Making Sense - Sam Harris - #403 — Sanity Check on Trump 2.0

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

00:00:11.780 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

00:00:15.740 the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

00:00:20.100 Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program,

00:00:25.900 where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

00:00:30.740 and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

00:00:34.080 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

00:00:45.500 I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me.

00:00:49.080 Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:00:51.140 So, Trump 2.0, how's it going?

00:00:54.540 Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny. In the waning days of the election, I had arguments with a lot

00:01:01.460 of friends of mine, and they're friends, who were going to vote against Kamala Harris for

00:01:06.540 Donald Trump. And I thought their calculations were wrong. I didn't vote for Harris, but I

00:01:12.680 was certainly not going to vote for Donald Trump. But I also live in Washington, D.C., so I didn't

00:01:16.100 think my vote mattered all that much. But the argument that you heard from everybody was

00:01:20.680 the best-case scenario was also the most likely scenario. And the best-case scenario for them

00:01:25.920 was that it was going to be a repeat of the first Trump term, which I thought they were overly

00:01:31.160 nostalgic about and forgot a lot of things about the first Trump term. But they said, look, you know,

00:01:36.360 at the end of the day, what was so bad? It was sort of a sophisticated version of it was a lot of

00:01:39.960 mean tweets, but the economy was great, right? And my position at the time was that is the best-case

00:01:46.880 scenario, because he's not going to change. But it is not the most likely scenario. And I think we

00:01:51.780 now know I was right. The first term, whatever successes there were, were largely the result of

00:01:56.940 the fact that Trump didn't know what he was doing and was constrained by more sort of normie Republicans

00:02:02.640 who narrowed his scope of options and warned him off bad things and in some ways undermined him in

00:02:09.640 ways that people can legitimately complain about. Yeah, many of us spoke about guardrails at that point,

00:02:14.480 and people didn't seem to care. Right. Institutions are holding and all that kind of stuff, right? And

00:02:19.260 so, like, fast forward to today, he has surrounded himself entirely with absolute loyalists whose

00:02:27.180 mission is to enact whatever Trump wants to do rather than push back on it. Rather than say,

00:02:32.360 Mr. President, that's a bad idea or you shouldn't do that. It's all yes, sir, how high kind of stuff.

00:02:37.720 And it's a mess. I think it's a mess. So, yeah, let's talk about this. How many closeted normies

00:02:44.380 do you think there are? Because I'm starting to worry that there are not that many. I find that

00:02:50.320 the people I know who voted for Trump, and many voted very much in the spirit in which you just

00:02:55.640 described, they looked at the first term, they thought that's as, you know, everyone's fears

00:03:00.740 about authoritarianism or corruption or self-dealing or just sheer chaos. All of that was overblown because

00:03:08.720 not all that much happened. I mean, these are people who didn't care so much about January 6th

00:03:14.580 for some reason, or his attempt to actually steal an election prior to that, the big lie that the

00:03:20.160 election was stolen from him, et cetera, et cetera. The people I know who voted for Trump heavily

00:03:24.540 discount those indiscretions and looked at his term and said, this is, he was a comparatively normal

00:03:30.940 president whose policies I liked. And obviously we have a problem at the border. And obviously the

00:03:37.160 Democrats can't speak honestly about that or about DEI or any of these other things we're allergic

00:03:42.720 to. So there's not much of an issue. And now with all of these loyalists appointed, I mean,

00:03:49.060 when you see someone like Kash Patel brought in to run the FBI or, I debated Ben Shapiro a week before

00:03:55.460 the election and he was assuring me that Mike Pompeo was going to have an outsized role in the

00:03:59.780 administration. You know, this is probably, you know, a month before his secret service protection

00:04:04.320 was stripped off, uh, in, uh, uh, in an obvious attempt to, you know, cow people, uh, and show you 0.66

00:04:12.240 just what kind of price you, you could pay if you are not a perfect loyalist, but everyone has just

00:04:17.300 moved the goalposts. And now they seem to feel that this is all acceptable and even quite a hopeful

00:04:24.200 sign that we're going to doge our way into some sort of a golden age of American renewal.

00:04:30.700 Yeah. So I mean, a couple of points about that. One, I think bringing up the Pompeo security stuff,

00:04:35.620 John Bolton and others as well is, is really worth just pausing on for a moment because it's not just

00:04:40.680 that Trump got rid of the security protections. He announced it to the world. Yeah. He effectively

00:04:46.600 put a target on these people's back and said, you have a free shot now, which is just despicable

00:04:51.960 in all sorts of ways. If you try to do that in a movie, everyone who recognizes it immediately is

00:04:55.440 immoral, um, and villainous. Like I, we don't know each other that well, but I'm going to go out on a

00:05:00.540 limb and suggest that the people you talk to tend to be on the overly intellectual side. There are people

00:05:08.120 who deal with words and images and concepts, and they're very good at intellectualizing and

00:05:13.620 rationalizing things. And among that crowd, I think you're exactly right that this has happened.

