David French is a columnist for The New York Times. His most recent book is Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David French discuss how politics has changed since 2017, where the Democrats have gone wrong, and how Donald Trump’s second term is different to his first.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I was trying to think about what I want to talk to you about. I read you assiduously and listen to you. You have a lot of interesting things to say, but more than anything else, it felt like a therapy session. We’ve known each other for about eight years now.
David French: It’s amazing, Yascha. The thing that has struck me so much is if you go back and put yourself in a time machine to 2017 or 2018, there were terms we used a lot then that you just don’t use anymore, like “dog whistle.” People were constantly trying to determine whether there was some sort of emerging racist element on the right. They were trying to determine that through things like dog whistles, subtle signals, and subtle messaging—was the “okay” sign an okay sign, or was it a white nationalist sign? Doesn’t that seem quaint? It’s not dog whistles anymore; it’s nothing but bullhorns. It’s remarkable how overt the racial, ethnic, and religious aggression has become.
Mounk: Another term we’ve given up on is “normalization.” Back then, we had this idea that there was normal politics, and Donald Trump was outside of that normal politics. If only we resisted his normalization, then this moment would pass. More broadly, it’s interesting to think back to some of the assumptions we had wrong. I remember being in many debates at the time about who would win the civil war within the Republican Party, and how quickly Trump would win it. I was a relative pessimist because I thought that Trump would eventually win that civil war. But, of course, there was no civil war. The old-style Republican Party simply flipped over and played dead.
The other striking thing is that back then, I was somewhat skeptical of that narrative, but not as much as would be warranted now. The assumption was that this was the last stand of the old rural white men who voted for Donald Trump, and that he was the nostalgic force in politics—the force of yesterday. It’s completely unclear that that’s true now, either in the United States or anywhere else, when you look at the fact that Reform is leading in the polls in Britain, the Rassemblement National in France, and the AfD in some polls in Germany.
French: If I look back at the 2016–2017 period, one of the things I did not anticipate was how much parts of the left would view Trump not as a threat but as an opportunity. In other words, he was going to so completely discredit the Republican Party and be such a destructive force for Republicans that Americans would turn on him quickly, creating an opportunity to enact a lot of left-wing goals and visions for the country.
If you look back at the original #Resistance, the Women’s March, and some of the figures around it, you could see the emerging trends that culminated in the wave of cancel culture we saw in 2019 and 2020. I’ll never forget your piece in The Atlantic, “Stop Firing the Innocent,” about how leftist overreach was going to empower Donald Trump. That was not something I saw, because in the circles we were in, many people did not see Trump as an opportunity at all. They saw him as a genuine threat that caused people with traditional differences to put them aside.
But large parts of the American left were not willing to do that and instead doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on really extreme, unpopular, and often intolerant ways of moving, acting, and thinking in the world. At this point, it’s inarguable that this helped Donald Trump a lot.
Mounk: That, I think, is one of the fundamental truths about this moment that is not sufficiently remarked upon, which is that Donald Trump, with all the power he currently holds, is a bigger danger to American democracy and to basic American values than the progressive left. But the degree to which both parties have distanced themselves from where most Americans stand is the condition of possibility for each of them continuing to be so extreme.
If Republicans were able to go into the cultural center of the country, they would blow the Democrats out of the water. But since they don’t, Democrats can continue to be dysfunctional in all kinds of ways, and Donald Trump can get reelected. Conversely, if Democrats were only able to actually stand for decent, progressive, inclusive values, but in a way that actually speaks to most Americans, then Donald Trump would not have won in 2024.
French: I agree with that completely. What you’re watching is MAGA essentially recreating many 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, with all the instruments and levers of power that the federal government possesses. As strong as the Twitter mob could have been in 2018 or 2019, it’s still nothing compared to the full weight and power of the federal government.
By doing this in such a heavy-handed way, what you’re already beginning to see is that even the things Trump promised to do that were popular have become unpopular because of how he’s doing them. There’s that Newton’s law of motion—for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. What we’ve seen is that for every extreme, there’s an equal and opposing extreme.
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This large group of Americans—it’s even wrong to say “in the middle,” it’s better to say non-extreme Americans—are being left out of this. I’m firmly convinced that, at this moment, MAGA is engaged in serious overreach and will learn the same lesson the far left learned when it engaged in overreach. But because MAGA’s overreach is so connected to the power of the federal government, the damage they can do before the backlash is very considerable and dangerous.
Mounk: It’s amazing how violent and protracted the birth pangs of a political realignment turn out to be. I do think that the natural realignment of American politics is that the Republicans become a kind of multiracial working-class party, and the Democrats become the party of the relatively educated and prosperous in the more thriving parts of the country.
But neither party has quite realized that this is what is going on or has been able to consistently pursue that new electorate. That very much includes the Trump administration. It’s remarkable how successful Trump was at winning. We now know from the Catalyst study, which is the most reliable analysis of voter trends, that he doubled the African American vote—albeit, from a low base—and that he very significantly increased the Asian American vote.
