#426 — How Bad Is It？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
189.90327
Summary
David Frum joins me to talk about the corruption scandal that has rocked the Trump administration, and why he thinks it s worse than he thought it would be. He also talks about the economic problems that have plagued the United States in the first half of Trump s second term.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
00:00:11.740
hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing
00:00:15.720
the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
00:00:20.060
Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore
00:00:26.240
it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're
00:00:30.220
doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with David Frum. David, thanks for joining me.
00:00:41.220
It's been a while. I feel like we speak more than we do because I just consume your stuff
00:00:46.120
over at The Atlantic, so I know what you're thinking about, but I think it's been some
00:00:52.160
I think that's right. Since then, I've ventured into your domain. I've started a podcast of my
00:00:56.900
own, and I want to salute you. I think I always knew that it was not easy. I didn't know how not
00:01:02.720
easy it was. So, Maestro, you know how it's done, and I take my hat off to you.
00:01:08.660
Oh, nice. Well, congratulations on the show. It's the David Frum Show over at The Atlantic.
00:01:14.140
That's fantastic. Well, let's jump into the current moment. We're, what, six or
00:01:22.140
or so months into the second Trump administration. There's a lot we could talk about where the
00:01:28.320
fires of controversy are currently raging on the, about the Epstein case. Trump and his
00:01:35.620
courtiers have been amazingly inept at putting those fires out, and I would love to know the
00:01:42.180
reasons why you think that is. But we'll start with just the big picture on the domestic front.
00:01:48.680
How has it been these last six months from your point of view, and what has surprised you? What
00:01:54.000
has been worse than you thought? What has been better than you thought?
00:01:57.840
Yeah. Well, here is the thing that has been worse than I thought, and this is one of the two or three
00:02:01.700
biggest stories, which is the corruption has been on a fantastically larger scale than anything I
00:02:07.020
imagined or anything that I was ready for from the first Trump administration.
00:02:11.780
In the first Trump administration, Trump used techniques like making the Secret Service follow
00:02:17.240
him around to his various resorts. He used techniques like making sure that any Republican
00:02:23.300
candidate who wanted his blessing had to use one of his facilities. He pressed foreign governments
00:02:27.960
that needed American favor to use his facilities for their national day events and to stay. He would
00:02:33.180
ask diplomats who visited him, where did you stay last night? But over, that probably moved some
00:02:38.720
single millions of dollars into his pocket, maybe something over $10 million. There are different
00:02:43.400
estimates in the first term. So in the second term, he has left all, we're talking now, much
00:02:48.880
faster sums of money through the meme coins. As you and I speak, that President Trump is about to go to
00:02:54.860
Scotland to open a new golf course of his own. He's got golf courses in Vietnam and other countries
00:03:00.740
that seek America's favor. So all of that is bigger by a factor of 10 or 100 than it was in the first
00:03:05.980
term. So that's one thing that has changed. A second thing that has changed is the trade disputes
00:03:11.060
of the first term were definitely a problem that hurt Americans. Before Trump became president,
00:03:16.220
the United States was the largest exporter of soybeans in the world. And over the first Trump
00:03:19.920
term, it fell into second place behind Brazil because Trump alienated so many soybean buyers.
00:03:24.780
But the trade disruptions we were seeing and the threat to the American economy and the world
00:03:28.540
economy, that's much bigger. The damage to alliances is much bigger. And of course, the shock to America's
00:03:36.900
future standing from this enormous debt that Trump is incurring through his fiscal measures, that's much
00:03:41.900
bigger. Yeah. And also some of those indiscretions are linked, right? So the trade disruptions seem in
00:03:48.780
many cases to be motivated by Trump's personal corruption, right? I mean, you cited Vietnam, right?
