David French on The Mess We’re In
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What you're watching, though, is MAGA essentially recreating a lot of the excesses of the radical left, except with much greater force and energy because it's being directed and driven from the White House in a very decisive way and with all of the instruments and levers of power that the federal government possesses. As strong as sort of the Twitter mob could have been in 2018 or 2019, it's still going to be nothing compared to the full weight and power of the federal government. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is a good friend and one of my favorite writers, David French. is a opinion columnist at the New York Times.
He is an evangelical Christian who is socially conservative, but also deeply critical of the Trump administration. And this conversation, which we recorded in person in Nashville, was really a kind of therapy session for both of us. It was our attempt to try and make sense what is going on in American politics today. Going back to the natural experiment which Francis Fukuyama posited in 2016 and 2017,
of trying to figure out whether, as the founders intended, the institutions are going to be enough to contain a president who wants to undermine the checks and balances and the rule of law in the United States, we ask, to what extent are the institutions holding? Is the Supreme Court doing Trump's bidding or is it actually standing up to some of what Trump wants. Are we on the way towards people being deeply afraid to express themselves because of the administration's attacks on free speech, or do we continue to have a very robust media that is challenging the Trump administration in all kinds of ways? We also talked about how and why Democrats in the left are flailing, why they
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