David French: Moral Clarity in an Age of Manufactured Distrust

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. History is littered with examples of dictators who overreact, who trigger a backlash, and the society starts to fall apart. And so this sort of idea and I think Trump has this very directional idea. He has it in his mind that if you're just firm enough, then you can gain control, and that is just not the way these things work, especially in free societies. I'm thrilled to welcome David French back to the puck.

David is one of the most thoughtful voices in American political commentary today, a columnist for the New York Times, a former senior editor at the Dispatch, and a fellow at the National Review Institute. He's written extensively on the Constitution, civil liberties, and the state of our national discourse. Today, we have the chance to catch up on the dizzying cascade of events unfolding here and abroad. We'll talk about the rule of law, the nature of the American character, and what our future might look like if we allow ourselves to see it from a different perspective. It's an encouraging conversation at a time that is very tense.

So let's get to it. David, welcome back to the puck. Well, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. So you've had what I consider a remarkable run lately at the times, and in conversations that keep calling us back to both clarity, and what I like to refer to as conscience.

So I'd like to take a moment and just touch on the fact that we're living in a very morally disorienting time. Yeah. Israel's been attacked. They've been demonized, and now pulled into even more direct confrontation with Iran, launching a preemptive strike last night. It's obviously an existential fight, but globally, we're seeing moral confusion, a lot of antisemitism re emerge in mainstream spaces.

Yeah. So let's let's just start there. You've been outspoken about Israel's right to self defense. You're also committed to moral integrity. Yeah.

So how should Israel balance that right with the moral and humanitarian consequences of military action, especially taking into account antisemitism on the rise? And do you do you see this recent strike on Iran as a continuation of Bibi clinging to power as your colleague Thomas Friedman seems to suggest? How do you make sense of all this? Well, I I don't think there's much doubt that Bibi is trying to cling to power, but I also think that Bibi is taking advantage of a unique and important opportunity to cripple Iran's program. And why do I say unique and important?

So unique for the reason that Iran and its allies as a result of, you know, months and now more than a year of continual warfare since 10/07/2023, Iran and its allies are very weakened compared to where they were on 10/06/2023. So Hamas is decimated. Hezbollah is decimated. The Assad regime is gone. The Houthis have been weakened a bit, but they're down in Yemen.

They're not as immediately dangerous to Israel. And in previous exchanges with Iran, Israel degraded Iran's air defenses to the point where Iran is essentially open. The Iranian skies are open to the Israeli Air Force. So here you have an opportunity where Iran is weaker than it's been in a generation. You know, when Pakistan developed a bomb or when India developed a bomb or when North Korea developed a bomb, they all had intact, huge intact militaries that could protect the country while they engineered a nuclear weapon.

That meant that the cost of taking them on was extremely high. Well, with Iran being so weakened, the cost of taking on Iran is much lower. So that's where you have this unique opportunity, but it also an important opportunity because look, we've always known that nuclear weapons are horrific, just beyond horrific. So there's enough reason from what the weapons can do just on their own to try to to encourage non proliferation or to enforce non proliferation. But here's this other thing that a lot of people are missing.

What the Russia invasion of Ukraine taught us is that if you have a nuclear umbrella, you can be extremely aggressive militarily and limit your opponent's reaction to you. So you can use this, the the nuclear umbrella, as a shield that enables the conventional sword, if that makes sense. And so if Iran develops a bomb, you'd have two immediate problems right off. One, they could threaten the destruction and the end of lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Israeli citizens. Number two, even if Iran didn't do that, which would result in its own nuclear you know, Israel's own nuclear response could devastate Iran.

Even if Iran didn't do that, it could ramp up its conventional warfare activities, securing the knowledge that Israel would not be able able to cripple the country without potentially triggering that nuclear response. So it's the same thing we've seen with Ukraine. Russia attacks, and then the Western allies want to support Ukraine, but there's been this constant anxiety if we if we are we gonna go too far and trigger that nuclear response? So I put these attacks on Iran in a kind of separate bucket. I also each one of these different conflicts, the one with Hamas, with Hezbollah, they are separate in some interesting ways.

And I think the one where Israel has the most problem is what is the long term approach and what has been the short term approach to Hamas? And this is where I have some problems with the Israeli strategy. I think the Israeli strategy has resulted in needless civilian death, strategy has resulted in needless civilian deaths. And, you know, we can talk about that. There was a course of action they should have pursued that they did not pursue, and that is causing an enormous amount of, in my view, needless suffering.

Now that's not to say that Israel shouldn't have struck Hamas very, very, very hard. The way they did it, I have raised objections because it reminds me of the way we fought the first part of the war in Iraq. And it's ignoring the lessons we learned in those mistakes. And they should have taken the approach that we took in the second part of the war in Iraq. And that involved actually moving in occupying territory, holding the territory until you can make sure that you have a civilian force that can come in and administer and, you know, govern the territory and secure it.

And then you move on to the next phase and occupy the next part until you're sure that there's a civilian force that can come in and secure it. It's called the ink blot strategy. It's where you like an ink blot sort of spreads across a piece of paper, control and peace spreads across the territory. And they did not do that. They instead went with a very, very heavily punitive strike as was their right to try to destroy Hamas without occupying Gaza.

