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French Friday: Signalgate & the Future of the Democratic Party
01:00:52
Top Trump officials are embroiled in a scandal after they accidentally included a journalist on an insecure text thread containing top secret military information. David French, a former military lawyer, explains why this is a no laughing matter, what...
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- [00:02]
David French
Guess what day it is. It's French Friday. It's French Friday, so grab your fries and say hooray. David French is here to play on French Friday. It's French fry day.
- [00:17]
Sky Giottani
David French. Welcome back to French Friday, March 2025 edition. How are you, Sky?
- [00:24]
David French
Thanks for having me back. It feels like just yesterday. These months are flying by.
- [00:28]
Sky Giottani
I'm glad you feel that way because I kind of feel like it's an eternity, the amount of things that are going on every month now between.
- [00:35]
David French
Oh, I think the more intense it is, the more quickly the time flies. It's like having a really busy shift as a waiter when I was in college. Like, when it's going crazy, it feels like the night flies by, which is sad. Sky. I don't want time to fly by. I'm getting older.
- [00:50]
Sky Giottani
I know. I feel that. I feel that, too. Okay, we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon, March 26, and the hot story at the moment is Signal Gate. And I don't want to bore people with all the details that they probably are already aware of, but essentially, a lot of administration officials in the Trump administration, including the Secretary of defense, national security advisor, the vice president, CIA director, national security advisor, all these different folks were using Signal, which is an online messaging app that is supposed to be secure, but we'll get into that in a minute to share about the strikes that were happening against the Houthis and in the Middle East. And for some reason, Jeffrey Goldberg, who's editor at the Atlantic, was included in this text thread in which they were talking about classified information. It's become this big scandal. Those texts have now been released publicly. David, you were a JAG officer in the military, a lawyer in the military. You dealt with cases of classified information not being handled properly by military officials. From your point of view, what's the story here? What is the mess really all about?
- [02:01]
David French
Yeah, it's a combination of grotesque incompetence and dangerous levels of corruption. Okay.
- [02:10]
Sky Giottani
Thank God we didn't have any DEI hires in this administration.
- [02:14]
David French
Well, I loved what I saw someone say online that Pete Hexis wasn't a DEI hire, he was a DUI hire. But ouch. Anyway, that is a joke. It's a joke. But let's start with the incompetence. So you have a journalist inadvertently invited on a group chat that is much of the senior leadership team of the Trump team. Let's break this down. Number one, you have a journalist invited to join the group chat. Mind blowing. It's mind blowing that that would occur okay, second thing, that's mind blowing. I don't know about you, sky, but I'm very cautious about the group chats I'm a part of. When I'm in a group chat, I do take a look and see who is there. Now, maybe that's a result of the fact that, like, I get a lot of hatred online and, you know, I'm just a. That makes you more cautious when, you know, you're the object of a lot of hatred. But you know who should be even more cautious than me? The National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, senior advisors in the Trump administration. So this sort of pass that we're giving to all of them, that nobody noticed Jeffrey Goldberg in there is inappropriate. And then the third thing is on the competence point, and then we'll get to the corruption, is this idea that Signal, even putting aside the policy guidance and everything that's issued to the rest of the national defense establishment, just let's put that aside. This idea that this is the appropriate location for this conversation is grotesquely incompetent. Just grotesquely. And it betrays a sort of lack of sophistication that you do not want to see in your senior leaders. Look, I know that it's easier to communicate on Signal than to go to a skiff, a secure facility where you review classified information. I know it's all easier. But you know what? It's easier was one of the justifications for Hillary Clinton's emails. It's easier. What do you expect us, like, on a Thanksgiving Day, to go to a SCIF when we're with our families? Just email me the information. You know, that kind of convenience is absolutely. That kind of convenience is the reason they do it. But it's a symbol of incompetence, because if you're remotely competent, you know that an encrypted app is not the same thing as an insecure app, because the phone that it's on may not be secure, for example, or the. There's been warning and guidance given to service members about SIGNAL that there are vulnerabilities here. So the incompetence of it is off the charts. And that's before you get to the corruption of it, which is this sort of combination of hypocrisy, double standards, and dishonesty. Because everyone on that. Everyone on that signal group either knows or should know, has no excuse not to know that if members of the military were doing the exact same thing, they would be prosecuted if that kind of information, prosecuted if that kind of information was on their phones. So they had either they knew or had no excuse not to know that. And then, and then when they're caught, what do they do? They just brazenly lie. No war plans? Are you kidding me? No war plans. Nothing classified. And so that tells the Atlantic, well, if it's not classified, let's release it. And they release it and you find out what, anybody with the two brain cells to rub together knows that that's all classified information.
- [05:57]
Sky Giottani
Okay, there's a couple of things I want to unpack here. First of all, for those who are truly ignorant about this entire world of class of military strategies and the details of strikes and things like that, what's the risk? Why is this kind of information typically only communicated in a skiff in a highly secure format and not on phones? What is the government or if you are in the military and you do handle information this way, why would you be prosecuted? What is it that the government is worried would happen if things are handled this way?
