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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And this week, we're talking about the prospect of a national divorce. If you missed it, a couple weeks back, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. Everyone she talks to.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene's social circle notwithstanding, there's no doubt our country is facing deep internal divisions. And MTG isn't the only high-profile figure to raise the prospect of secession, national divorce, and civil war over the past few years. But how interested are Americans really in breaking up?
Our focus groups have some thoughts. My guest today is David French, newly minted New York Times opinion columnist and author of Divided We Fall, America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. David, my friend, thank you for being here. Well, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to join you.
Do you feel good about the fact that I said national divorce? Get me David French. That's who I want to talk to. I really have mixed feelings about being the first call when national divorce comes up. Yeah. I don't know what to say. You literally wrote the book.
on the potential of a national divorce. And so, you know, I think just to set the stage for this conversation, can you just give us like the thesis of the book? Yeah. Yeah. The thesis of the book is really stated in the first sentence of the book, which is that there isn't any truly national, cultural, religious, social, political trend that is pulling us together more than it's pushing us apart. Right.
So all of the major social, political, cultural, religious forces are pushing us apart into separate camps. And this is happening not just in the sense of you and your neighbor being pushed apart,
We're being pushed apart on multiple fronts, including geographically, for example, that people are super clustering into very bright red, into very bright blue parts of the country. We're clustering culturally. We're clustering religiously, like religious faith and practice is not evenly distributed across the United States of America. Just on point by point by point, there are forces that are stretching us and pulling us. And what I wanted to say was,
We can't do this indefinitely without serious consequences. Yeah. Although, can I just ask, every time somebody brings up the national divorce, I know in your book you kind of lay out two scenarios, one where Texas secedes, one where California secedes. But like-
National divorce doesn't make any sense. Like the red states, blue states thing, they all have blue cities inside of red states. And we are all intermingled. And also based on Thanksgiving's, as best I can tell across people, you know, share these different political opinions with people that they love. So every time somebody says this, I'm like, this is deeply stupid. This is never going to happen. Why are we talking about it so much? Is it actually more
a social signaling way just to be like, no, we really hate you guys. Like, is that really what it's about?
Well, yes, it is. But OK, so, yes, there's absolute social signaling where we're in a competition and I see it more on the right. I don't see so much national divorce rhetoric coming from the left. I see it more coming from the right where there really is this sort of cultural competition on the right. Who is going to be most aggressively anti left? Right. And so it's hard to beat. Well, let's just break up the country as well.
most aggressively anti-left. So some of it is this social signaling. I'm the toughest right winger in the room kind of thing. I'm so tough that I would watch Texas to secede or Tennessee or Georgia to secede. And so there is some social signaling here. However, at the same time, and I actually want to write about this. I think a lot of the folks were saying, well, look, I mean, we've got blue cities and red states and got red areas and blue states and
There's no way all of this would happen are just a little too Pollyanna-ish in my view, because if you go back to secession in 1861, if you go back to the American Revolution in 1775, moving into 1776,
Much of the same stuff was true. There was a mixture of communities throughout the American colonies. There was loyalist communities and there were revolutionary communities and they were often in the same city. They were often in the same colony. In secession, there were parts of the South that didn't want to secede. I mean, this is where you get West Virginia, for example, East Tennessee. I live in Tennessee. East Tennessee had a lot of unionist sentiment there.
There was unionist sentiment in the South. This was not a universal sentiment towards secession. And if you look across the world, you'll see, for example, the United Kingdom came very close to its own separation with the Scottish referendum. You know, the majority of people in Scotland voted to stay, but if 55 percent had voted to leave, that's
Scotland might be independent, as messy as that would be. And so if you're talking about secession, what you're often talking about here, if you're looking at sort of historically, I mean, we've had various attempts. Quebec and Canada has had various referenda about secession and leaving. There's no such thing sort of historically as, well, everybody wants to break off here and everybody wants to stay here. If you have super majorities,
Tennessee is like an R plus 20 state, even though it has a blue Nashville and a blue Memphis. If you had a plus 20 vote for secession, then Nashville's coming along because it lost. And so I think that this is a thing where people look at this sort of patchwork of blue cities and red states and forgets that
In any kind of separatist movement, you're always going to have dissenters. And the presence of dissenters doesn't mean that the separatist movements don't succeed, as we've seen from our own history. All right. Well, then I stand, you know, more afraid. You know, you're not the first and you won't be the last person to accuse me of Pollyannish thinking about people. And I like to just think that this is not a thing that could really happen. To me, it's more, I've always felt like it's a way of talking about
a dissolution of trust and fidelity and, like, good feeling between all of us that can manifest itself in violent and terrible ways, but that, like, the logistics are too hard. Like, in some ways, we're such couch warriors and, like, keyboard warriors now that I'm not sure we could muster the energy to do the real logistical work of a national divorce, but...
But I want to play you just as a setup here. This is actually from just some accumulated clips because people do talk about the idea of national war, civil war, and just like how tense things are all the time. It is a through line in the group. So let me just hit you with a smattering of what we hear. I see this buildup of like a different type of civil war almost where it's like it's not a civil war of fighting. It's a civil war of words and legalities.