Among Latinos, he did just as well as exit polls suggested back in November 2016. But I also bet that many of those new voters who could have become lifelong Republican voters if Trump had played his cards right are now quite alienated and horrified by what he is doing. Some of the most robust anti-immigrant speeches I have heard in my time in the United States were often from Latinos—Uber or Lyft drivers, cab drivers, and others I have spoken to in my life. Trump could very easily have gained a huge foothold with Latinos through very robust border enforcement policies and deportations of undocumented migrants who have committed crimes, but the kind of brutality with which he is pursuing deportations and the evident lack of regard for the fears that even documented migrants may have about the way in which ICE is entering neighborhoods, etc.—that is going to alienate a huge chunk of that electorate.
French: Especially since many of the Hispanic Americans who are actual citizens are being brutalized right now—actual citizens, green card holders, or people with legal authorization to be in the country.
Mounk: It doesn’t take many examples of ICE agents getting the wrong person and doing something wrong for a lot of people to start feeling legitimately afraid.
French: Absolutely. There was an incident where the reporting is that a Black Hawk helicopter descended on a Chicago apartment building. They separated the Black residents of the apartment building into one area and the Hispanic residents into another, mocking and laughing at children who were crying. That kind of behavior, which is much more reminiscent of Russia than the United States, is circulating through the country.
Most people don’t follow the ins and outs of Twitter. They’re not aware of every outrage on any given day. But when you brutalize people at scale, even if they’re not paying attention to the news, word of it leaks out very broadly. The Republicans are, on the one hand, extremely proud that they’ve started to build this multiracial working-class coalition and then act as if they don’t have a multiracial working-class coalition. It’s the strangest thing.
It’s a reverse image of the way the Democrats took the highly educated far left—Black and Hispanic scholars and theorists from the academy—and decided that’s what Black and Hispanic voters are like. They’re not.
Mounk: We need to get better at reaching Latino voters. What are we going to do? We’re going to get the president of the Latinx Victory Fund, who has an MA in migration studies from Brown University, and have them tell us how ordinary Latinos feel? It’s absurd.
French: Everybody knew this in real time because, if you go back to 2019, there was a tremendous Nate Cohn analysis of the Democratic primary electorate. It found that one-third of the Democratic primary electorate was online and two-thirds was offline. The one-third online was disproportionately white, prosperous, and progressive, and the two-thirds offline were far more diverse, working class, and culturally conservative.
In the 2020 primary election, all but one of them ran for the one-third. Only one of them, Joe Biden, ran for the two-thirds.
Mounk: The tragedy is that the only candidate who was too old and not attentive to the advice of strategists was Joe Biden. We ended up with a president who had some genuine strengths in communication, both because he was a genuine moderate and because he was able to connect with ordinary people. I’m thinking back to when he went to the offices of your now employer to ask for the endorsement of the editorial board. The editorial board didn’t even take Joe Biden seriously and ended up, I believe, recommending a split endorsement—which had never been done before—Elizabeth Warren and the Senator from Minnesota,Amy Klobuchar. But Joe Biden won over someone who worked at The New York Times in a custodial capacity, in the elevator, and there was a viral clip. But that also set up the tragedy that Joe Biden was way too old to run for president. Then you had all of the other self-sabotage of the Democratic Party that came out of it.
I want to go back to immigration for a moment. There is a genuine problem with immigration where you have cycling preferences of voters. What voters want, by and large, is very firm control of the border without state cruelty. The reason voter sentiment keeps switching on immigration is that for a while you have no state cruelty and very porous borders, and people get angry about those porous borders and demand a crackdown. Then politicians try to crack down on the border, but that necessarily entails some state-sanctioned cruelty. Then people say they don’t want the state to sanction cruelty, and that’s why you have these cycling preferences.
Having said that, it’s hard—both normatively and in terms of pleasing voters—to know how to trade those things off, because the preferences of voters are incoherent. But what the Trump administration is doing is not even trying. They’re saying not just maximize border control, but maximize border control and state-sponsored violence to show how tough they are, with no attempt to minimize the cruelty.
French: I don’t think the immigration issue is rocket science in the slightest. The immigration issue is the simplest imaginable. The parties are in the grip of extremists on both sides. Here’s the position that has been polling well for generations: control who comes into the country and show compassion for the people who are already here. If you are a peaceful person contributing to society—especially if you’re a Dreamer, especially if you’re a kid—many people either want you to stay or want you to be the lowest priority on the deportation scale. But if you’re a criminal, out immediately, instantly.
You can expel illegal criminal aliens very quickly without brutality. The brutality comes when you do giant sweeps of people, trying to gather up large numbers at once. On the extremes, the Republicans don’t just want a border wall—we’ve hardly heard about a border wall this term—they want absolute, total, punitive repression. The Trump administration is enacting that.
It will always be a mystery to me how the Biden administration thought it could permit that level of immigration on the southern border. It’s one of the biggest own-goals in history. We’ve talked about the far cultural left, but I think Biden could have still won if the border had been under control. It would have been tight, close, an absolute nail-biter, but Biden or his successor could have won if the border had been under control.