00:05:19.440 There is something that happens to people when they make bad decisions rather than own up to it and say,

00:05:25.020 my gosh, I was wrong. They said, they look for new reasons to convince themselves first and then

00:05:30.140 others that know in reality they were right. And that's where the goalpost moving goes.

00:05:34.180 I think that critics of Trump, right? Um, which we both are need to work on being careful about

00:05:41.260 conflating those people. Some of them were good people. I just think they're wrong, right?

00:05:46.700 Those people, they sort of Trump, the professional Trump apologist class with the median Trump voter,

00:05:53.000 right? The, the voters that gave Trump a narrow victory. And I, you know, I keep hearing about

00:05:58.940 all this land side stuff. It was a significant victory. It was a decisive victory. All that

00:06:03.180 swing state stuff matters, right? The county movement stuff matters, but let's keep it in

00:06:08.000 perspective. It was the 44th biggest electoral college win in American history. And he won the

00:06:14.380 popular vote by what? A one and a half, 2 million votes or something like that. So in the history of

00:06:18.280 American politics, it's a pretty narrow win. The people who made that majority, the Hispanic mechanic 1.00

00:06:23.740 who felt, you know, besieged by COVID and inflation and all that kind of stuff, they're not paying

00:06:28.700 attention to, they weren't paying a lot of attention when he was president the first time. And they're

00:06:32.240 not paying a lot of attention to this stuff. Now the idea that they all endorse everything that he's

00:06:37.140 doing, you can get that impression by listening to the Fox news crowd. But if you actually like look at

00:06:43.540 the polling, you know, his, his pardoning, which I thought by itself was an impeachable act on his

00:06:48.640 first day, his pardoning of the January 6 rioters is not popular. It's just not polling well. And

00:06:55.060 the, and so in some ways, I mean, just as a matter of rank punditry, you can make the case that Trump

00:07:01.320 is already repeating some of the mistakes that Biden made, which is thinking he's got a much bigger

00:07:06.780 mandate than he does. I think the concept of a mandate is garbage to begin with, but thinking is a much

00:07:12.180 bigger mandate than he does. And that he has a mandate for these boutique, you know, demagogic 0.96

00:07:18.000 authoritarian moves that the guys who are voting on egg prices and inflation, and maybe the border

00:07:23.680 weren't voting for cash Patel and Dan Bongino to run the FBI. They weren't voting for purges in the

00:07:29.900 justice department. And to think that he's got the endorsement of the people, even all of his voters

00:07:36.740 for all that stuff, I think is a political miscalculation. It doesn't get us out of the problem that he's

00:07:41.500 president and nobody else is. But I just don't think that outside of his core base, the very online

00:07:48.860 crowd and all of that, that he has got the kind of popular support that people want to, you know,

00:07:54.700 for either to support him or to criticize him or to catastrophize about him. I don't think he's got

00:07:59.640 that level of support that he thinks he does, whether, and that, that the people who are the

00:08:03.840 most scared or the most happy about what he's doing think he does.

00:08:07.220 What do you make of the influence of people like Curtis Yarvin and other, uh, seemingly, um,

00:08:14.520 fringe and certainly idiosyncratic figures on the tech bros and oligarchs who are now facilitating

00:08:24.860 this second administration?

00:08:28.000 So it's funny. I, I kind of ignored Curtis Yarvin for years. And then I listened to the

00:08:32.740 New York times interview with him and to say I was underwhelmed by his arguments is a wild

00:08:40.820 exaggeration. There's intellectually, I think there's very little there, there. Um, not the

00:08:47.080 everything he says is wrong. I agree with some of his sort of subsidiary points. I just don't think

00:08:52.020 they back up his major conclusions that, you know, we need a monarch. I think that's ridiculous. 0.97

00:08:56.780 I think that, so I don't take him very seriously. I really don't. I wanted to, I was, I, I, I look 0.83

00:09:02.520 for intellectual and interlocutors that I can really fight with, but I, I find his arguments 0.93

00:09:06.900 so specious and sort of silly.

00:09:08.660 But what do you make of the fact that people like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and all of

00:09:14.420 these other people who are quite, have been quite instrumental in, in building Trump 2.0? I mean,

00:09:20.120 they, they arguably introduced JD Vance to Trump. And if Vance becomes the future of the party,

00:09:26.300 well then they, they certainly will largely own that. And they are really, you know, just,

00:09:31.520 they're not even hiding it. They're quite influenced by Yarvin and the people he reads. And some of the

00:09:36.740 people he reads are actually Nazis.

