Making Sense - Sam Harris - #432 — The Undoing of America

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

00:00:30.200 doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with David French. David, thanks for joining

00:00:39.340 me again. Thanks so much for having me back. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's great to see you. I'm

00:00:43.200 a big fan of your writing. Remind people where they can read you online. New York Times. I have

00:00:48.660 a newsletter and a column every week at the Times, and then also podcasts pretty regularly. So just

00:00:55.100 go to the New York Times, and there I'll be. Do you publish anywhere else, or are you exclusive

00:00:59.260 to the Times now? All my written work is at the Times. I'm also on a, I have a podcast called

00:01:04.360 Advisory Opinions that I do with Sarah Isker, and that is covering the law and the Constitution,

00:01:11.280 basically exclusively with a little bit of free, like, dating advice for lawyers sprinkled

00:01:16.060 in there as well. Right. Well, we're not going to cover the dating advice, but we will talk about

00:01:20.520 the law a little bit. Let's start with your big picture experience of the last seven some

00:01:28.920 odd months. How has the second Trump term struck you? I would classify it as an assault on our

00:01:37.120 Republican form of government, is one way to put it. If you're thinking about the American system

00:01:44.120 and the American form of government, one of the things that's really important is you sort of break

00:01:49.540 down the two foundings of America, the first founding, the 17, you know, running from 1776

00:01:54.540 and the Declaration through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and then the second

00:01:59.540 founding is the Civil War and the Civil War amendments. The fundamental aim of the first

00:02:04.820 founding was establishing this Republican form of government. No monarchs, no centralized power

00:02:11.000 under one person. This is really fundamentally the entire object of that first founding is

00:02:16.960 establishing this Republican form of government. And what we've seen is in the last seven months is

00:02:22.720 what we've seen is an escalating attack on that Republican form of government. This is something

00:02:27.620 that's been happening for a while in the sense that the presidency has continued to just accumulate more

00:02:32.700 and more power over time. But it has now gotten to a point where that process is accelerating out of

00:02:38.920 control. And we're now seeing sort of a not just presidents accruing power sort of as part of a

00:02:47.300 incremental process, but now grabbing power. President Trump is grabbing power with both arms

00:02:53.780 in a way that is supported by particular MAGA legal theories and directly contradictory to not just the

00:03:01.520 letter of the Constitution, but the entire spirit of the Constitutional Project. So other than that,

00:03:07.280 things are going great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, before we get into more of what concerns you about

00:03:13.180 Trump and Trumpism and this assault upon our form of government, remind people about your political

00:03:20.620 biases such as they are, because I mean, one of the reasons why I love talking to someone like

00:03:25.420 yourself is that any allegation of partisanship just simply doesn't run through. So what is it? How do

00:03:30.960 you describe yourself politically? Well, I had been a lifelong Republican, so I was born in 69, came of age

00:03:37.120 politically during the Reagan presidency, would have long considered myself a Reagan conservative. So

00:03:43.780 I was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2012, supporting Mitt Romney, for example.

00:03:52.400 I was a member of the conservative legal movement. I was a former president of FIRE, the Foundation for

00:03:58.640 Individual Rights and Expression. I worked for conservative public interest legal organizations.

00:04:03.520 FIRE is not conservative. It's nonpartisan. But after I was at FIRE, I worked for conservative public

00:04:09.200 interest legal organizations. I'm a former army JAG officer served in Iraq during the surge. And right

00:04:17.360 until the rise of Trump, I would have proudly called myself a Republican, definitely called myself

00:04:23.900 conservative, still call myself conservative, but no longer call myself Republican.

00:04:27.940 Right, right. So what is the worst thing so far that has happened? It doesn't have to be one

00:04:35.880 thing. It just, what comes to mind when I ask you where the bright lines are? I mean, one of the

00:04:41.940 things that's most mystifying to me is to find myself in conversation with a smart person or an

00:04:47.400 ostensibly smart person who simply doesn't see anything that has happened that shatters any kind

00:04:55.000 of norm that should have been inviolate or, I mean, just like there's this kind of slow creep

00:05:00.060 where more and more becomes permissible. There's just too much to pay attention to. We just can't

00:05:06.860 follow the plot anymore. In Bannon's terms, the zone has been flooded fully with shit. And that turns 1.00

00:05:14.380 out to be so effective that you talk to people who really have nothing on their list of things that

00:05:20.400 seem so far out of the ordinary is to be disqualifying for this president or the political

00:05:27.400 movement behind him. What's clearly crossed the line for you in the second time?