And that's what we tried to do in Iran. We tried to destroy Al Qaeda without extending a real true occupation of the country, and we found out you couldn't do both. You couldn't destroy Al Qaeda without engaging at least a temporary. And, again, when I say occupation, I mean temporary, a temporary occupation. And so by refusing that occupation approach, they increased the level of violence necessary to deal with Hamas, and then they made it to where Hamas could never really be removed from the territory.

So I think that's been a real problem. Any idea why they took that approach initially? And and is there any sense now that they're changing their strategy and moving back to that approach? Oh, absolutely. I know why they didn't because nobody wanted them to including them.

Right. Okay. Okay. So so most of your Israeli citizens remember the pre there are reasons why Israel left Gaza in 2005. They don't want to be administering Gaza.

Right. It is a drain on Israelis resources. It would create there would be low intensity guerrilla warfare even in the places where they had control. So Israel doesn't wanna do this. At the same time, the international community doesn't want them to do it either.

They sort of hear the word occupation and they think of oppression. Well, I think of it in a different sense. I think of it in the sense of the law of war. Now in the law of war, if you're going to strike and hold territory, you become a quote unquote occupying power and that creates obligations to the civilians in that space to protect them, to provide for their basic needs. So I'm not talking about annexation.

I'm not talking about that at all. I'm talking about very temporary occupation under the laws of war, but it's easy to see why Israel didn't do it. They didn't wanna do it. Right. The international community didn't want them to do it.

I don't think the Biden administration wanted them to do it. And so there's a lot of pressure for them not to do it and there was just a very few sort of, you know, people who had experienced in counterinsurgency warfare, who had experience in Iraq, experience in Afghanistan were jumping up and down and going, there are lessons here. There are lessons here that we need to learn, and sometimes military reality should dictate political realities instead of the other way around. When you look at this as somebody that obviously knows a lot about history, and military tactics, and so forth, and you look at what's going on today, you have some people out there saying, oh my god. Is this the beginning of World War three?

Stock market down big, oil prices up. I mean, what's your what's your take on this? I mean, you you you started by saying Iran has been severely weakened. We know the Sunnis have been much more ready to make a deal and want to open up economically. Is this kind of a once in a generational opportunity for kind of to really redo the the Middle East?

And is some of this pressure gonna get taken off of Israel? Because again, for Israel to deal with the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, all, you know, for the next several years is it I would think would exhaust a a very small country. How do you see this, you know, strategically playing out over the next couple years? Yeah. I would say you can say two things at once.

It's extremely dangerous moment, and it's a generational opportunity. So let's deal with the dangerous moment first. Look, you do not cripple an entire large country's military in one night of air strikes. You don't do it. Iran has thousands of missiles.

It has naval assets. It has air assets, although they're pretty weak. It has drones. It has an ability to create immense harm even if it doesn't have any more allies, close allies in the region. Now if this all happened on 10/06/2023, Israel would know it was in for potentially hell on earth if it did this.

You would have an intact Hamas perhaps attacking, an intact Hezbollah attacking. You might had assist assistance from Syria. You would have an intact Iranian arsenal attack like, all of these things at once, it would have been an order of magnitude more dangerous for Israel. But now after all of the combat since October 7, as I said, Hamas is weak, Hezbollah is weak, Syrian regime is gone. The Iranian air defenses have been crippled.

So it is a more manageable risk. Doesn't mean it's not dangerous, but it's very difficult to see another power coming in on Iran's side. Russia is fully engaged. China may provide some assistance, but they're not gonna come into this. So this was a unique moment, but doesn't mean it's not dangerous.

I mean, Iran has the ability to potentially, they're right as we're speaking, Tel Aviv was just hit by a missile. So there's, you know, likely casualties from that. Iran has teeth. It just doesn't have the teeth that once had. And so what we're dealing with here is a risk assessment by Israel that it can absorb whatever Iran sends at it at Israel and it and it would be a reasonable cost.

It would be cost worth bearing. But nobody should think that just because I have said and others have said that this is a strategic window of opportunity, that this is in any way a cakewalk or that their success is guaranteed. I can imagine a situation where Israeli airstrikes are not effective, and you end up inflaming the region without actually crippling the bomb program. And so, you know, you could imagine a ways that this could go wrong, but every war is a risk and you are making risk assessments at all times. And so this is a very dangerous time, but it was also the best time in the last decade for Israel to take this action.

That that makes sense. So let let's shift to kind of what we were talking about, this issue of moral clarity, and and kind of the ability to have these more complicated discussions. So for instance, I recently read a piece in the free press called The Knowledge System Collapse. Right. And and for me, it hit home because our institutions of truth making, whether it's media, science, law, they they do feel shattered.

What do you make of that framing? I I would say I'm living at a time with and this is no surprise to anybody. We're living at a remarkably low trust time. Now the question I have is how much of that low trust is a correct assessment and how much is an exaggerated assessment? And so what I would say is that our low trust right now is the result of an exaggerated assessment.

Not to say institutions are perfect, not to say that institutions are perfectly truthful. I do contest the idea that institutions are now somehow less truthful now than they were in the relatively recent past or even in ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. You'd have to go institution by institution. Which ones? Right?

