Donald Trump’s enduring hold over the Republican Party may send him back to the White House. On this episode of “The Opinions,” the columnist David French joins the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy to discuss the future of the G.O.P. and what a second Trump term might mean for America.
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Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of Opinion, and I’ve covered American politics for decades as a reporter, editor and running our New York Times focus groups.
David French: I’m David French, a columnist for Opinion.
Healy: David, you and I have been watching the election results come in tonight, and just an important caveat, we are recording this at about 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and we don’t have a declared winner yet in the presidential race. But one thing looks clear right now: Donald Trump is favored to win. And even if Kamala Harris does eke it out, this election is far from a repudiation of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It looks instead like a lot of Americans think Trump is the best available answer to their worries and their hunger for change.
And David, I want to bear down on this with you because, as a lifelong conservative, you were someone who hoped that the Republican Party would move away from Trump. And I just want to start off and ask you, how are you feeling right now?
French: I am not remotely surprised right now, Patrick, by anything that I’m seeing. Not one thing, not one state, not one city, not one precinct. I think all of us going into this who had taken a look at it from sort of the most coldly analytical standpoint, knew a couple of things right away. And one is that Trump’s hold on the Republican Party never really slipped, not after January 6th, not at any point.
The closest it came to slipping was for maybe a week or a few weeks after the 2022 midterm disappointment for Republicans, when a lot of MAGA candidates underperformed. But there was no point at which it was clear at all that Trump’s grip on the G.O.P. had slipped. And we just can’t understand American politics until you realize what a vast chunk of the country is just unpersuadable, unobtainable to the other side. If you’re the incumbent party, and you’re coming from the incumbent administration, and you’re carrying sort of the record of the four years on your shoulders.
If you’re challenger like Donald Trump, he has this very, very, very high floor of support, and then he just has to pick off a few extra voters. That’s it. That’s all he had to do was a few extra voters who were disgruntled with the current state of the country because he comes in with this really high floor. And here we are.
Healy: I think you’re right. I’m not surprised by what happened tonight. I thought after all those focus groups, that Trump had a good chance of winning this election because the desire for change and the hunger for a leader who might be able to make their economic lot in life a little bit better, deal with their concerns about immigration and safety, was so great that it drew them to Trump.
But what I’ve always found so fascinating about your work, David, is that you have clearly been trying to reach people who you’ve shared viewpoints with for many years about Donald Trump. And I found myself wondering if Trump is elected, what do you think those conversations will be like? Will there be half the country that is telling us “we told you so,” or that is just so angry with the left that it makes the divisions in the country even worse?
French: Well, I think there’s going to be just an enormous amount of triumphalism. I mean, there’s just very little question about that, especially in the religious world. There are, as I’ve written about, a number of prophecies around Donald Trump. And I think we ignore the religious fervor around Donald Trump at our peril. And so, if he’s doing this well, there are a lot of religious voices who are going to feel extremely vindicated at a spiritual level, not just a political level. That is going to be something that’s going to be very interesting to see how it plays out in American life. At the same time, there’s going to be a lot of sort of spiking the football on sort of the never-Trump movement. All of that sort of end zone touchdown dance element of this, I just ignore it. You know it’s coming, you know what’s going to happen.
But look, the way I look at it, Patrick, there are just a lot of enormously important fights that are going to be emerging very soon, from what is Trump actually going to do with Ukraine? (That’s an open question. He’s never really specified it.) What is he going to do truly actually in the category of mass deportations? We’re in this interesting place where a lot of people voted for Trump because they wanted him to do what he said he was going to do, and a lot of people voted for Trump, Patrick, not believing he was going to do what he said he was going to do.
Healy: David, can I bear down on that? What do the current results tell you about what people ultimately cared about when they voted in this election?
French: You know, I always view exit polls with a bit of skepticism. I think you can talk about them more as directionally accurate rather than precisely accurate. And what was fascinating to me, if you looked at some of the exit polls, the big four issues were the economy, democracy, immigration and abortion. Well, that just really identifies the two biggest issues for the Trump voters — immigration and the economy — and two of the biggest issues for Harris voters — democracy and abortion. I think what you see is two different sets of voters that ended up with pretty different priorities.