- [06:33]
David French
So let's start with the second part. Why would you be prosecuted? Well, there's a statute that says that you cannot remove information pertaining from the national defense, from its, from its lawful location and deliver it to anybody else who's not authorized or to an unauthorized location. So there's a statute and now it says you can't do it through gross negligence. Well, this is gross negligence. Like the idea that you're going to have the transmission to signal was intentional, which is worse than gross negligence. The inclusion of the reporter was the gross negligence. So you actually have a statute here that if they were officers in uniform, I guarantee you JAG officers would be talking about applying that right now. If they were mid level employees of the State Department, Department of Justice lawyers would be talking about applying that statute right now. Now that's the legal part. Why is the law there? Well, because that kind of information is extraordinarily dangerous. Now let's, you know, if you want to look at the actual text themselves, you can see it includes things like timing of aircraft launches, then type of aircraft that is being deployed, drone strikes, when bombs are going to fall, and if, regardless of whether it includes information like the bombs are going to fall at this location, even information as general as the bombs will start falling at X time gives the enemy, if they're able to get this access to the information to prepare air defenses, if they have any, to prepare for a particular type of aircraft to perhaps launch their own missiles before those missiles are destroyed by air attack, which would be extremely dangerous. To US Sailors and to civilian shipping in the Red Sea, they could move high value targets away from targeted areas. If you know an attack is coming in two hours, there's a lot of things you can do to either mitigate the damage from the attack or to maximize the damage to your opponent. And look, sky, this is such common sense stuff. It's just so basic. But I do think in this time and in this era where people are so deeply in their partisan corners and so likely to hear a message from the Trump administration that says, well, no big deal. This is no big deal, that you have to sit down and slowly and clearly explain why it is in fact a big deal. Just to put this in perspective, when I was in Iraq, sky, we were so careful with operational security that we would not even allow soldiers to send emails home to their family members like of the damage from a Humvee. Like soldiers, we all carried these cameras. And the cameras were useful for detainee operations. They were in many ways a self protection mechanism so that we could take pictures of detainees at each stage of the process to show that they're in good physical condition, et cetera. Also, we needed cameras for sensitive site exploitation to take pictures. So we all were carrying these cameras. And so what a lot of young soldiers would do is if their Humvee got damaged, or if their tank got damaged or their Bradley got damaged, they take a picture of it. Look at what happened. This was my near death experience, right? And, and some of them would send these messages home. And we had an urgent issue about that. Because displaying battle damage teaches the enemy, if they get their hands on it, on do they need to increase the size of the charge? What is the effectiveness of this particular IED versus a particular form of armor? So there were OPSEC reasons, operational security reasons for that. This is so far beyond that, it's hard to even put it into words. How far beyond it?
- [10:14]
Sky Giottani
So for those who are minimizing this and saying it's no big deal, no harm done, I would think if it were my son or daughter who was flying one of those F18s or responsible for part of this attack or stationed on one of those ships, I'd be pretty furious. Because the leader of the Department of Defense is sharing information that the enemy could use or could have used to target my kid because of their incompetence.
- [10:39]
David French
I talked to, I was texting with a parent of a child who's deployed to the Middle east, and that parent was white hot with rage. Because even if they're not, say, let's say you're on a ship. Well, how did. What's the fastest way the Houthis would try to prevent this? Firing missiles at ships?
- [10:56]
Sky Giottani
Right.
- [10:56]
David French
Well, let's suppose you're not on a ship. Let's suppose you're in a different part of the Middle East. What's one of the fastest ways that the Houthis can preserve their missiles from destruction is firing the missiles. And where would you fire the missiles? Well, you might fire them at American targets. Right. And so, I mean, again, the dangers here are just obvious. It's by the grace of God that, A, the person who was in the chat was a very responsible, ethical person, Jeffrey Goldberg, who didn't choose to immediately publish, and they're very fortunate, B, that given the negligence of all of these people, that Goldberg was the only extraneous person in the chat. How many other chats are out there? Sky, how many other chats are out there?
- [11:41]
Sky Giottani
So this is the other thing I heard recently. Apart from the military intelligence that were. That was clearly disclosed in this chat, there was other intelligence that was disclosed. So the chat included conversation with Vice President Vance, talking about how he wasn't fully on board with President Trump's decision to attack the Houthis, and some derogatory comments about our European allies. And I heard one person say, associate or connected or maybe a former agent with the CIA say that if they had intercepted that kind of communication of a foreign power, of a vice president acknowledging disagreements with the president, if they were a CIA agent intercepting that kind of communication, they would have been given a medal because it's intelligence that can be exploited by our enemies and our allies, I suppose because it reveals details about the inner workings of the Trump administration that can be exploited and used to. To harm American interests. So just the entire thing from top to bottom, is disgusting.
- [12:43]
David French
Well, this is.
- [12:44]
Sky Giottani
I.
- [12:44]
David French
Let me share with you some messages that I got from somebody from. From a. Let's just say from a person in position to know how these decisions are made. So even the existence of groups like that and their subject is usually treated as secret. Like, at a minimum, secret is one of the lower levels secret, top secret, etc, top secret, compartmentalized. So even the existence of that group, much less even the title of the chain, would probably be classified. All those internal deliberations classified, even without the strike information. And then inside, the insight into what the leaders are thinking would generally be classified as well. So even if you did not have the attack plans, the strike plans, then even there, even if you don't have the plans, then what? You definitely have, you still have loads of classified information on a non classified system.
- [13:42]
Sky Giottani
Okay, last thing then. My understanding is that there are certain administration officials, including the President, the Vice President, and others, who are required by national law to preserve all of their documents and communication while in office. And that's the kind of stuff that ends up in a presidential museum library. It's stuff that's preserved in the National Archives. And so signal is an app that you designate how long messages should be kept before they are permanently deleted. So the very fact that you already mentioned that this app is not secure the way that communications are supposed to be secure in this area, in defense areas. But secondly, it's also, they're not being preserved. So on multiple levels, there's violations of federal law and regulation here. I mean, I hate to be cynical about it, but I have a hard time believing there's going to be any fallout or consequence for this. Because the Trump administration's posture is to deny they're accusing Jeffrey Goldberg of being a spy now that he somehow infiltrated this Signal group rather than was mistakenly invited into it by one of the participants. They're accusing everyone and anyone of incompetence and treachery rather than looking at the most simple explanation, which is someone or multiple people who are part of this group screwed up. And even beyond that, they shouldn't have been using it in the first place. And no one's talking about that.