The combination of inflation—where, truth be told, America did better than most countries—a border out of control, and this sense that so many Americans have that the far left isn’t just alien to them but actually hates them, despises them, looks down on them, thinks they’re horrible people. It’s like three strikes and you’re out at that point.
Mounk: Yeah, in a strange way, I think from a political science perspective, there’s one tiny good news story buried in that, which is that it’s tempting to say, and some political scientists and some economists have argued over the last decades, that voters are not very rational and that they don’t reward or punish politicians for what they do. Of course, I think that on the whole Donald Trump is worse for America. But actually, I think a lot of voting behavior in 2024 was a retrospective evaluation of what Democrats did, and it was responsive to some of their mistakes.
The United States did a little better than other countries on inflation, but there were also economic policies that accelerated inflation. On the border, the Biden administration took proactive policies and executive orders that hugely aggravated that problem.
From a political science perspective, it’s reassuring that we don’t live in a world of lol, nothing matters. When things go off the rails, voters punish incumbents. More likely than not—and we’ll get to what our outlook is for 2026 and 2028—I think for similar reasons Trump is significantly underwater in approval ratings now and may sink further if some of the bad policies the administration is enacting, from tariffs to all the things we’ve been talking about, start to harm ordinary Americans.
French: That’s exactly correct. There’s also another rational response we haven’t mentioned—the absolutely disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden had a positive approval rating until then, and it went down and never came back up.
This is what I want people who are sitting there screaming at their iPhones right now—Trump is worse! Got it, I agree. I did not like the Biden administration on a number of levels. I really think this is substantially worse than where we were under Biden. I agree one million percent on that. However, if your party is failing in some significant areas, and it’s a two-party system, at some point the argument that the other side is worse isn’t going to keep working. You just have to deliver at some point.
It’s pedantic to say it because it’s been said so much, but if you really want a country to prosper in a two-party system, you need two healthy parties. Somebody might say, no, if you have one healthy party, then it can just keep winning. No, parties are made of human beings. Your “healthy” party might fail in some material ways, and you better pray to God at that moment that the other party is ready, willing, and able to step up in a constructive way that’s oriented toward the common good and the prosperity of the republic.
Instead, what has happened is that the Democrats often refuse to listen to criticism because they always say, Trump is worse. Fine, but at some point, don’t we have to acknowledge that you’ve got to sell yourselves to the public in a positive way? It cannot simply be that the other side is so bad. Otherwise, we’re never getting out of this cycle.
Mounk: I wrote a lot of articles in the first Trump term about how horrible Trump is and how the things he was doing were dangerous. I still sometimes write those articles and still sometimes talk about that on the podcast. There’s a reason why, in certain ways, I’ve shifted my focus. It’s not that I’m less convinced that Trump is dangerous. In fact, Trump is more dangerous now than he was in his first term in a number of ways.
That assumption we had in the first Trump term—that somehow this was a four-year problem and it was going to go away—was fundamentally wrong. Unless we look in the mirror and figure out how more moderate political parties in the United States and other countries can meet this moment and give voters an offer that allows them to win consistently, and hopefully win big at the ballot box and force the right back to a negotiating table on democratic grounds, they are going to win.
When I think about where my comparative advantage is, in terms of who’s listening to me—because I don’t think I have many far-right MAGA listeners on this podcast—and where there’s a lack of serious reflection in our intellectual culture, it’s in trying to build this project of how to defend the basic principles of liberal democracy in a way that can win the assent, and the enthusiastic assent, of a large, majoritarian share of the population.
If we’re not asking ourselves that question—if we think it’s enough to just preach to the choir of people who are already convinced about why the thing Trump did yesterday is terrible—we’re missing the point. The thing Trump did yesterday is terrible. We’re recording this a few days before the podcast is out, and I’m sure as you listen to it, three or four days from when we’re recording this, he did something terrible. I’m sure that’s true. Absolutely. That’s not going to help rebuild the Democratic Party.
French: Anybody can look at my work and know that I have gone with both barrels at every outrage in this Trump administration. I’ve taken an immense amount of incoming from the MAGA right. But I will tell you, my friends on the left, the idea that people got volcanically angry at Ezra Klein for writing a book about abundance, about how to make America able to build big things, to build houses, and to make housing affordable—and they get volcanically angry at him because of their niche, hyper-specific, left-wing ideology—is absurd.
I try so hard to be charitable, Yascha, I really do. But at some point, you just have to say when things are idiotic. Ezra made this tremendous point—I believe it may have been to Ta-Nehisi Coates—when he said, “You can imagine the end of the Republic more than you can imagine a Democrat winning Arkansas.” But Democrats used to win Arkansas all the time. A president was from Arkansas. I remember when Democrats would win the state of Tennessee.
One thing you might want to do is make yourself open to a pro-life candidate in the Democratic Party—a socially conservative candidate who shares your values on economic policy, foreign policy, and immigration—but who is socially conservative. You would have thought I had sacrificed a goat on live television. It was unbelievable. What it made me realize is that for an awful lot of people, Yascha, politics is much more like religion than anything else.