Civil war seems, you know, sooner rather than later. It's getting very difficult to talk to people who do not agree with you without getting offensive or activating their defenses. We should be able to agree to disagree. We should be able to get along. I've never seen it like this. I'm 57 and I've never seen it like this. We're almost out of civil war.
I mean, the way that we're trending with violence, look what happened with the riot in January. Like before that, nobody would have ever imagined that like on a government building.
That was unimaginable. But now that it did happen, there's definitely people out there that are like, okay, it's not a fortress. It can happen. We can make this happen. So it is scary to think about. Like, I don't hope for it and would never wish on it, but it's scary. And I think that is a possibility just with such polarized ideologies and people seeing that, you know, these things are possible and we may possibly get away with it. I think a lot of these recent events are making it seem like it is a bigger possibility.
I wouldn't be surprised if it took another civil war, to be honest. I honestly could see that in our cards in the near future because I don't see what else, aside from some huge radical change like that, is going to do anything. So, David, here's my notice about these comments. These people aren't advocating.
for a national divorce or a civil war. Right. They just think one might be coming based on what they're seeing around them. So you and I are both big fans of a group called More in Common, and they do these great studies sometimes around how we perceive our ideological opposition, and we often impute much more
deeper things onto them than is true in terms of what they really believe. And so I wonder if this is one of those things where people like overemphasize how another set of people thinks about something and the actual number of people who might want a national divorce is actually very small. What do you think? I would say that the actual number of people who really, truly want a national divorce is very small, relatively small. I mean, if you're talking about in the millions, yes, but as a percentage of Americans, it's
But here's the problem, Sarah. And let me be very clear. I do not think a national divorce is going to happen. The thing that I was writing about in my book was we're getting so polarized that it's possible.
It's not probable. But if we're in a position where it's even possible, that's a scary thing. And so what I would say, and you said this interesting thing right before those clips about keyboard warriors, and that goes both ways. So yes, keyboard warriors are not the kind of people who are going to get in the streets, right? But guess what? Keyboard warriors are also not the kind of people who are going to stop something once it starts unfolding.
They're passive participants and commentators about events that they're not in control of, that they're not going to exert their will over one way or the other. And one of my big concerns is that
The minority of Americans who are extremely activated politically are extremely polarized and hate each other very much. And the more in common data is both reassuring and not. It's reassuring in the sense that what it says is.
Look, the vast bulk of us are not in these polarized edges and extremes. And in fact, if you're a typical Republican, you think the average Democrat is a lot more extreme than they are. Or if you're a typical Democrat, you believe that the average Republican is a lot more extreme than they are. There's a lot more commonality than we believe. That's all the good news, right? The bad news is the term for that group of people is the exhausted majority.
Now, why is that bad news? Because the word exhausted, they are like, to use an illustration, you've seen the gif of Homer Simpson with his eyes wide kind of backing into the shrubbery. Love it. That's the exhausted majority. Their eyes are wide. They're looking at all this toxic mess and they just kind of back into the shrubbery.
And it leaves the field of political engagement to the most angry, most energized minority. And so you can be a majority. You can be frustrated at how contentious politics are. But if you don't exert your will...
you're going to leave the field to that most activated minority. And that's what really concerns me. I don't think the bulk of Americans, there was this really great moment at the very beginning of the focus group about national divorce with the Trump voters, where her comments were brought up and most of the Zoom room laughed like, ha ha, that's absurd, right? But if you're not exerting that as a force of will, right?
You leave the field to the people who are deadly serious about this stuff. And so that's why, you know, when I think about national unity going forward, that exhausted majority, so long as the operative word is exhausted majority.
and not majority, we face a problem. Once the operative word starts to be majority and not exhausted, then we've got a chance to work our way through this. Well, I'm glad you gave me the segue. I do want to ask you a question when we're done about whether or not your feelings have changed at all since you wrote the book.
But before I do that, since you brought it up, I want to hit this set. I sort of felt like this group was made in a lab for you, David. Like as I was watching the group, I was like, this is such a good group for David French to watch because it's like they're two time Trump voters who definitely don't want Trump to run again. They do not like Trump and they're DeSantis people, but they're still quite, I would say, of the right in almost all the ways. But you're right. When we read them, Marjorie Taylor Greene's tweet, here is how they responded.
I think she's just silly. She's not serious. I mean, she definitely appeals to that super far right group, I guess, whoever votes for her in Georgia. I just think she's like the AOC of the left side. I just don't pay much attention to what she has to say.
I don't really understand what she's saying. Maybe somebody could explain it to me. A divorce from what? I don't understand. Basically, she thinks that the red states and blue states should each become their own countries. Oh. If Democrats move into red states, they shouldn't be able to vote for at least five years. Oh, God. Kelly was right. Kelly was right. Don't listen to her.