Because there are some institutions that are better. There are some that are worse. But I will say that public confidence is extraordinarily low. And one of the reasons why it's low is by this process I've called and other things I've written Manufactured Distrust. Okay, and so what does that mean?

What that means is if there's an institution that is perceived to be on the other side of you. In other words, in this hyperpartisan time, conservatives say perceive, a lot of conservatives perceive the New York Times as against them. Or a lot of liberals of course perceive Fox News as against them. And so, therefore, if you're highly partisan, you're gonna wanna inoculate your tribe against any negative information you get from the other side. And so you're, there's a consistent message.

You can't trust the New York Times. The New York Times is going to lie to you. The New York Times is against you. And I see how this, because you know, I have lived since 2006 in Tennessee in the heart of MAGA country. And so, you know, when I started at the Times in 2023, I would say that my neighbors as a general matter were not overjoyed with that, right?

And so they just had a lot of tough stuff to say about my new employer. And I tried to approach it with a spirit of curiosity. What specifically has bothered you? Well, as soon as we got specific, all of the there were no specifics. And that is a great sign that you're dealing with manufactured distrust.

Okay. So if someone can say, well, I don't trust them. Why? And they don't have a good concrete specific answer, that's a great warning sign. So conversely, there's a whole, Rui Teixeira has written about this concept called the Fox News Fallacy.

That is if people are progressive and there's a news story that generates out of Fox News, there's like an automatic disbelief. Now, okay, if you're gonna ask me like what's my perception of Fox News, I'm gonna get pretty precise. I'm gonna say, well, you know, they entered into the largest defamation settlement in media history recently after conducting a deceptive campaign to describe the twenty twenty election as stolen. So I have a specific beef with Fox, but at the same time, I don't disbelieve everything Fox says. Sometimes Fox reports breaks news.

Right? And so you really do have to take it by case by case, but within, you know, an eyebrow lifted of skepticism. But we're in a moment where people are being told don't trust them, don't trust them, don't trust them. Without specifics, sometimes using misinformation to generate this distrust. So I'm not being naive apologetic.

I mean I'm not being mounting some sort of naive apologetic. I know that institutions have failed. I know that many institutions have failed. I also don't have a rose colored view of the past. I don't necessarily think, you know, look look at the Pentagon papers.

Right? I think the Pentagon is more trustworthy in all likelihood than it was thirty, forty years ago. Well, thirty, forty, that's nineties and eighties. Fifty years ago, let's get our timing right, then time flies. So I'm very curious, I'm very interested in a specific indictment of an institution.

I'm much less interested in a general indictment of an institution because I feel like a lot of times that's a partisan effort to inoculate people against opposing voices. Yeah. And that's an interesting perspective. And when I look at what's going on with polarization and AI and algorithms and the way we're fed certain information, we are really being shown the very black and white perspectives. And and I've recently, for instance, even said to somebody, when do you think was a better time?

Mhmm. To your point. And in that regard, let's let's move talking about a a better time or not. When when you look at what's going on in LA, for instance, you do I think the opinions on June 10, you talked about protests happening in LA, the upcoming parade. And do you still see Trump's responses in overreaction?

Oh, yeah. I mean okay. Let let's just be as frank as possible here. There was a violent attack on law enforcement. There was a, you know, whether you wanna call it a riot or civil whatever label you wanna put on it, it was unacceptable violence.

Full stop. Full stop. At the same time, its scope was very limited. I mean, it was not that substantially different from a Super Bowl riot Sure. When a team wins.

Like, arguably, Super Bowl riots are bigger. There's more people involved. But this was a limited but violent moment in LA. One that the LAPD, the California National Guard under state control has more than enough resources to handle. The state did not consider it an emergency.

The mayor did not consider it an emergency, but Trump is spoiling for a fight here. And when I say spoiling for a fight, I don't mean spoiling for a political fight. I think he's spoiling for a fight in the streets. He has expressed strong regret for not being more decisive and with troops in 2020. He has a team around him that's been preparing to deploy troops.

All during the Biden administration, they were preparing to use the Insurrection Act, which thankfully they not done yet. So I think there's a lot of evidence that he's spoiling for a fight. He sees a small riot, and here come ultimately almost 5,000 troops, which is more troops than were than are currently in Iraq and Syria, just to put that in perspective. So, yeah, it's you had a extremely heavy handed response. Now if you know anything about dealing with urban unrest, you know that it is difficult and delicate.

There are times when you need to have a firm hand, and there are times when you need to have more finesse. Because if a firm hand is all it took to deal with unrest, well, then dictators would never fall, would they? Right? But sometimes firm hands trigger greater violence. And so if the objective is peace, if that's the objective, if the objective is peace, then it is not always the right thing to just go more force, more force, more force.

That is not always the right way to approach things. History is littered with examples of dictators who overreact, who trigger a backlash, and the society starts to fall apart. And so this sort of idea and I think Trump has this very directional idea, like, he he has expressed, you know, if not admiration, then some degree of respect for the Chinese response to Tiananmen Square. He has it in his mind that if you're just firm enough, then you can gain control. And and that is just not the way these things work, especially in free societies.