00:03:55.980
So the reason to slap a 46% tariff on Vietnam is that their remedy for that is to immediately
00:04:03.020
greenlight a $1.5 billion Trump family resort deal. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I'm speaking to you
00:04:09.260
right now from Canada, which has been a special target of Trump's animosity. And a lot of people
00:04:13.900
in Canada are sort of baffling. What the hell happened here? What did Canada do? Canada's linked to the
00:04:19.820
United... Canada signed all these trade agreements. It signed a new trade agreement with the United States
00:04:23.560
that was signed by Donald Trump. He's just ignored that. And I think a big part of the Canadian
00:04:27.720
problem is the Trump organization had two hotels in Canada, one in Toronto and one in Vancouver.
00:04:33.040
And they both went bust. The Toronto hotel, Trump just licensed his name and it went bust for sort of
00:04:38.440
semi-objective economic reasons during the Great Recession or soon after. But the Vancouver hotel went
00:04:43.680
bust. Trump owned it and operated it. It went bust because Vancouverites wouldn't set foot in his
00:04:48.360
building during his first round. And he seems to be really mad about that and is blowing up
00:04:52.300
the North American common market or the North American trading zone to punish Vancouver for
00:04:57.420
not liking his hotel more. So why is it in your view that half of America appears not to care about
00:05:05.580
this? Is the problem that people don't know any of the facts you just elucidated or they've heard
00:05:14.780
about them but they think it's fake news or they understand exactly the shape and scope of this
00:05:20.960
corruption. They understand that the meme coin is a device for the pain of bribes directly to the
00:05:28.960
first family. They know that really there is no precedent in American history for a president
00:05:35.540
to use U.S. trade policy and foreign policy as a mechanism by which to extract tribute from foreign
00:05:43.940
governments. And essentially he's running a protection racket. And it's both internationally
00:05:48.160
where he's putting the global economy at risk for his personal gain and it's domestically where he's
00:05:55.120
shaking down some of our largest corporations. I mean we have news organizations settling spurious
00:06:02.000
lawsuits that they were almost certain to win but this is a way of just funneling money in Trump's
00:06:07.100
direction and hopefully getting his favor on future deals. Is it that people know all of this and
00:06:14.220
simply do not care? What's your interpretation of half of the half of America that still supports
00:06:19.280
Trump? Well I don't think we should be so surprised that this would happen. But American politics has
00:06:25.220
always been deeply tribal. This has been a two-party system more or less for almost all of its political
00:06:30.680
existence. Now who's in the tribes changes from time to time and the tribes are always remaking
00:06:35.940
themselves but they're two big tribes. And I think the way to think about how strong these tribal
00:06:40.880
loyalties are. So 1932 is probably one of the worst years in American history. Bottom of the Great
00:06:45.960
Depression. People are literally, Americans are literally going hungry. Incumbent President Herbert
00:06:51.600
Hoover who presided over the disaster ran for re-election in 1932 and got 38 percent of the vote.
00:06:58.140
So there's a core 35 percent that's just unmovable. Yeah. It's called the base for a reason. It doesn't
00:07:05.920
move. And if you ask people in 1932, look, things are terrible. Why are you voting for President
00:07:11.660
Herbert Hoover? They would have deep reasons of identity. Well my grandfather was at Antietam
00:07:17.360
under Grant and we vowed we will always vote Republican no matter what. Or the Democrats of
00:07:22.820
the party of the Catholic Church. Or the Democrats of the party of liquor. So we don't care about these
00:07:27.380
economic facts. We are voting for the union against the Catholic Church, against liquor. And that's why
00:07:32.300
this household votes Republican in 1932. And there you could tell the same story about Democrats. So
00:07:37.680
elections are always decided at the margins. And I think that's one of the reasons that Donald Trump
00:07:42.280
is so freaked out about the Epstein story. Because that is one of those rare events that can shake up
00:07:47.360
the tribal structure and move people from column A to column B. Because Trump has already told them,
00:07:53.860
Trump talkers and validators have told them, this is the biggest scandal in the world. It's the most
00:07:58.580
important scandal in the world. And only Donald Trump can get to the bottom of it. And it's as
00:08:04.120
if, I'm going to borrow an analogy from my son, it's as if they built a giant device of paranoia and
00:08:10.660
fear and rage and hatred and never thought to ask, in whose basement are we building this device?