Yeah, she's there to fire up the far right wingers. I mean, which okay. I mean, I guess you kind of need somebody like that on the team too. But you don't really put anything into it. Like Kelly said, I mean, it's the hot air, you know, it's coming. And you know what her job is. And she does it well. But, you know, that's what she does.
So they're like, this is stupid. But to me, actually, part of what was funny is the way that they perceive Marjorie Taylor Greene as having sort of like a legitimate role in the coalition. Yeah. Like you should take her seriously, but not literally. Yes. What did you make of how the group reacted? I thought that was such a textbook example of countless conversations I've had since late 2015. Yeah.
Which is one of the responses people have to some of the most outrageous rhetoric on the right, whether it comes from Trump or it comes from Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz or you name it, is they laugh. Okay.
Okay. There's a, oh, that's ridiculous. Oh, you can't take that seriously. Now there's no real condemnation to it. In other words, that's dangerous. Don't say it. It's like, that's absurd. Don't take that seriously. And I just heard this for years with Trump. Oh, ha ha. That's funny. Oh, that's ridiculous. And that's the seriously, not literally, but at no point there, the sense of,
Well, that's just too far to be in our coalition. That's right. Like that's too far. And so I just felt like I was watching a rerun of all kinds of conversations I've had from everything around dinners in restaurants locally to conversations with old friends about all of this rhetoric.
The sad thing is, though, as they're laughing and I think they know this and this was hinted at in the focus group, they know there are a lot of people who are not laughing. Right. They know there are a lot of people who take this seriously and they're part of the family.
And, you know, one of the things that's distressing is that this idea that, well, we know they're extreme. We know not to take them seriously. But at the same time, we're not really going to say this is way too far or we're going to exert any will to sort of purge this from the larger right wing coalition. It worms its way in. I don't get the sense from hearing that that they're going to actively oppose Marjorie Taylor Greene.
They're just going to kind of keep her to arm's length. That's right. So she has a role to play in the coalition. She's not their cup of tea, but they're not like mad about her. And the thing that I noticed, I hear this a lot actually, where people say she's like AOC, right? They see like a mirror image on the other side. And so therefore the what about them kind of justifies that, well, the left has people like this in their coalition. So we get to have people like this in our coalition. But I got to tell you, when I was watching this group,
I was reminded of something. One of the things I get yelled at the most for online is whenever I say I really like a lot of the people that I listen to in the groups. And part of the reason is like so many people in this group, their moral compass was not horrible. But there was a very troubling part about why Nikki Haley could not be the president. And it was super like, wow, no.
no world leader would take a woman seriously. And again, it was like a little bit heartbreaking because again, it was a perception thing. Although I hear Democrats do this with Pete Buttigieg where they're like, I would vote for a gay guy, but I'm not sure other people would vote for a gay guy. And so these people, including the women in the group were like, well, I would vote for a woman, but unfortunately I don't think other people would, or I think world leaders wouldn't take them seriously because of how these other countries are. But in any event, so there are things that,
They said that I wasn't wild about, but like for the most part, they were decent people who recognized like that Trump is bad. They voted for him twice though. And this to me, I find myself understanding these people.
And then also thinking that these are the most dangerous people, because these are the people who sort of know better, but there's no leader or anybody else who is appealing to the good nature that's inside of them that you hear coming out and is pulling on those best instincts to say, we have to resist this. This is actively bad for the country. Right. Right. That's the key here is that
And I've said this a million times to folks who've asked, well, how can all of these folks continue to vote for Donald Trump in spite of everything? Well, we just heard some of the ways in which this happens. One is there's always a what about. Yep.
So there's somebody else on the other side, always a what about. Number two, there's a minimization of what's negative about Trump or the Trumpist movement, sort of laughing at the excesses, not taking it incredibly seriously. And then number three, there's the question of identity. And the identity is, well, I'm a Republican. And so why wouldn't I vote for the Republican? And
He's the Republican nominee. People have asked me a million times, well, why did so many evangelicals vote for Trump? And the answer is one sentence. He was the Republican nominee and they're Republicans. And so there's this absolute unwillingness to sort of say, this is so far beyond the pale that I'm going to break with this kind of core sense of identity that I have to actively oppose it.
And then therefore, what that means is however far Trump goes or Marjorie Taylor Greene goes, there appears to be no direction they can go that will put them actually truly beyond the pale for the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of Republicans. Now, we've seen from 2022, for example, that there might be a 2 percent or a 3 percent or a 4 percent who are not going to go that far, that will not vote for, say, a Herschel Walker or a whatever.
And that's enough in close states to really make all the difference. But the bottom line is there's a 90 plus percent of Republicans who will go as far as far as their politicians take them. So long as their politicians remain Republican compared to the Democratic Party, which is just not an option for them, period, end of discussion. No further conversation necessary. And that is exactly how this group was. I mean, there were people who said, and I hear this all the time,
Everyone's like, look, as long as they got an R by their name, like I'm going to go for them. You know, like I got preferences within the group, but like as long as they got that R, they're going to be better than what we've gotten. Actually, just to back up your point, we're calling it the anti-anti-national divorce sentiment, which is exactly what you were just describing. Let's listen.