- [15:07]
David French
This. Sky, I'm so glad you brought this up, because we've gone through sort of two layers here. Layer number one being incompetence, layer number two being corruption. But this is moving into a third layer, which is, let's move beyond just the specific facts of what occurred here. And what does this all mean? What's the implication? What's the meaning of this? So in any other administration, had this occurred, you would immediately have an investigation. Immediately. You would almost certainly have the DOJ working in the, in the FBI working through its counterintelligence function to tear this story inside out. In other words, to just sort, to figure out from soup to nuts how all of this happened, and then to file charges if charges are warranted. You had cash Patel putting out. Well, I, I don't think the FBI is going to get involved here. You have had no indication that the administration is interested in doing anything other than spend this. Okay, so let's pull back. What if this is occurring? This is not occurring in a vacuum. It's occurring after the administration has fired inspectors general. This is occurring after the administration has fired the JAG generals, fired the chairman and the Joint Chiefs, not, by the way, for incompetence, but because they're not politically aligned with the president. Now, then you have actual incompetence and corruption, and so far, nobody's fired. So what does that tell you? It tells you that what Donald Trump's priority is is a politically loyal military institution. That's his priority. That's the number one thing. And don't you don't think for a moment that ambitious officers who are not seeing this, they're not seeing that I have entirely different level of permission structure if I am pro Trump and I have no flexibility, I have no freedom, I have no future if I'm in any way even suspected of being anti Trump. And so what does this do, sky? What you're doing is you're seeing the process. We're looking in real time what it looks like for the American military to become, to be from the top down, pushed in a direction to be more like the Russian military. Now, there would be a lot of resistance inside the military because the military has decades of professionalism and decades of a commitment to honor and duty and to ethics. So he's pushing against an institution with a lot of cultural ability to resist. But make no mistake, the institution is being pushed. And when I say comparing it from American military to a Russian military, I mean it in a very specific way. The American military is a professional military. That's its primary focus is on the profession of arms. The Russian military is primarily a political military. Its primary focus is loyalty to the head of state. Now, it also has professional components, for sure. But when you have a military that is primarily and fundamentally oriented towards the politics of the leader, then there are consequences to that. And the Russian military, while lethal in many ways, is not one that we would want our military to be. Our military is far more competent, far more lethal, far more professional than the Russian military. And one of the reasons is that the Russian military is very much focused on pleasing the political master. And this is the direction that Trump is pushing this our military.
- [18:29]
Sky Giottani
So last question before we move on to our main topic today. Is there any chance of real accountability here, given that the Congress is run by Republicans, most of whom are beholden to Donald Trump, and the Justice Department has been reworked? Beholden to Donald Trump. The FBI director, as you already mentioned, said he's not going to get involved. If there's no authority to force the administration to really deal with this, is there going to be any accountability?
- [18:57]
David French
I'm going to be a pessimist and say zero accountability. But with an exception, I think there is some possibility that a National Security Advisor might receive some consequences, which he should, but not as many consequences as Pete Hegseth. And I think one of the reasons why he might is that also he is not necessarily seen in magaworld in the same category as a Pete Hexith, that there are people in the Republican establishment outside of MAGA who like the National Security Advisor and respect the National Security advisor in a way that they don't with Pete exit. So the fact that they're establishing Republicans that like him, that makes him more vulnerable. So I think there's a possibility maybe that him or somebody on his team could face consequences. But as of right now, I see no possibility that the guy who dumped the war plans into the unsecure chat, Pete Hugseth, is going to face any meaningful consequence. He's doing exactly what he's taught to do, and all of MAGA experience tells him to do, which is deny, deflect, and blame the media.
- [19:56]
Sky Giottani
I'm certainly no defender of Secretary Hegseth, but what he did might be the most egregious in actually putting the specifics of the attack plan on this app. But how many people are on it? 17, 18 people in this group chat.
- [20:13]
David French
Oh, it's a lot. Yeah.
- [20:14]
Sky Giottani
And like you mentioned earlier, they all know, number one, this is not a secure channel for having this conversation. And number two, we're supposed to preserve our communications within the administration. Neither of those are possible. And so where's the accountability for everyone else? It's kind of like saying, you know, well, so and so pulled the trigger, but there were 18 other people driving the getaway car, and we're only focusing on the one rather than the whole mess that this.
- [20:42]
David French
Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I talked about this on a Times podcast where, you know, as a general matter, every single person on that chat would receive discipline. Exactly. Every single person. The problem is, like, that's almost the entirety of Trump's senior team. And so this sort of idea that, hey, I'm arguing that the whole. The whole core team of the administration should be fleshed out in month two. Well, in an ideal world, they would be.
- [21:13]
Sky Giottani
I know.
- [21:13]
David French
But in an ideal world, you wouldn't even have these people in government.
- [21:16]
Sky Giottani
It's a vivid example of how the old saying, a fish rots from the head down, down. Like, you can see the way Trump has always operated, as if the rules don't apply to him.
- [21:25]
David French
Yep.
- [21:26]
Sky Giottani
And when he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, it's the Roy cone approach of deny, deny, deny, attack, attack, attack. And that's exactly what everyone under him is now doing. The rules don't apply to them. They can do whatever they want. They can break the rules. They can flagrantly disregard regulations that are there for a good reason. And when they get caught, deny, deny, deny, attack, attack, attack. And they're emulating their leader and leadership matters. Character matters. We're seeing that. I'm grateful that apparently no American lives were lost as a result of their incompetence. But it's scary to think this is the one case we are aware of. We don't know what else is going on. And the lack of regard for norms that is being when you dodge a.
- [22:09]
David French
Bullet doesn't mean there was no bullet.
- [22:11]
Sky Giottani
Right. Okay, let's transition to the other thing I really wanted to talk to you about, which is also in the realm of politics again. So recently, Democratic Minority leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer's come under a lot of attack from his own party because there was a continuing resolution bill put forward by the Republicans in the House that was meant to keep the government open. And there was some thought that maybe the Democrats should resist the CR bill and essentially force a government shutdown as a way of protesting various things that the Trump administration was doing. The last minute. Chuck Schumer decided, no, we're not going to do that. They allowed the bill to go forward and it's created this firestorm of outrage from various sectors of the Democratic Party. And it's really the larger debate of what is the right posture the Democrats should be taking both toward the Trump administration and maybe at a higher altitude, just towards the country in trying to gain some credibility again to win another election, to take back the Congress, to take back the White House. Recent data came out that showed the Democratic Party's at an all time low in its approval rating. Of course, it lost big in 2024. A lot of people are now looking back on the Biden administration having removed their rose colored glasses to see a lot of problems that maybe they weren't willing to acknowledge at the time. And so what I want to talk about is just, I mean, I'm not a Democrat, you're not a Democrat. But I think we are in agreement that there needs to be a healthy Democratic Party to be a viable alternative to the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. So I just want to get your take on where do you see the Democrats at right now. And then let's explore what are their options, how do they, what lessons do they learn? And how do they position themselves coming out of 2024 in a way that will make them a viable party again because they really feel like they're in the wilderness. And I'm curious about your diagnosis.