00:08:17.580
Oh, it's the basement of the guy we think we're supposed to be following. It's in his basement.
00:08:22.120
And when it blows, it blows him up, not the people we want it to blow up.
00:08:25.640
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to get to Epstein because it's the one thing, the one controversy
00:08:32.080
that seems to be doing him some damage with the base or with certainly parts of the base.
00:08:37.940
But before we get there, let's linger on this litany of abuses you have put forward. I mean,
00:08:44.540
there's the additional problem of how needlessly provocative and cruel the immigration crackdown
00:08:51.620
has been. Again, I feel like there are many people who voted for Trump who in the abstract
00:08:57.420
supported some of these policies and would have been even insouciant about his corruption because
00:09:03.920
they just think, oh, well, it's more or less the same thing all politicians do. You know, Nancy Pelosi
00:09:08.600
made some stock trades that are hard to explain, et cetera. So they just put it all in the same bin.
00:09:15.220
I mean, they're insensitive to the scale of the problem, right? A million dollars is the same as a
00:09:19.260
billion dollars, really, if you're going to look at it that lazily. But I think many people are
00:09:25.880
genuinely surprised by the optics of the immigration crackdown. How has the implementation of this
00:09:32.540
policy struck you? And why does it seem, I mean, frankly, it seems reckless. I'm surprised by how
00:09:40.540
ruthless and chaotic they seem to want to be in the implementation of this policy.
00:09:47.160
Yes. No, that's a very important question. I should have mentioned it at the opening. And it's
00:09:51.660
one that hits me especially hard because I have been arguing for a long time that America needs
00:09:57.060
a stronger border policy. And this is before the surge of 2020. This is before even the surge of 2014.
00:10:03.900
I've been writing this since the 1990s. Because my view has always been immigration, if done right,
00:10:09.060
is a great benefit to a country. So it's very important to do it right. Because if you do it
00:10:15.560
wrong, you will get a backlash. And the backlash will be even worse than a failed immigration policy.
00:10:21.520
I'll remind you of your own famous line. I mean, many of us have made this point,
00:10:24.720
but you made it most sententiously. You said, I believe, if liberals won't police borders,
00:10:32.460
Right. All right. And you get Brexit and you get other forms of self-harm.
00:10:36.520
So it's been, and so I was, my first article about the Biden administration, when it took
00:10:40.860
over in January of 2021, was they began undoing many of the Trump restrictions on the border that
00:10:46.740
had kept people from flowing across. I said, this is the first and biggest mistake they make. If they
00:10:51.180
get, if they undo this, they are courting a lot of damage because the whole world wants to come to
00:10:56.580
the United States. And if you don't police the border, you'll have the problem.
00:10:59.400
The answer people like me insisted was the way you enforce the border is not at the border. It's
00:11:05.760
at the workplace. And what you should have a system where, when an employer is looking to hire
00:11:10.460
people, there's a requirement the employer check that they're legal in the country. The same way
00:11:15.080
that the employer should check that they're not a minor. In the same way that the employer should
00:11:18.180
check that they actually work the number of hours that are legally allowed to be worked. And that
00:11:22.780
there should be consequences for the employer. If you should treat immigration as another aspect
00:11:27.500
of labor law. And if employers get the message that the government is checking whether the employees
00:11:32.120
are legal, there will be less incentive for people to enter the country in the first place.
00:11:36.020
And the reason I was so emphatic about this over many, many articles was if you start, because the
00:11:41.840
alternative is our walls and roundups and the country won't stand for it. We are seeing scenes
00:11:47.380
that shock the conscience. We've got this network now of camps that are being built in which people
00:11:53.040
have not been convicted of any crime or just here illegally in the country, which is not a crime.
00:11:56.820
It's a violation of status, but it's not a crime to be in the country illegally. It's against the
00:12:01.080
law, but a lot, you know, so is driving recklessly, not necessarily a crime. They're rounding up people.