We are not united. Everybody is just button heads. They get in and then they start calling the other people names and saying how wrong they are. We don't know anything about compromise. The Democrats' idea of compromise, for an example, on gun control, their idea of a compromise is we'll take only half of what we think we should take.
Compromise is give a little and take a little. They don't give, they take, they take, they take. They keep taking rights away. They don't give you anything back. They're not taking all of what they think they should take and that's a compromise to them. I think some people, probably just the far right, but they definitely agree with her. A lot of people think this country is headed for a revolution.
I mean, it's ridiculous the way it's run right now. And who has the power? It's not Biden. I mean, he's just standing up there. And, you know, who does run the United States? You know, I don't know. But I definitely think that she's not totally off base on some of the things she says.
Because I've even looked at if that ever happened, I would move to a red state. I mean, I live in California. I want to leave California. I am victimized by the politics here. I do not like them. No, I don't. That's Dr. Seuss. But anyways, obviously I have children. But the point is that I would love to live in a red state instead of a blue state.
I love this woman who makes up Dr. Seuss rhymes about being victimized about living in a blue state. So one of the things you talk about that I also talk about, you and I are frequently on the same page about this, is the role that leadership can play. You know, towards the end of your book, you lay out what you call it, James Madison's vision of pluralism. So explain that and why these voters might benefit from a more concrete understanding of pluralism.
Pluralism. Yeah. Yeah. So James Madison wrote Federalist No. 10, which is the best Federalist paper. Best. And the best Federalist paper. And so in Federalist 10, what James Madison does is he talks about expanding the sphere of the American Republic. In other words, the way that you deal with dissent and debate and profound disagreements in what he calls like the danger or the violence of factions.
It's not by trying to suppress factions because then you're aiming straight at liberty. You're gunning straight for liberty, which undermines the American Republic, the American experiment. And so, Madison, you can't do that.
Here's the caveat. This is a guy who was a slave owner. So was he living up to his ideals? No. Are the ideals as described in Federalist 10 good? Yes. So what does he say in Federalist 10? He says, what you essentially need to do is to dilute the disruptive power of faction by allowing factions to bloom. In other words,
You don't have to defeat or suppress another person to live according to your core values. The sphere of liberty in the U.S. is broad enough to where a variety of communities can live side by side with each other. People who have dramatically different points of view can live side by side with each other, possess the same amount of liberty, and live side by side with each other.
possess the same rights of free association and all of the things that we possess to allow us to create thriving communities. And we expand the sphere. We make the sphere of liberty bigger. We make the sphere of faction bigger so that we don't have that zero-sum game where if Democrats win, then somehow my ability to live according to my core values diminishes. Or if Republicans win, the Democrats' ability to live according to their core values diminishes.
And so that's sort of this core vision of pluralism. And if you look at the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Civil War Amendments together are this big one-two punch that says, here are all of the baseline rights that we have, human rights that we possess as Americans, that we all possess, and that cannot be taken away by losing an election, that cannot be taken away by living as a red minority in a blue state or a blue minority in a red state.
If that social compact gets threatened, then we face real problems. And every time we have faced critical sort of nation defining problems, it's when we have violated that social compact. So slavery, for example, violates that social compact in the most dramatic of ways. Jim Crow violated that social compact in the most dramatic of ways.
That is when we're talking about a situation in which we look at an election as having existential consequences for our ability to fight
within the American social compact, that's when we're in a very dangerous place. Oh, which is exactly where we are. The other thing I think you and I both talk about a lot and agree on is the nature of leadership and how critical it is. And one of the things I talk about a lot, that's my favorite parable, I guess, it's called Two Wolves, and they're fighting. And the question is, is like, well, which one wins? And the answer is the one you feed.
And the reason that I like that so much is that what I feel like politicians are doing right now is
I was, I believe, and no one's going to talk me out of it, that people are essentially good. And that Americans, because of the built-in infrastructure that we got from our founders, are especially inclined toward pluralism. You know, every dollar we have says, out of many, one on it. And like, you know, it's built into our American infrastructure and we don't live up to it, but we still have like the best tools.
I think of just about anybody else. The problem right now is that I listen to these people and I can see they take care of their families. They volunteer at
dog shelters and they love their kids and their grandkids. And yet the most unbelievable things often comes out of their mouths. My special favorite is one. And you just heard some examples of this where they're like, yes, things are so bad. Like it's like a powder keg. People are really angry or whatever. And like 10 seconds later, like, and it's those stupid Democrats that won't, you know, get on board with whatever. But the point of the one you feed is that means, um,
It's what they're taking in, right? It's their inputs. And the leadership is this key element to how you bring out the better angels of our nature. And so I talk about how critical leadership is because that's in your book. You agree with this? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, the leadership point is really important. I was listening to an interview and oh, gosh, Kristen Soltis Anderson, I believe, who's
And, Kristen, I'm sorry if I'm misattributing this to you, but I remember hearing an interview where they were talking about polling Republicans and how important the person at the top of the ticket is to Republican views on issue after issue after issue. So, for example, going back several years, single payer health care would be an incredibly low support for Republicans. But then as soon as some Republicans learned that Donald Trump had said some nice things about single payer health care, their esteem for single payer health care went up. Right.