00:09:39.600 Yeah. So as I was saying, I was about to say, I don't take him seriously. I take it very seriously

00:09:45.460 that, that important people take him seriously. That is very disturbing to me. The red pilling of

00:09:51.260 the sort of tech bros has been sociologically fascinating. And I think really problematic. I

00:09:58.000 have a theory. I got it from a friend of mine that, you know, Peter Thiel, I used to really admire

00:10:03.560 a lot of Peter Thiel stuff. I liked the seasteading, you know, techno libertarian stuff. Let's get jetpacks,

00:10:08.340 all that kind of thing. And I think that he basically, and a bunch of people around him have decided

00:10:13.160 that the country is going to be run by oligarchs, that oligarchy is the future, even though we really

00:10:19.400 should call them plutocrats because oligarch just means rule of a few. And if that's the way things 1.00

00:10:24.900 are going, better to be an oligarch than not. And, and then, so I think that JD Vance, it's,

00:10:31.100 it's funny, like JD Vance has been making a name for himself on the sort of, on the far right for

00:10:36.380 years, endorsing industrial policy, saying nice things about Lena Kahn and Elizabeth Warren and

00:10:40.720 all these things saying, you know, 10,000 cheap toasters isn't worth one American job and other

00:10:46.040 economically illiterate stuff. And yet when he gave his big speech in Europe about, about regulation

00:10:52.300 and free markets, he was like a Reaganite free market guy about AI and big tech, but nothing else.

00:10:59.980 And to me, that seems like, okay, he is carrying water for that constituency, but for no other

00:11:06.320 constituency that believes in free markets. He's, he's, it's free markets for us, but not for that

00:11:11.220 other stuff. And I think that's a sort of a sign. And what can actually come of this? I don't know.

00:11:17.840 I think that the, the most dismaying stuff to me is not the threat necessarily to liberty right now,

00:11:23.280 although there are some things to be worried about. It's just the corruption of it, like the meme coin

00:11:27.480 corruption, the crypto corruption, the, the special dealings and special pleadings. One of the attractions

00:11:33.820 that people don't seem to really understand why Trump loves tariffs so much is that historically

00:11:38.440 tariffs are the biggest driver of political corruption because every single interest goes

00:11:45.900 hat in hand and either asks for an exemption to tariffs or asks that their, their competition get

00:11:51.740 tariffed. It is a way to beseech those in power for special pleading. And that I think is the,

00:11:58.720 that is the economic philosophy of this administration.

00:12:01.620 Yeah. That's, that's a point that's made not often enough. Tariffs are often criticized as just

00:12:08.420 bad economics, but it really is a bottleneck that Trump can construct so that he can dole out

00:12:16.960 favors. I mean, it really, it's really enables a kind of mob boss style of rule.

00:12:22.240 Right. And I think the mob boss thing just to dwell on that for a second, I recently wrote about

00:12:25.060 this at the dispatch, but like the mob boss thing is real. One of the biggest influences on Trump was

00:12:31.000 this crooked democratic machine mobbed up mob, uh, party boss in Brooklyn. And his whole approach to

00:12:38.860 politics was punish you if you're an enemy and reward you if you're a friend. Trump's approach to

00:12:46.380 macroeconomics is exactly that. But also like you look at the Ukraine deal where, you know,

00:12:53.160 he's like no security guarantees, but we need a piece of the action. You know, you need to give us

00:12:57.580 a chunk of your resources just to make us whole. And in fact, he said, we're going to get our money

00:13:02.740 back plus, right? So he wants to make a profit off of Ukraine. His view of foreign policy, you can get

00:13:09.280 very egghead-y and I'm happy to do it if you want about spheres of influence theory and Carl Schmidt and

00:13:15.440 all of these kinds of things and a 19th century understanding of great power relations. But really

00:13:20.880 it's Tony Soprano approach, right? He thinks NATO is a protection racket and they're not kicking up

00:13:26.200 enough. He, it explains why he's so nasty to our allies, but so deferential to our adversaries

00:13:33.180 because the adversaries are in effect heads of the other five families and they deserve respect as

00:13:38.960 equals because he's a boss and their bosses, but his underbosses, his capo regimes, his button men,

00:13:44.980 you know, England, all Canada, all those guys, they aren't showing enough respect to the Don as it

00:13:50.220 were. And that colors his entire approach to our relationship with allies and our relationship

00:13:56.680 to adversaries is that our adversaries deserve respect because they're strong men like him

00:14:00.720 and our allies are weak and they're, they're living off of his teat and not showing him enough

00:14:06.300 respect. Yeah. Well, let's drill down on that because I think that's, um, the center of my concern.