00:05:32.400 Yeah, there's a few things, but the one that really stands out to me, and it's not going to be one

00:05:37.200 incident, but it's the cumulative effect of a number of incidents, and that is the distortion of our system

00:05:43.020 of federal justice. So the distortion of the Department of Justice into an instrument that is being

00:05:49.140 stocked increasingly with Trumpist partisans, the explicit targeting, public explicit targeting of

00:05:55.780 political enemies for potential criminal investigations, or in some cases, maybe actual

00:06:00.880 investigations. We can talk about the Bolton search, for example. I'm withholding judgment on

00:06:05.840 the underlying merits. I've not seen the search warrant, for example. I don't know some of the underlying

00:06:11.820 facts, but I do know that the run-up to the search warrant and the conduct of the administration

00:06:15.740 after the search warrant absolutely transgresses prior DOJ practices. The firing of prosecutors of

00:06:23.420 the Jack Smith prosecution team, the pardoning of the January 6th rioters, all of these things

00:06:30.340 together very clearly indicate that there is a two-tiered system of justice, that Trump's allies

00:06:36.460 receive mercy, Trump's allies will even receive pardons, and Trump's enemies, at the very least,

00:06:42.780 are going to be subjected to the most heightened and exacting scrutiny. And at the worst, even innocent

00:06:48.580 people will feel the brunt of the law under this administration. And this is the kind of system of

00:06:55.940 justice that is far more reminiscent of monarchies or autocracies, where you have the monarch, the single

00:07:03.300 figure, where their will, their desire is what justice is. And so I would say the attack on the

00:07:10.760 Department of Justice followed very closely behind something that is not as much in the headlines,

00:07:17.060 but is the systematic purge we're seeing in the Department of Defense as well. Both of those are

00:07:23.740 very much related. They have similar impulses. They have similar outcomes. But the DOJ process,

00:07:30.740 the Department of Justice process, is sort of further down the road.

00:07:34.080 Yeah, this selection for loyalty above all, right, just purging the various branches of government of

00:07:42.980 anyone who, you know, has a history of having criticized him or, given that history, hasn't made

00:07:48.880 sufficiently obsequious amends. I mean, because obviously there are people in his orbit who did

00:07:53.920 criticize him, like his vice president. But I think if you bent the knee enough and low enough

00:07:58.860 in supplication, he's a fan of that as well. So, but this using loyalty as the test, it produces many

00:08:07.240 outcomes which are undesirable. But one is that it selects for people who are not ethical almost by

00:08:15.100 definition. I mean, selecting for people who are willing to pass some humiliating loyalty tests where

00:08:20.300 they have to pretend to believe things that they obviously can't believe because they're preposterous

00:08:24.720 and are willing to say those things in public, right, and willing to, I mean, just the kinds of

00:08:30.120 proclamations you hear from Pam Bondi or Kash Patel. I mean, some of the things they said in,

00:08:35.680 you know, in the aftermath of the raid on Bolton, which we'll talk about. Again, I don't know the

00:08:41.100 details of the case, but the way Bondi and Patel spoke publicly on social media around that just

00:08:48.320 sounded like the, it's the language you expect from a tyranny. I mean, this is just not,

00:08:54.020 this is not the way our politics used to look. Well, you know, it was sometimes frustrating

00:08:59.500 prior to Trump that there is this DOJ practice that we're not going to confirm

00:09:04.140 the existence of investigations. This was the general matter. And there's a very good reason

00:09:09.400 for that. And the reason is that when people know that someone is subject to a criminal

00:09:15.380 investigation, they often skip straight to guilt that the existence of a criminal investigation is

00:09:21.080 somehow proof of criminal wrongdoing. And if somebody is investigated and not charged,

00:09:26.080 a fair society, a fair country doesn't want that cloud hanging over them. And so even this notion

00:09:32.480 where there, that Kash Patel is going to go on Twitter while the search is ongoing, or even while

00:09:38.980 it just ended and sort of, and, and spike the football over it, no one is above the law. When you

00:09:44.460 talk about J.D. Vance going on television and confirming investigations of Ambassador Bolton,

00:09:50.280 when you see the president of the United States calling for vengeance against his enemies and advert,

00:09:56.200 you know, you see administration officials advertising that they want to do mortgage fraud

00:10:00.600 investigations of some of their political opponents. When you see all of that, it, it reminds

00:10:05.500 you of why some of these rules exist, that, that some of these rules and norms and practices exist,