00:12:06.840
They're removing status from categories of people like Venezuelans and others who were granted
00:12:11.960
temporary protected status, who thought they did the right thing, and who now find themselves
00:12:15.680
without status and subject to being dragged to a camp. The country won't wear this. And Trump is
00:12:21.440
going to create a situation where, in addition to all of the terrible suffering that people have done
00:12:25.900
nothing really wrong, other than break a labor law to make a better life, they're in camps. He's also
00:12:31.360
going to change the political structure about immigration in this country in a way that is going
00:12:35.160
to be to his own harm and those of the people who follow him.
00:12:38.060
Do you actually think that the country won't put up with it? I mean, haven't we shown an inclination
00:12:43.780
to put up with it thus far? I mean, obviously, there are people, you know, a handful of people
00:12:48.780
in the streets of Los Angeles who, at least for a time, showed some signs of not putting up with it.
00:12:54.640
But in terms of the way the rest of the country views the so-called sanctuary cities where these
00:13:01.180
raids are happening, I feel like there's, it's not even an acquiescence. There's basically,
00:13:06.200
at least perceived, full acceptance of it as this is what you liberals get. I mean, you wanted your
00:13:12.420
nannies and your housekeepers and your gardeners to be as cheap as possible. We don't have the same
00:13:16.620
black market economy and that kind of labor over here in Ohio or Pennsylvania. You're getting what
00:13:21.860
you deserve and we wanted these people out of the country.
00:13:24.240
Well, as I said, the base doesn't change. But here are two things to keep in mind.
00:13:27.980
One is, there is a lot of polling about how attitudes toward immigration, which hardened during
00:13:33.000
the Biden administration, are softening under Trump, quite dramatically so. And the second thing to
00:13:37.640
keep in mind is, one of the reasons that Donald Trump won the presidency with an actual plurality
00:13:41.980
of the vote in 2024, unlike 2016, was that quite a number of Hispanics, especially Hispanic men,
00:13:47.480
moved in his direction. Now, I'm going to forget the statistic off the top of my head,
00:13:51.340
and I probably shouldn't quote statistics off the top of my head anyway, but what percentage
00:13:54.400
of Hispanic voters have a relative who is in the country without status, but it's high?
00:13:59.840
And Hispanics are not immigration single-issue voters. That was a big mistake that Jeb Bush made
00:14:05.400
back in 2011 and 12 to believe, or sorry, 15, 16, to believe that there would be single-issue
00:14:10.940
voters on immigration. That's not true. And many Hispanics welcome more enforcement. But if you're
00:14:16.700
rounding up their mother-in-law and putting her in a camp, that's going to be a problem,
00:14:20.880
and it's going to be a problem with people, with voters that were trending Trump and that Trump
00:14:23.800
needed to keep. Do you think we're just getting started in the unveiling of this ugliness,
00:14:29.620
or is this, have we seen the sort of the peak of what is morally outrageous?
00:14:35.980
And in the immigration side, we've built a new bureaucracy. ICE is soon to be bigger than the
00:14:39.820
Marine Corps, if I read the numbers right. And you can't build up a law enforcement agency that fast
00:14:44.760
without terrible risks. So the bureaucratic machinery that is built is going to keep chomp,
00:14:49.160
chomp, chomping, and there'll be more and more terrible stories. And first people will read about
00:14:53.220
them, and then they will hear about them, and then they may feel them. And then you'll have cases where
00:14:58.840
a family, some of whose members are in the country legally, has other members who are in the camps.
00:15:03.420
And so it's not just going to be the Fox News audience. It's not just going to be,
00:15:06.540
you know, the diehard voter for one side or another. It's going to be people who
00:15:10.040
were potential Republicans who are going to say, well, I would have been, but now my mother-in-law
00:15:17.260
So what else strikes you as surprising from the first six months? I'll remind you, we have three and a
00:15:25.920
half years left, right? So many things, I have to remind myself of this because I keep noticing
00:15:33.400
that I'm living with a kind of political illusion that the shape of the thing is already fully
00:15:41.100
manifest, whereas it's obviously evolving hour by hour, and who knows what we're going to be
00:15:47.860
Yeah. Well, let's start with some things that are not as bad as they could be,
00:15:52.060
so we don't sink too deep into the gloom. Ukraine is still fighting. Trump is obviously not sympathetic
00:15:57.720
to Ukraine. Vice President Vance, even more hostile to Ukraine, but he's not stopped the
00:16:02.060
Ukrainian forces from fighting. And weapons and support do continue to trickle to Ukraine.