00:14:12.300 We're having this conversation about, uh, six days after that debacle in the Oval Office,

00:14:17.480 many people have analyzed it. I think there are two diametrically opposed views of what happened

00:14:23.620 there. It seems to me more or less axiomatic that if they're high-fiving in the Kremlin and, uh,

00:14:31.380 shouting for joy on Russian state television, whatever Trump and Vance thought they were up to,

00:14:37.540 they're on some level, they're not serving American interests. I mean, I just, I don't,

00:14:42.780 I don't see how anyone looks at, at this, uh, alignment with Russia when Russia and, you know,

00:14:50.700 Putin himself have been explicit enemies of the United States for so long. I mean, Russia,

00:14:56.580 Russia has, you know, Putin and, uh, you know, his surrogates on Russian television have explicitly

00:15:03.740 threatened us with nuclear annihilation for our support of Ukraine. These are not our friends, 1.00

00:15:08.460 to leave aside everything else they've been doing to try to, um, undermine, you know, American

00:15:14.080 democracy. I mean, how, how is it possible that your, uh, friends and, and Aristotle friends in the

00:15:20.940 Republican party have lost sight of the fact that one Putin is actually a dictator who kills his

00:15:28.360 political opponents and, or, you know, jails and kills them as well as journalists. He launched a,

00:15:33.880 an actual war of aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine is, is a country that we convinced to 0.98

00:15:39.940 give up its nukes. I mean, one unfortunate lesson of this whole episode is that, you know,

00:15:44.880 no one can look at this and think it was a good idea to give up your nukes because this is what

00:15:49.140 happens to you. Yeah. Again, are there, are these, are most Republicans closeted and sane now,

00:15:56.900 or they have just actually taken the, the firmware upgrade of their brains offered by Trump and Vance

00:16:03.280 and they, and I mean, what, what do you think Mark Rubio thinks is actually going on here?

00:16:08.460 Um, well, you know what Nietzsche said to look into Mark Rubio's soul, the soul look back into you.

00:16:13.460 Yeah. Be careful about that. Um, yeah, you know, you asked this before and I didn't really answer

00:16:17.020 the question about like how many normie Republicans are left, right? Their numbers are shrinking for

00:16:21.960 sure. I mean, just as a matter of just head counting, the number of Republicans in Congress who were

00:16:28.160 there prior to 2017 has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, right? Because a lot of the normies

00:16:32.700 you know, it's like, it's like, I don't want to quote Yates, but like the best lacked all conviction

00:16:37.320 and got the hell out of there and were replaced by the worst in a lot of cases. And so, you know,

00:16:43.500 there's a reason why my podcast is called the remnant for, you know, but I think there are still

00:16:48.380 an enormous number or a significant number of Republicans, including Republican voters, right?

00:16:54.700 Ukraine is still like, I looked at the numbers recently, like 60, 70% favorable views from Republican

00:17:02.340 voters, while Russia is like 20%. It's, some of this is a manifestation of being way too online and

00:17:08.560 only listening to your biggest fans, which is a form of corruption. But the problem is, is that while

00:17:14.120 there are still significant numbers of normies, they lack courage and they, and you know, and they'll

00:17:21.900 say, look, I have to pick my battles. You know, I've, I've talked to Republican senators who I think

00:17:26.640 are, who agree with us very, you know, broadly and actually narrowly on all of these sorts of

00:17:33.820 issues when it comes to Ukraine and a lot of other things. But they're like, look, I'll, I'll lose a

00:17:38.240 primary. I, there are only so many fights I can take. Some of them are legitimately, this gets under

00:17:44.740 reported, but there are, there are Republicans who are elected Republicans who are literally afraid for

00:17:51.040 their personal safety. Yeah. You know, with the Pete Hegseth, uh, nomination, you know, uh, Joni Ernst

00:17:56.620 was one of the holdouts and there are a lot of, there's a lot of talk about how, like, what she was put

00:18:01.080 through, the death threats and all of that were one of the things that tipped her over. There are a lot of

00:18:04.360 decent people who were friends of mine who left in part because they're like, why am I risking my family,

00:18:09.840 like literally my family's lives for a tenth of what I can make in the private sector, right? I mean, and so

00:18:16.740 some of it is well-founded lack of courage. Um, but nonetheless, the, it is, if you stick your head

00:18:25.180 up in this environment and actually speak with conviction about some of these things, you, your