- [24:13]
David French
Yeah. So, you know, there's sort of two things going on at once. What is your short term response? What is your long to medium term response? And I think for the Democrats, they have a lot of bad news on the short term response, because that is the bad news is you have very few tools at your disposal. I don't care how angry you get. I don't care how much you yell or shout or do whatever at a congressional hearing, how many viral moments you create. You just don't have a whole lot of ability. When you're in a minority in the House and you're in the minority in the Senate, you basically have one tool, and that's the filibuster. And it can't be used all the time. It can't be used against judicial nominees, for example. It can't be used when there's. The parliamentarian, you know, says it's, you know, there are specific kinds of bills for which not even the filibuster can block you. So it's a very limited tool. And so a lot of Democrats are like, do more, do more, do more. And Chuck Schumer, if I'm putting his shoes, what, what is this more that I can do? And I get it that they could have filibustered that bill. They could have. But let's think that through. If you shut down the government in the age of Doge, you're doing Trump's work for him. I mean, this is, this is. Do you, you don't like Doge. Don't Doge the government. Now, I recognize that there are elements of that continuing resolution that Democrats really didn't like, but that's one of the problems here, is they lost the election. Right? And so they're going to be facing legislation that they're not gonna like. Right. And so a lot of the anger at Democrats reminds me of when, for example, Republicans were furious at Congress for not repealing Obamacare, as if they could have.
- [25:57]
Sky Giottani
Right?
- [25:58]
David French
Like they had no ability to do it. So they're sitting here mad at members of Congress for not repealing. Now, to the extent that members of Congress told them they could, that's on them. Right. But they're sitting there furious at members of Congress for not repealing Obamacare during Obama's term when Obama would have been able to veto anything and there was not the votes to override a veto. And so a lot of this is I just have bad news for Democrats, which is once you lost the presidency and the House and the Senate, a lot of your options for resistance really narrowed. And so what you end up arguing about isn't so much, isn't so much legal tactics or political tactics as it is sort of posture and messaging.
- [26:45]
Sky Giottani
Exactly. Yeah. I don't want to get into a nitpicky should he or shouldn't he have resisted the bill, the Chuck Schumer debate. I agree with you entirely. And that's why I think a lot of the conversations that I'm bumping into in different places are taking that higher altitude view of going, all right, the next two years are awash. We know the Democratic Party can't mount any significant resistance to the Trump administration, which is part of the reason the Trump administration is doing so much and getting away with all these crazy executive orders and doge and whatnot. And if there is any check, it's probably going to come from the judiciary. But that's a whole nother story. So they are talking about how does the party reposition itself, what is the meta narrative it's going to present, what kind of candidates does it put forward? And there's different diagnoses that are coming forward as to why the party has been struggling so much and why it lost in. Well, you can look at 2024 as a particular moment because of Biden and Harris and all that. But just in general, the demographics are not on their side anymore. They used to think demographics was destiny and as the country became less and less white, that it was going to solidify a Democratic majority in perpetuity. And they now realize that's not true because a lot of Latino voters have shifted over to the, to the Republicans. Black men have shifted more than they expected to Republicans. Working class voters, non college educated Americans have overwhelmingly gone to the Republican Party. And so a lot of people are looking back going, all right, what have the Democrats done wrong and can they course correct? Maybe not in two years, maybe in four years, we'll see. But as an outsider and but somebody who observes this stuff, I'm curious what you think if you were, you know, in charge of the DNC and had actual authority, what would you tell the Democrats to do to get back on track?
- [28:31]
David French
So I would, I would even go a little turn further than what you said it wasn't just that the identity that this emerging Democratic majority or the coalition of the ascendant, whatever you want to talk about, however you want to describe this Democratic idea that because certain identity groups vote in a certain direction, historically, the more those identity groups grow, the more likely we are to have lasting power. Not only did that prove wrong, but I would say that the very diagnosis or the very idea that that was true ultimately proved devastating for the Democratic Party in this sense because it made them double down on an identity based politics.
- [29:11]
Sky Giottani
Right.
- [29:11]
David French
So if they thought that identity was their key to future power, then there is a logical reason why that they would double down on identity politics. Sort of. I'm on the side of these identity groups. Well, the problem was and is is a lot of these identity groups, quote, unquote, identity groups don't see themselves the same way that the Democrats see them. Because Democratic Party has long had, ever since, you know, Goldwater Republicans turned their backs on the civil rights movement. The Democratic Party has had a very tight grip on the, on black voters in the US for very specific and unique historical reasons. Because the black population in the US Overwhelmingly shares a common heritage, shares a common history, shares a common story. You cannot say that about Asian voters, Hispanic voters. So if you had, I was just talking to somebody who was, we were talking about this very issue and he was Colombian and he said, I'm not Mexican, I'm not Cuban. Right. Using this term Hispanic voters as sort of a one size fits all. You don't say that about Europe. You don't just say European Europeans. When we know there's big differences between Germans and Italians and Norwegians and French and Spanish. We don't lump them all, you know. Right. And so what the voters had done, what the Democratic Party had done is just like lumped people in these big, big groups where they didn't feel like that. And also an awful lot of these people didn't agree with sort of the identity based messaging to begin with. And so you had this very strange phenomenon over the last 10 years where white Democrats move substantially left even on race and identity issues than non white Democrats. And the non white Democrats in many ways stopped feeling heard. Because here's another element of non white Democrats, they're by and large more moderate than white Democrats.
- [31:10]
Sky Giottani
Yeah, right. When you look at the data around black voters in this country, they tend to be far more moderate or even conservative on quite a few social issues.