00:16:07.460
They're interruptions, but they're getting something. And it looks like they may get some
00:16:11.220
more stuff. Again, not enough, not as much as they should have, not maybe enough to win,
00:16:15.080
but enough not to lose. I have to say, as a supporter of the state of Israel, I have been impressed and
00:16:19.700
grateful that the Trump administration has improved the already generous support for Israel that the
00:16:25.560
Biden administration gave. And that has led to some decisive results. I think also the kind of,
00:16:32.440
I had thought the uncertainty that Trump was creating about trade would move us faster to
00:16:36.760
recession, but the opposite seems to be happening. It's because Trump, he does something dumb and then
00:16:41.600
he retracts it. He does something else dumb and then he retracts it. And I thought the market would
00:16:45.540
say, well, in that case, we have to stop investing altogether because who knows what the future
00:16:49.600
is. But the market keeps hoping for the best and paying more attention to the retractions of the
00:16:53.960
dumb policy than the dumb policy. So we're not in a recession. It looks like right now in the summer
00:16:58.340
of 2025. It doesn't seem so. And we hope that maybe we can get through the rest of this year
00:17:03.160
without too much of a recession. So that would be a good thing if we could avoid that.
00:17:07.060
Although it does seem on its face, completely irrational. The market seems to have drawn the
00:17:12.320
lesson that there's actually less uncertainty now than there was before so-called Liberation Day.
00:17:18.880
Right. I mean, all of this lurching back and forth, it seems to have convinced the market that this is
00:17:23.060
better than it was four months ago. Yeah. Well, the Trump trade policy has failed
00:17:28.580
and has predicted to do what it pretended to want to do. What it's pretended to want to do
00:17:33.580
is to bring back manufacturing to the United States. And that is doomed to fail for two reasons.
00:17:38.680
One is if you're producing something where your costs are higher than a Chinese or Vietnamese
00:17:43.540
competitor. And the government says, okay, we'll protect you from the competition. You're safe.
00:17:48.720
It doesn't matter that your costs are 20% or 30% or 40% higher than the Chinese or Vietnamese. We're
00:17:54.500
going to put up a wall to protect you. To which the investor will say, okay, but the investment I'm
00:17:59.080
contemplating is a very big one. And it's going to take quite a lot of years to pay itself off.
00:18:03.560
Can you assure me that this protection is going to be in place for the next 15 years? Because I'm not
00:18:08.160
making this investment unless I'm guaranteed 15 years of protection. And obviously Trump
00:18:12.800
can't protect that. And so we have seen business investment not responding. The second thing,
00:18:17.040
and this is a point that the Trump people cannot, will not understand, and that you can't get
00:18:21.080
protections to understand. Every product is also an input. So when you raise the price of a product,
00:18:28.080
you are making, of one step in the industrial process, you're raising every price. So fine,
00:18:33.820
when you protect steel and protect it from foreign competition, and you then say, we also want to
00:18:39.120
bring back shipping to the United States. What do you think ships are made of? You've raised the
00:18:44.700
cost of the ship. So you pretty soon, it's like the house that Jack built. And when America was
00:18:48.900
more protectionist back in the 19th century, this was all that politics was about. The wool people
00:18:53.700
would want protection. So the coats would need protection. The coat people would get protection.