In a religious context, if you’re talking to a Christian about doctrine, they’re not going to negotiate on the divinity of Jesus or on the doctrines of baptism because those are ultimate things. But in politics, which should be far downstream from religion, the question of incremental change versus total change is a common choice you have to make. Is incremental change better than regression? These kinds of decisions are made all the time.
If politics becomes religion—let’s suppose you’re a strong supporter of trans rights—the idea that having a Democrat who doesn’t want biological males participating in women’s sports or who has hesitancy about medical interventions for youth is somehow indistinguishable from someone who wants to reform the law so that a trans person can’t even own a gun or is deemed a domestic terrorist, or almost the equivalent of one, is beyond irrational. It’s only explainable in the context of an almost fundamentalist religious worldview.
Mounk: I thought there were two interesting things about that conversation. Broadly speaking, I agree more with Ezra Klein than with Ta-Nehisi Coates. But there was an interesting weakness in the hemming and hawing way the moderate left often talks that came out of that exchange.
First, on substantive grounds, I agree exactly with the point you just made. I was preparing to make it myself—that even if you think biological men should absolutely be allowed to play in female competitive sports, and even if you think there should be no concerns at all about giving cross-gender hormones to twelve- or thirteen-year-olds, you could still recognize that compromising on those issues may be worth it if it means that serving trans service members aren’t being booted out of the military with dishonorable discharges, as is happening because of Trump. Trans Americans would be spared the really nasty rhetoric from the White House that we’re getting under Trump. Even if you just care about the full package of what the more radical trans organizations want, you could say that perhaps we should compromise on those one or two things if what it spares is many other things.
But I also find it interesting that there’s a cowardice in that framing—of talking about it merely as a compromise. Too many people on the reasonable left are saying, well, the problem is that the average American is a bigot. Or in the case of Kamala Harris, the average American is a bigot, so I can’t choose Pete Buttigieg as my running mate because they’re not ready for a gay vice president, which is essentially what she says in her book, astonishingly. They just want to compromise. When I hear that stuff, a little part of me wants to say, well, then I’ll go with AOC. I see why someone who says “no compromises” and proudly holds their moral position ends up looking like the more attractive option when the alternative is, I agree with everything the progressives believe—number one. Number two, unfortunately, we live in a country of bigots. Number three, I’m the person saying we should just cut deals with the bigots. That’s not a very attractive vision.
We need the courage to say we stand with trans Americans. We stand against people being booted out of the military. We stand against the horrible rhetoric about trans people from the White House. There are also principled reasons to worry about the fairness of competitive female sports if people who’ve gone through male puberty are allowed to partake in them. If there’s good evidence that twelve- or thirteen-year-olds, after one appointment with a doctor, are being given puberty blockers and then relatively quickly rushed into cross-gender hormones and other things that make them sterile and cause serious health problems for the rest of their lives, perhaps that’s something we should worry about—not because we’re selling out trans people, but because we care about the interests of those twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids.
French: I think treating all of these issues—sports, youth gender transition, intimate spaces like locker rooms—as if the only positions are bigotry or full participation, with nothing in between, is wrong. As you were saying, compromise is often framed as a compromise with bigotry because there are other things that need to be accomplished. You’re 100% right. But here’s the thing, Yascha—you and I have spent enough time in center-left spaces to know that, by and large, many people in the center-left do have concerns about youth gender transition.
Mounk: I’m sure your dear colleague might secretly feel that way as well, even though that’s not what he was saying on the podcast.
French: I cannot speak to that at all, but I know for a fact that I have many friends on the center left who genuinely have these concerns. I will tell you why they don’t voice them. The left side of America has a very similar problem to the right side of America: if you deviate from the MAGA line, it’s not just that people disagree with you—they will brutalize you. They will treat you as if you are Satan himself.
In extreme cases, they will threaten you, they will try to cancel your job, and they will attack you. There’s an ideological discipline that exists in both parties that is brutal.
Mounk: A disciplined agent is always on your own side. If you’re a liberal or progressive professor at a university and the MAGA people are going after you, that’s unpleasant, but you’re not worried you’re going to lose your job or that your colleagues are going to look at you strangely. When you’re being attacked from your own side, that’s when it becomes scary. The same is true on the right—if you criticize Trump, God help you.
French: Yes, exactly. I say this from the standpoint that I have gotten enormous heat from the right for defending the basic civil liberties and human rights of LGBT Americans. I have been brutalized on the right for defending basic free speech rights. At the same time, if you take my exact set of beliefs and move them into the Democratic Party, I don’t know if they would permit me to stay.
This is a remarkable dynamic. You nailed it—there are many people in the center left who are not standing up to this at all. They frame it purely as pragmatic compromise instead of acknowledging that there may be legitimate concerns here. There are rational concerns, as you were saying, about starting youth gender transition so rapidly and dramatically with untested, unproven medical treatments.
The idea that expressing those concerns in good faith could lead to total social death is alarming. I do think it’s less severe than it used to be. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, that was what was happening—you were talking total social death. It’s changing, and changing in a positive direction, but given the urgency of the moment, not quickly enough.
