Welcome to Beg to Differ, the Bull Works weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left to center right. I'm Mona Charen's syndicated columnist and policy editor of the bulwark and I'm joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of the Brookings

Institution and the Wall Street Journal, and Damon Linker, who writes the substack newsletter,

notes from the middle ground. Linda Chavez is away this week, and in fact, this is a little bit

of a different show because three, four of us are all in the same room.

We are delighted to welcome two guests this week, New York Times columnist David French

and Larry Diamond, professor at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Larry's most recent book was Ill Wins, Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.

Welcome, one and all.

I guess saving democracy is a bit of a theme for many of us as we contemplate the last election.

And so I'd like to begin with a little bit of a look back at what happened

about how and why Trump won and whether we are seeing normal politics or something else.

So David French, I'll start with you. To what degree does this election seem to

have been decided by the usual things that decide elections? In my view, almost entirely.

You know, if there's this brilliant analogy that my friend Sarah Isker has about campaigning,

she was a Republican campaign operative, was deeply involved in Republican campaigns for a long time up through 2016.

And she compares campaigning to curling, the sport of curling. And there is a, if you've, if you've

ever seen curling every four years in the Winter Olympics, the way it works is there's a big 44 pound stone that goes down the ice.

And then you have a small squad of sweepers.

And these people are sweeping frantically in front of the stone to see if it'll go a little further or maybe turn a little bit more or less.

But if the throw is bad, if the stone has the wrong momentum,

the sweepers can't do anything about it. And so the point is, most elections, unless they're

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