00:18:31.320 political career could end very quickly. The intimidation, you can be vilified and you can

00:18:35.740 be physically scared for your safety. And that's very scary. And I don't know, you know, uh, I don't

00:18:41.980 know how to judge it because I'm so, uh, sometimes I'm too close up to this. I know the personality is

00:18:46.060 well enough that it's hard for me to say, oh, this guy is a terrible person when he's, you know,

00:18:50.360 under all these pressures. And at the end of the day, politicians are politicians and they go,

00:18:55.080 you know, the spirit of there go the people I must go with them for I am their leader has defined the

00:19:01.000 Trump era for a very long time. And I can't tell you how many politicians I know who were totally

00:19:07.860 freaked out when they started going to Republican events in the first term, nevermind now people who had

00:19:13.840 been, you know, representing a district for, for 10 terms, 20, you know, 20 years, all of a sudden

00:19:18.300 not recognizing anybody in the room because Trump has brought in all sorts of new voters to the party

00:19:25.060 who aren't conservative. You can call them right-wing, but they're much more populist

00:19:30.180 nationalists than they are anything like, you know, the William F. Buckley conservatism I grew up in.

00:19:35.160 Yeah. So let's talk about this, this alternate perspective on what happened vis-a-vis Ukraine and,

00:19:41.280 you know, what happened in the Oval Office last week. I mean, there's, you know, I've heard it

00:19:45.820 in various pieces. I did a podcast actually just before that Oval Office incident with Neil Ferguson,

00:19:52.940 who was surprisingly open-minded about the wisdom and probity of the Trump administration. We had,

00:20:00.500 you know, you know, I pushed back on many of his, his general points, but many people felt that I let

00:20:06.140 him get away with murder simply because we, you know, we, we pitched that episode into the chaos of,

00:20:12.220 of what happened in the, the Oval Office. And we had recorded it the day before and, but then released

00:20:15.880 it. And it was perceived very much that, that lens as this is a bizarre response to what had happened

00:20:20.620 here. And, you know, it was, it did not age well, you know, even by the, by the hour. But I think,

00:20:26.040 I think Neil would say, again, just forgive me, Neil, if I'm getting you slightly wrong, but based on what,

00:20:30.600 what he said last week in our podcast, and I've, I've certainly heard other people say as much

00:20:35.400 since, that what's happening here is that the Trump administration has recognized that the U.S.

00:20:41.460 cannot fight multiple wars now. We can't fight a war with Russia and then also maybe fight a war with 0.84

00:20:48.140 China and then also maybe help Israel fight a war with Iran. I mean, we, we actually have to triage

00:20:54.420 our commitments here. And the charitable analysis of what's happening with Ukraine is that Trump has

00:21:01.600 recognized that we have to really put our entire focus on this, this rising risk of, of a collision

00:21:09.260 with China. And so we have to get out of the business of policing Europe, let Europe take care

00:21:14.700 of Europe. Ukraine is not a crucial American interest, even if, you know, you might think we

00:21:20.560 have some moral, um, obligation to support a democracy that has been attacked by a, um, a true

00:21:28.600 enemy of democracy. We're just doing triage here and we're, we're now pivoting to Asia. What's wrong

00:21:35.840 with that analysis? So this is one of the great frustrations I have in the Trump era. And, and Neil

00:21:42.940 Ferguson's a friend of mine, as I'm not ascribing this necessarily to him. First of all, this, the goalpost

00:21:48.780 moving you referenced at the very beginning of the conversation among your friends, you know, there's

00:21:52.320 a lot of that in the intellectual classes in part because a lot of people want to be relevant, to have

00:21:59.900 influence in the administration, to be part of the conversation. And you just see that again, I'm not

00:22:05.800 ascribing this to Neil, but like it's, it's replete across vast swaths of the world I live in. This idea that

00:22:12.140 somehow you can define reality slightly differently and get as a defensive, both a defensive Trump and

00:22:18.640 an inducement to get him to do something and, or to make the best of the policy. And I've seen a lot

00:22:26.040 of that about the, the mineral deal with Ukraine, where people are just sort of wish casting about

00:22:31.580 it, but in the abstract, right? You, the case that you lay out, that is a, that is a, on its face,

00:22:36.840 an intellectually defensible argument. It is, you know, foreign policy requires making,

00:22:44.080 governing is, to govern is to choose, right? And in a world of scarce resources, you put your resources where

00:22:50.420 they are most needed for the, the problems ahead. And I get all of that. My first problem with it as a defense of

00:22:57.520 what Trump is doing is that it's not a defense of what Trump is doing. It's this, you know, the, you hear it all the