- [31:17]
David French
Yes, exactly. And so you had literally the Democratic Party, in the name of identity politics, ignoring the actual identity and actual values of the people in the identity groups. Okay.
- [31:33]
Sky Giottani
So that gets to one approach. And I think the person who probably exemplifies this right now is California Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom's from San Francisco. He was the mayor of San Francisco earlier in his political career. Obviously, San Francisco is a center for a lot of the LGBTQ movement. And during his time there and throughout his career in California politics, Newsom has been very, very, very pro gay rights and LGBTQ rights. You have to be in a. To be a successful politician in that environment. But very recently, he did an interview on a new podcast he has, and he had Charlie Kirk from. What's that crazy organization? The. I want to say the Christian Coalition. It's not what it is, it's the. What, what is his group. Turning Point usa. Right.
- [32:22]
David French
Yeah.
- [32:22]
Sky Giottani
And to everyone's surprise, Gavin Newsom came out in agreement with Charlie Kirk that trans women should not be allowed in men's. I'm sorry, trans women should not be allowed in women's sports.
- [32:34]
David French
Right.
- [32:35]
Sky Giottani
And got a lot of blowback and heat from the political left for this. But he's. It sounds like he's positioning himself to be an anti activist Democrat, meaning he's trying to distance himself from the far left flank of the Democratic Party that was too embroiled in identity politics, too caught up in that stuff you're talking about. And he's trying to position himself as more common sense, more with the middle of the country, maybe on this. I don't know how he can possibly run away from his record, but some people are saying he's got the right idea. The Democratic Party needs to moderate itself on some of these far left cultural identity issues if it has any hope of winning over middle America again. Is he onto something? I mean, a lot of people made a point of that ad that ran.
- [33:22]
David French
Yeah.
- [33:23]
Sky Giottani
Nonstop in 2024, where the Trump ad that said Kamala Harris was for they. Them and he's for you and playing up transgender issues. And that's. Do you think the Democratic Party is that key to them winning again that they have to jettison that end of their coalition?
- [33:40]
David French
Well, let me, Let me. Let me be blunt. If the Trump administration continues on many of the paths it's on now, the Democratic Party wouldn't have to change a thing and it could come back into power.
- [33:52]
Sky Giottani
Actually, honestly, that kind of worries me.
- [33:54]
David French
And that worries me a great deal. Right. Because it continues this intolerable situation that we've been in for about 20 years, which is a party is taken out of, swept out of office, usually by a pretty narrow margin, overreads its mandate. I mean, and even if you use the term mandate, you're overeating because there's no mandate. You just narrowly won an election. Like a mandate is Reagan in 84. Right. That's a mandate. 49 states. Okay, you win 49.9% of the vote. You don't call that a mandate. But everyone overreads it. They push too far, too fast, and then the other party gets the benefit of the correction without having to change a thing. And, I mean, there's no better example of that than Donald Trump winning in 2024. I mean, the Republicans went back to the same well from 2020.
- [34:45]
Sky Giottani
I mean, I think we're all getting tired of the whiplash.
- [34:48]
David French
Trump, yeah.
- [34:49]
Sky Giottani
Trump gets elected in 2016 for whatever explanation you want to give. The country gets exhausted with his antics, the mishandling of the pandemic, and they boot him out in 2020 for Biden. Biden gets in, overreads his mandate, doesn't get control of the economy, doesn't get control of the border. They boot him out and put Trump back in. And now Trump is up to all of his nonsense. And you could see it almost as it's happening. The country's going to get exhausted. He's going to screw up some important things. Maybe inflation doesn't come under control. Who knows what other scandals emerge. And he gets booted in 2028. And we're back. But neither. But nothing is dealing with its core malady.
- [35:28]
David French
Yeah.
- [35:28]
Sky Giottani
It's just waiting for the other guy to screw up enough that we can get back in.
- [35:31]
David French
Exactly. And that's the, that's where we've been stuck for a while.
- [35:35]
Sky Giottani
Yes.
- [35:35]
David French
And, you know, but, and I, and I would say to Democrats, you have an easy path and you have a hard path. Here's your easy path that may pay off, but is not going to be necessarily great for the country. The easy path is we're not going to say Latinx anymore. We're not going to make people use their, you know, share their pronouns. We're going to be on the right side of some of these 8020 issues about, you know, like youth, gender transition and sports. And so these are tweaks. These are small things that ease some culture war concerns. But the real issue is that voters have not been able to find a party that can solve for the big problems that actually really govern their lives or that actually really burden their lives. I'm sorry. And so, you know, it's easy to Strike Latinx from your vocabulary. It's easy to stop making people share pronouns. It's hard to reform your cities so that housing is cheaper. It's hard to reform your cities where people feel safer or where homelessness is less of an in your face problem. It's hard to reform universities, especially elite universities, to the point where conservative students don't go there and then sort of feel immediately embattled and ostracized and fringe. Those are things that, that really matter in people's lives a great deal. And those are the things that if the Democratic Party can actually solve for them, that's where they would have an opportunity not just to win this next election, but to do the thing that actually tends to happen in American history, which is the party that solves for the problem of the moment earns generational control. So avoid the, you know, look, I don't want to. I don't like the Latinx stuff. I don't like the mandatory pronoun sharing stuff or the extremism on the trans issues. But those are side issues in 90% of Americans lives. If you can get the hard stuff right, you've got a great chance. And Ezra Klein had this conversation with Gavin Newsom where, you know, and I love the way this tweet summarized it. Ezra Klein explains how it feels to be a Democrat in under 30 seconds. And here's Ezra, my colleague. The stimulus bill under Obama that had three big headline projects for investment, high speed rail, smart grid and a nationwide system of interoperable health care records. And we have zero of the three. So would America be different and better in some substantial ways? If a lot of these promises made were actually promises kept, you actually had some of these big ticket blue items that people would like came to fruition, then you might have a different kind of country. So if I'm a Democrat, the easy, the sugar high is we got rid of Latinx and pronouns, Donald Trump fell on his face and now we're back in power. That's the sugar high. The lasting change is our cities are affordable, mass transit is efficient, medical care is more easily interoperable and more easy to obtain. All of these things are traditional Democratic initiatives, infrastructure, you know, health care, etc. Get that done and you've got a lot better shot at coming to the American people and say, trust us with power, not just for this election, but for elections to come.