00:10:11.280 because specifically we do not want innocent people to face clouds of suspicion. And once the cloud lands

00:10:19.140 firmly through say an indictment, then that person has an opportunity to defend themselves, very limited

00:10:24.100 opportunity to truly defend themselves if they're just subject to an investigation. And that's just like

00:10:29.360 one piece of all of this, where, where barrier after barrier after barrier has been just blown through

00:10:35.980 in such a way that it's very satisfying to his core constituency because they wanted this. This is

00:10:43.500 exactly what they wanted. But for everyone else, for his opponents, it creates a sense that there's a

00:10:48.340 target on your back. And for the rest of America, it casts aspersions on people who may be entirely

00:10:54.440 innocent of any wrongdoing, but the mighty, the bully pulpit has been turned against them and their

00:10:59.460 reputation could be stained forever for just forever without any kind of judicial proceeding.

00:11:06.980 And even if their reputation isn't stained, because even if anyone who looks at the case

00:11:12.200 knows that it was, you know, spurious and vindictive and not, and shouldn't have been launched in the

00:11:17.940 first place, they can be bankrupted by the obligation to defend themselves. I mean, it's just life

00:11:22.980 derranging punishment. Yeah. Yeah. However spurious it is. I'm thinking of someone like Chris Krebs,

00:11:27.980 who was the election security officer who simply wouldn't agree that the 2020 election had been

00:11:34.280 stolen. And now he's been investigated for what indiscretion I've forgotten, but the real

00:11:40.060 indiscretion is that he simply wouldn't sing the president's tune at the time. Well, so there's two

00:11:44.960 sides to this monstrous object. There's the favor to friends and the vindictive vengeance against

00:11:52.020 enemies or perceived enemies. Let's take the friend piece of it. You mentioned pardoning the January 6th

00:11:57.380 rioters. Why was that as sinister as you think, and not just a difference of opinion about,

00:12:07.240 you know, that just too much had been made of a protest that just got out of hand, right? This

00:12:11.940 is just not, no one was trying to do anything of substance. They just got a little agitated. And

00:12:18.020 then, you know, we've seen video on Tucker Carlson's impeccable program of cops letting other people in

00:12:24.280 at least one side of the building. So it wasn't all flagpoles stuck in the faces of cops. Sometimes

00:12:30.240 the cops just let people in. So this is a morally ambiguous situation. Why isn't this just, you know,

00:12:37.560 clemency and a sign of just how capacious the goodwill of the current president is?

00:12:44.220 You've convinced me, Sam. That's what it is. I'm sorry. No. Let's go back a bit and talk about

00:12:52.840 when the pardon power was put in the original 1787 constitution. This was something that was

00:12:58.660 controversial at the time. And so you'll even go back and you'll read some of the ratification

00:13:03.840 debates in Virginia, most notably, where George Mason stands up and strongly objects to the powers

00:13:09.640 of the presidency, including the pardon power. And the concern there was that the president would

00:13:15.100 use the pardon power to assist his friends, to grant friends and suspicious characters would be a

00:13:21.160 phrase that would be used. A kind of impunity that the president would use the pardon power for his own

00:13:28.360 self-interest and that the how capacious the pardon power was, it's unreviewable. It's totally at the

00:13:34.700 president's own discretion. It's not limited by its any real terms in the constitution, that this would

00:13:40.080 become an engine of political favoritism. This is something that has been worried about for more

00:13:44.660 than 200 years. And so the answer to this was that the pardon power in many ways, it was supposed to be

00:13:50.840 in a lot of criminal justice reformers will defend the pardon power and say, well, wait, wait, wait,

00:13:54.980 hold on. The pardon power allows for sort of last ditch interventions of mercy when the judicial

00:14:02.480 system has created a miscarriage of justice and the judicial system. We have exhausted the judicial

00:14:07.560 system, but the miscarriage of justice remains. And that's the use of the pardon power. The abuse of

00:14:13.560 the pardon powers for favoritism, for friends. And so what you see here unfolding is exactly,

00:14:20.720 exactly the scenario that many of the founders, particularly the anti-federalist faction,

00:14:26.580 were most worried about, that this awesome pardon power would be used for friends to

00:14:32.040 benefit friends and allies, regardless of the merits of their cases. And so, you know,

00:14:38.000 when you talk about the January 6th pardons, he did not go through and say, okay, John Smith here

00:14:43.940 and Jane Smith, the evidence shows that a police officer in this state of confusion and sort of

00:14:49.460 the fog of all of the conflict, let them in. And then they were prosecuted when someone just let

00:14:55.860 them in. And then here's somebody else who we have them on video beating a police officer with a

00:15:00.160 flagpole or beating them with their fists. That person is a violent criminal. There's no sort of 0.78

00:15:06.580 confusion or getting out of hand argument for them. They're assaulting a cop. He didn't do that. He

00:15:11.500 didn't do that kind of inquiry when instead he said, everybody, everybody gets pardon or clemency there.