What the leader does is the leader sets the course of a cultural river. And so the direction that the river flows, whether it's towards integrity, whether it's towards compassion, et cetera, or whether it's towards division or towards anger, it's not that you can't defy the leader.
But it's exhausting and hard because you're swimming upstream. And so we saw this in the Trump era in abundance. So Trump set a particular tone of endless combativeness, of constant rage. And if you were going to go against that cultural tone on the right, it was exhausting. It was hard.
And people could do it for a while. A few people did it all four years of his presidency. But it was really, really hard. And by 2020, you know, one of the things that I saw in this very red area of America where I live is people hadn't just given in to the course of the river. They were swimming along with the course quite merrily. So you went from holding your nose in 2016 to
to third Bass Boat in the Boat Parade in 2020. And it was that power of the cultural river. And now, would the Republican Party be like that if Mitt Romney had won in 2012 and was running again in 2016? Absolutely not. It would be a very, very different party. But that's what leadership does. It sets the course of the cultural river. And you see it in military units. You see it
If you're working at a McDonald's for a manager, if you're working in an insurance company for the manager, you name it. From the top down, there is a cultural course that is set. And that's one of the burdens of leadership is you have to set that cultural course in the right direction. And, you know, one of the powers, if you want to go back to our founding documents, for example, is.
The statement that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, was setting a cultural course for the United States that we were often contrary to, but had enormous power over the course of the next two centuries plus.
to where eventually we started to get more and more and more in conformity with that vision. One of the things I fear about the right is the cultural course of the river that is being set is towards conflict, towards division, away from honesty. I mean, just look at the Fox News revelations.
regarding the 2020 election. There is such an incredible pressure to conform with that Trumpist culture now that it's just radiating up and down the rightward part of the spectrum. Yeah, and you know, I'd imagine you'd get a little pushback
on this idea that there's not something endemic in the Republican Party, right? There's pushback that says, well, voters craved this. Like there's a part of the party that wanted Donald Trump. And I think that's invariably true. But I also think this is how Charlie sometimes puts it. And I've always liked this formulation that there was absolutely a recessive gene within the Republican Party that was populist and demagogic and
had all of these things that allowed Donald Trump to sort of get in there with his plurality. And it's not an insignificant part of the party. But this group that we were talking to is 100% people who voted for Mitt Romney.
and then became socialized differently through the course of Donald Trump. So I always say, yes, it was a recessive gene that became a dominant gene in part because Donald Trump had a genuine impact and changed a cohort of voters within the conservative coalition that actually cared a little bit maybe about some free market stuff or limited government. I call them normie conservatives, which is, I don't know why, because I need some broad terms to describe people. This is the kind of group where you see the most
change. Yes. And they would have been part of that old coalition and they're different now. They sound different. Yes, 100 percent. So on both counts. So, number one, Yuval Levin has said this very well, that there's a George Wallace constituency in American politics. There always has been this sort of populist, mainly white working class populist part of American politics, whatever it is, 15 percent of America, 20 percent of America. And Trump tapped into that group
pretty decisively. And in fact, one of the things that sort of saved us from that group is it's not all been in one party, right? Mm-hmm.
So it's been a minority of it is now and which makes it far more powerful. But then once this minority group, because remember, Trump clinched the nomination with the lowest percentage of the popular vote in the history of the Republican open primary era. But once he clinched it and he became the Republican, the course of the river was set.
And you can just start to see this on issue after issue after issue. Sarah, one of them, one of the most consequential is Ukraine. So when Russia invades Ukraine, you can see this instant instinctive response on the right to oppose Russian aggression. Just it's been built into the right through the Cold War era.
Through Romney telling Obama that Russia is our chief geopolitical foe. I mean, being hawkish on Russia is a core right identity for a long, long time. And then it runs in.
to the new course of the river. And so what's happening is you see this really strong fall off of support for Ukraine, mainly on the right. Now, there's been some gradual lessening on the left as well, but
mainly on the right. And that's a classic example of how the old instincts meet the new coalition and the new coalition gradually overcomes the old instincts. Absolutely. And that was in this group.
We didn't include it because we have so much to get to on this, but they 100% were like, well, in the beginning, I was for it, but now I'm against it because we have to take care of our own people first, and America can't be in these forever wars. It's all stuff they've just heard from right-wing media. So I want to talk, though, about one of the core causes. Let's get to the root causes of why people...
are feeling detached from one another. So much of it is this like, and people talk about this all the time, the collapse of trust, the collapse of trust in institutions and the collapse of trust in each other because you need like social fabric is built around a kind of social cohesion and trust. But like we asked these Trump voters about the investigations into Trump and they don't think any of them are legitimate and they can't name anyone they would trust to conduct an investigation. Let's listen.