00:18:57.900
So every industry that used coats would need protection and so on forever. And one of the reasons
00:19:02.940
that the United States changed and abandoned the protections policy was to say, you can't protect
00:19:07.600
everything, but you must protect everything if this is going to work. And the whole thing is crazy
00:19:12.240
and dysfunctional and expensive. So don't do it. Well, as you said, there are a few, if not silver
00:19:19.260
linings, there are things that are not as bad as one would have feared. I mean, the change of posture
00:19:25.920
with respect to Ukraine, since that awful Oval Office meeting with Zelensky has been good. Although it's,
00:19:32.520
it hasn't been principled. I mean, there's been this deterioration in his love affair with Putin
00:19:38.080
simply because Putin keeps humiliating him. And so we're seeing, again, U.S. foreign policy get bent
00:19:45.180
by the brain chemistry of the lone maniac in the Oval Office who perceives everything through the
00:19:52.940
politics of personal slights and flattery and the payments of tribute, et cetera. So, you know,
00:19:59.220
who knows what policy will change as a result of the next insult or the next piece of flattery.
00:20:07.240
And I think, you know, one hopes that there's a more principled stance underwriting his support for
00:20:17.000
Israel. I mean, he has, you know, on balance always been quite supportive of Israel and that would
00:20:22.940
explain his popularity there, except he has shown signs of, again, just being pushed around by any
00:20:31.660
perceived slight. I mean, I remember in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I really think, I think
00:20:36.660
the first thing he's had to say about that atrocity was something petty about, you know, Netanyahu
00:20:44.520
not, you know, treating him well. I mean, we can only imagine had the mullahs in Iran offered him a
00:20:51.560
sufficiently large golf course deal, we might have a different policy with respect to the Middle East
00:20:56.720
right now. I think we have another big problem with coming with Iran, which is, look, we all hope,
00:21:02.420
I think we all hope that the Trump actions against Iran were decisive and that the, and we've reached
00:21:07.360
the end of the story, that he's done significant damage to their nuclear program and we can close the
00:21:12.160
books on this for a long time. But what if that's not true? What if either the damage was not as total
00:21:18.300
as Trump said, or the mullahs have other tricks to play, whether that's regional, whether that's
00:21:24.080
global terrorism, whether it's something. What if this is a problem that requires more work than just
00:21:29.660
press a button, collect the accolades, forget about it? The whole Trump foreign policy idea is you do
00:21:36.340
something once and then it's over and you're a winner and you give yourself a parade. But foreign policy
00:21:41.540
doesn't work that way. And one of the things that, one of the ways I think we should consider,
00:21:46.560
when we're trying to think how serious are the threats to the United States from what's happening
00:21:50.360
today, one of the questions asked is how difficult will it be to undo? So the good news about the
00:21:56.180
Trump corruption is actually you can, as happened in the 1970s, you can have a period of cleanup.
00:22:01.840
So you could have a four or five years where both Congress and state legislators say, okay,
00:22:06.060
we have the corruption got out of hand and we're going to pass rules to make sure that nothing like
00:22:10.400
this ever happens again. You can, you can dial it back. Let's do that. You can fix it up. American
00:22:15.200
politics is sometimes more clean, sometimes less clean. We're in a dirty period. You can have a
00:22:18.880
clean period. The damage to world trade is not so easily fixed. If Ukraine goes under, that's not
00:22:24.420
fixed. If you get a long-term conflict with Iran, that's bigger than the one we've had. And above all,
00:22:30.680
and this is the most important thing, if American leadership is questioned by the allies who benefit
00:22:35.840
from it by the adversaries who used to fear it, I don't know how quickly you get that back. That's
00:22:40.120
a hard thing to reassert. Yeah. I don't know how you get it back given that whatever we do to get
00:22:46.160
it back, I mean, just imagine the next president who's presumably, if he did this or she did this
00:22:51.400
would not be J.D. Vance, just offers this omnibus mea culpa on behalf of the nation saying, we're
00:22:57.940
terribly sorry we did this to you. Trump was a monstrosity. He was a gift to our enemies and an enemy
00:23:03.940
to our friends. We want a hard reset of all of our relationships and we're going to resume something
00:23:10.860
like a normal role of leadership and collegiality with all other liberal democracies. The problem
00:23:18.440
is that there's one bell that cannot be unrung here, which is that we have announced to the world
00:23:24.300
that within any four-year political cycle, we are capable of reneging on everything. We're capable of
00:23:32.840
producing a tsunami of corruption and stupidity, the likes of which no one could have expected.
