, about 81-year-old Trump taking it kind of seriously in 2028.
So that's where I'm at. I don't know about you.
Oh, Tim, we're on the same wavelength. I think that what we're mainly dealing with here isn't nine-dimensional chess.
It's just, hey, look, I have more influence. I have a greater access the more I honor Trump.
And so you're going to see, especially here in this first year, before the kind of that lamed up calculus like starts to really lock in, you're going to see a lot of sycopancy. I mean, here in Tennessee, there was a state legislator who indicated that they wanted to change the name of Nashville's airport to Trump International Airport.
Why not just rename Tennessee? Oh, yeah. Tennessee feels like a woke name.
Is that an Indian name of some kind? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Why not call it Trump? Trump-a-stamp.
Trump-see. Trump-see.
So, some of it's just pure sycophancy to be in the room where it happens. But you do raise the really interesting point because I was just saying to a friend of mine yesterday, a lot of people in Washington are very, very, very independently ambitious.
And for right now, all of the incentives, if you're independently ambitious, are just to genuflect before the throne of Trump. But soon enough, it's going to sink into people that Trump's done in 2028.
So how does Trump maintain that hold once these very ambitious Washington politicians realize he's leaving the scene and Don Jr. isn't a great heir, that J.D.
Vance did not light the world on fire in his vice presidential run? They're going to see an opening for themselves. And as you were saying, one way to try to combat that lame duckism is to try to create the illusion that Trump won't really be over.
So, you know, you might hear things like, we're going to amend the constitution. That's the Ogles or, well, we'll run Vance Trump and then have Vance step aside.
And, you know, those kinds of things, you'll hear that as on none of it's serious. Like it's allivolous.
It's all ridiculous. But it will be- Until Trump starts to take it seriously.
And I'm with you. Right.
And that's the thing that we're just listening to your story. I just like thinking about Trump's brain.
It's like, oh, once these guys start posturing, he's going to have to bat him down. And this is one way to bat him down.
And then he starts to convince himself of it. You know what I mean i mean you know i think you'll see things like many law professors are saying that you know you might even hear him say many law professors are saying that amendment is unconstitutional or something non utterly nonsensical right but i'm with you i think he'll float it he'll entertain it and And maybe, as you were saying, an 81, 82-year-old Trump will indulge it.

But it is legally, constitutionally frivolous.

boys behaving badly in the house as well not just andy ogles not to accuse andy ogles of being with

the anonymous person in this case but some house members in the republican conference are concerned

that their texts to cassidy Hutchinson, which are allegedly inappropriate, lecherous, creepy, would get revealed if she was subpoenaed.

And so in the Congress's effort, Brady Loudermilk's effort to re-look at the January 6th investigation, to investigate the investigators, a Washington Post story by Jackie Alamany yesterday says that their desire to subpoena Cassidy Hutchison has run into some internal concerns. They are thinking, maybe not a great idea to subpoena somebody if it might reveal that multiple Republicans in Congress sent her inappropriate texts.
How gross are these guys, Tim? Like, you know, it's funny, Gates, who's sort of like, if you're going to talk about the Avengers, he's like the Thor of grossness. Like, you know, arguably the most powerful of the most gross of the gross ones.
But he always said, hey, I'm the tip of the iceberg. You know, and some of these guys who've been really identified as being truly creepy have indicated, well, I'm not the only one you, you know, you saw that Mark, was it Mark Wayne Mullen saying who, who here, who wants to hear about all the adulterers, you know? So there's this kind of, you know, tip of the iceberg feeling that we have that some folks like a Matt Gates have been outed.
But there's a whole bunch of stuff lurking under the surface. And one of my first thoughts when I heard that story was, well, Cassidy released the text.
And then I realized, well, they might have been sent to her on a government phone that she no longer has. Right.
So maybe she can't. And also, by the way, just on the Gates thing, if it was just Gates, I don't think that that would be limiting their investigation of cassidy hutchinson there's not a lot of love lost for old matt gates if they were just if they were just worried about matt gates i think they would be you know full barrel ahead on cassidy hutchinson because i to me like the interesting thing about all this is i had been hearing scuttle in new york earlier this week from people who are like you know who are reporting on this stuff and in the know that Cassidy was really in their sights because she was not part of the group that was preemptively pardoned.
And there's a lot of personal animus because she was a turncoat. Like they were seriously looking at her.
And so I thought it was interesting that I was hearing that around inauguration time. Then a couple of days later, you have this Washington Post story that comes up.
That's like oh, maybe not Cassidy, actually. Maybe we should turn our sights on Deborah Birx.
I don't know. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, you know, I also think, Tim, that a lot of these folks are living on borrowed time, that there is so much, there's so much smoke, there's sort of so much rumor milling about this kind of conduct and this kind of behavior that you know how many reporters are right now digging into this i mean it is i think a lot of these guys are living on borrowed time and as far as like keeping it concealed people care but they're not living on borrowed time for their political career so long as they're close enough to trump so long as they're mega enough one more.
One more person on this regard you had in your newsletter, I just had to mention this briefly, Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, speaking of Christian kind of behavior from our leaders, has asked the Texas Supreme Court to reject the idea that serving vulnerable migrants is free exercise of the Christian faith. Yep.
This case, Tim, wild. There's a migrant shelter in El Paso called the Annunciation House.
And for years and years and years, it has housed undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, provided them with food, clothing, shelter, doesn't hide them from law enforcement. In fact, the shelter is in daily communication with federal immigration officials.
Federal immigration officials will send migrants to the Annunciation House to stay for shelter. And Paxton's people showed up one day with a subpoena and said, you have to let us in immediately to examine your records.
And they're accusing them of operating an illegal stash house or harboring illegal aliens unlawfully under Texas law.

And the Annunciation House was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Give us 24 hours to look at the subpoena and examine our legal options.

And so when they look at the subpoena, they realize it's overbroad and they go to court to clarify and narrow the subpoena.

And as soon as they do, Paxton tries to revoke their charter to do

business. So in other words, he tries to extinguish the organization entirely.
And this goes, the trial judge says, nope, Paxton appeals to the Texas Supreme Court. And the Annunciation House quite rightly says, well, we have a religious free exercise right that is protected under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act to engage in our Christian ministry.
And Paxton files a document with the Texas Supreme Court that says this isn't religious free exercise. They're not doing mass.
They're not taking confession as if serving the poor isn't Christian religious free exercise. What are we doing here? I mean, this is one of the most ancient forms of religious free exercise.
It predates the Christian faith even. Sorry, David.
If you don't have the Trump Bible inside, then it does not any more Christian free exercise. I was seeing in my Twitter, I was getting random replies from people during the whole interregnum that was like biden should declare the equal rights amendment in the constitution and i was like trying to i was like what the hell is this like i don't even understand like what is happening here and then he did it and it was like five days a day it's like we have a 28th amendment he did and i just didn't i never took it seriously enough to actually learn what happened and so I thought that you might just tell me briefly what the fuck happened.

Oh, I may almost make the whole podcast without cussing.

I try not to cuss for David.

Tim, Tim, come on.

So I, this is such a mess.

So when the ERA was originally proposed, Congress gave it a time limit.

I can't remember exactly the year. It might've been 1982 for a sufficient number of states to ratify the ERA was originally proposed, Congress gave it a time limit.
I can't remember exactly the year.

It might have been 1982 for a sufficient number of states to ratify the ERA.

That did not occur.

And so the ERA was dead.

It did not get the sufficient number of states to vote by 1982.

But everyone forgets about it.

People move on with their lives.

There is no ERA.

But there was a small group of people who said, wait a minute, can Congress really do that? Can it really do a time limit? Is that something that Congress can do? I don't think so. So they started to kind of continue to press the ERA.
And I can't remember which state it was, but there was a ratification recently that if you had zero time limit on it at all, if it was just however long to get, then it would have the necessary cross that threshold. And so there were some folks who believed that that meant the ERA was in force and effect.
But no, the time limit, 1982 time limit still applies. So in the closing days, Biden, I don't know how, why, what was going through his mind essentially decides, well, I can decide that the time limit doesn't apply and I can declare an amendment.
And so, you know, like the archivist and, you know, the people actually, you know, would, you know, print the 28th Amendment, whatever. Everyone's looking at him going, what are you doing? And look, Tim, I thought this was disappointing from biden absurd from biden but

at this point you know he's in a yolo phase right now that is weird and destructive what was particularly disappointing kind of like a bucket list i think yeah what was particularly disappointing to me was lots of people in groups sort of in that online progressive world who absolutely no better. We're going,

yay!

This is a win!

What on earth? sort of in that online progressive world who absolutely know better. We're going, yay.
This is a win. I can explain that to you.
These people are very sad and really going through it emotionally. And this has been a, I think for a lot of people, myself included, like the second win was a lot harder to stomach, you know, and, maybe a deeper impact on them.
And people deal with that in different ways. I think there are some folks in this case that are like lashing out, like, can we kind of grab onto something? Can I find a win here? Anyway, I wanted to just ask you before I lose you for the weekend, how you've been processing all that, how you're dealing with it.
If there's any sadness. Yeah.
You know, I think i hit my sadness well before the election by the time of the election i was i was teaching my class at lipscomb and we were i remember on election night on tuesday class i was walking out right before the polls closed and my class said who do you think is going to win because i'd asked them and they were even they were pretty evenly split i had 21 students in the class 11 said trump would win. 10 said Harris would win.
And I said, oh, I think Trump evenly split. I had 21 students in the class.
11 said Trump would win.

10 said Harris would win. And I said, oh, I think Trump's winning.
I think there's only maybe two

or three days in the whole cycle that I thought Harris had a real chance.

Damn, man, Seltzer tricked me. I was telling everybody I think Trump is going to win up until

that last weekend. And I was like, maybe I'm missing something.
Maybe I'm missing something

with women anyway.

Yeah. But I just had a sort of a bleak view.
And I think I went through my lamentation in the Biden presidency when I was sort of thinking through the arc of American history and how Americans have demonstrated that, okay, while overall, if you look from 1776 to 2025, America's a much, much better place in 2025 than it was in 1776. It's not close.
But we've had decades of regression sometimes. We will go through periods of regression that are prolonged and serious.
I mean, think about what happened in the United States between 1877 and the compromise of 1877 that ended reconstruction and 1964 in the Civil Rights Act.

That is a long period of regression after the hopefulness of reconstruction. So I just realized Americans can go off course for a while.
And while I don't have quite as bleak a view of Americans is JVL. I don't think we are a uniquely special people.
I think we have a lot of special institutions and we have a lot of special values that we try to use to define our nation, but we're made from the same human clay as any other country, any other place. So why would we think that Americans are uniquely invulnerable to demagogues? Why would we think that Americans are uniquely not vulnerable to years and maybe even a decade or two of real backsliding and real xenophobia and bigotry? Because we've seen it happen before in American history.
So, I'm not making you feel better, Tim, but- I'm trying to get you to make me feel better, but maybe not. But I'm looking for counselor, minister, French, you know? Okay, I'm with you.
I'm with you. I'm with you.
I was saying to, I was on a, I forget which, maybe one of the more progressive pods, I was a guest, and I was saying to them, I said, my advice to you is, my small C conservative nature is that maybe you have to readjust how you look at everything. And instead of thinking this is a period where there's going to be a lot of progress, there's thinking about this as a period where there's an effort to conserve remaining good things in institutions.
But even that's like, kind of bleak. How do you process, you know, thinking about your fellow man like that, and how to engage in what we do in a way that is fulfilling? Well, nothing that has occurred has surprised me given my view of pre-existing view of human nature.
So I'm not surprised truly by any of this, but I will say there is purpose. And can I just be a nerd for a minute, Tim? Please.
So there's this great show on Apple TV called Foundation. It's a sci-fi show, and it's about a group of people called the Foundation who predict the collapse of an empire.
And their mission is, they don't believe they can stop it, but they can do something they call shorten the darkness, shorten the darkness. And that is a high calling.
As we have seen in this moment, Trump can get dark fast, but it is not guaranteed that we're going through an extended period of backsliding. It is not guaranteed that we're on the front end of an entire demagogic generation.
None of that is inevitable. And the combination of courage and compassion and resisting Trump, combined with some of the natural consequences of his own erratic and incompetent nature, mean that there's going to be a real opportunity.
There will be an opportunity, I believe, to turn the page from Trump. He will give that opportunity.
The question is, are we, are the people who oppose Trump going to have our act together well enough to truly seize it? Because one of the things that Trump has benefited from is incompetent and sometimes corrupt opposition. I mean, think about how the prosecution just fell apart in Georgia, for example, just craziness.
And think about some of the mistakes that I know that you've seen that Tim, that you've pulled your hair out with it a lot. And so he has benefited a lot from incompetent and corrupt opposition, but he will give us an opportunity.
He will give his opponents an opportunity to turn the page. And it really is going to be up to his opponents to present a vision, to sell a vision to Americans that's different.
And finally, the one thing I would say is he's at a high watermark now, Tim. When I was researching my book several years ago, I went through and I looked at post-election rhetoric from politicians and political movements after every one of our alleged realignments over the last 20 years.
There's always this period of extreme triumphalism. You know, in 04, Karl Rove.

I remember.

I mean, remember that, you know, this is a permanent majority. And then 06 happens.
You know, 2012, it's the coalition of the ascendant. And then 2014 and 2016 happened.
I mean, we just have this constantly in recent American history, this flip-flop, flip-flop back and forth of power. And I think the Trump folks are deluding themselves if they think that they have triggered some sort of permanent

realignment here. Shorten the darkness.
That's good. That gives me something to hold on to

over the weekend. I appreciate that, David French.
Thanks as always for coming on and for sharing

your time with us and I hope you'll come back soon. Thanks so much, Tim.
I always enjoy chatting

with you. All right.
Everybody else, we'll be back Monday with Bill Crystal. We'll see you all then.
Peace. It's a hell of a time in the dark Maybe the States, there's an alien race I wouldn't be surprised So without a go-do, we'd like to introduce you to

Rekorda On the sea with you, on the sea with you now Stand in the countryside

Let's talk about a month ago Yeah, on the TV now Standing in the countryside

It's so hard to mount the back

He's always standing outside

Looking at him, they smile a bit

Oh, look at him, say that it may take a while

With more diamonds in my smile

And maybe I won't even go to work that day

I don't care if I'm in trouble at all

I'll just sit on the floor with my fingers and the same for the diamonds The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

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