I could not pick one person or institution or individual that I would trust. I think it's just all a witch hunt regardless, but I couldn't think of anyone either. It would be hard for anybody to find, but I guarantee you one thing. I guarantee you as soon as Trump pulls his name out of the hat, a lot of those investigations will automatically disappear because it's all political.
If someone like Chris Ruffo or who just got left Project Veritas, James O'Keefe investigated and uncovered crimes of Donald Trump, I would believe him. OK. But I don't think Donald Trump committed a crime. I don't trust the FBI, but I would trust my own eyes. I've seen the evidence of his crimes is the only reason I would agree with their decisions.
The stuff in Georgia, he told the guy, you know, see if you can work out a detail. The numbers don't seem to add up. He didn't twist the guy's arm. He didn't threaten him. He didn't say, you know, I'm going to go down there and beat you up if you don't give me the votes. The votes were all skewed in strange ways.
This whole voting system is ridiculous. Yeah, you can throw, put any ballots you want into a box and then watch who counts them and then run the ballots through the machine a few times and then close up the window so it's all hidden. This is ridiculous. They need to have a much more clear way to vote like it used to be. Even then they'd find ballots in the back of somebody's trunk, but it was a lot more difficult. This election had so many loopholes.
and so many places where you could cheat, you will never find what exactly happened. Okay, now I just want to stress again, this is a group that dislikes Donald Trump.
wants to move on to Ron DeSantis. And David, I'm sure you caught this, but that everyone said they would not trust the FBI or any other institution who prosecuted Trump. And with one of the guys in there, when he's saying, you hear him say, I'd only trust them because I saw it with my own eyes. That's about Hunter Biden. So when we asked about Hunter Biden and we said, well, would you trust them if they prosecuted Hunter Biden? 100% of hands went up right away. Is that a collapse in the faith of institutions or is that just
negative partisanship all the way down. Maybe it's both, but what do you think? Yeah, I was going to say yes to both.
And we also know, Sarah, if Chris Ruffo came out tomorrow and said, I have concluded that Donald Trump has committed crimes, many people in that group would say, what happened to Chris Ruffo? Yeah, that's right. Totally. I mean, when did Chris Ruffo become a traitor to the cause? Like this is absolutely what would happen. So I like to draw a distinction between earned distrust and manufactured distrust. So there is no question that major American institutions are
have made some pretty serious and profound mistakes. There's just no question about that. We have seen scandals in the FBI. We have seen media scandals. And so I do think there is no American institution that you just sort of say, well, whatever they say, I take it face value for granted. They're absolutely trustworthy. Look, that's an unhealthy instinct in a democratic polity. You say, look,
I don't fully trust any institution. I like transparency and I like accountability. So that's a sort of a general principle. But then there's this whole concept of manufactured distrust. And if you listen to right wing media, if your entire diet is right wing media, you're going to hear wild things all the time. And it was reflected in what they just said about voting, for example.
It's voting less secure now than it was back in the day.
No, it's more secure. And in fact, the Dominion voting system that was the subject of an enormous amount of controversy is a dramatic improvement over prior forms of voting. When electronic voting first started, I would go to my polling place in Tennessee and I would press the button and I would light up all of the people I was voting for and then I would press vote. And that was that.
I just trusted that that was how the vote was recorded. Now we have a Dominion voting system in our own county, which is hilarious because lots of folks in our county are convinced that Dominion was corrupt. And I said, well, how was your voting experience? And they said, well, we liked it because we voted and then we got a paper printout that showed exactly who we voted for to confirm. And then that paper printout was what was actually scanned. And I said, that's a Dominion voting system. Yeah.
So it was a better system than I've seen before. But there has just been this relentless drumbeat. And I wrote about this for The Times. So prior to the election, Fox and Trump, both of them. And you can go back and you can see the clips and read the reports. We're telling everybody, don't trust mail-in balloting. Don't trust mail-in balloting. Don't trust mail-in. And then Fox calls for Arizona.
And the whole right wing population or much of it was like, wait, we were told not to trust this process. And here's Fox going ahead and calling this red state for Biden. That can't possibly be real. And it was like a breach of trust between right wing media and the audience that they had cultivated to be distrustful. And so when you talk to somebody who like those folks in the focus group, it's like peeling an onion off.
of manufactured distrust. And then here's the other problem, Sarah.
They can point to scandals, you know, in mainstream or left wing media and that are real, that happened and are bad. Sure. OK, but then if you tell them about, say, the Seth Rich conspiracy theory coming out of Fox or all of the Dominion nonsense coming out of Fox, that doesn't tell them to distrust Fox. That's right. They continue to trust Fox. This is such a key point. And unsurprisingly, the next section I have here is let's listen to these voters talk about the media.