- [39:11]
Sky Giottani
So you mentioned the sugar rush option of just clean up some of the crazy stuff on the far left and wait for Trump to screw up and you'll get back into office and it feels like water always runs to the lowest point. The easiest way back into power is to keep the country exhausted on Donald Trump and just bide your time. It is really hard to fix these intractable problems about healthcare and housing and, and pick your problem, inflation. I can't imagine that there are Democratic leaders who are actually, because those are not solvable in one cycle, you can't solve them in two years or four years. These are big, big, big issues. But here's the other thing. I'm not sure it's either or, because let's say in a perfect scenario.
- [40:01]
David French
Oh, I don't think it's either.
- [40:02]
Sky Giottani
Or let's say there was a blue state or a blue city, maybe California, that somehow cuts through all of its bureaucracy and actually rebuilding horrific fires in la, actually manages to reestablish itself in record time. And you see government working efficiently. All these wonderful things occur. And a Gavin Newsom or whatever Democratic leader from California can go to the rest of the country and say, see, we did it. This is how government works efficiently. This is what happens when your tax dollars are respected and put to work in proper ways. So give us back control of Washington. I think a big chunk of the country would look at that and go, yeah, but you know what? The, the crazy stuff that teachers are doing in public schools right now, no thanks. Or do you know how many teenagers I'm hearing are changing their genders? No thanks. Or you still are doing the Latinx pronoun thing. And for a lot of Americans, the brand of the Democratic Party is so tainted that it is so out of touch with basic common sense that they won't listen to the Democrats when they do have a win on something like housing or immigration reform or you pick, you know, the intractable problem that we really do need to face. So the brand, and this is where MAGA I think has been really, really effective is they have so clearly branded the Democrats as crazy, out of touch left kooks that nothing good they do accomplish they get any credit for because they're, they're just zero credibility with so many Americans.
- [41:29]
David French
Right. I do think MAGA has made enormous strides culturally in this notion that, look, don't go over there. They have, and with a lot of, you know, with a lot of evidence to support it, especially in around 20, in the 2000 teens and 2020 or so, they will hate you. It's not just that they won't like you or they will be moderately displeased with you. They will hate you and trying to ruin your life unless you agree with them on 18 different, highly subjective, shifting ways of looking at race and gender and sexuality. And if you don't use all the right language at the right time, if you aren't using the right pronoun in the right moment, if you're not with them on everything, they will wipe you out of. If you're not with them on everything, they will view you as with them on nothing. And so it wasn't just that the left was strident and intolerant. MAGA can be very strident and very intolerant. It's also that their stridency and intolerance was comprehensive and often inscrutable unless you are in the in club. Whereas for MAGA, it was ice. It was. There was one. There was one condition. You're. You are welcome in maga. You are going to be loved in MAGA with, you can be pro life or you can be pro choice. You can be for vaccines, you can be against vaccines, you can be for Ukraine, you can be against Ukraine as long as you're willing to put on the red hat and vote for Donald Trump. Come one, come all.
- [42:56]
Sky Giottani
Yeah, Elon Musk exemplifies that perfectly.
- [42:59]
David French
I mean, the fact that an Elon Musk faction and a Steve Bannon faction are still existing side by side in the Republican Party tells you that they actually, for all the talk, which I think is legitimate about the way some people view Trump in an almost culty way, they actually ended up creating a bigger tent than the Democrats. And one of the reasons why the Democratic tent is smaller is because the far left in the Democratic Party was vicious, vicious to any disagreement. You know, a lot of people are, for a lot of good reasons, frustrated by Harris's loss and how much Harris was saddled with her 2019 rhetoric. And that's exactly correct. Harris's 2019 rhetoric was extremist. And if you go back and you look at the Democrats writ large, the only one who didn't really dive into all of that was Joe Biden and maybe a little bit Pete Buttigieg, and he won the nomination going away. But if you were a Democrat in 2019, 2020, and you deviated one millimeter from any of this stuff, you are going to be annihilated by the far left. Just annihilated. And that is the dynamic that absolutely has to change for Democrats.
- [44:13]
Sky Giottani
I agree. Do you think this is going to sound weird? Do the Democrats need their own Donald Trump? Because when Trump came onto the scene in 2015 during the Republican primaries. He was saying things that were obviously outrageous and he was saying things that were completely against Republican orthodoxy, whether it was tariffs or his rhetoric about immigrants or, I mean, you go down the list, he was changing the script. And everyone thought, well, the Republican establishment's going to hate this guy. And the Republican establishment did hate him, but the rank and file loved him and he wiped the floor with the other candidates and, you know, he's completely transformed the party in his image. Do the Democrats need their own hyper, charismatic, cult of personality like figure who can single handedly redefine their party? Hopefully not to the degree of incompetence and, and narcissism and, and toxic masculinity that you see from Trump, but towards a healthier form that can become a broad coalition again, even if it does upset the party establishment or the activist wing.
- [45:21]
David French
You know, I'm so glad you raised that sky, because I'm beginning to think, and you tell me, I'm just sort of, I'm processing this out loud in real time. I'm starting to wonder if that's the only way parties change at all ultimately is the, the next, the next successful charismatic leader breaks whatever cycle existed before them. So let's go back to the Republican Party in a state of crisis after Richard Nixon. Well, I'm sure there were lots of think pieces saying, what is the thing that will really change us? We need this policy position, et cetera. And then along comes Ronald Reagan, who's a dude, a guy incredibly charismatic, who wrenches the Republican Party away from that sort of Nixonian mindset, puts it in a whole new mindset that then dominated Republican politics for a long time with a lot of overhang, until Donald Trump, another immensely charismatic person, comes and wrenches it away. Same thing happened with the Democratic Party. They were in a tailspin. And then, yes, Bill Clinton was sort of this centrist guy and a lot of people said that we needed more, that the Democrats needed more centrism. Right, the Democrat. And so he did fit that mold, but he was also a person of really unique talents as well. Barack Obama in 08. A lot of people forget it wasn't just that he was the first black president. And that was exciting to people. It was that he also presented himself as a very, you know, remember, there is no red America, there is no blue America, there is only the United States of America. And he presented himself as sort of a, almost a uniquely American figure of unity and reconciliation. And so I think that the more I think about this, the more I think that we can talk all day about programmatic ideas and you need to, you need to have these ideas and you need to have these policy ideas, you need to have cultural strategies. But at the end of the day, it only all comes together in politics through the form of a person.
