David French

on problem after problem after problem that we faced as Americans, the actual underlying mistake of previous administrations is we were just never tough enough, that we just didn't fight the war with the gloves off enough, or we haven't been punitive enough, or we haven't tried to bully people enough.

And so you see this again and again, and there's this phrase you see on MAGA where it says, you can just do things.

And what they mean by that is you can just exercise power and you can change the world.

And one of the reasons why they look at the Venezuela situation, they keep going back to that, is that's probably their most successful version of it is that Venezuelan intervention.

But you go again and again and you see the same pattern.

It's just we have to pummel people harder.

And that works with Republican members of Congress, for example, but it doesn't tend to work with other sovereign nations.

Other sovereign nations don't like to be pummeled.

And so what they'll do is they'll find a way to stop or prevent the pummeling, and it's not always the way you want.

So, for example, if you're trying to torment Canada—

Well, you can't go crying if Canada says, well, you know, we're gonna forge a closer economic relationship with China and Europe than the US because we have self-preservation interests.

No, they keep thinking if we pummel, then we'll achieve the results that we want, when sometimes pummeling has the exact opposite effect.

What it typically does is alienate people at scale.

It's not as if nobody thought of, well, why not use force

I mean, that's the oldest story in the book.

I mean, that's Putin to the core.

Again, sometimes that is appropriate, sometimes, but as a universal way of dealing with the world, it is extraordinarily dangerous and counterproductive.

I can't emphasize enough how much they think of the everyone else that came before them as a collection of idiots.

Like, you know, when J.D.

Vance basically says, well, those were stupid presidents or those were dumb presidents or whatever he said talking about previous interventions, there really is a sense in MAGA that everyone who came before is just corrupt, woke, too empathetic, idiotic, et cetera, and they are the ones who've just figured out the world.