David French

Our Times Opinion colleagues recently launched a new podcast called “The Opinions.” It’s basically the Opinion page in audio form, so you can hear your favorite Times Opinion columnists and contributing writers in one place, in their own voices. It’s an eclectic and surprising mix of perspectives, as you’ll see with these two segments we’ve selected for you to enjoy. The first is with the Times Opinion columnist (and friend of the pod) David French, a lifelong conservative who’s staunchly pro-life, on why he’s voting for Kamala Harris this November, and the second is with the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, who enters into a writing competition of sorts against a new writer on the block — ChatGPT.

There’s this incredible dissonance at the center of our politics right now. On the one hand, all the polling suggests that Donald Trump is about to win Iowa Republican caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. He seems overwhelmingly likely to be his party’s nominee, and so possibly our next president. On the other hand, he could be constitutionally disqualified from taking office. Colorado and Maine concluded as much, and tossed him off their ballots. And now the Supreme Court is poised to take on this unprecedented question of whether a little-known provision of the Constitution, written in the aftermath of the Civil War, can bar Trump from running and scramble the election in 2024. The Times Opinion columnist David French has been on the show before, as both a guest and a guest host, to break down the criminal cases against Trump. This time, I’ve asked David back to make his case for why Trump is constitutionally disqualified. We discuss some of the biggest objections, what the Supreme Court is likely to do, and how the possible options risk destabilizing the country in different ways.

Donald Trump’s legal troubles are mounting. A Manhattan grand jury investigation into the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels could soon make Trump the first former American president ever to be criminally indicted. But the Manhattan case isn’t the only source of legal risk for Trump. In Georgia, the Fulton County district attorney is considering criminal charges for Trump’s efforts to influence the 2020 election, and the Department of Justice is investigating his role in the Jan. 6 riots and the removal of classified documents from the White House. This level of legal vulnerability surrounding a former president is unprecedented. It’s also unsurprising — Trump routinely flouts protocols and norms. But even more than his disregard for convention, Trump has a knack for forcing our legal and political systems into predicaments that don’t really have good solutions. How should a political system handle criminal charges against a current political candidate? Is it appropriate for prosecutors to consider the risk of mob violence in weighing charges? And what’s the risk of damage to our institutions of holding Trump accountable — and for failing to do so? [You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.] David French, my colleague at The New York Times, is a lawyer and conservative commentator who has been trying to parse the legal merits of the Trump inquiries and the thorny political questions they raise. In this episode, we explore the investigations into Trump’s misconduct and the interconnected risks that he, his supporters and the Republican Party pose to our political system. We discuss the details of the Stormy Daniels case and why it may not be a slam dunk; the inquiry into Trump’s efforts to overturn election results in Georgia; the appropriateness of weighing the “national interest” when prosecuting a political figure; whether Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon created a precedent that presidents are above the law; why French worries about giving a mob “veto power” over the rule of law; the Department of Justice’s Jan. 6 investigation and why the legal definition of incitement might be hard to clear; French’s belief that moral courage among Republican elites could stopped Trump’s rise to power; why he thinks the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News was a “tremendous public service”; whether Fox News is really showing “respect” for its viewers, and more.