00:23:05.300 time, oh, what Trump is doing, he's giving tough love to NATO, for NATO to fix itself. The idea that Trump really wants NATO to

00:23:11.080 become robust and strong is just nonsense, right? It's not, it's not his goal. He feels like he, he sees the world stage in this

00:23:19.080 very zero sum way. He's a real estate guy. And he thinks if, if, if, if they win, we lose. That, you know, he thinks the EU was

00:23:27.080 created, he said it just the other day, it was EU was created to screw America. Right. And it's just, it's a historical bullshit. And you can go

00:23:35.080 down a long list of these kinds of arguments that are pretextual rationalizations for what Trump is

00:23:44.240 actually doing. You know, like when he calls Zelensky a dictator, he, he doesn't actually care. He

00:23:50.220 doesn't, in his, in his own moral universe, he doesn't think dictator is an insult. He just thinks

00:23:55.460 that's the nearest weapon to hand that is usefully insulting against adversaries. When he was asked if

00:24:02.000 Putin was a dictator, like two days later, he says, I don't like to use that. I don't use that

00:24:05.660 language lightly. Yeah. It's just all nonsense. Right. And so I think that it is good that Europe

00:24:12.480 is rearming and, or apparently is rearming. I think it's good that Germany is, is doing this. I think 0.89

00:24:18.360 Britain has been negligent in all sorts of ways about its national security and all that.

00:24:23.060 But at the end of the day, part of my fundamental problem with this supposedly new realism, and I, I've,

00:24:30.120 I've long believed that realism is kind of nonsense. It's basically the best working definition of a

00:24:35.580 realist, of a foreign policy realist is an ideologue who lost an argument. It is a way, it's a rhetorical

00:24:40.920 trick of being able to say, oh, those ideologues are screwing things up. And if you'd listen to me

00:24:45.820 where I actually understand the facts and I have an empirical grasp on reality, everything would be

00:24:50.360 different. And, but the problem with that is that it is a fact of, of realism rightly understood that

00:24:58.540 national honor matters, that we have made commitments to allies, that, that when we betray

00:25:05.680 those allies, when we betray our commitments, when we break our word, that has consequences for us going

00:25:12.000 forward in all sorts of ways. And if you, if you want America to remain, if you want the U.S. dollar

00:25:18.300 to remain the world's reserve currency, pissing off basically all the other rich friends we have

00:25:24.340 is not a way to do that, right? I mean, China doesn't want the dollar to be the reserve currency.

00:25:29.960 Europeans and the Japanese, they go along with it because they're our allies and they're part of

00:25:34.060 the international order we created. When we tell them, you can't trust us, that we are going to look

00:25:39.320 for maximizing, literally maximizing profit over your misfortune. The idea that you're going to get

00:25:45.600 them to cooperate in all, cooperate in all these other institutions is just not, is, is fantasy. And

00:25:51.960 it's also just, it's, it's, it's undermining, I don't want to get too poetic, but it undermines

00:25:57.200 the country in all sorts of sort of almost spiritual ways. When you tell people that the best way to

00:26:03.820 conduct foreign policy is to belittle your friends and allies and make friends with your enemies and to

00:26:09.920 say that all that stuff about freedom and, and, and liberty and leading the free world, that was all

00:26:15.600 BS and we don't care about that. What Americans think about their own country starts to change.

00:26:21.920 And I just, one small example of this, because I thought it was just so evil. When we bullied Israel 0.99

00:26:27.120 into voting with us in the UN, where we voted with North Korea and China and Russia and all of that,

00:26:33.940 you know, Israel has a vested, deep and abiding national interest in maintaining the idea that

00:26:42.160 the world should come to the aid of scrappy little democracies fighting for their survival.

00:26:48.060 Yeah.

00:26:48.360 But when you force Israel to vote with us and the, basically the pitch was, yeah, you got to put all 0.57

00:26:52.320 that stuff aside because in reality you rely on us to keep you around. And, and so the Israelis were 0.98

00:26:59.640 left with an impossible choice, be loyal to an abstract rhetorical principle that is in their

00:27:04.480 interest or piss off an administration that they desperately need help from right now. And so we,

00:27:10.240 to bully them into doing that, we didn't even let them abstain was a perfect example of basically

00:27:15.700 making dishonor a linchpin of our foreign policy. Yeah. I think this is a crucial point and it puts the

00:27:22.720 lie to this, this traditional opposition between realism and idealism or, you know, moralism or

00:27:29.220 some other variant of it. I mean, because ideals and moral principles have real consequences. So

00:27:37.200 if your, your realism has to embrace the causal efficacy of having people trust you, having people

