David French: Our State of National Shame
The Bulwark Podcast
The Bulwark
4.6 • 11.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Trump casually posted a racist video and the White House essentially told Americans to calm down. Convicted felons are being treated better than rounded-up immigrants in detention centers. And the evangelicals' favorite president doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the word, prayer. Still, Republicans on The Hill are seeing the broad unpopularity of ICE's behavior in Minnesota and may be starting to distance themselves from the policies they funded. Plus, a simple measure beyond masks that could really rein in ICE, the extensive structural damage at the DOJ, trads keep rationalizing cruelty, and why is SCOTUS taking so long on the tariffs case? Also, Tim puts David in the squirm chair with a Kid Rock v. Bad Bunny lyrics quiz.
David French joins Tim Miller for the Super Bowl weekend pod.
show notes:
- David on ending immunity for federal agents
- Chris Geidner on government lawyer Julie Le
- David's tweet about "tradlife"
- Tim, Sam, and Will Sommer on Elijah Schaefer
- JVL on the Beatitudes in "The Triad"
- David's recent piece on liberalism
- The NYT on Katie Britt
- Tim's playlist
- Tickets are now on sale for our LIVE shows in Dallas on March 18 and in Austin on March 19. Plus, a small number of seats are still available for our second show in Minneapolis on February 18. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bulwark-events
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. |
| 0:15.7 | Delighted to welcome back to the show, an opinion columnist for the not-so-failing New York Times compared to the competitor. |
| 0:21.8 | He's also the co-host of the legal podcast advisory opinions. It's David French. How you doing, |
| 0:26.4 | sir? Tim, great to see you. Great to see you. And I'm so thankful we're not-so-failing in this business, |
| 0:33.1 | Tim. My goodness. Yeah. If you are going to go woke, go mainstream, you know, and leave your conservative media purchase for an actual business. |
| 0:41.1 | You picked the better one, it appears. |
| 0:43.2 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 0:44.2 | I mean, you know, it's just sad. |
| 0:47.0 | I mean, it's just really sad. |
| 0:48.6 | The idea that you're going to heal your institution by cutting out your reporters in a war zone. |
| 0:55.1 | I know that war reporting, for example, is extremely expensive. |
| 0:59.1 | And quite often not enough people read it, right? |
| 1:01.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:02.3 | But we, how do you, this is absolutely vital. |
| 1:07.6 | And we're now leaving it in the hands of, you know, we're doing a great job over |
| 1:10.8 | there. The Wall Street Journal's had a lot of great resources, but I don't think enough people |
| 1:15.8 | understand sort of how the entire news gathering, global news gathering enterprise is now |
| 1:21.6 | hanging on just a very few institutions right now. Us, the BBC. I mean, there's just not very many. |
| 1:29.8 | Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, well, I know that's not what we're going to focus on today. |
| 1:34.8 | We've covered that pretty well yesterday with Marty Barron. I want to start with you in an area of |
| 1:40.2 | expertise, which is praying. There was a prayer breakfast yesterday. Donald Trump, the |
| 1:46.7 | president, I'm just picking a few choice things. He called Thomas Massey a moron. He said that Biden |
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