Mounk: Let’s go back to our therapy session and to the year 2017. I think it was in early 2017 that my esteemed colleague, Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion, argued that we’re living through a kind of natural experiment in the United States. He said that the idea of institutions is that they were supposed to be able to withstand people who don’t have much respect for democratic institutions. That is why we have checks and balances. That is why we have a division of power between the presidency, Congress, and other branches of government.
So the question was whether or not those institutions would prove capable of withstanding even a president who, I think, evidently lacks respect for those democratic values. Eight years in, how do you think we’re doing on that natural experiment?
French: Terribly. I would say my alarm about the state of our institutions has only accelerated in the last eight months because we have witnessed some of the most powerful institutions in the most powerful country in the world capitulate. In spite of possessing strong political and legal positions, they have capitulated utterly to pressure from Trump’s authoritarianism. He’s vicious. He’s also incompetent. So we’re not even talking about the most lethal, effective, vindictive form of authoritarianism. This is a form that’s often bubbling, incoherent, and incompetent.
I’ve said this many times, but it’s true. Many people imagine themselves to be brave. Many of those same people look at mistakes of the past and can’t comprehend: how did our country allow that to happen? You’re seeing it now. An awful lot of people, when push comes to shove, aren’t willing to bear risk. It’s turning out they’re not even willing to bear much risk at all.
They may be unhappy. They may be angry. They may still oppose Trump, but they’re going to give him what he wants because it’s actually hard to be brave. Courage is not easy. Even a little bit of courage is not easy.
Now, when you’re living through something less extreme than years past and you’re capitulating just as fast, there needs to be a wave of humility across this country followed by a wave of resolve that says, okay, I thought we were stronger. We’re not. Now we have to gear up, get ourselves some backbone, and confront this administration lawfully, peacefully, and maybe with real civil disobedience.
If I had said to you before this second term of Trump that major networks, some of the most powerful law firms in the world, some of the wealthiest academic institutions in the world, in spite of grotesque violations of their rights, would go ahead and preemptively capitulate to the president, I think we both wouldn’t have predicted that.
Mounk: I agree with you. During the first Trump term, I was very worried about the way in which these institutions would cave because I had seen it in many other countries. American institutions actually fared reasonably well under the first Trump term—not thanks to him. In part, it was because he was less competent than he is now, had less of a team of lawless individuals than he does now, and had less of a clear program in his mind about what he wanted to accomplish. The institutions held up relatively well.
I was wary of being overly alarmist a second time, but as a result, I probably did not predict that things would move as quickly as they have over the last eight months. I am very worried, for example, about the fact that Trump is now clearly in a position to bring politically motivated prosecutions against his opponents. We’re not talking about tweet storms or people getting fired. We’re talking about people getting indicted by the full force of the federal government and its investigative powers. I am very concerned about those things.
At the same time, I feel like we’re in a fog of war, and it’s hard to tell whether we’re in steps one, two, and three of the ten steps toward a situation in which Freedom House would rightly—or at least should—call the United States partly free, and we’re in a form of competitive authoritarianism, or whatever the political science terms are. Or whether, in fact, the institutions are holding up somewhat well.
Trump is able to go after James Comey, to bring a prosecution that clearly would not have happened if Trump wasn’t directing it, firing prosecutors, and putting others in place who will bring the charge. At the same time, it looks relatively unlikely that Comey will actually go to jail or be found guilty by a jury of his peers.
We see compromises, for example, by law firms targeted by Trump in ways that are brazen violations of democratic norms. I think those law firms have acted shamefully. But there are still lawyers in the country willing to represent opponents of Donald Trump. In fact, the federal government has lost an astonishing share of court cases.
French: Note the common thread there, where Trump abuts against the judiciary. The judiciary, to take the wonderful title of my podcast co-host and dear friend Sarah Isgur’s new book is The Last Branch Standing. I’m not going to say I agree with everything the court and the judiciary have done, but by and large, it’s functioning.
Mounk: Let’s stay with this argument for a moment because I find, especially in Europe, people think the court now has a super conservative majority and will do whatever Trump wants. Even in the United States, I hear people on the left and in the center talking as though the Supreme Court is clearly captured by Trump. I share your skepticism about that, but lay out the case. Tell listeners some of the things the Supreme Court has done that demonstrate this is too simplistic a view of where it stands.
French: Let’s go back to Trump’s first term. He had the worst record at the Supreme Court of any modern president. That was all four years, and it was a majority Republican-nominated court his entire first term. In the interim period between the two terms, during the Biden administration, MAGA lost time and again at the court.
MAGA reached goals regarding things like the independent state legislature doctrine—an extremely aggressive legal initiative—and had a miserable record at the court. Trump did win the immunity case and the 14th Amendment disqualification case, but I will circle back to that. In this new administration, especially early on, he took some significant losses, such as the ruling that required notice and an opportunity to be heard if someone is going to be deported, even under the Alien Enemies Act. That was a big deal. By saying it had to be a habeas petition—something more intricate and complicated than a typical deportation proceeding—it actually put a bigger brake on deportations than people realize.
Here’s the key to understanding the Supreme Court and its jurisprudence regarding Trump: these justices are old-school classical liberal originalists, by and large. I would say there are 5.3 originalist justices on the court. I give Roberts a 0.3 in originalism. These are classical liberal originalist justices who, to varying degrees, adhere to some version of the unitary executive theory.
What that means is, if a case challenges Trump’s control over the executive branch—as many emergency docket cases have—then, according to traditional Federalist Society originalism, the president’s control over the executive branch is deemed very broad. However, when Trump moves into areas involving substantive constitutional rights or the roles of Congress, they give him a much shorter rope.
You saw this just this week with Lisa Cook. The court refused to let her be immediately fired. The Fed is not neatly within the executive branch, which makes it different from other firings. They’ve scheduled oral arguments months from now, while she’s still in office.
That shows a distinction. I would fall out of my chair in shock if Trump wins the birthright citizenship case. I think he loses that 8–1 or 7–2, best case for him.
Mounk: By the way, an interesting case of complete misreporting. Even if you read many of the most esteemed news sources in the United States—and particularly when I looked at the media in Europe—when the court decided that we shouldn’t have one federal judge out of hundreds be able to suspend executive action or legislation until it’s been fully negotiated in the courts, the occasion for that was Trump’s attempt to undermine birthright citizenship.
Any educated German, French, Italian, or British reader would have thought the Supreme Court allowed Trump to get rid of birthright citizenship. I think even many readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times may have gotten that impression. Weeks later, the Supreme Court then certified a collective class action lawsuit, which said, no, you cannot strip people of birthright citizenship for now. Once it’s negotiated, we’ll see—the judgment is yet to come out. But like you, I very much expect that Trump will not win once it winds its way, most probably, up to the Supreme Court.
French: I would also be surprised—not “fall out of my chair in shock” surprised—if he wins his tariff case. So if, at the end of this Supreme Court term, you have a situation where Trump can fire members of the executive branch, but he can’t change birthright citizenship, can’t unilaterally implement tariffs, can’t deprive people of due process, can’t deprive people of free speech, then what you have is classic conservative jurisprudence.
I disagree with many elements of unitary executive theory. I think much of it is inconsistent with originalism. But that theory is not unique to Trump. This is part of the Venn diagram where Trumpism overlaps with traditional Republicanism. Some of it is not traditional, but this area is.
What I would say is, knowing the judiciary—and knowing judges as well as I do—it’s the last branch standing for a reason. I think it will continue to be the last branch standing. However, if Congress doesn’t resist the president, then the one thing I’d love to communicate clearly is this: you could have a perfect Supreme Court. The Supreme Court could rule for Trump in every way he wants, and he could still do enormous damage to American culture, society, and law just by Congress being prostrate before him.
For example, the Venezuelan boat strikes. The court does not enjoin military action. That’s not what it does. It’s up to Congress to check a president going rogue with the U.S. military, and they are absolutely unwilling to do it.
So the last branch standing is like a rear guard for a retreating army. It can slow the defeat and maybe allow the retreating army enough time to gather its forces and counterattack. But if the retreating army continues to retreat, all the rear guard does is slow down the loss.
Mounk: I think we have a similar mental model of how to think about the Supreme Court. The way I sometimes describe it to European audiences when I give media interviews is that the majority of the Supreme Court is broadly in the tradition of the Federalist Society. If you read the consensus-ish opinions of where the Federalist Society stood on a range of issues in 2014, before Trump entered politics, you would do pretty well at predicting the decisions of the Supreme Court today.
That overlaps with what Trump wants to do on some things, but it’s also important to note that it doesn’t overlap on others. Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment about why the last branch standing may not be as reassuring as you’ve been saying. One is a question, and the other is a thought experiment.
The question is: what about the immunity case? How does that fit into what you’ve been talking about, and how concerned should we be about it? Isn’t that what has allowed the Trump administration to go very far in what it does, with many members of the administration not afraid of legal liability for actions taken once Trump is no longer in the White House?
The related question is: if the court allows Trump very broad control over the executive, is that going to be control enough? If, for example, it means that Trump can fire every career prosecutor at the FBI and put in place loyalists who start methodically going after Americans who displease the president, and the price of criticizing the president becomes a high likelihood of being indicted by a grand jury—and, famously, in the words of the New York judge from the 1980s, you could indict a ham sandwich?
Perhaps eventually you get off, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and defending yourself with the risk of ending up in jail for a long time. Perhaps, in most cases, juries of your peers will let you off in the end. That is still a tremendously dangerous tool of power that the White House now has under its control. How much will—and can—this last branch save us?
French: Let me talk about the immunity case, which I completely, 100% disagreed with on originalist grounds. But let me put it in perspective. The immunity case was meaningless to Trump getting off. The reason Trump was not prosecuted and convicted had nothing to do with the immunity case. It had everything to do with how long it took to bring the case and him winning the election in 2024.