00:23:40.960
And I mean, it's impossible to exaggerate. We can befriend dictators. We can claim that the victims
00:23:47.780
of a war of aggressions actually started the war. I mean, there's just up is down and down is up.
00:23:53.760
And we are capable as a nation of, given all the protections against this that one would have
00:23:59.400
thought existed against this, we are capable of doing this on a dime in response to a 51% vote.
00:24:05.880
And who knows when we're going to do this to you again.
00:24:10.500
So let me give you some concrete examples of things that I think are going to be with us for a long
00:24:14.920
time. With the European allies whom Trump is so hostile to, there are deep commonalities of history,
00:24:21.200
of culture, legal systems. You know, the British, the Germans, they'll probably forgive the United
00:24:27.120
States sooner or later. But the great challenge to American power in this coming century, in this
00:24:33.380
present century will be China. And of course, China's neighborhood is very different. The
00:24:37.420
allies you need to balance China are countries that don't have that kind of affinity. Vietnam has no
00:24:42.680
sentimentality about America's role in Vietnamese history. The Indonesians don't have much. The
00:24:48.240
Indians have zero. The Filipinos may have like a little, but not much. So what all of these people
00:24:53.340
are wondering about is, can we, the Chinese are close, you're far. The Chinese and you are about
00:24:58.640
equally strong. You say you will protect us if things get tough. Can we trust you? And the
00:25:05.480
American answer is about 50% of the time. Yes. Yeah. We're good for 50% of the time. And you never
00:25:10.320
know in advance which 50% it's going to be. So the Vietnamese are going to think, and not just the
00:25:15.080
Vietnamese, but even more congenial countries like Australia are going to think, we need to hedge our
00:25:19.760
bets here. We can't be so close to the United States because they're not so reliable. Or here's
00:25:24.060
another concrete problem. Trump has used American weapon sales as a tool of not only national
00:25:30.720
strategy, but personal irritation. So one of the big questions that the Europeans have is the European
00:25:35.740
Union economy is at least equally big to the United States. Europe does not have an arms industry
00:25:40.660
competitive with the United States. And the French government has always said,
00:25:43.980
Europeans should buy European, even if the European weapons aren't at the moment quite as good as the
00:25:48.040
American weapons, because then they won't have to worry about being cut off. So when Trump is saying,
00:25:53.160
you know, we've got a kill switch in every weapon, whether that's true or not. He's the best
00:25:58.560
salesperson the French arms industry ever had. If you're a German, if you're a Pole, and you think,
00:26:03.560
should we buy the French system? I was in a, I won't use the specifics here. I was in a NATO country
00:26:08.360
at the earlier part of this year and had dinner with the defense minister who was contemplating a major
00:26:13.720
weapons purchase, at least major by the standards of that country. They had a series of bids, one
00:26:18.620
from American, the United States, one from France, one from some other country. The American system
00:26:23.720
was clearly the best, most capable, but it was also the most expensive. And they also had lost
00:26:29.040
confidence that they could trust it. They had bought, they had heard about this kill switch
00:26:32.700
rumor. Trump hadn't said it yet, but they had heard about it. They were worried about it. And they
00:26:36.320
were going to lean instead to a French or South Korean system because at least they could trust that
00:26:40.640
system. And after all, while it wasn't as good as the American system, it was still better than the
00:26:44.620
Russian system. Yeah. Yeah. So are you anticipating a new wave of nuclear proliferation as a result of
00:26:52.780
what's happened of late, especially our, our on-again, off-again support of Ukraine? I mean,
00:26:57.640
it seems to me that the only rational lesson to draw from Ukraine's experience on the one hand,
00:27:03.960
that maybe you could hold North Korea on a reason. If you'd like to continue listening to this
00:27:09.240
conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to
00:27:15.020
all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free
00:27:19.980
and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.