And so I think he's overreacting. I think he's overreaching. And he's overreacting and overreaching in an area where the public broadly supports him. It's very interesting. If you look at polling around immigration, it'll say by about a 10 margin, fifty five forty five, people support his deportation objectives.

But by a larger margin, 56 to 44, people object to his deportation tactics. And so he's actually undermining himself right now with these tactics. And so, it's going to be very interesting and more than a little scary to see how things work out. One thing leads to another leads to another leads to another, which is why I say there's just no one size fits all response to urban unrest. So this could start to feed on itself essentially.

Yes. And it could be I mean, you could have people in front of tanks for instance, unrest, he's gonna deploy troops. Couple of things. One, you're gonna start to stretch our military thin. This is a big country.

Our military had trouble containing unrest in the nation of Iraq, which is much smaller, much lower population with a 180,150 troop deployment in a war zone with wartime rules of engagement. So an idea that we're gonna just turn our military in and just clamp down on America if things start to get really widespread, I think is a foolish belief. The better approach is peacemaking. That is the better approach. Now there are times, I'm not naive, I know there are times when you will need to call up the National Guard.

It does happen. Absolutely. It is sometimes necessary. That is first resort is local police, second resort is local police plus state police, third resort is local police, state police, national guard under state control. But putting military forces under federal control in American cities, that is something that's not really been done since 1992 with the LA riots, which were vastly more deadly and dangerous than anything that happened in LA last week.

And David, I, by the way, agree with everything you're saying. And not playing devil's advocate, but going back to this issue of one thing leads to another. Sure. What about this whole issue about LA being a sanctuary city, for instance? I mean, are we putting, you know, oil on a fire, so to speak?

Are we in a sense tempting and teasing Donald Trump and playing into his hand? Well, yes and no. I mean, yes in the sense that I think sanctuary city policy is a bad policy. I don't think that cities should designate themselves sanctuary cities. I think that cities should cooperate with federal law enforcement enforcing federal immigration law.

We do have a problem with uncontrolled immigration. We do. And I'm a pro immigration person. I want more American. I want more people here, but I want them to come in through a controlled rational manner where we know who's coming in, we decide who's coming in, and we I want lots of people to come in, but I wanna know who's coming and I wanna decide who's coming.

I think that's what a sovereign country that's the way a sovereign nation should act. It should have that ability to decide who's coming in and why. But I'm very pro immigrant. But at the same time, I do think that, however, this big flood of illegal immigration that we've seen has had real consequences. It's had real costs.

And so for a city to just or a state or a city to just say, well, we're not gonna cooperate in being a part of the solution here, I think that that's a real problem. I think it is very provocative as well. At the same time, however, they don't have to help. The American system is a federal system, and there's a whole legal doctrine that says that federal officials cannot do not have the ability to commandeer state officials. We do have actually separate sovereignties.

So it is within California's rights to say that we are not going to use our own state resources to accomplish federal law enforcement objectives. They have the right to do that. That's part of our federal system. And in fact, by the way, there are red states who do that to prevent more blues blue initiatives. So for example, there are states that don't want like, you know, in in jurisdictions that don't want to use sheriff's to cooperate in, for example, enforcing federal gun laws.

Okay? That's pretty provocative. Right? That's pretty provocative. But you don't have the right to commandeer those state officials to enforce the federal gun laws.

So this is a legal dance that's we've been dancing for a while. It's unwise. I think it's foolish, but it is actually also a byproduct of our federal system. So here here's here's another off the wall question. Do you have any idea why Trump loves to call people names like Gavin, new scum?

I mean, on the one hand, he seems like he's trying to be liked by people, that he's got this need to be liked. And he's talking about, like, Elon Musk. Right? They're they're bros. They're look, you know, he's willing to make up.

I mean, it's he's got this ability to get really mad, and then he says, I like Gavin. I like Gavin. But then you hear Gavin interviewed, I think it was on the daily in fact, and, you know, he was, like, saying the last time somebody called him news scum was he was when they were seven he was seven years old. Any idea why Trump does that? Yeah.

I have some ideas. I think, one, he enjoys it. Like, I think there's sometimes there's an Occam's razor explanation. He likes it. Right.

He likes taunting people. He likes bullying people. Number two, his base loves it, loves it. And one thing that I think that people don't really appreciate is how Trump has this kind of symbiotic relationship with his rally crowds. Not just the base, but very specifically his rally crowds.

He uses them almost like a focus group, and he tests different words and phrases and messages. And when they really respond, then he'll go with it. You know, one of the reasons why we went through this wave of Trump trying to force football players to stop kneeling was because he was at a rally and I believe it was Pensacola back in 2017, and he said something about, you know, fire them all or whatever. One of a million things he said on the rally, but it created this giant response. So he's gonna double down on that.

And he'll sometimes muse about it in real time. I mean, it was a couple years ago where he's talking about, wow, y'all really get into it when I talk about trans issues or whatever. So he uses the feedback. And so, you know, this idea that Trump likes to be liked. Yes.

