Never Trump Media Pundits and the Bridges They’ve Burned (full series)
David Frum | Robert Kagan
Jennifer Rubin | David French
David French
The same cannot be said of David French, a Never Trumper that has called the New York Times editorial page his home since January 2023. A military veteran and attorney, French has also written for National Review, litigated free speech cases for conservative public interest law firms such as the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom, and was the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“I’m an evangelical conservative who believes strongly in a classical liberal, pluralistic vision of American democracy, in which people with deep religious, cultural, and moral differences can live and work together and enjoy equal legal protection and shared cultural tolerance,” he says in his New York Times biography.
French is today (or at a minimum once was) a traditional, Reaganite, limited-government conservative. Nothing he has written for the New York Times or in his Never Trump phase directly contradicts this history. Instead, he dings Trump for character issues while trying to awkwardly wedge his own principles into his new Democratic allies.
This is how he defended voting for Kamala Harris in 2024:
I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m “still conservative,” and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.
The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.
As noted above, French’s columns betray an obsession with Trump, but in a way that’s harder to define as Trump deranged. Note in the passage above that he predicts Trump will fail to resist Russian authoritarianism, not that Trump is personally an authoritarian. Unlike a lot, maybe most of the Never Trump movement, French has rarely—if ever—used the fascist, authoritarian, or other labels to describe Trump and his MAGA supporters.
Instead, his columns are more analytical, often an effort to explain MAGA Republicans to anti-Trump Democrats, and vice versa. In a March 2025 report, he recounted the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Tea Party movement and advised Democrats to avoid the temptation to create their own.
“For a moment, it actually inspired me,” he recalled of the Tea Party years. “I was talking to grass-roots activists who were reading the Constitution for the first time. Local Republican Party volunteers were passing around copies of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and talking about the dangers of central planning. My clients rented spaces in local libraries to host lectures about the founders and framers.”
Rare among the Never Trumpers, it’s difficult, but not impossible, to imagine French finding his way back to the good graces of those old Tea Party allies. He would probably claim he’d never left them in the first place.