As Amy Coney Barrett deftly pointed out during oral argument, it became clear that many of the charges against Trump were related to his private conduct, and the immunity decision was going to do nothing for him. In fact, the strongest charges against him were related to his private conduct. So, the immunity case is a problem.
Mounk: The Stormy Daniels case would have been private conduct. What about the Georgia case?
French: That was Amy Coney Barrett who clarified that when Trump was, for example, pressing the Secretary of State of Georgia, that was as a candidate, not as a president. Much of what happened in the January 6 cases was clarified during oral argument to have been private conduct. So he was still absolutely on the hook for the most serious charges. The reason he was never prosecuted is because he won—not because of the immunity case.
Mounk: So you think the same is going to be true of members of this administration going forward? That a lot of the damaging things they do, even if done with power, won’t be covered?
French: They’re not covered by that case, the lower link. But the immunity case is not the dagger at the heart of the American Constitution. The dagger at the heart of the American Constitution is the pardon power. The president has total authority. On the very last day of his term, he could engage in political prosecutions, graft, corruption, and take bribes. His entire administration could be on the take from Qatar, for example. His entire administration could be making Bitcoin millions by colluding with crypto allies. He could just pardon everybody.
There is zero recourse. He could pardon them from all federal charges. He could issue preemptive pardons in every federal employment. This is something the Anti-Federalists were screaming about in 1787 and 1788. Madison, in one of the few areas where he got it wrong, said, don’t worry about it. Impeachment will take care of it. We know impeachment is a dead letter.
So when people talk about the immunity case—again, I thought it was completely wrong—it is a non-factor to the health of American democracy compared to abuse of the pardon power. If you combine the ability to fire, even if you fire everybody and bring in apparatchiks, in theory they’re all bound by the Constitution. But you can just pardon them.
The pardon power, in my view, is the dagger in the heart of American democracy. Smart people have seen this for more than 200 years: that a particularly unscrupulous man could get into office and wreck the country this way.
Yes, I’m very worried about Supreme Court decisions that extend the unitary executive, where you can scorch through the civil service and replace it with a pure spoils system. I don’t think Americans fully understand what that could mean for their daily lives. If every four years you sweep out a million people and sweep in a different million, it’s just nuts.
Mounk: There’s a very deep problem that incoming parties face, which we can see now in Poland. I’m calling it a post-populist dilemma. If a government replaces civil servants with loyalists, and that populist government then loses power, the new government—broadly committed to democratic norms—faces a terrible choice. Either leave those loyalists, who are actively undermining democratic norms, in office to continue doing damage, or fire them all in a similarly irregular way, thereby creating a new norm that each incoming administration will do a clean sweep.
That dilemma helps explain why the Polish government is floundering in deep ways. Democrats are going to face that absolutely in 2028, and it’s going to be a big problem.
I want you to keep helping me think through this moment more broadly and see through the fog of war. Let’s take an area like free speech. I’m deeply concerned about what the administration has done in terms of punishing students for unpopular political speech by canceling their F1 student visas and making them immediately deportable, by trying to punish universities for engaging in unpopular speech or practices by threatening federal funding and imposing very hard conditions. We’re now apparently giving them a kind of poisoned carrot—this carrot or else.
I was very worried about the commissioner of the FCC going on a podcast and saying about Jimmy Kimmel—who, by the way, said something factually wrong and disgusting about the assassin of Charlie Kirk, implying he was somehow part of a MAGA crowd—but for the commissioner of the FCC to go on a podcast and say, they gotta fire him. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, like some kind of mob boss, as even Ted Cruz recognized, is clearly worrying.
I’m very worried about all of these attacks on free speech. At the same time, you look at the headlines of mainstream news outlets and don’t get the sense they’re pulling punches. I myself am often asked, particularly outside the United States, are you worried, as a professor at an American university, about criticizing Donald Trump? I have to say, in this conversation, there’s no part of me that thinks, oh my God, if I say this about Donald Trump, is he going to come after me? Perhaps that’s naive. Perhaps three years from now he will. But I don’t think we live in that culture or climate of fear yet.
This is another area where I’m deep in the fog of war and torn about how to think about it. Are we really on steps three and four toward people being incredibly afraid to criticize Donald Trump? Or do you think by 2028 it’s going to be obvious that we can still say what we want about the president, and unless you get really unlucky, it won’t have consequences? Where on that spectrum do you think we’re going to end up?
French: Let me just say the reason I think it’s a little naive not to be concerned is this: if something you said went viral—if you had a moment that really ticked off some people in MAGA—watch out. What that means is, often, it’s a matter of who they choose to fixate on at a given moment. Whoever they fixate on, regardless of status—whether an American citizen, a green card holder, or someone like Jimmy Kimmel—they will suffer. MAGA will use whatever avenue of control or authority they have to make that person suffer.
With Kimmel, it’s a historical accident that he’s on broadcast television, and the government owns the airwaves, so there’s some degree of FCC control—not as much as the administration thinks it has. So they use that lever. With you, your academic institution could be a lever. Obviously, the publication you started is not going to punish you. But what lever might they have over you? Immigration status.