Yeah. Sure. I think he really likes to be feared. I think he really likes to be feared. And I think that he sees this bullying as a way And by the way, why wouldn't he think so?

He has bullied people and had them yield his whole career. Bullies people and they give up on him his whole career. And that's why he's so stumped by the judges. I mean, think about it. The judges the judicial branch of government is the only branch of government to not really capitulate to him.

You know, look, I know Democrats in Congress don't capitulate to him, but you would never expect the opposing party to just roll over. What frustrates is him, his own judges that he appointed don't capitulate to him. And so this is a a source of extreme befuddlement to Trump. But I would say he loves to bully people. His crowd loves it when he bullies people, and bullying people has gotten him results.

So why would he stop? You know, without a moral check, without a moral count you know, without the conscience to draw lines on his behavior, he's gonna push to the limit. And without that check and balance, when you talk about how we can move towards into authoritarianism or otherwise have this snowball, is it partly because, again, Trump doesn't understand that there are repercussions of these actions? Like, you've talked about winning versus how you win and the importance there. And and so how how does that all relate to the unintended consequences that he may unleash?

Well, you know, I think that you have to look at it this way, which is and I'm I'm I've just finished a column where I quoted a definition I gave of Trumpism all the way back in '20 in September 2016. And this was my definition in September 2016. I said, it is entirely about the aspiration and will to power of one man, and that one man will say and do and believe anything he needs to say or do or believe to accomplish his political ends. So this is not a guy who is necessarily taking some sort of long historical view about America's place in the world, setting historical precedents for America, thinking long term strategic strategically about America's long term interest. He is thinking in the short term about the health, welfare, and power of Donald Trump.

That is what he's doing. And so that's why, you know, in 2017, he was unpredictable because we'd never quite seen anything like it. In 2025, he's pretty darn predictable. He's pretty darn you can almost script out everything and not everything, but almost. And you know you can predict him because you know he is single mindedly focused on his own political success.

That is the single-minded focus. That is the one thing he won't compromise on. As much as he loves immigration enforcement, he talked about, well, I might have to ease up some because of hospitality workers and agricultural workers. So he'll give in there. As much as he loves tariffs, and I've never seen a human being love tariffs as much as Donald Trump loves tariffs.

He will back away from them so quickly that Wall Street folks have dubbed him Taco Trump. Right. Trump always chickens out. But what is the one area where he has never chickened out or backed down in a millimeter? The election of twenty twenty.

Why? Because that is directly related to his own power. So he doesn't love tariffs more than he loves Trump. He doesn't love immigration enforcement more than he loves Trump. So he'll give up on those things.

But in 2020 was about Trump being in charge and he will never back away from that. And up to a violent attack on the Capitol, up to doubling down even after the violent attack on the Capitol. I mean, so I do think that he is quite predictable in in that way. And that's why when you look at him, he's not thinking a generation down the line. He's thinking five minutes down the line.

I'm not gonna say he never engages in strategic thinking, but that's not his default go to. You know, it it's interesting. I I agree with most of your perspective, but I I I would frame it a little differently in the following sense. Mhmm. I think Trump sees life as a game.

Tony Robbins says that if you wanna be successful at something, you need to make losing equal death. And I think for Trump, winning is everything. And I think that part of the 2020 is sure, he he loves power. He loves the attention. But but I think acknowledging that he lost is so against everything that he, you know, stands for.

I think he wants to see himself as always, always winning. Yeah. Whatever it takes to do that. And and my concern has been that when COVID happened and there was no easy answer to be loved and to win, he kinda panicked, went over the bleach and stuff. And what I've been wondering about is, again, whether or not it's economic or it's militarily, you know, if this economy were to stumble, which I still think with the debt we have, it it it likely will at some point, because he has this desire to win and be seen as the guy that oversaw the greatest economy in the world, that that he's gonna have a really hard time navigating a challenging economy.

Mhmm. You know, this idea that I like to win, I like to win, I like to win, I I completely agree with that. I mean, think I think that's part of his towering self regard is he just sees himself as a winner. And it also is interestingly why he pays so much attention to the markets. Right.

Right. So what saved us from, you know, the the Liberation Day tariffs, which were mind blowing Right. Was that he saw where the mar I mean, the bond markets were indicating, like, pre depression levels Right. Of problem. And so he then he just pulls back.

Right? Right. And so, yeah. He likes to win and and the market is one way one thing that he uses to measure winning. Obviously, opinion polls, whether they're real or fake.

He likes to use election results. I mean, that's why he's so empowered right now. I mean, he's on cloud nine. I mean, think about this. He was indicted.

He was convicted. He was found responsible for sex abuse. He was shot at. He had two assassination attempts, and he wins a pretty wasn't a landslide by any means, but a pretty convincing win by close election standards. I mean, the man is on cloud nine.

I mean, he's on top of the world. You know, he sees himself as sort of like the Apex guy right now and for a lot of pretty good reasons, you know. And so that when he's feeling that much full of himself, this is in my view when he is very dangerous. You know, it takes a person who feels pretty darn confident in their political standing to just put almost 5,000 troops in LA on a thin pretext. You know, he is very cocky.