I tend to hit the Fox News first, and then I tend to hit CNN or MSN, and I try to read a lot of sources. I clearly can't trust our local papers anymore. So I feel like I'm in this kind of whirlwind of trying to fact find. You'll find maybe more information on Facebook or social media, but you're not necessarily going to get the truth.
either. So I don't know. That's one of the struggles I have, even whenever I see things that are happening locally is to try to find a local source. But I don't know. I have no idea where to find the right answers. My father-in-law, who just passed,
Follow the epic times. And I don't know enough about them to know if they're trustworthy or not either. And I also like look at the daily wire and try to find a news source that seems pretty balanced. But then I do try to do my research on other areas because you can read the same story and hear two totally different sides.
It's not what happened at the FBI or the CIA or whatever institution you want to talk about. It's what the media does to it. And it's so hard to know where the truth is. A lot of people have echoed that already. It's very hard, but I tend to really appreciate the epic times. And I do like to listen to Tucker Carlson and Hannity and Laura. At least they're a voice that's different
and gives you another viewpoint. No, they're not always accurate either. They have their own agenda, but the media in this country, that's who, that's almost who elects the president.
Personally, I think Fox is probably the most down the middle of any of them. And they do lean right, absolutely. And they go far right. But at the same time, if there's something bad happening caused by the right, they'll call it out. No, the mainstream media will call it out when the left messes up. No more censoring. No more state run media. And when you say censoring and state run, who do you mean?
Well, censoring, there's a lot of censoring in media. There actually is a body that is overseeing the media right now and determining what is allowed to be said and what's not allowed to be said. Disinformation is like the biggest word out there. And does it not strike anybody strange that you go to four different media houses and they're all saying the same thing? Why? Because it's like state-run media.
like what they have in China. Okay. So I'm going to say something again, which is that this is another situation where I listened to these people and they're telling you that they don't know where to go for the truth. They're telling you that they're trying to find answers. It's pretty much like in good faith, but because they're pouring Fox news and the daily wire and other right-wing sources into their ears, they're,
They don't have that much context and they do think that Fox is the most trustworthy and it's all the other people who are wrong. Look,
People are responsible for their own actions, are responsible for things. But I'm also like, you guys are being poisoned slowly by these institutions. And you had a great piece, you were just talking about it, about this latest thing with Fox News. And what makes me so mad about that Fox News thing is, and you hit this, right? Is this idea that they were like, well, our people believe this and they're good people, so we're going to reinforce it. And that is wrong. When you think people are good people or you're a news organization, like your obligation is to tell them the truth. And they knew the truth and they didn't tell it to people.
which means they hold them in contempt and they think they're stupid. And now you can talk, but I'm so mad about this. No, you should be. And here's the other thing. So as Howard Kurtz said, he was on Fox and said, I'm not allowed to cover this. So they're going to watch Fox and they will know nothing.
About all of the hosts that one of those people just mentioned as being pretty much straight shooters intentionally lying. Right. So they won't know about it. Then you'll go to the Daily Wire. I looked a couple of days ago. I didn't see that the Daily Wire had covered this. The Fox scandal. They may have. I didn't see it. Certainly not prominently.
Across right-wing media, this is not really being covered because a lot of right-wing media is an audition for Fox News. This is where people want to end up. And so if you are watching right-wing media, you're not going to know. You're literally not going to know about one of the most consequential media scandals of my lifetime is this intentional lying about the election for day after day, week after week, leading up to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.
And so this is what I talk about when it's manufactured distrust. They're going to go to Tucker, to Laura Ingram, to Sean Hannity. They're not going to talk about their own lies. And they're going to continue to say the mainstream media lies, the mainstream media lies, the mainstream media lies. And so if that's your news environment, then
And look, people are responsible for their own choices about the news that they consume. And I've had the same conversation with folks who say, well, I go first to Fox and then I also look at CNN. And when I drill down, I find out that they don't actually. They just go to Fox and then Fox tells them about MSNBC or CNN or whatever. And I've said this to a million different people. If the right wing media is your universe, right?
A lot of the critiques of the Trump era are going to be mystifying to you. It's like a person has landed from another planet to tell you things that are completely outside of your zone of experience. And then, of course, you're going to be automatically mistrustful of it. You're going to be automatically dismissive. And quite literally, Sarah, there is no amount of right wing credentials that can allow you standing in
to tell folks that Trump has lied terribly or that Tucker Carlson is spouting falsehoods. Because the instant you do, then the question isn't what happened to Tucker? It's what happened to you? That's right. That becomes the question. The only way they would ask what happened to Tucker is if Tucker started to question what was happening at Fox. Right. And like sometimes people end up
They come to us like belatedly. And it's because like Liz Cheney, good standing, good standing, good standing. January 6th happens and she says something. And now it's like, you're out. Liz Cheney is a rhino. She's never been conservative about anything. She's wrong about everything. Or Judge Ludig.
You know, like anybody who says the thing, they find themselves over and suddenly are like, ah, welcome to meeting all of us. We are all no longer conservatives. We're all rhinos. We certainly can't be counted on having conservative beliefs because we said something about what was happening. Yeah. And that was the end of it. One of the most disturbing pieces of data I have seen in the last, really since Trump came down the escalator, which is, I mean, Sarah, think about it. It's coming up on eight years since he came down the escalator. I know, it's been a long time we've lived in this world. It's been a long time. Yeah.