- [47:27]
Sky Giottani
Okay, I think I agree with you, but let me push back on your historical example.
- [47:33]
David French
Yeah, please. Like I said, this is real time. Yeah, real time.
- [47:36]
Sky Giottani
We're both processing in real time.
- [47:37]
David French
Yeah.
- [47:37]
Sky Giottani
So you're right. Reagan comes along at a time when the Republican Party is reeling after Watergate and after Nixon. And he was dynamically. I was just at the Reagan library a few weeks ago in California. It was fascinating. But anyway, he was a dynamic and amazing personality. And yet the Nixon wing of the Republican Party didn't go, we're out of here, we're leaving. Because of Ronald Reagan. He was able to maintain them. Bill Clinton comes along in the early 90s when the Democrats are on the ropes as a more moderate. You know, the era of big government is over. All that. And yet there wasn't a faction of the Democratic Party that said we're out of here because Bill Clinton is not extreme enough on the left. Same thing with Barack Obama. He comes along and he builds on the coalition that the Democrats had. He didn't. There wasn't a whole wing of Democrats that fled the party because Barack Obama was too inclusive. But when Donald Trump came along, and you are living proof of this. Yeah, Donald Trump comes along and a whole huge chunk of Republicans never. Trumpers go, this guy doesn't have the character, he doesn't hold the policies, he doesn't have the competency to be the president. And a whole bunch of Republicans left the party and now he's a two term president because he brought in a whole bunch of people that don't normally vote or people who had been Democrats are now being attracted to him. Do you need somebody in the Democratic Party to come along? Not like Clinton, not like Obama, but somebody who comes along who's willing to alienate a chunk of the Democratic Party and lose them because they're not extreme enough or they're not loyal enough to the far left and remake the party in their own image. The way that Trump, I think he's a, I don't know of another figure in my lifetime or maybe Even in the 20th century that compares to the what Trump has done to the Republican Party. What other candidate? Maybe fdr, but even that's iffy. Yeah, I don't know a parallel here.
- [49:30]
David French
It's Interesting. Now, I would dispute your historical account. A couple of words in it. Huge. As a chunk of the Republican Party being never Trumpers.
- [49:38]
Sky Giottani
That's true. Fine. Not huge.
- [49:39]
David French
Not, I think, what we were a.
- [49:41]
Sky Giottani
Significant and influential portion.
- [49:43]
David French
We. We had more platform than we had power. So a lot of the people are never Trumpers. Have a big audience. You know, if you write for National Review, as I did when, when Trump rose up, I mean, we had a big audience. National View has a big audience. But we did not. We did not. We had an audience, but not followers. And there's a difference between those two things. And so I do think it actually ultimately proved to be a very small slice of the gop. But I also think that by shedding that small slice actually enabled Trump to kind of reach new people.
- [50:23]
Sky Giottani
Right.
- [50:24]
David French
Because we are a particular slice that he loathed and that he saddled us with. The. He sort of saddled us with previous losses, I think, illegitimately, illegitimately, but he saddled us with. And if you go back and you look at the Democrats, there's an interesting parallel with the quote, unquote, sister soldier moment that Clinton had. I think that is misunderstood. The slice of the Democratic base that actually cares about, like, should, you know, I'm going to defend rap music or whatever it is, celebrating killing cops is really tiny. Yes, it's really tiny. But the Republicans did a very good job and have always done a very good job. Both parties do a really good job of taking the small fringe of a party and saying, this is who the whole party is. And so when Trump, I mean, I'm sorry, Clinton did the sister soldier moment, he wasn't actually taking on a big faction of the Democratic Party at all. He was taking on the tiniest sliver of it. But when he did that and sent a signal to everybody else that that tiny sliver does not, in fact, define the Democratic Party. So it undermined that kind of Republican messaging. And that really does get to the key problem that the Democrats had, like 2019, 2020, et cetera, is they were really allowing a very small sliver of the party to define the whole thing. They were literally held captive or held to ransom by what you call the groups, you know, these activist groups that would just lacerate people on, especially on social media. And so that what ended up happening was the opposite of the Clinton situation in both circumstances. Tiny sliver in one, Clinton confronted, in the other. The Democrats largely conformed. And that creates a big difference politically.
- [52:20]
Sky Giottani
Well, okay, but the weird thing that seems to have happened Is when Trump came on the scene, there was, I don't know how tiny a sliver it would be in the Republican Party, but there was a sliver of the Republican Party that was very populist, it was very anti woke, it was nationalist, all these things. And a lot of folks in the Republican Party like, oh, yeah, they're, they're here, but we don't like them. We don't want to give them a lot of attention. Platform. And Trump comes along and goes, oh, no, those are my people.
- [52:48]
David French
Yeah.
- [52:49]
Sky Giottani
And he majors on that stuff, and the whole party ends up, A significant part of the party ends up capitulating him. So it would be like if Barack Obama had come into the Democratic Party and said, yeah, you know, that, that sister soldier sliver that Clinton didn't like. Those are my people. I'm going to major on that side of it. And the whole party just goes, all right, okay. So that my concern is what we end up with in the Democratic Party in response to Trump.
- [53:15]
David French
Yeah.