He has been extremely aggressive, and I think a lot of this is explained in in the terms you described where he's he sees himself as winning. He's a winner. He's gonna keep on winning in his mind. So in this time we're in David right now where there is this threat to our democratic norms. And in your new role at the times and what you're seeing, what what more do you think we can do to to shore up trust and to bring people together?

Yeah. That is a really good question. And I I think I'm gonna write about this more extensively, but it's very hard to sort of give a one size fits all sort of plan. Here's your five point plan to help save America. I I look at it this way.

So when I was growing up and I learned about the civil rights movement, I grew up in the South, born in Alabama, raised in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. So I come by my Southeastern Conference loyalties very honestly, but the when I was growing up at the South, one of the things that I was interested in was what was my family doing in the Civil Rights Movement? Just very curious pivotal moment in American history, my family is all across the South. And when you dive into it, I think, you know, one of the things that I would say to people is you're living right now in a moment where your children and grandchildren will ask you what were you doing? And I would say that you want to have a tangible answer to that question.

And that tangible answer is going to depend on your life circumstances. Where you live, what kind of platform you have, what kind of resources do you have. But what I would say is, be ready to give the next generation a tangible concrete answer that says I stood up for American democracy, I stood up for the American character, I stood up for the American rule of law. And maybe even raise the bar to say it's not just something that I can tell you about, it's something I can also show you. Whether it is, you know, pictures at a peaceful protest, or whether it is the things that I wrote in that time period, or whether it is this is the money that I gave.

Have a tangible thing and think hard about what is it this tangible thing that I can do that the next generation can look back and say, I am proud of you for this. And I think if you formulate it like that, instead of a one size fits all or even like a menu of suggestions, if you formulate it like that, it makes people get creative and intentional. And that's what this moment's gonna take. It's gonna take intention, it's gonna take creativity and it's also gonna take courage. And all of those things are encouraged when you say, what's the tangible thing you can tell your children and tell your grandchildren about that you did in this moment in American history.

You know, that's beautiful. And it's something that people can do on a practical basis. What about on a more macro basis that in the same way the printing press led to the thirty year war, and I mean, the the challenges that went along with that. Do you think that there's an opportunity to help explain to Americans why we're so triggered and to remind us that we're a little flooded all the time and to help us develop the tools to be able to tolerate the discomfort of having these difficult conversations? Yeah.

I think one of the first things I tell people is one thing that should make you feel better is you're probably wrong about most of your political opponents. And you're wrong in a really good way. They're less extreme than you think they are. You have more common ground than you think you do. And the reason why I say that is that there was this just fascinating study done by a group called More in Common called the Perception Gap.

And it showed that Americans, Democrats and Republicans consistently consistently overestimate the extremism of their political opponents. They are just always wrong about how extreme their political opponents are. Now there are reasons why they're wrong. It's not that we're all silly or ridiculous. It's because political media is very very good at surfacing the most extreme views.

So one of the most interesting findings of this study was the people who consumed the most news were the most wrong about their opponents. And the people who consumed the least news were the most correct about their opponents. Why? Because they got their information about their political opponents from this antiquated thing called friendships and relationships. And so one of the things that I would encourage people by is if you stand up and you're reasonable and you're sensible and you show grace and compassion to other people, but you but you stand up nonetheless, you're gonna actually find that there's greater receptivity than you thought.

Now you do have to screen out the screaming extremists that do exist. They're out there and they can occupy disproportionate headspace. However, if you realize that most Americans are in what's called the exhausted majority, they're actually looking for reason, they're actually looking for conversation, they're actually looking for compromise, then you can begin to have maybe a few shards of hope here. I love that. You you use the word grace and you use the word compassion.

That's a great segue to my next question, which is, you know, you've carved out what I consider a pretty unique lane at the New York Times. I mean, a faith rooted center right legal voice in a largely progressive space. Has has that changed the way you write or the audience you imagine you're speaking to at all? Well, I think that every single writer if you're a writer and you're not thinking about who your audience is, you're just doing a bad job. Right.

Right? And so, I think that you one of the things that a writer needs to do is meet their audience where they are. So when I'm writing for National Review, there's a lot of background sort of conservative knowledge that my readers had. There was a lot of sort of understanding about conservatism that my readers had. I did not have very many progressive readers especially at first or democratic readers especially at first.

And so, when you're writing to a group of people who are like minded, there are sometimes shortcuts that you take can take and sometimes that's actually not good for you. You need to like show your work at all times. But there's one way that you write when you have a group of people who are largely coming from your worldview. There's another way you write when the your readers are largely coming from a different worldview. That means you're gonna have to do more work to show how you share values.

You're gonna have to do more work to explain the background of your beliefs. It just means, I mean, like the theme is you gotta do more work. But I think if you are gonna say, I say the same thing no matter who I'm in front of, you're just not doing it right. You know, if you talk to a I'm a recovering lawyer. I I was a litigator for twenty more than twenty years.

And I had some jury trials and I had oral arguments before judges and the juries are different and the judges are different. And if you just walk in and say, I don't know any I don't care to know anything about this jury. I'm gonna be myself. You're a bad lawyer. Right?

