A wave of hate has engulfed David French and his family for most of the past year.
Threats intruded deep into his family’s lives.
“We had a weird incident where somebody literally broke into a phone call my wife was on with her father and began yelling profanities supporting Trump,” he recalls.
Also, gruesome videos of suicides and murders were posted to his wife’s blog, along with depictions of his daughter, whom his family adopted from Ethiopia, being tortured.
French’s name may be little-known outside political circles.
But for a few weeks this summer, many conservative activists nationwide were hailing the lawyer and writer living in Maury County as the guy to “Stop Donald Trump.”
French’s harsh criticisms of the president-elect unleashed a torrent of online abuse. French, however, says he has no intention of backing down now.
He’s a
writer for National Review, an icon of conservatism, and throughout this election cycle, he’s repeatedly attacked the self-described “alt-right,” a movement that he calls racist and vicious.
To those people, going after Trump makes him a traitor.
“You know, when you’re talking about fringe characters, sometimes they get angrier at people that they think are betraying their cause than they are at the other side.”
A National Fight
French accuses alt-right activists of attempting to intimidate him into silence.
So he alerted local police to the threats. French and his family also went over security measures, including firearms.
But, for the most part, they’ve strived to maintain normalcy.
“We didn’t buy new weapons,” French says with a chuckle during a recent interview at his home. “I mean, we’re pretty well stocked up as it is.
“No, it’s just a matter of how often do you carry? Do you go from sometimes, when you think you might be in a more dangerous place, to always? So you go to always.”
That fight has propelled French from obscurity to a national figure — maybe not famous enough to be recognized at the grocery store, but known well enough in political circles that this isn’t the first profile that’s been done about him this year.
That’s despite living and working out of the small Middle Tennessee community of Zion, a crossroads that dates back two centuries, centered around a conservative Presbyterian Church. French, his wife and their three school-age children are members.
French doesn’t keep any of this secret.
“You can’t live in fear, and I couldn’t scrub where I live if I wanted to,” he says. “I mean, we’ve lived here a long time — well before I started writing prominently at all. I was just a First Amendment lawyer doing my thing, and then the more you get involved in public life, things change.”
French is originally from Kentucky. He came to Nashville for college at Lipscomb, then went off to law school at Harvard.
After that, he worked a series of jobs in the Northeast. But he would eventually settle down in rural Tennessee, where he has extended family.
Living in such a community helps him as a writer, he says: Too many conservative commentators are based in Washington or New York.
“You know, there were pundits all over America writing about Donald Trump who didn’t know a single Donald Trump voter,” he says. “
I mean, if you’re living in D.C., the most you’re probably going to meet is somebody who’s willing to support him if he got the nomination, but he was their last choice. That would be the most enthusiastic Trump supporter who wasn’t on the campaign payroll that you would encounter.”
His prominence hit a crescendo in early June. That’s when conservative writer Bill Kristol floated French as a darkhorse alternative to Trump.
Kristol pointed to French’s conservative credentials, his education, his service in Iraq with the Army Reserve and his roots in Middle America.
French ultimately turned down the chance to run for president. So the mantel eventually passed to
Evan McMullin, a former intelligence officer living in Utah.
The Next Wave Of Hate
French voted for McMullin. But plenty of people in his church and community went for Trump, even close friends who knew French and his family were under threat.
He says that choice has not caused him to look at his neighbors differently.
”
If you walk into a voting booth and you’re looking at three names, and those names are Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Gary Johnson, I’m not going to think ill of any person who looks at those three name and goes, ‘You know what, Donald Trump’s not my favorite, but amongst those three, I think he’d do better.’ That, I totally get that.”
French believes Republican voters liked the fighter in Donald Trump. His slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was an easy message to grasp, like the Obama campaign’s promises of “Hope” and “Change.”
“That message — ‘I love this country and I’m going to fight for you’ — that’s a tough message to beat,” says French. “If that was the main message that I knew about him, I would have enthusiastically voted for him over Hillary Clinton.”
But he thinks what really got evangelicals to turn out was Trump’s promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion.
“If you’re pro-life, you’re looking at abortion, and you’re saying, look, this is the intentional killing of an innocent human being that is sanctioned and permitted by law. It’s a monstrous injustice,” he says.
“This was the No. 1 counterargument to me. And it’s the one that came the closest to persuading me to vote for him, to be honest.”
French, however, believes Trump has built his appeal on a nationalist identity that excludes many people, like his daughter born in Africa.
“I think one of the things that’s distinct about America is that it is a nation built more on an idea than a geography or an ethnicity,” says French. “We agree and we believe that there are these inalienable rights.”
French hopes he’s wrong about Trump and that the president-elect will show a different side once in the White House.
But if that doesn’t turn to be the case, French says he’s prepared to criticize — and endure the wave of hate once again.
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