So the way I look at it is this: if you’re a public critic of Donald Trump and haven’t experienced some sort of reprisal from the MAGA movement or the administration itself, a lot of that is just a matter of luck, to be honest.
Mounk: I agree with that, but I don’t think it has created a culture of fear. Perhaps I’m wrong about that. I know what it’s like to look at Hungarian newspapers and see every outlet print the same picture of Viktor Orbán with the same positive write-up of his latest speech. For now, that is just not what MSNBC, The Nation, and NPR feel like. It’s not even what The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and other organizations—some right of center, like The Wall Street Journal, and others left of center, though not far-left progressive—feel like.
They are daily criticizing Donald Trump in a pretty robust way. The question I have is: how likely is it that this will still be the case two or three years from now? That’s where I think the real danger lies. I don’t know. This is a genuine question. I find it really hard to think through.
French: I agree with that, but it’s worth noting that, at The New York Times, for example, we don’t have a culture of fear—but we’ve been sued for $15 billion. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t seem to have a culture of fear either. It’s continuing to report on Epstein and has similarly been sued for $10 or $15 billion.
The difference is that the lever Trump has against The New York Times is not as strong as the one he has over an immigrant. It’s a totally different strength of leverage. He’s trying to do what he can to The New York Times, but under current conditions and legal structures, his ability to impact us is less than it is for someone like Jimmy Kimmel.
Mounk: But that’s the question I’m asking. I have no doubt whatsoever that Trump is willing to use any lever he has, and the federal government is very powerful in all kinds of ways—direct and indirect. That’s a very bad state of affairs.
I’m trying to ask this question from the perspective of the natural experiment that Francis Fukuyama talked about in 2017. Right now, I think it’s fair to say the administration is attacking free speech in deeply concerning ways. It’s also fair to say that we clearly have a free press in the United States that is unafraid to report on and criticize the president. How do you think this is going to look in two or three years?
French: If present trends continue, you’re going to see a substantially different media environment. Twitter is already under the direct control of one of Trump’s closest allies. TikTok is heading in the same direction; that deal is in the works. Meta has been thoroughly cowed and intimidated. Right now, the Zuckerberg position seems to be: “How high?” when the administration says jump.
So, in the world of social media, there’s already a significant amount of existing and emerging control. Then there’s broadcast. We can’t forget the $25 million that YouTube just agreed to pay to the president. ABC paid a very large settlement without fighting a case that was stronger than their case against CBS. CBS filed a large settlement in response to a specious, frivolous case. They settled. We’re not settling. The Wall Street Journal isn’t settling. I feel like The New York Times would fight this to the ends of the earth, and that’s one reason I’m grateful to be where I am.
When you talk about a culture of fear, at this point, the administration’s actions have been so aggressive on so many fronts that if you don’t feel afraid as a critic of the administration, that’s more a matter of disposition than anything else. One of the firms that settled had very strong positions, but dispositionally, they weren’t up for the fight.
You’ve been in the middle of the free speech maelstrom for a long time. You’ve had people come after you in very aggressive ways—cancel culture, etc.—and you’ve developed a thick skin. You’ve spoken in the face of criticism that would make the average person wilt. So it’s harder for you to look at a situation and say, this makes me afraid. That’s your disposition.
I bet a lot of people who haven’t been in the fray, who aren’t all about the fray, or who are used to a way of existing where you could directly challenge an administration without getting hit with a billion-dollar lawsuit—over time, they will feel differently. I don’t think we’re going to lose robust dissent in this country, even if people are being sent to jail. You would still have robust dissent, even if it got to the point where he’s rounding people up—which I don’t think will happen. I hope not. But you’d still have it. What you’re seeing is a slow and steady increase in the zone of fear.
Mounk: I think you’re being far too kind about me and hugely overstating my personal level of courage. Even in Russia, you have people who speak out—some who are courageous, wonderful, and heroic, and who will speak out no matter what. But you’re right to point out that can’t be the criterion.
French: A lot of people would ask me, why did you defend this person who said this horrific thing? When I was president of FIRE, we defended a professor named Ward Churchill, who compared the World Trade Center victims on 9/11 to little Adolf Eichmanns. Horrific speech.
One of the things I’ve said is: imagine the zone of free speech like a big circle. Your average person does not want to come close to the outer edge of the circle. So the bigger you can draw the circle, the more permission you give the average American to express what’s on their mind and heart. The more the circle constricts, the more the actual zone of conversation in America constricts. Wherever the line is, most normal people are going to be well short of it.
The more the circle constricts, the more the zone of conversation constricts. People who have been in the free speech trenches for a long time are sometimes the worst gauges of the actual free speech climate. We’re used to representing, defending, and talking about deeply unpopular speech. You get into a mode of “bring it on” when defending free speech, if that’s been a big part of your life’s work.
When it’s not a big part of your life’s work—when it’s ancillary to your experience—people tend to be shocked and extremely nervous at the very idea that their words can hurt them.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and David discuss how serious the situation in the United States is—and how to fight back. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