You you need to understand and know who your audience is with the aim of persuading persuading people to be more friendly and maybe even to adapt adopt your values. And so I think that that's just what you have to what you should be doing when you have a new audience. You gotta learn about your audience. You gotta find out where they are, meet them where they are, and try to bring them with you by noting and observing and explaining how shared values could lead to a common conclusion. So having strong faith, and and I also have strong faith, we we know or we believe, and we have faith that in the long run, things are gonna work their themselves out.

But in in in the world we're living in right now with the challenges that we're having, I mean, again, from my perspective, when I see antisemitism as a Jew, it obviously is horrifying. When I look at the fact that we've got a $37,000,000,000,000 deficit and neither party for twenty years has been able to deal with it, it is incredibly frustrating. How do you maintain infinite patience and faith with all the things going on? Well, first, I do not have infinite patience. I you know, if you went back and you look through ten years of my tweets, there's more than one tweet that I'm like, I I don't delete my bad stuff.

I just let it all hang out. Right. But there's more than one tweet back there that I just, why? Why did I do that? I I, you know, so I try to be patient, but I'm not perfect at it.

I think one thing that really helps me so much is historical perspective. It is so easy to say, it's never been this bad. It's so easy to say, everything is at a unique crisis point. But then you broaden your historical perspective and you realize, no, actually, no. A lot of people in a lot of previous generations have gone through a lot worse.

And when you have that perspective and you and then you begin to learn how did we come out of that, how did we change, how did we improve, You know, I think it gives you it doesn't mean that you are just casual or relaxed in the face of what's occurring because I don't think you should be. But it does give you some perspective and it does does give you some confidence. And then another thing that I would say is I think that what faith does is it gives you a even longer time horizon. Right? And even longer.

So, you know, you can read the the Bible and see people who follow God being oppressed sometimes for generations for hundreds of years and yet maintaining faithfulness maintaining faithfulness knowing that deliverance is going to come not on their timetable, but on God's timetable. Table. And I it's interesting. I often think a lot of it this verse in the Old Testament from the book of Joel, Joel two twenty five. And it's sort of a promise to God's people.

It says, the Lord will restore to you the years taken by the locusts. And so this is an ultimately redemptive promise. Right? And so if you can have faith and hold to that promise of ultimate redemption, understand that the time horizon that we're dealing with is never gonna be on our time horizon. Rarely do things occur in exactly the way and exactly the timing that I want them to occur.

But if we have that larger view and we take the longer time horizon, I think that it really does help us persevere even when times are difficult, even when times are tough. I mean, I often think about the fact that even with all of the unrest that we're dealing with, even with all of the confusion and uncertainty in the world, gosh, just there's a lot of people alive today who have dealt with and handled worse. And they are walking around our nation right now. And we could learn from them and benefit from their perspective. That's a great way to, you know, frame it.

And it it is interesting because I I find myself thinking about that, okay, was it better when Hamilton was fighting a duel? Was it better when we had the civil war? Was it better during the sixties when we had assassinations of of of Bobby Kennedy, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King? I mean, I I think it's easy to come to the conclusion that things aren't so bad right now. But by the same token, going back to what you said before, each of us individually has to take action because it's not a foregone conclusion that even though we've, you know, been there before, that this time it's gonna be the same.

The trajectory matters a lot. So in 1968, 1969, a lot of people don't realize this, there was so much civil unrest in The US that there was more than one domestic terror bombing a day. A day. Hundreds of domestic terror bombings a year. There were riots at a scale that absolutely dwarf anything we saw in LA last week.

Just they make what happened in LA last week look like a frat party gone wild. So we we came in 1968. I don't even know if our country could survive the level of violence we had in 1968 if you add social media on top of it. So if you had the level of violence in '68 and then you had the level of violence right now coming in next in '69, everyone would be going, oh, man. Things are going great.

But, no. We're on the opposite trajectory. So we got a lot better after the sixties and the seventies. Our crime rate got a lot better after the eighties and the nineties, and then now the political violence is ramping back up again. So it's the trajectory that is really alarming.

The level is not at the historic levels, but the trajectory is bad. And then we've never quite had a president in my lifetime like a Donald Trump. Now I know we've had presidents in the past. Woodrow Wilson, prosecuted thousands of political opponents. He resegregated the federal government.

Woodrow Wilson was a bad actor. But in my lifetime, we've not had anyone like Donald Trump. And so that means the trajectory is bad and the leadership is bad. That makes the moment so dangerous. But it is not out of control.

It is not unprecedented. And I agree with you. The trajectory is not great. I I I wonder because I spent a lot of time trying to think about this myself because Donald Trump is unique. Mhmm.

But I also remember being young and idolizing Nixon. My grandfather loved Nixon, and when I was, like, 12 years old, 13 years old, whatever, I think it was when he was running the first time or 14. And and I remember, you know, following the platform and seeing things. But in a historical con going back and looking at history, and looking at the carpet bombing and and and the Christmas bombings in Vietnam, and some of the things that were done for political purposes, and the way he used the IRS and did other things. I'm wondering if he looked and talked like a president.

Yeah. Right? I mean, to me, what is so shattering about Donald Trump is that I revere the office. You know, people wore a tie, when when an old person walks in the room, you stand up. I remember a time when we had certain, you know, institutional kind of things that were appropriate.

