4.6 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 68 minutes
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| 0:00.8 | What you're watching, though, is MAGA essentially recreating a lot of the excesses of the radical left, except with much greater force and energy because it's being directed and driven from the White House in a very decisive way. |
| 0:15.7 | And with all of the instruments and levers of power that the federal government possesses. |
| 0:19.7 | So as strong as sort of the |
| 0:22.1 | Twitter mob could have been in 2018 or 2019, it's still going to be nothing compared to the full |
| 0:29.3 | weight and power of the federal government. |
| 0:32.6 | And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. |
| 0:41.7 | Thank you. Now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is a good friend and one of my favorite writers. |
| 0:47.3 | David French is an opinion columnist at the New York Times. |
| 0:52.6 | He is an evangelical Christian who is socially conservative, but also |
| 0:58.1 | deeply critical of the Trump administration. And this conversation, which we recorded in |
| 1:05.1 | person in Nashville, was really a kind of therapy session for both of us. It was our attempt to try and make sense what is going on in American politics today. |
| 1:18.4 | Going back to the natural experiment, which Francis Fukuyama posited in 2016 and 2017, |
| 1:24.9 | of trying to figure out whether, as the founders intended, |
| 1:28.9 | the institutions are going to be enough to contain a president who wants to undermine the checks and balances and the |
| 1:34.5 | rule of law in the United States. |
| 1:35.7 | We ask, to what extent are the institutions holding? |
| 1:41.1 | Is the Supreme Court doing Trump's bidding, or is it actually standing up to some of what |
| 1:47.4 | Trump wants? Are we on the way towards people being deeply afraid to express themselves because |
| 1:54.9 | of the administration's attacks on free speech? Or do we continue to have a very robust media |
| 1:59.9 | that is challenging the Trump |
| 2:01.7 | administration in all kinds of ways? We also talked about how and why Democrats in the left |
| 2:11.0 | are flailing, why they proved incapable of stopping Trump's re-election, and why they may end up making big mistakes that allow |
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