- [53:15]
Sky Giottani
Is a little bit what you're seeing with Bernie and aoc, which is this very angry, very socialist fringe of the Democratic Party that is now emboldened and is using that anger to ferment a transformative posture for the entire party where it's actually less moderate and less inclusive, but somehow manages to ignite a remake the way that Trump did with the fringe of the Republican Party.
- [53:43]
David French
Oh, I think that's entirely possible. I really do. Especially in this 5050 nation. Because what Trump showed us in 2016 was that if you capture a plurality of your party.
- [53:53]
Sky Giottani
Right.
- [53:54]
David French
And then you're the only option when the other party, the Americans, are ready for a change, you're going to win.
- [54:01]
Sky Giottani
Yeah.
- [54:01]
David French
Right. And so it is in that sense, I think we are dealing with a different America that Clinton or Reagan came up with. These were not 50, 50. This was not a 5050 country then. Right now you have that 5050 country, so that if you can get the plurality to capture the party, then you're just walking into any election with about a 50, 50 chance to win this thing. Right. And so that creates a different dynamic. And I think in looking back on Trump, it's easy to forget how contingent his rise was. I mean, he won the primary with the lowest percentage of the popular vote in the history of the Republican open primary era. He walks into the election trailing in all the polls, almost certainly headed for defeat after Access Hollywood. Then you have the Comey letter, and then he wins. Drawing this without a popular vote majority, with this sort of Drawing this inside straight and three Midwesterns states. I mean, a very unusual process from start to finish. So unusual that, you know, I distinctly remember the Republican party, until about 8pm on the night of the election, was sharpening its knives for maga. It was ready to move on from maga. And then as soon as Trump won, everything changed.
- [55:15]
Sky Giottani
Right?
- [55:15]
David French
Everything shifted. And so I do think that we are actually more vulnerable in exactly the way that you describe. But I also think the way past this moment of vulnerability has to involve taking on the toxic fringes. And so I think if the advice to the Democratic Party is what do you need to do to win the next election, that's a very narrow thing. And the honest answer is they may not have to do anything or much at all. But if the question is for the Democratic Party, much less the Republican Party, when it moves out of this Trump era, what is it that you can do to fundamentally transform your political prospects and therefore fundamentally break us out of this extremely dark and toxic political moment? That's something way beyond all the Latinx they them, blah, blah. It gets into do the jurisdictions where you govern are those jurisdictions where people want to move to or move away from? And sometimes it gets really that basic.
- [56:18]
Sky Giottani
So last thing on this, there are some folks around the Democratic Party who are saying that the real problem isn't one of the party's policies or positions or even its activists fringe, that the real problem is the. The model of its messaging, that it's too. It's been too reliant on traditional media. And what we learned from Trump in 2024 was we need to get out there on social media more. And in more blogs, they always point to Joe Rogan and the fact that Trump did Rogan's show and Kamala didn't. In the last, I don't know how many weeks, we at the Holy Post have been contacted by Democratic politicians trying to get on our show.
- [57:00]
David French
Right.
- [57:00]
Sky Giottani
And you can almost see that they're. They're just like, oh, blogs, we're supposed to do blogs, I guess, or podcasts. We got to get out there and do podcasts. Is there any validity to that? Do you think they need to change their communication strategy, but not necessarily the substance or branding of the party? Is that the issue?
- [57:18]
David French
No, no, no. I mean, I think obviously you go and you talk to as many people as you can. Like, I think that's what politicians should try to do, is get in front of as many people as they can. So, yeah, go on some of these podcasts, absolutely. But at the same time, you can't just sort of say, well, we need our own Joe Rogan. I'm so glad you brought his name up, because you know what? The left had its own Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan. Right? And so this is symbolic. This is perfect symbolism of the whole thing, because they had him now. He was a Bernie guy, but he was not. And he was what you would call a heterodox liberal. He wasn't fully aligned on A through Z of the liberal project, but he was definitely left of center, definitely somebody that a Democrat would feel more comfortable, like he was one of them and he was not Republican. Right? So then you have this era arise where there has to be total obedience on all issues, and they turn their fire on him because he's not an ideological purist. He's not that disciplined and ideological thinker at all. Right? I mean, he's a comedian. He's into ufc. Like, he's not. He's not a senior counsel for the aclu, for crying out loud. He's. He's a guy. And they just come after him, often over the smallest microaggressions, and then drive. And if I were him, you know, he's just a human being. I would like to go where I'm wanted and liked. And if the place where I am right now doesn't want me or like me anymore because I don't mesh perfectly with all of their agenda items, well, you know, there was the whole right with its arms extended wide. Come here, big guy, we got your back. And this is a thing that people need to realize. Everyone they're talking to in public life is a human being. Human beings do not like to be hated. Human beings do not like to be treated with zero tolerance. Human beings do not like to be treated with zero grace. And if your movement is one that treats people with no tolerance and no grace, then expect your movement to shrink. Just go ahead. I'll just go ahead and predict that. And this is something, by the way, that MAGA is going to find out they were. You know, it's easy to pay tribute to their political savvy. They won again. You know, they ran a very smart campaign, obviously won the popular vote, but at the same time, the way in which they're responding now, they're not just repeating the mistakes of the left. They're often magnifying the most mistakes. They're often doing it bigger, more. And they're cruising towards a backlash, just cruising towards one right now.
- [60:06]
Sky Giottani
I think it's a good word to end on. Are you able to stick around for a few minutes or do you need to head out?
- [60:11]
David French
Just a couple minutes. Yeah.
- [60:12]
Sky Giottani
Okay. So we're going to say goodbye to David for the Normal podcast, but you're gonna stick around for a few minutes. We're gonna talk about the season finale of Severance.
- [60:21]
David French
Yes.
- [60:21]
Sky Giottani
Because I want to get your take on it. We'll post that on Holy Post. Plus, thanks for being with us again, David.
- [60:26]
David French
Thanks so much.
- [60:27]
Sky Giottani
Sky French Friday is a production of Holy Post Media featuring David French and me. Sky Giottani music and theme song by Phil Vischer. This show is made possible by Holy Post Media patrons. To find out how you can become a Holy Post patron and to find more common good Christian content, go to holypost.com.