I’m not quite sure where this goes. I don’t see the animosity — partisan animosity — lessening. Trump is likely to walk into the Oval Office in a pretty vengeful mood. If there’s any regression in the economy, if there’s any recession, the Trump election is going to age like milk, not like fine wine. So we’re going to move very quickly, Patrick, into something more reminiscent of early 2017, which was sort of full-on political and legal battles, and it’s going to come on us fast.
Healy: David, can you help me make sense of something? I grew up in an America that didn’t like so-called political losers. It didn’t like people who lost elections or were turned out of office in scandal. Donald Trump barely won in 2016. He lost in 2020. His popularity crumbled even further after January 6th, 2021. But now it looks like he’s back. How does that happen? And does it say something about America being different than the country that I grew up in?
French: Patrick, America is different. America is different.
Healy: Face it. Let’s face it. Right?
French: Here is a key to understanding what occurred, and I am haunted by this post January 6th chart. It’s charting the approval rating among Republicans of three men: Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence. Whose approval rating plummeted, and I mean plummeted, like falling off a cliff after January 6th? It was Pence and McConnell. There was some slight degradation of Trump, but very slight.
So what he did is he did something different. From Jimmy Carter, who was persona non grata with Democrats for a while after he lost. He did something different from George H.W. Bush, who was persona non grata with Republicans for a while after he lost in the sense that nobody was saying, hey, we need more of H.W. Bush running for office, right? He said, I didn’t lose. Right there, he’s not going to admit to being a loser. And to think about that, why would that violence, why would that chaos not turn off Republicans? Well, Republicans have overwhelmingly negative attitudes about Democrats. And so when Trump was saying, they stole it from me, years of polarization in this country had prepped Republicans to believe that Democrats would steal an election.
And so that’s why McConnell and Pence plummeted and Trump stayed up. It’s because they saw McConnell and Pence capitulating. They saw Trump fighting. And I really think we cannot understand the present political environment unless we understand that animosity.
Healy: David, America has never been here before. It looks like a convicted felon is about to take the presidency. Someone who incited an insurrection at the Capitol, who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Whose view and belief in the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power and the constitution is just a really open question. I know it’s left a lot of Americans with a lot of frankly terrified feelings and they don’t know what the next four years are going to be like or how they’re going to get through it. And I find myself wondering when you look ahead, what’s weighing on your mind as we head into Wednesday and in the next few days?
French: You know, I was speaking at a college a few days ago and someone asked, “What will be your mindset if Donald Trump wins?” And I think of it as having two real components: Protect the vulnerable and speak the truth.
When you think about Trump’s declaration of vengeance, he wants to pursue his political enemies. He wants to pursue deportations at a scale that would be terrifying. So you can already see that there are vulnerable populations that will need protection. That includes political dissidents, political opponents that might be vulnerable to a vengeful Department of Justice. That includes immigrants and others who — you know, think about it this way, you’re talking about people who have said, “Hey, look, if there’s a person who is an illegal immigrant, but they have children who are citizens, well, so what? So what? Just sweep them out.” Right?
So there’s going to be this real need to protect vulnerable populations, protect vulnerable people. And then the other thing is, if there’s one thing that we’ve learned, it is very, very difficult to combat large scale lying and defamation from people who have an immense amount of power and privilege. That is just very difficult because people who come into politics sort of more casually don’t know much about it — they don’t know if someone says yes and another person says no, if one person says up and another person says down — they don’t know how to adjudicate these disputes. And so I think about it in these two ways, protect the vulnerable, speak the truth., and I think of it in this moment as this is a real clarion call moment. At some point we’re going to have to sort of continue to put aside many of the differences that have divided sort of the different elements of the anti-Trump coalition.
I think it’s totally fine to grieve this. It’s totally fine to lament that this has occurred and to grieve that this is where we are as a country. But that’s got to be short, because if we care about justice in this country, there’s going to be a lot of work to do. I don’t think anyone should feel like the American experiment is over, but we should understand and gain knowledge from history that America can regress.
You know, Martin Luther King Jr. said the arc of history is long, but “it bends toward justice.” I remain relatively optimistic in that direction. But we’ve had long periods of backsliding, and we might be walking into one of those periods right now. And I just think when I look back at American history, you know, who stands out in those periods as having resisted the drift of the times, as having said no when so many other people were saying yes to injustice and hatred, and so that’s why I really think of it in these two frames. Defend the vulnerable, speak the truth.
Healy: David, thanks so much for talking to me.
French: Thanks so much, Patrick.
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