And when a person talks like Donald Trump, it just blows my mind because it's not what I view as presidential. And so what I've tried to do to comfort myself is sometimes say, is his bark worse than his bite, or is that naive? I would have said his bark is worse than his bite until the twenty twenty election. Okay. That dispelled any sense any sense at all that his bark is worth it worse than his bite.

Now his bark is worse than his bite when his bark causes him political problems. Right. So there are ways that he does moderate. There are ways that he does change when he feels like it's threatening his grip, his hold. He'll moderate and change to some degree.

But as the election showed, when his power is at stake, he it's hard to know what limits he has. At the same time, he's also got a lot of he's the the thing that makes him less dangerous arguably than perhaps some other people could be is he's also he's very shrewd politically, but he's also incompetent on a matter of policy again and again and again. I would put it this, you use the Nixon comparison. I think of Trump as if Richard Nixon took steroids and then wore a clown suit. So he's more corrupt than Nixon.

Nixon was corrupt. Nixon was corrupt, but the brazenness of Trump's corruption is just off the charts. So he's more corrupt than Nixon, but he's also less sophisticated than Nixon. Now he's very politically shrewd. I don't want anyone to that's not the same thing as saying he's dumb.

He's very, very politically shrewd. At this point, after he's won two elections against the backdrop of all the if anyone's saying he's some sort of political idiot, they need their head examined. He's politically very shrewd. But from a policy standpoint, he's also very ignorant. He's very ignorant and stubbornly ignorant.

And so that's why I say he's almost got and then he's he's got that bizarre eccentric personality. So you combine that ignorance with his eccentricity, with his corruption, and you've got, you know, the Barry Bonds version, the second half of the career Barry Bonds version, Richard Nixon. All the HGH, all the PEDs. So he's amped up the corruption and he's amped up the, for lack of a better term, the ignorance. And that's where we are.

Well, and what's amazing to me about the corruption is it's out in the open so that people seem to put up with it. They're, you know, taking an airplane, having people buy your crypto. It's like he he's got no shame about it, and and it's becoming normalized to a certain extent. That's the that's the scary thing to me. Well and and this is unlocking something fascinating about human nature.

We are so used to politicians wanting to be seen as better than they are that you're used to when there's an allegation of corruption that you have to dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, and find it. And then once you find it, it's like, And one of the reasons why you know it's all so wrong is because the politicians try so hard to cover it up. Right. Think of Bill Clinton in the blue dress. Right?

So he comes out in '98. I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Right. They you know, Ken Starr spends months dig, dig, digging, digging through the record. Then they find out there's a dress, and then they seize the dress, and then they find out that Clinton did in fact have sexual relations with that woman.

Trump walks around in the blue dress. Okay? So Yeah. If there's no cover up in many ways, people don't think there's a crime. Right.

And so if it's it's imagine if somebody walks into a bank and he just takes the mask off, And he says, hey. I'm David French. I'm here to rob the bank. You can find me. I'm at you know, I live at this address.

And, yeah. Come by anytime, and now give me all your money or you're gonna die. And then someone says, well, you know, he did it out in the open, so it couldn't be a real bankruptcy. Well, yeah. It's a real it's gotta be a reality television show, and we're gonna be and we're gonna be famous.

Gotta be a reality TV show. Yeah. And the the moment where it hit me that this was the dynamic was first impeachment because he releases the transcript of the call that clearly shows a quid pro quo with Zelensky. And he's like, I just put it out here. If we had spent two, three, four months where he said, no.

I had no quid pro quo. I had no quid pro quo. And then we found it, it would have been like one of these Woodward and Bernstein moments. Instead, he's like, here's my quid pro quo, and it's great. And so then his fans are like, well, he just laid it all out there.

There's nothing wrong here. I mean, Mike Johnson said this the other day where he's like, well, Trump's just very open. That's not a defense. It's a confession. If you're open about your crimes, it's not a defense to the crime.

It's a confession to the crime. But we're so trained kind of to our core to think that if something's wrong, somebody's gotta be trying to cover it up. That it's we don't we almost doesn't compute the alternative. With the airplane, he's like, they're giving us a $400,000,000 plane. I mean, that's a gift.

We'd be crazy not to take it. And he makes it sound like the because the problem is not a gift of a plane. If Cutter wants to give America a plane, whatever, the problem is that this would be his to use after he's president. Right. And then he takes it, looks at it, and he goes, why why wouldn't I take a plane?

Right. Right. And I think a lot of people go, well, if somebody gave me a plane, I'd take it. Right? Right.

But that's not the equation. You're not supposed to be enriched by serving directly enriched by serving as president by a foreign nation. And I'm sorry. You don't cleanse it of the stain of corruption by channeling your enrichment through your nonprofit foundation. So or your presidential library or whatever it is.

So yeah. I mean, he's just completely open, and and that openness acts as a weird political defense to corruption because people don't think it's corrupt if it's open. David, thank you. Listen. We love your stuff.

Keep doing what you're doing. Stay healthy, and thank you so so much for for the time today. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a real joy. The talk venture capital beyond is produced by CMG Advisors.

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