00:27:43.540 admire you, having people want to help you because you're the good guy, you know, you really are,

00:27:48.100 it matters if you really are the good guys, you know, and because there really are bad guys out

00:27:52.740 there. And that's the thing I just can't understand in this analysis. It's, I mean, for years, for as

00:27:59.140 long as we've been alive virtually, the enemies of democracy and now, you know, Putin is, you know,

00:28:04.360 exhibit A in that cast of characters have been trying to advance the claim that all of our ideals are the,

00:28:14.560 you know, wanting to support the liberal democratic order because it's a good thing. It's better than

00:28:19.720 the alternatives. All of that is bullshit, right? There, there really are no deeper ethical principles 0.99

00:28:25.320 that govern the relationships among nations. There's just raw power. There's just bullies and 0.68

00:28:31.380 aspiring bullies. And Trump in, you know, a few short weeks seems to have fully ratified that view of

00:28:40.440 America. And I mean, he's, he's just revealed us to be totally transactional and, uh, extractive in

00:28:47.760 our relationships with our allies and even extortionate. I mean, the, the, the, you know,

00:28:52.660 Zelensky effectively has a gun to his head. And as you point out, you know, Trump and Vance waltz in

00:28:59.540 there and start demanding, you know, mineral rights and even a profit on the war. And then, you know,

00:29:08.320 hector him for not, uh, you know, dressing appropriately and saying, thank you obsequiously

00:29:13.600 enough. It is a complete immolation of our moral stature on the world stage. And yet the Republicans

00:29:21.720 I know who voted for Trump simply don't care. They don't think any of that matters on some level.

00:29:28.600 Yeah. At least they don't care now. Right. But look, I mean, this gets to the point we were talking

00:29:33.020 about before about the importance of courage, right? I was listening to an interview with a man

00:29:39.140 on the street interview with the Ukrainian, um, on, I guess it was on NPR the other day and he was

00:29:43.920 making the point and like, look, we, there are reasons for hope. Donald Trump isn't a king. He

00:29:48.200 was saying he doesn't, he doesn't speak for all of America. America, we know Americans are on our side

00:29:54.560 and, you know, and we have hope that, you know, there will be pressure put on the administration to

00:29:58.940 change course. I think that, that hope is alas going to be somewhat in vain, but if you don't

00:30:05.160 speak up, right, if you don't actually lend actual evidence to that hope that, that Trump doesn't

00:30:12.940 speak for all of America, if you just go along with it, then it becomes true. Right. And so I wish

00:30:18.760 more Republicans would speak up. I wish more conservatives would speak up. I wish they would,

00:30:24.880 they don't have to necessarily have to say I was wrong about Trump and he's a horrible person,

00:30:28.560 but they just have to say, look, there are good guys and bad guys in this story. And the, you know,

00:30:33.140 the tests are so small. I mean, it's something out of, it's a very Orwellian sort of Stalinist kind of

00:30:38.880 thing where you force people to lie. That's the key, right? You make them lie and then you kind of

00:30:45.780 own them. And so forcing people to lie about whether or not they think Russia started the war

00:30:51.820 is just a way to signal that truth will not save you, right? That, that you cannot tell the truth.

00:30:59.040 You cannot have the courage of your convictions and speak honestly. And that creates an environment

00:31:04.000 that I think makes it easier for people, the ones that are really frustrating you. And I,

00:31:08.880 I know lots of people just like the ones you're describing to convince themselves, right? I mean,

00:31:12.720 one of the reasons I ultimately left Fox was that I was basically not allowed to criticize Trump on air.

00:31:19.160 Now, no one told me that I was just never asked a question where I, and my whole thing is I don't

00:31:25.480 lie, right? I, you know, you ask me a question and I'll answer honestly. So if you only ask me

00:31:29.060 questions about what I think of Nancy Pelosi and you never asked me what I think about Donald Trump,

00:31:33.360 it'll sound like I'm on board. And the way Fox operates, the way, you know, the, the most of the

00:31:40.220 MAGA echo chamber operates and the Republican party now operates is that silence is taken as

00:31:47.720 approval and consent. And you create an environment where breaking that silence gets punished. And

00:31:54.200 well, the, the case you just referenced is, is even stranger and in some sense, more depressing than

00:32:01.260 that. I mean, I agree with you that Trump and, you know, authoritarians generally put up a series

00:32:05.860 of loyalty tests and you, you, you fail them at your peril, uh, at least political peril. But, uh,

00:32:12.040 in this case, his claim that Ukraine started the war, I don't, I don't know if you noticed this, but

00:32:18.320 it struck me this way at the time. And then I heard, uh, John put put Horitz on the commentary

00:32:23.560 podcast say that this is how it struck him. And so when Trump said that Ukraine started the war,

00:32:30.860 it was almost like he misspoke and then he just couldn't take his foot out of his mouth. And he just

00:32:36.520 doubled down, he doubled down on it. And then everyone was forced to insist that the emperor

00:32:41.760 has clothes after that. But it's like, he actually wasn't making the claim in any kind of straightforward

00:32:47.780 way that, that no history is other than you think it is. Ukraine actually started the war.