And one of the most disturbing pieces of data that I've seen is watching the contrast between Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell's approval rating and Donald Trump's after January 6th. And after January 6th, Trump's approval rating with Republicans stayed very high, very slight downslope, very slight. And Pence and McConnell, who opposed Trump's attempt to overturn the election,
Their approval rating dropped to such an extent that Mike Pence now, who may well run for president, is widely viewed as having no standing, no meaningful standing in
in the Republican Party to take on Donald Trump. Now, we'll see. I mean, of course, nobody's voted yet. But the idea that between the two people on January 6th, Trump, who wanted to overturn the election, and Pence, who had stood by Trump every second of the four years prior and who drew the line at a coup, was going to then lose his standing and become a what happened to Mike Pence situation. Tells you an awful lot. And again, Sarah, I want to underline something you said earlier.
These are folks that if you met them in any other context and we're talking about any other topic, you'd find them to be some of the best, most down to earth people that you'd meet often, like people you would want as neighbors. And then as soon as the topic veers into politics, you're
Then all of a sudden it's like watching one of these old sitcoms where the car's driving and you see the transmission coming out in the road and the wheels are coming off. You're thinking, wait, we're having this really great conversation. And then now what? What?
What do you think? What is happening? I mean, the number of times you're just listening to the sweetest grandma who is introduced because you do this thing at the beginning where everybody tells you like what they do for fun and, you know, where they live and what they did for work. And like, you know, just get the sweetest grandma who just talks about her delicious grandchildren. That's what she spends all her time doing. And she knits them sweaters and all that stuff. And then she's just like,
And these socialists that are ruining the country, they should all be thrown in the gulag. And you're like, oh, my God. Oh, no. Yeah, this is right. This is how things go. My favorite example of that, Sarah, I was volunteering for Samaritan's Purse in Mayfield, Kentucky, after these terrible tornadoes. And I'm with these awesome people who dropped everything when they heard the tornado had happened.
descend upon Mayfield, Kentucky. They're sleeping in cots, you know, in church fellowship halls to help these folks. And I'm talking to one of the most lovely people who's, you know, up to her eyeballs in debris, trying to dig people's possessions out of this catastrophe. And we're having the great conversation. And then she turns to me and she says, you know, they sent this tornado to punish the red states. I'm like, okay. Who sent it? Do I engage in this? Yeah. Yeah.
do I engage on this point or we go back to talking about sec football and you just kind of go back to talking about sec football, but yeah,
Yeah, it's something else. Oh, man. Okay. So this is my last question for you. I actually had a whole section on Democrats that we just don't even have time to get to. Because I will say, it is not a one-sided thing. We've mostly been talking about the right. We know a lot about that. But when we talk to Dems and we ask them about the Supreme Court, for example, right now. I mean, you ask them about Merrick Garland. Talk about someone who's tanking with them. It's not a one-sided problem. But
We talked about leadership. We know trust is the problem. We know that the media feeds it. The politicians feed it. I often talk about the Republican triangle of doom, which is the toxic and symbiotic relationship between the right wing infotainment media, politicians and the voters that like increasingly radicalizes them. But like how we get out, man, what's the solution? You got it. You know, I don't have the solution yet. And I think the Fox revelation should be very sobering.
Because what they have told us is that, you know, we've talked about the power of leadership. Leadership has exerted such power for so long that I'm starting to wonder how much attempts to counter the flow of this river, how effective they can be. And because when Fox called Arizona, the response was not, oh, man, Trump was such a bad candidate that he even lost Arizona.
The response was, that can't be right. Fire the pollster who just called this race. Fire the guy who called this race. So here you had Fox sort of at the apex of the infotainment pyramid, the tip of the infotainment spear saying, Arizona is lost. And the people just said, no, I refuse.
So how much have we built sort of this cultural stream that is now so powerful that any given individual can't really stand in front of it anymore and say, no more, no more. And however, here is where I will say that I'm seeing some signs of hope. After 2022, where every one of the hyper MAGA candidates in a statewide swing state election lost, every one of them.
For the first time, I started to see some reappraisals. And the reappraisal, interestingly, wasn't just on 2022. It was backdated all the way back to 2018 and 2020 and 2022 that said, oh, maybe this doesn't work. I do think that movements can be learning organisms. And if the hyper MAGA world keeps losing movements,
then there can be a hope for a reassessment. There can be. But right now, Sarah, we're still in the world where anybody who stands up, no matter their credentials, no matter their credentials, the instant they stand up, it's what happened to so-and-so. Trump broke you. I used to respect you. That's the dynamic. And
It's very difficult to go against that. Yeah. Well, on that uplifting note, David French, my friend, thank you for coming on the Focus Group podcast and talking to us about our big national crackup. We will all continue the work of trying to better understand our fellow citizens by doing these focus groups, listening to podcasts, grappling in a real way with what they're telling us. So thanks to all of you for joining us for another episode of the Focus Group. We will see you guys again next week. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.