David French: Trump Tries To Run Away from the Christian Nationalists

Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to have back David French, opinion columnist for the New York Times, his most recent book, Divided We Fall, America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. He's co-host of the Advisory Opinions Podcast and his wife, Nancy, cancer-free.
Is that right? Cancer-free. I mean, way ahead of schedule, Tim.
We were supposed to go through chemo, surgery, and radiation. After surgery, they declared her cancer-free, but she still has to do the radiation, unfortunately, but it's the best possible news.
Man, we are so happy for you. Needed some good news.
I keep telling people, I was like, if I have good news, the closer it is to me and out in the world gets less and less good. But that's great.
We've been sending you all our love and prayers. So happy for Nancy.
Give her a squeeze for me. Absolutely.
And we so appreciate it. All right.
So we've been doing a lot of talk about the democratic troubles, the troubles with Joe Biden. And we're going to do that.
But after the Ezra Klein podcast yesterday, and I was looking to see what kind of degree I need to put the oven up to, I was going to put my head in there. And so we're not going to start with that.
We're going to get to that at the end. And I want to start with there was a national conservatism conference this past week i'm sure you saw some of the clips from that and um i'm always interested in your your take particularly on christian nationalism coming from an evangelical perspective so i want to start here with this crowd pleaser from josh Hawley.
Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am.
And some will say that I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do.
For the YouTube viewers, his smug face adds a little bit to the effect there.

What do you make of all that? Just kind of the Nationalist Conference writ large and just sort of the more unapologetic move towards kind of embracing that nomenclature. Yeah, it's really interesting, Tim, that this happened at the same time, at the exact same time that the RNC was approving the least pro-life platform in what, 40 years plus.
And so you had this kind of paradox. On the one hand, you have also Donald Trump saying, Project 2025, what is this? I've never heard of this.
Who are these people? Which Project 2025, for the listeners who don't know, is a Heritage Foundation initiative that, although a bunch of its proposals are relatively anodyne, conventional conservatism, some of it is relatively radical. Some of it is rooted in sort of a much more robustly Christian nationalist vision for the United States.
And so Trump's distancing from that.

Trump is saying we're abandoning the pro-life movement on the platform. And then you have this nationalist conservative conference where not just Josh Hawley, but a lot of folks were talking about this quote, Christian nation, talking about Christian nationalism, talking about in some other panels, you saw people talking about, you know, sort of the second-class status of people who are outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition in this new Christian nationalist utopia that they think that they're building.
And so, on the one hand, what you see out of Christian nationalism is kind of an increasing radicalization, that it, at the same time, is becoming increasingly delusional. Because what's also happening, by the way, I'm sure you've seen this.

One of the speakers at the Republican National Convention is Amber Rose,

who is one of the founders of Los Angeles' Slut Walk,

and a former Kanye girlfriend who has adopted MAGA. How many Slut Walks have you attended, David? Is that kind of a yearly sojourn for you? You know, if you're just doing it yearly, Tim, you're not committed.
That's good. I mean, come on, who do you think I am? It's every six months or so.
It's like a circuit. Yeah.
So you have this paradox where you have some of the most radicalized of the MAGA supporters are drawn from the most Christian fundamentalist ranks, and they are engaging in conversations about forms of Christian supremacy in the United States that would be grotesquely unconstitutional if they attempted to implement it. But at the same time, the guy that they are hitching all of their hopes and dreams to, in many ways, seems to be kind of running away from them in some very, very concrete ways.
So on the one hand, I say, this stuff that you're seeing at NatCon is, if it could attain any level of power is quite dangerous. And then at the same time, in many ways, it feels as if Trump is saying to the most religious supporters that he has, I don't really care about your main issue.
And by the way, I'm going to go ahead and make the Republicans a kind of moderately pro-choice party. And I know you're still going to vote for me anyway.
I know you're not going anywhere. Is it possible that it's not a paradox, it's just a put on though? That like Donald Trump is just, just knows that this is not particularly popular stuff, particularly in the states that are going to matter in the election.
And so he's more politically astute than some of the other members of his movement. And meanwhile, you he gets back in there, sure, his agenda wouldn't be the same agenda as Jeff Landry that I want to get to here in Louisiana or Josh Hawley.
But he'll let a lot of these guys in their little fiefdoms and the agencies do whatever they want once he's in there. And it could include, you know, some of these more authoritarian, some of these more Christian nationalist agenda items that he doesn't really feel comfortable talking about or doesn't think is smart politically.
Oh, I think there's no question that's the political calculation that we have right now amongst the Christian nationalists. They're going to keep bear hugging Trump as tightly as they can, many of them, even though he has distanced

himself from them because they know really, truly the number one criteria for being part of a Trump administration isn't ideological. It's a loyalty test.
And if they're with him, then they can perhaps build a fiefdom and they'll have that fiefdom unless and until it embarrasses Trump in some way and then they'll be squashed like a bug. And so, yeah, there's no question that there's an element that's a put on.
Also, they know they're pushing on an open door in a Trump administration if they stay loyal to him. So it's not as if they're not dangerous at all, but they are definitely delusional if the idea is we're building some sort of Christian nationalist

superstructure on top of the constitution. Yeah, I would say that the biggest test to

getting a Trump administration is loyalty to Trump, but it's also breaking the ninth commandment of

the 10 commandments, which is being willing to lie, being willing to bear false witness for Trump,

which takes us to my adopted home state, Louisiana. I agree with you that at the federal level, obviously this is not Trump's agenda, right? I think that some of his, it will be some of his minions agendas and some stuff will slip through in various places in Department of Ed or Department, you know, in HHS.
But in red states, Christian nationalist power is starting to, you know, gain, I would think, steam in some ways. If you look at the Ten Commandments law here in Louisiana for public schools having to post them, and Oklahoma, the mandatory teaching of the Bible and having PragerU take over the education curriculum.
What do you make of all of that? Yeah. So I'm so glad you went to the states because at the federal level, this idea of a Christian nationalist takeover is remote at best.
At the state level, particularly your uniparty, your one party state, red states, there it's a very different thing. And it's actually a logical extension of what we've been seeing for like that around the last five or six years, when we began to see red states passing laws that were directly defying Supreme Court precedent in the realm of the First Amendment.
And so some of this, for example, Tim, was you remember the initial burst of banning drag queens, for example. So this was a blatant First Amendment violation that even

Trump appointed judges had no patience for. Then you had, you know, things like the Florida Stop

Woke Act. Again, a direct attack on the First Amendment.
And both of these are attacking free

speech in the First Amendment. The Stop Woke Act has applied to these professors, has applied to

private corporations. The drag queen bans has applied sort of everywhere in the First Amendment.
The Stop Woke Act has applied to these professors, have supplied to private corporations. The drag queen bans has applied sort of everywhere in the state.
All of these things were direct attacks on the First Amendment, all part of this larger, more authoritarian project that has two sides of the coin. Side number one would be blocking the speech or prohibiting the speech of your ideological opponents.

And then the other side of the coin is then mandating and dominating the sphere with your own point of view, including at the state level.

So you begin to have things like, well, we're going to have the Ten Commandments in every classroom where Oklahoma tried and failed, for example, to have a public charter school run by, you know, a Catholic public charter school.

That failed.

Now Oklahoma's talking about bringing Bible instruction back into schools from the, you know, back into public schools. And so it's all a unified whole, Tim.
So if you're looking at sort of a Christian nationalist project more broadly, what you see is they want essentially to take the constitutional clock and unwind it about 70 to 80 years. And what they want is fewer free speech rights for speech that they deem to be transgressive or destructive and more state authority to impose religious values, such as, you know, again, the Ten Commandments.
And so, you know, what you're really going for here is this nostalgia for what, you know, my colleague Ross Douthat has called the soft Protestant establishment. This would be the nostalgia for the 40s and 50s when kids began school days by reading the King James Bible and there was prayer and that the Ten Commandments were on the walls.
And if you've been around folks at all, you've probably heard this sentiment. Well, this country started going to hell when they took prayer out of schools.
And so this is that project. It's essentially an attempt to rewind the constitutional clock to a period 60, 70 years ago where we had much fewer free speech rights and the Establishment Clause was much less robust.
And that's the project. You were on the front lines fighting for religious liberty and people in the courts.
That was your work right before you became a New York Times, a failing New York Times columnist. And so within that construct, what is your just take on the Ten Commandments legislation in particular, but also just in the broader, you know, of where the threats are to religious liberty right now? So if you're going to look at sort of the arc, the battle, you have to put things into three buckets.
So let's look at the Establishment Clause. So you would have people sort of on the left or the far left who would say, we need to cleanse the public square of all religious expression.
So if there's a cross at a war memorial or if there's an old Ten Commandments monument or if there's a nativity scene next to a menorah from Hanukkah or Kwanzaa exhibit. We need to get rid of all of the stuff that's religious.
That would be sort of one extreme. And then the other one is, no, no, no, wait, this is a Christian nation.
It's a Judeo-Christian nation. So we can put front and center into the public square, all of the symbols and many of the trappings of this Judeo-Christian heritage, including Bible reading, including the Ten Commandments, all of these things.
And then there's the middle ground, which is where I spent my career, which is, wait, wait, wait, we don't want establishment and we don't want suppression. You know, in the establishment clause arena, things like acknowledgement are fine.
Like if we're going to have ecumenical legislative prayer that each member of the clergy in a community could begin a legislative session. Like it's ecumenical.
You're acknowledging the religious character of the community. And that's something that I've always thought was important.
And then in the religious liberty world, you have the same, a very similar three buckets. One is we're going to censor you.
If you are a religious institution, you don't get equal access to public facilities because you're religious. And then there's the other extreme, which is the Christian nationalist, which says, we want religious authority.
We're first among equals. We're top of the line.
And then my position was always this other ground, which is equal, equality, legal equality. Don't treat religious speech worse than secular speech and don't treat it better than secular speech.
Treat it the same as any other form of speech. And that was my legal career was about the equality, viewpoint neutrality, the equality of access to public facilities.
And so what you're seeing on the part of the Christian nationalist far right is we want establishment of religion, and we want to be sort of first among equals in our own speech and freedom. And that's incompatible with the Constitution.
And so do you think that the Ten Commandments thing is incompatible then, or is it a closer uncalled? It's closer than it would have been five years ago, but I do think it's unconstitutional. And the reason why is if you had, let's say, a social studies class, and you had Hammurabi's Code, the Magna Carta, Ten Commandments, various historical documents that are absolutely important to the development of Western law and culture, and you put it in that context, sure, fine.
But if it is from K through 12, biology class, social studies, civics, physics, mathematics, they've all got the Ten Commandments, and it's a specific version of the Ten Commandments, then you're talking about something very different from acknowledging the role of the Ten Commandments in Western civilization. And now you're on to the primacy of the Ten Commandments.
And it's very hard for me to see that as anything other than an establishment. And Tim, I've won an establishment clause case.
I actually challenged the Georgia Institute of Technology. It had a program that was saying, hey, Buddhism, for example, is preferable to being a Baptist.
And so when you are leaning on one religion is preferable to another, then you've got really a big establishment clause issue. And I think that's still going to be the case, even with the Supreme Court.
We're going to continue down the path of nerdy court talk. It's not quite advisory opinions, but I kind of more of a, I don't know, an entry level advisory opinion.
You wrote this about the two Trump cases, the 14th Amendment case and the immunity case. I think it's your most recent column, maybe second most recent.
You wrote this, for the second time this term, after Trump v. Anderson, which blocked efforts to remove Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the court has reached a decision that's truly difficult to square with the constitutional text.
What is going on? I'd like for you to answer your own rhetorical question there. What is going on, David French? What is going on? That's a great question.
So I think the kind of social media answer is wrong. The social media answer is they're just biased in favor of Trump.
There's too many cases where they rule against the Trump or MAGA position, including in 2020, to say this Supreme Court is in Trump's pocket. I don't think that's the answer.
Here's what I think the answer is, Tim. I think that what they did is they looked essentially at two different slippery slopes.
Slippery slope number one is presidents have total sort of immunity, the act of sovereigns, et cetera. Slippery slope number two is presidents get prosecuted routinely by their successors.
And they said in their, you know, slippery slope number two is scarier to us than slippery slope number one. Slippery slope number two of, you know, we have Trump promising to, you know, take his vengeance on his enemies, including the Biden family, etc.
So what we want to do is make that hard. We want to make it hard for a successor to prosecute his predecessor.
And so here's this expansive immunity doctrine. It's not absolute in all areas.
They can still be prosecuted for private acts, for official acts at the periphery. They can still be prosecuted if you can overcome the presumption of immunity.
But it's like they said, slippery slope number two is the real problem. Now, the problem I have with that, Tim, is not that- Is that we have an aspiring authoritarian leading the race for the presidency.
Right. Because that would be my problem, but I'm interested in your problem.
Yeah. Well, the problem is not that prosecuting a successor in bad faith isn't something to be concerned about.
Trump is in many ways promising to do that. The problem that I have is that the Supreme Court is an interpretive body.
It's not a policymaking body. It's not their call to just sort of say, between these two slippery slopes, which one are we most frightened of? It is, what does the Constitution say? What are the words on the page? Because the framers had their own mind about what was the sort of scarier branch of government.
And it's very clear there's no immunity given to a president in the text of the Constitution. But they do give some limited immunity to members of Congress.
They do the speech and debate clause. Also, they're writing the Constitution in the shadow of the British monarchy.
So they were absolutely familiar with sovereign immunity, the immunity of the king. And so there's none of that.
And in fact, to the extent the Constitution even speaks squarely to it at all, the impeachment judgment clause in Article 1 says that if someone's impeached and convicted, they shall or to shall be subject to accountability on law. And so what the court actually did by creating the sweeping immunity is to say that even when there's an impeachment and a conviction, then the general rule is that presidents generally will not be subject.
And so to me, they contradicted the wisdom of the founders. They contradicted the text of the constitution.
And in so doing, the decision that they made is ultimately the more dangerous decision. So that was pretty harsh.
My colleague JPL is even less generous than that, if you can imagine. I can imagine.
And so here's something he wrote. He wrote, maybe it's possible the conservative legal theory was all a lie, and it's just turned out to be mostly post hoc rationalization for the preferred outcomes, at least on the big questions.
That is an exact quote if I'm characterizing his article. Here's an exact quote.
We're writing a rule for the ages, Justice Neil Gorsuch said during oral argument, but no one asked Gorsuch to write a rule for the ages. The court was given a narrow question to decide and the court's conservatives chose to widen the aperture as much as possible so they can make right some cosmic wrongs they see in American law, which is exactly what conservatives used to complain that liberal justices did.
Where are you on that notion that as a body of work, not every specific case, but as a body of work, this court has really kind of revealed some fundamental lies in the conservative judicial philosophy. I'm not going to go that far, but what I'm going to say is I think that in many ways, this court is actually an embodiment of pre-Trump conservatism, but that at certain specific pressure points yields to pressure.
So the two big pressure points of the last term were Trump v. Anderson.
This is the 14th Amendment with Colorado striking Trump from the ballot or attempting to strike Trump from the ballot, and then Trump v. United States, which was, of course, the immunity decision.
And in both of those cases, the court really did something that it hasn't done before. It had a role reversal where the six, well, I'll say five, because Amy Coney Barrett is standing on her own in many ways here.
But five of the six conservatives essentially say, look, we're just really worried about what's happening here. This idea that states can strike someone from the ballot or this idea that a successor can prosecute a predecessor, and we're going to just cut that off.
And what they did was in both Trump v. Anderson and Trump v.
United States, they did it in a way that ended up contradicting the text of the Constitution. In many ways, they became almost like living constitutionalists.
But then if you read the concurrence, which is really a quasi-dissent in Trump v. Anderson, where the more liberal justices scold the majority for essentially saying, hey, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is basically a dead letter unless Congress does something.
They said, you know, that's not what it says. You know, so they were far more textualist and originalist than the conservative majority.
And that's a point that I made in my piece is at the end of the day, in both Trump v. Anderson and Trump v.
United States, the originalists were the progressive dissenters, and the living constitutionalists were the conservative majority. That's enough to make some of us who didn't go to law school wonder about the intentions and motives.
Cynical. Yes, it drives cynicism among those of us who didn't go to FedSoc bootcamp.
John Lovett last week asked, kind of an absurdist hypothetical, but given this is your bailiwick, I think you're a good person to present an absurdist hypothetical to when you look at the cases between Chevron and between immunity. And his point was something to the effect of how can the court declare that a president cannot order an agency to interpret a law a certain way and also declare that any official act is immune from prosecution? Because in which case, what would be the enforcement mechanism for preventing a president from ordering an agency to interpret a law a specific way? How would you feel about that one? It's a really good question because it presents kind of the paradox of the current court, which is, in many ways, it has limited the power of the presidency more than any other Supreme Court in my lifetime.
So, you know, whether it's major questions doctrine, Chevron, overruling Chevron, I mean, I don't want to get too nerdy into all of this, but they have really limited the power of the executive branch. But then with this immunity decision, what they say is, okay, if it's a core power, like I'm granting a pardon or I'm ordering the troops to open fire or whatever, if it's core, I'm absolutely immune from criminal prosecution.
And if it's even at the periphery of my power, I'm presumptively immune. So Tim, there's an inconsistency there.
There is an inconsistency, which could be exploited by a horrible human being. So obviously I could file a lawsuit to enjoin.
We might have one of those in the office. Wait, wait.
Is one of those running? The horrible human beings. So let me play it out.
Let's say I am a citizen and an executive agency at Trump's direction is violating my constitutional rights or exceeding its authority.

I can sue to make the executive agency stop and I can get a court order making the executive agency stop.

But then what if Trump says, no, keep going, defy the court, and I'll pardon you if anything happens? Then in that circumstance, you do see the tension if these rulings, and I have yet to have somebody to satisfactorily explain to me how it is that if a president is just hell bent on lawlessness, how he can't use that absolute immunity in his core functions and the presumptive immunity at the outer periphery and serial granting of pardons to accomplish a lot of horrible, nefarious stuff. Now, it would take a terrible, terrible, lawless human being to do it.
But guess what? One of those is running. One of those is running.
Yeah, and winning. Not just running, but has explicitly basically said he will use the pardon function to give cover to people in certain contexts, particularly with regards to January 6th and immigration.
So all right, last thing on court nerdy stuff. Your colleague, your counterparty on advisory opinion, Sarah Isger, wrote this following the immunity ruling.
The Trump people on the left's court haters are hot to trot on this being a complete victory for Trump. The delay is undoubtedly good for Trump, but as of now, it looks like all but one of the Jan 6th charges will probably move forward.
That was a little ray of hope for me in that tweet, but I'm not sure if it's correct. So anyway, I hate to talk about your counterparty behind her back here, but what would you say on your podcast? I have a feeling that talking about it on a very popular podcast is not behind her back.
That's a good point. She's right.
I mean, she's right. So the real concern with the ruling isn't actually, in my view, backwards looking to the January 6th prosecution, because if Trump doesn't win the presidency, he's still in a world of hurt in the January 6th prosecution.
because Justice Barrett elicited from Trump's attorney and the oral argument,

a lot of confessions that a lot of the conduct was private.

And there's pages in the oral argument transcript where she's walking Trump's own lawyer through these events and saying, private? And he's like, yeah, private. So all of that private conduct is still prosecutable.
And then on the official conduct, almost all of that is peripheral official conduct. And so there is a presumption of immunity, but it's not absolute.
So you can overcome it. So he can still be prosecuted on the private conduct and he can still be prosecuted on most of the official conduct.
But the issue that I have is that the Supreme Court, rather than just simply deciding the case in front of it, went ahead and said, we're trying to decide sort of like the immunity question writ large. And so then that provided a roadmap for a very terrible, horrible human being president to exploit.
So the forward- immunity, I'm much more concerned about than the backward looking prosecution of Trump on January 6. If he loses, he's still in a world of hurt.
But notice I said, if he loses, which- That's a big if. Yeah.
Yeah, that's the depressing part of it all. Okay.
Well, and we're going to get right into that with why he's on a course for victory right now. But Charlie used to do something called a little palate cleanser.
So before we get to Biden, let's do a palate cleanser. There's someone on the resistance Twitter like, why are you talking so much about this? Talk about Project 2025.
Talk about the crazy stuff that the ride is up to. And I'm like, yeah, I've been having a segment focused on Johnny McEntee, who is going to be one of the architects of the Schedule F side of the Project 2025.
And we call that segment The Right Stuff. If white people are so awful, why do you keep moving to their neighborhoods? Each one gets stupider.

That's Johnny McEntee's TikTok that I pull from for the right stuff.

So anyway, David, take a shot at that question about why people are moving to white people's neighborhoods.

And also in the broader question of having Johnny McEntee in charge of hiring.

And Trump could point out.

I mean, historic inequality has meant that the blessings of American prosperity have not been equally distributed. And so if you're, if you're going to move into a neighborhood where the blessings of American prosperity have been unequally distributed because of a lot of that historical legacy, there's going to be a lot of white people there.
And it has nothing to do with whether white people

are good or awful. It has everything to do with the fact that between 1619 and 1964, we had one part of the American population that was systematically dehumanized and discriminated against with legalized bigotry defended by violence.
And that has massive consequences. even after you get rid of all of those formal legal discriminatory structures.
That was beautifully done. And the Bulldog Podcast audience will appreciate it.
I don't know that that would have landed on TikTok. I don't know, you know, I don't know that you would have had the same kind of engagement for that reply.
But maybe we should try it. Maybe we should do one of those things.
I'm about to show my age. I don't know what it's called, where you reply to a TikTok.
There's a specific turn of art of that, but maybe we should try that. Tim, you didn't see me say those exact words while dancing, which is how I would do it on TikTok.
And then it gets very compelling. All right.
Well, let's do that. We're going to do one of those and see how it goes.
We'll compare who gets better engagement between you and Johnny. Yeah, it's pretty alarming that these are the clowns that are going to be kind of running the government, right? Yeah.
I mean, so Tim, I've written this and I believe this and each week or month, which of these vices is more important, like I go back and forth, but the end of this era, sad era in American history, and it will come to an end one way or the other, historians will debate whether the cardinal vice was malice or stupidity. And so what you have seen is an awful lot of malice coming out of MAGA, for example, but just a tidal wave of stupidity as well, just a tidal wave.
And so basically, if you take a default position of sort of blanket anti-elitism, a blanket rejection of any of expertise, etc., and then you replace it with a new measure of a political class, which is essentially, are you just a big enough asshole to relentlessly, continuously fight the left? you're not always going to get the best and brightest in that formulation. And so you, you do end up with an awful lot of absurd commentary, just absurd.
And this is one thing that I see on Twitter all the time. A lot of times you look at Twitter and you say, okay, is this person really a terrible person? Or do they just frankly don't even understand what's being talked about? And there are some combinations of those vices at almost at all times in play.
The malice or stupidity question is one that has been relevant to the Joe Biden debate as well.

So we might as well move to that.

For listeners, Joe Biden does have a big press conference today at NATO.

We're taping this Thursday morning.

And so by the time you listen to this, that might already have happened.

But we'll be talking about that on tomorrow's podcast.

But I want to play for me something on Morning Joe.

It just aired a couple hours ago

from what? Let's just listen. I'm not going to characterize it.
Let's say one thing that we do have to underline here just so so viewers can can follow what's going on behind the scenes is is the Biden campaign and many Democratic officials do believe that barack obama uh is is quietly working behind the scenes uh to orchestrate this i mean david like this is where we're going on the left we're going into conspiracy world magic obama stuff i mean this is like reverend right air is level so i mean it, I guess. So it's not all the way there, but like Barack Obama isn't orchestrating a conspiracy.
Joe Biden just couldn't talk on stage and is getting crushed. Like that's all that's happening here.
There's no complication. Yeah.
Go ahead. You were channeling me, Tim.
If your view of the present crisis is Barack Obama is a central sort of villain in this, what are we doing here? Because the reality was, look, I watched the debate. I was in Chautauqua, New York on the 27th.
I watched the debate. I happened to be at an event where there were a lot of Obama folks and sort of what you would call the Obama wing of the Democratic Party.
I was around these folks.

What was the context for this? I was speaking at Chautauqua. And there were other speakers and things like that.
And we're all watching. And they were rooting for Joe Biden.
They wanted Joe Biden to do well. And they were gobsmacked, gobsmacked at Biden's performance.
So the crisis is Biden's performance.

It is not the reaction to Biden's performance. If a Democratic Party leader, whether they're Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer, I mean, you name it, you go down the line.
If one of them are looking at what we could all see with the evidence of our eyes and our ears and are alarmed by that, that's not a problem. That's a party working if they actually do something about it.
Now, it remains to be seen. I don't know if you would agree with this, Tim.
I think it's the worst debate performance I've seen in a national election by orders of magnitude. No, whatever the worst debate performance you think that you've seen, it was closer to Miss South Carolina talking about the Iraq during the Miss USA pageant than it was to whatever Herman Cain's, you know, 999 debate appearance or whatever you think is the second worst debate appearance.
I mean, it was a catastrophe. And JVL says it was like it was closer to a health event than a bad debate performance.
Yes, that's how I felt. In the first 30 minutes, I was worried for him.
I was worried that we were witnessing a health event. I mean, that was something that crossed my mind.
And so no, it is not Barack Obama's fault. It is not Nancy Pelosi's fault.
It is not, come on, guys, come on. And the thing you also have to realize is that the argument that says, hey, New York Times, if you only talked about this less, everything would be okay, or hey, media, or hey, talking heads, that's totally misunderstanding the entire dynamic of this race.
If readers of the New York Times are, by and large, overwhelmingly supporting Joe Biden, and by the way, readers of newspapers in general- Readers are overwhelmingly supporting Joe Biden. Okay, that was mean.
That was mean. All right.
That was mean. Go ahead.
You don't have to reply to that one. Outside of MAGA, outside of MAGA, who is really supporting Joe Biden? The lower propensity voters, the lower information voters, the ones who don't know chapter and verse of all of the Trump scandals.
And millions of low propensity voters are supporting Trump. They get their news from Facebook, TikTok, et cetera.
And they don't know all of the Trump scandals. They don't.
But they can look at a candidate and see that he's in an advanced, very advanced age and a state of decline. They can see that with their own eyes and ears.
And then if a newspaper that they don't read highlights all of Trump's scandals, that's not dealing with the problem. And I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people can't see this.
It's like the New York Times editorial board. If they only said the right and negative thing about Trump, then Joe Biden would be doing better.
It's like, what? It's all the New York Times editorial page has done for the most part. I mean, with some exceptions, some of your colleagues have, you know, there are obviously other things, but there have been plenty, let's just say, there have been plenty of negative editorials about Donald Trump and the New York Times.
That clearly hasn't been the silver bullet. The other thing about this, and I wrote about this in the morning newsletter, is the conspiracy of the elites that the Biden team and super users of political social media, political hobbyists that have decided to rally to Joe Biden's side.
The narrative that they've put forth, like there is a conspiracy of elites to undermine Joe Biden maybe some of them even want Trump and these people are going against what the will is of regular Democratic base voters like has it exactly opposite has it exactly opposite we talked to as we're going about this yesterday it's like regular voters for the most part not again by regular, I don't mean people that tweet about politics eight times a day.

I mean, Democratic voters who are reliable Democrats, who are not political hobbyists, they are gobsmacked about Joe Biden. They're worried about Donald Trump.
They don't really know what to do. They'll vote for any Democrat.
and their leaders are privately know that joe biden is on a path to lose and they are hoodwinking them

with this like talking point about how there are these other bad elites that they should focus their anger on. The whole thing is a put on.
It's the opposite of the truth. It is.
It is nuts. It is nuts.
And here's where I've got a problem with the way the right and the left are handling this. On the right, it's like there was this giant media conspiracy.
Everyone at the New York Times knew exactly how degraded Joe Biden was. And then, you know, only us, the truth tellers and right wing media saw this coming, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, that's completely at odds with the reality, especially at the times where we have been getting hammered by the left for month after month after month after month for talking about Joe Biden's age. And then on the left, I've started to see similar arguments that I saw on the right for Trump in 2016, like you're not electing a man, you're electing an administration.
It's a real pro-democracy argument, by the way. Just don't worry.
Unelective bureaucrats will take care of things. That's the pro-democracy case, I guess.

And then it gets to populism. Don't let those elites tell you what to do.
When the reality is,

there is a difference. There are people who have more information about the president's condition,

and there are people who have less information. And when people have more information, share that information with those who have less information.
That's called reporting. That is not called, you know, elitism.
It's reporting. You know, nobody says like, if you see a New York Times report from the frontline in Ukraine saying, oh, look at the elites trying to tell us about the frontline in Ukraine.
No, it's reporting. You are reporting on, and there's been a lot of good reporting in the last several days about all of the extreme steps to isolate Biden from even the rest of his administration to such an extent that even some of his own aides who had been frozen out in recent months were surprised at how bad things were.
Yes. Literally the headline of my morning shots this morning is about the Democratic elites real conspiracy.
So I have plenty of criticism of the Democratic elites in this moment for not being candid. But like this notion that they all knew that Joe Biden was a vegetable and just were hiding it and we're trying to weaken at Bernie's it is just totally belied by the facts of like, that's why they wanted to have a debate in the first place.
Because they thought that Joe Biden could do it. Right.
And could allay these concerns. And secondly, by this new reporting, which is there was the one behind the curtain thing I can say from my conversations with leading Democrats.
There was this kind of discussion, a parlor discussion that was like, it's kind of weird that Joe Biden hasn't called called so-and-so or it's kind of weird that i haven't been invited to this meeting or it wasn't like reportable like it wasn't something that you tweet like i think it's odd that the president hasn't called me you know what i mean like you know there was there was a there was a wonder about why the bubble had gotten so tight nobody was on sure enough footing to like say anything about it until what we saw in Atlanta. And that's what I think really happened.
I agree with that. And also, I thought Olivia Nosey in her blockbuster report outlined that dynamic pretty well, that she said, I'd been working on this for months, and really people were not willing to talk to me.
After June 27th, then a lot of people were suddenly

willing to open up and willing to talk. But also what I would say is there's a difference.
And you know this, Tim, be sort of like generalized concern slash vibes and reportable information. And so I would say, yeah, for some time, there has been generalized concern slash vibes that what's going on here, but the ability to get reportable information, that's why, for example, so many people jumped on the Her Report, the Robert Her's report, because it was a piece of reportable information that matched a lot of pre-existing generalized concerns and vibes.
And so that's why it kind of created this. There was sort of a frenzy around the Herr report when it first came out.
And a lot of people in the Democratic Party got really, really angry at Herr and the report and the reporting. I was much more alarmed by the Herr report than many other people.
But the reason why that frenzy happened was because the her report was landing in a, an environment that was already concerned. And then the concerns have just grown over the last several months.
Yeah, I do think that's a fair, and I think that the lashing out at her was clearly wrong headed in retrospect. So I think that's, that's one thing that's a fair criticism coming from the right.
And it's you know the other thing is just like you know even in the nuzzy reporting it's like her analogies are like well i talked to somebody who's like biden should have known me but he didn't seem to remember me in a meeting but like again is that something you can report it's like it's a weird thing to report it's like joe smith who is a biden donor said said that Biden didn't seem to remember him in one event.

Right. Is that like, you know what I mean? So this stuff's harder than it seems.
And you've written about a little bit about this, about how it is parallel to what a lot of people have gone through with parents or grandparents or family members in their lives, where it's not oftentimes like, you know, you go one day and the lights are off. You know, it's like there's good days and bad days.
There's, you know, and I think that's why a lot of regular voters actually were ahead of reporting on this. Yes.
There's nothing mysterious about aging. It is the most relatable thing.
And at this point, most voters, people 18 and over have had an experience with aging with a grandparent or a parent. And they know, and a lot of us, a lot of people have had experience with that tipping point where somebody who six months before was much more vibrant is not nearly as vibrant.
And we know that you don't come back from that. There isn't like an exercise or diet regimen or whatever that brings you back from that tipping point.
And so at some point, the spin becomes just pure gaslighting and you're gaslighting on a matter that basically everyone has some experience with. So it's the least effective form of gaslighting imaginable.
So that now what we're left with is the case for Joe Biden is almost purely the case against Donald Trump. And as compelling as that is for millions and millions and millions of voters, it's not a compelling enough message for Joe Biden to win the election.
I think clearly not. I want to talk to you about one other thing related to this now as you move ahead to the election question, because I received two notes this morning that or kind of like contrary views on how the Democrats could move forward with Joe Biden or without to try to reach

some of the people that they're going to need since they're behind with. Sam Steinman,

who kind of pointed out that news is getting better, right? Like if we're in a more stable

democratic environment, maybe they could, you know, would have more sturdy ground to campaign

on. They'd say inflation is easing in June to 3%.
Economic outlook keeps getting better. We're nearing maybe an Israel-Hamas deal, it seems like.
Jobs are steadying. That's one way to look at things.
I had a text from another friend that said that an under-discussed problem here is actually the voters don't think things are good and are getting better. Yeah.
And the Dems are deluding themselves about this.

And even if they get a new candidate, a fundamental issue is going to be this kind of desire to run on things are great status quo rather than run on, you know, future oriented.

We can make things better.

Which of those arguments is more compelling to you?

Yeah, I think the latter argument for now is more compelling because if you look at the dynamic, you've got this weird combination in the Trump, of Trump voters right now. You've got the MAGA core who are like, America's going to end if Joe Biden continues.
We need a revolution. It will be bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Like that's the Kevin Roberts statement about, you know, from Heritage. Victory or death, you know, Steve Bannon.
All of this talk about American Revolution, which is- Flight 93 all the way down. Yeah, deeply disruptive, very wrenching, very chaotic.
And then you've got this really interesting, weird dynamic of the nostalgic Trump voters. Now, what are they nostalgic for? They're nostalgic for pre-COVID America.
And so they look at Joe Biden and they don't see, oh, he handled a lot of colossal challenges that have been radiating out from COVID and in the international sphere pretty well. Like, you know, the American economy is the envy of the world.
Russia has been stopped cold in eastern Ukraine. You know, so far, as you were saying, he's supported Israel while maintaining support for humanitarian efforts to aid Gazan civilians.
He's, you know, assisted Israel in defending against Iran, which has helped prevent Iran from escalating. There are good things to say, but what is the thing you'll note from all of this? All of that is responding to crisis.
And so it's understandable that people would say, I want the pre-crisis life. And they have that sort of view, even though Trump was the instigator of many of the crises that we're, and contributor to many of the crises that we're still battling to this day.
And so I think that argument that says a lot of voters are not really happy with how things are, and you actually can give them statistics all day long, and it doesn't register with them. They still look at it as, well, there's a war in Europe.
There's a war in the Middle East. Inflation is higher.
And the reasons for all those things and the adequacy of the Biden response to all of those things, I think there are compelling arguments to make. But again, if you're in this core group of the low propensity voters that are not tuned in to news media very much, the current time does have challenges that pre-COVID did not.
This takes us to the Kamala question, kind of, right? So let's say that Joe Biden does what I think to be the right thing and step aside. You look at the vice president and there's some obvious there's some obvious upsides.
You know, she can deliver a message against Donald Trump, which is something that's been missing. That's the main upside, I think.
I think there'd be a new level of excitement among certain democratic base, you know, not maybe the whole population, but certain people would be more excited, I think. And, you know, that bubbles out.
There is, though, the baggage of all that stuff you just talked about, being part of this crisis-ridden administration, maybe through no fault of our own. And then there's also this, are people going to vote for a black woman question? Also no fault of our own.
How do you assess all of that? If I told you that your only options were riding with Biden or the vice president, do you think that she presents more upside or not? I go with the vice president in that scenario 10 times out of 10, for both a political and a practical reason. Yes, she is not a popular politician.
She has obvious weaknesses as a politician. The question right now is not a world between good and better.
I'm really worried about Biden's fitness to finish the term, to be honest. And so we're talking about a person who can make a case versus not make a case, who can perform the functions of the presidency for 18 hour days and not perform the functions of the presidency.
And so both from a practical political standpoint, somebody who can do that is, I believe, going to be a better candidate than somebody who can't. And then we just have the small little detail, Tim.
Yeah, absolutely. You need to defeat Donald Trump, but then somebody has to be president.
And if you're saying what we want to have happen is to defeat Donald Trump and then the somebody who's going to be president, it's fantastical to think in the current rate of decline that he could finish his term, maybe even finish the first year of his next term. That's a giant issue.
So both on a matter of politics and practicality, I think she's a better alternative. I don't think she's the best democratic alternative.
But I also think that there's an element that I've been seeing that I don't know. I'd love your opinion on this, Tim.
You're much more the political expert than I am. If you see the right go after her, they go after her in the grossest of ways.
You know, in the Obama era, there were a lot of dog whistles against, you know, the sort of subtle or hidden or veiled kind of racist discourse. With Kamala, it is out front and center.
The way that right-wing discourse has devolved over the last nine years means that there's going to be no shortage of wild, crazy, horrific, bigoted things said about her. And one of the questions I have is, does that actually undermine the right in a way that their own bigotry would make them more vulnerable in that situation? I think it's worth a shot.
Throughout this whole process, I wanted to demonstrate, like, I don't know. It's possible that I'm just naive about the hurdles a black woman faces, right, in the world.
And I listen to some of these focus groups that

Sarah does on how people talk about a woman president. And I'm just like, it's unbelievable

to me that people say this shit out loud, forget that they think it. And so maybe that's just an

insurmountable hurdle. But that said, just as a political matter, as a political tactician,

I would be like, man, you get her in there and they start doing this DEI president, gross,

racist shit. I think about the post George Floyd and how even a lot of conservative people kind of initially, you know, before the riots kind of rallied around Black Lives Matter.
I think there's a lot of people that want to believe that it's not a racist country. I think you can bring some of these folks back.
I really do. But last thing that I have to ask you about.
Are you as depressed as I am about threads? I don't think threads actually matters. But just as a sociological experiment, there's this notion that Twitter is a cesspool, and it's mostly these racist and anti-Semites that make Twitter a cesspool, and everybody is cruel.
And what threads, which ended up being a self-selecting group of people that left Twitter because they thought that Elon was bad, basically. To me, it's revealed over the past two weeks is that it's social media that's bad and human nature that's bad.
And any epistemically closed organism is going to reveal people to be cruel and bullying and tribal. And I find that to be pretty depressing.
So do you have anything to add to that? Agree completely. I think threads in many ways, I'm not on Twitter anymore.
I still prefer threads to Twitter. But I will say the bloom is off the rose, because what ended up happening is you had a largely what I would call largely center left exodus with some never Trump right exodus from Twitter, but they're in their own bubble.
They're in their own cocoon. And then the Biden stuff and anything that sort of challenges what you might call kind of mainstream Democratic Party conventional wisdom gets just dogpiled, like just dogpiled.
Now, I will say the dogpiling- Sometimes the mean ways, because I can take criticism, but sometimes the meanness is also something. Oh, it is, I would say, right-wing adjacent in its cruelty.
Very MAGA, echoes of MAGA. And I don't know if it's you or some of your colleagues line blue MAGA.
I prefer blue Anon. I think blue Anon has a nice ring to it, but yeah.
Blue Anon. there's just a lot of, a lot of cruelty in partisan politics in the United States.
And it is not confined to the Republican Party. And if you doubt that, if you doubt that for five seconds, I'll introduce you to this website called Threads and suggest a tweet, a post or two.
And you'll get to experience that just in an abundance. Stuff out there, David French.
I'm glad we've got islands of sanity like you. I appreciate you coming back on the Bulldog Podcast.
My love to your family. We'll stay in touch.
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Tim.
It's always so great to talk to you. All right.
We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the Bulldog Podcast. We'll talk about the Biden-NATO press conference, and we'll have our friend Amanda Carpenter talk to

us about some Project 2025 stuff. We'll see you all then.
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