00:32:53.900 He was just started, he was sort of riffing. He was saying, you had, you've been, you've been

00:32:58.180 fighting for three years. You shouldn't, you should have put an end to it. You shouldn't have started

00:33:01.780 it. And he, like he sort of blurted out the phrase, you shouldn't have started it and was anchored to

00:33:06.580 it. And then, then you watched the ripples through the, the epistemology of the Republican party,

00:33:13.980 where people had to figure out how to, how to construe that utterance as anything other than,

00:33:20.920 than delusional. Yeah. No, I, I, I think you're exactly right. John's a good friend of mine. Um,

00:33:26.000 I think he's right about that. You know, I mean, there's a dynamic, there's that old joke about how

00:33:30.780 you never want to be the first person to stop clapping when Stalin, when Stalin enters the room,

00:33:36.740 right? You know, there was that, I, I, it might be apocryphal. I don't know if it was, uh,

00:33:41.360 Solzhenitsyn or I think it's from the gulag archipelago, but there's a story of, you know,

00:33:45.560 like people clapping to the point of just excruciating pain, like clapping continuously

00:33:50.060 for 20 minutes. And the first person who stops was actually killed. Right. I mean, that's, that's,

00:33:55.280 uh, yeah. I mean, I mean, and so again, we're not there, but that's the emotional temperament

00:34:00.300 that we're trying to kind of talking about. I mean, I'll give you just small, very small

00:34:04.920 anecdote about this. You may probably, probably don't even remember, but very early in his first

00:34:10.400 term, he butt tweeted something. Uh-huh. Covfefe. Yeah. It was like just, it was obviously just like

00:34:17.120 a stupid typo, butt tweet kind of thing. And I made some jokes about it in the, in a column or 0.99

00:34:23.300 something. And one of the right, I can't remember if it was the federalist or national greatness,

00:34:27.840 but one of those sort of turd polishing Trump is great in all things, things wrote an entire piece

00:34:34.100 condemning me for not understanding that it was possible that what Trump was really doing

00:34:42.080 was tweeting a message to the persecuted people of the middle East that he was on their side and

00:34:49.760 that they should rise up because Covfefe is only a couple letters off of some word in Arabic that would,

00:34:57.140 and it's like you, the work, you guys are going to give yourselves hernias trying to make his,

00:35:03.580 it was like the, the, the Sharpie thing with including Alabama and the hurricane and everyone,

00:35:09.220 oh, you know, he was right. You know, it's like, you're not doing him favors politically. I mean,

00:35:15.180 forgets character logically that ship has sailed, but like if you surround yourself only with people 0.99

00:35:19.840 who think every brain fart is brilliant, when you actually do something stupid or wrong, 0.97

00:35:25.260 that's very scary because no one's going to have the courage or the political muscle 0.98

00:35:29.200 to say, Mr. President, back off on that. And in an environment where everybody is told that the

00:35:34.780 first test, I mean, like the job interviews for a lot of positions in government, you are asked who

00:35:40.240 won the 2020 election. And if you answer wrong, you don't get the job or you get fired or you don't

00:35:44.560 get promotion or whatever. And if you answer wrong to the, one of the other questions that's been

00:35:48.840 reported was who were the real patriots on January 6th, right? He wants a government full of people

00:35:54.500 who either are so lacking in integrity that they're willing to lie about those kinds of basic

00:36:00.580 fundamental things or so deluded that they actually believe the correct, quote unquote, correct answers.

00:36:06.520 Either way, it's just no way to actually run a government. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about

00:36:12.280 how you trim a government. What's your impression of what Elon is doing and the Doge efforts?

00:36:20.660 So I've tried really hard to be case by case about a lot of this stuff. And I have some

00:36:26.040 criticisms for how the media, the Democrats are treating some of this as making the real story

00:36:31.660 unfairness.

00:36:33.800 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

00:36:39.000 samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense

00:36:44.280 podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't

00:36:49.500 afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast

00:36:54.520 is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

00:37:03.800 and you can subscribe to the channel. And you can subscribe to the channel. And you can

Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 10, 2025

#403 — Sanity Check on Trump 2.0

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript