PROVO, Utah — Conservative New York Times columnist David French, who worked on Mitt Romney’s campaigns for president in 2008 and 2012 and briefly considered a run himself in 2016, will speak Tuesday at a Brigham Young University forum in the Marriott Center in Provo, Utah.
While some Republicans who initially confronted former President Donald Trump before his election or during his first term have changed their minds, French is an unwavering Trump critic who considers his position a principled stand for conservatism. He left the Republican Party in 2018 to become an independent.
Last week, French wrote a withering condemnation of Trump’s refusal to say he wants Ukraine to beat Russia.
“His negative attitude toward Ukraine isn’t rooted in a grand strategic vision,” French wrote. “It is rooted in his personal pique over Ukraine’s nonexistent participation in a fictional conspiracy. It was an astonishing display of corruption and unfitness.”
French was invited to speak at BYU because of his work as a First Amendment attorney on behalf of religious freedom and freedom of speech. He is the author of the 2002 book “A Season for Justice: Defending the Rights of the Christian Church, Home, and School.”
He graduated from Harvard Law School, earned the Bronze Star while serving in the U.S. Army during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was a staff writer for the conservative National Review. He latest book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”
French joined The New York Times opinion page as a conservative columnist in 2023. He has written on a wide range of topics in that role. The 2024 presidential election has been a consistent topic this summer.
Has David French said whether he will vote for Trump or Harris?
In August, French wrote a column saying he will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump in November.
“I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump,” he wrote, saying that he remains a conservative and contending that the Republican nominee has displayed a cruelty that has embedded itself among conservative evangelicals.
“There are many churches and Christian leaders who are now more culturally Trumpian than culturally Christian. Trump is changing the church,” the columnist wrote.
French’s own Christian congregation recently canceled him this summer.
“I said no to Donald Trump,” French said in a piece about that experience. “I ultimately said no to the Republican Party. I didn’t say no to being a conservative, but said no to being a Republican. And when we made that decision, we knew there would be blowback. We knew that. We had no idea at all what was really in store for us when we made that decision.”
What French has written about Trump and Christianity
The fallout came around the time French wrote a column in July in which he encouraged people to “criticize Trump, but don’t demonize him.” He said American evangelicals were being torn apart by a conflict over theology. He argued that orthodoxy (which he defined as right belief) and orthopraxy (”right conduct”) shouldn’t be as distinct as he sees them becoming among evangelicals who support Trump.
“Let’s make this less abstract,” he wrote. “In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a bold statement of belief — it passed a resolution on the moral character of public officials that clearly stated, in no uncertain terms, ‘Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society and surely results in God’s judgment.’
“Yet in 2016 and 2020, Southern Baptists were a key part of the evangelical coalition that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump, one of the lowest-character men ever to run for president. They’re expected to do so again in 2024. In this case, the denomination declared an orthodoxy, but utterly failed at orthopraxy, and its compromised conduct is now, sadly, far more relevant to American life than its lofty ideal.”
French concluded that “the church that truly influences a nation will be one that focuses on doing good more than on being right.”
How politically conservative is the BYU community?
BYU long has been considered a conservative Republican bastion, but researchers have noted that the precincts around campus where students live were increasingly blue in the past two presidential elections. Half of the precincts surrounding BYU voted for Biden/Harris in 2020, BYU professor Jacob Rugh reported.
“The reality is that BYU is much more representative of the U.S. as a whole than most American campuses, which often resemble balkanized liberal states within regions that are far more ‘purple’ politically,” two other researchers wrote last year. “Maybe, then, it’s time to begin questioning the tired stereotypes of Brigham Young University as a stodgy ‘conservative’ institution — and begin to consider the distinctive benefits of political diversity like we observe there.”
French’s forum topic is unknown, but he has written recently about his work defending religious freedom in the context of this year’s election. In one piece, he said he defended both secular and religious organizations whether they agreed with him, and that it had been a value of the Republican Party.
“Along comes the age of Trump and the party takes this very authoritarian turn, which contradicted all of my previous legal work, quite frankly,” he wrote. “But at the same time, that move, that G.O.P. move, vindicated a lot of critiques of the G.O.P. that I had previously dismissed. And it made me realize that I had not been seeing my own community as clearly as I needed to.”
In his column saying he would vote for Harris, French said that he cannot 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.”
Tuesday’s forum address will begin at 11:05 a.m. and is scheduled to be broadcast on BYUtv.org. Forum assemblies are free and open to the public.