00:15:17.800 And so even the most violent, even the most depraved received unmerited favor from Donald Trump.

00:15:25.240 This is exactly what the founders, many of the founders were worried about. And when you go back

00:15:31.340 and you look at those early debates, what was the answer from the defenders of the constitution?

00:15:35.720 Madison arose and said, oh, we can deal with that through impeachment. Impeachment is the remedy.

00:15:43.120 We've seen how powerful the impeachment mechanism has been in Trump's case.

00:15:47.340 Right. But what this also shows us is the very thing that Donald Trump did, no lesser a founder

00:15:55.180 than James Madison would say that's impeachment worthy, that that's beyond the pale. And so it's

00:16:03.440 not just sort of the obvious injustice of obviously guilty people have who have engaged in violent

00:16:10.900 attacks on law enforcement have been granted a reprieve by this president solely because they're his

00:16:16.840 political allies and they committed violence for him. But what we're seeing is it's not just that in

00:16:22.920 isolation. This is also systemic. It's exposing a systemic problem with the power, the way this

00:16:30.240 president is exercising his power.

00:16:33.320 How is it that he can, on the one hand, spin himself as the law and order president and on the

00:16:39.760 other hand, pardon people who we've watched attack police officers on video and there's no apparent

00:16:46.760 cognitive dissonance suffered by his supporters? I mean, does anyone in Trumpistan break with him

00:16:54.260 over that contradiction, the fact that he didn't distinguish among the rioters?

00:16:58.500 Your key word there was in Trumpistan. You know, if you are in Trumpistan, you believe the election

00:17:04.700 was stolen. If you're in Trumpistan, you believe that the entire January 6th riot and attack,

00:17:11.680 if anyone is really to blame, it's Nancy Pelosi for not having sufficient security at the Capitol.

00:17:17.800 In true Trumpistan, they believe that without foundation, that many of these January 6th

00:17:24.100 protesters were imprisoned and prosecuted without real due process. So in Trumpistan, you have people

00:17:30.720 who believe that the January 6th protests were exaggerated in their violence, no worse than,

00:17:38.040 say, the protesters who would occupy parts of the Capitol building, say, to protest the Kavanaugh

00:17:44.400 nomination, that the real violence that happened during that era was far-left violence in the Black

00:17:52.380 Lives Matter protests. And so they just have a completely different view of what occurred on January 6th,

00:17:59.340 that the violence was exaggerated, that the protests were legitimate, that the election was actually

00:18:03.360 stolen. And so they're going to look at a lot of those January 6ers as sort of heirs to 1776,

00:18:10.280 that these were patriots intervening on behalf of a president who was wrongly denied the presidency.

00:18:17.660 So they just, they're living in a different universe from many, many, many millions of other Americans. 0.74

00:18:24.720 Is there more to say about the Bolton case? I mean, I remember before the, the FBI raid of his house,

00:18:30.760 I mean, this is more or less right after Trump was inaugurated, he withdrew the security detail

00:18:36.220 from Bolton, who by all accounts had, you know, credible threats against him from Iran.

00:18:42.280 So the vindictiveness was easily and early established and clear. And it seems like, you know, whatever,

00:18:48.660 whatever the merits of this case, again, we, neither, neither of us know if Bolton's holding on to any

00:18:53.420 documents he shouldn't be holding on to, but it just seems like the president has telegraphed his

00:18:58.840 motives in, in focusing the justice department on people like Bolton from the outset.

00:19:04.900 Well, this is why you don't do that. This is why you don't name political enemies. Cash Patel had,

00:19:10.480 for example, had an enemies list in his book. When you name your political enemies, what that means,

00:19:17.440 and you name them and identify them and you take vengeance against them. So for example,

00:19:22.180 by lifting a security detail, what that does is it casts a shadow on all of the actions going

00:19:29.080 forward. So for example, neither you nor I, I don't have seen the, the search warrant or have

00:19:35.120 seen the filings in court to ask for the search warrant. So we don't know the underlying evidence

00:19:40.140 or lack thereof. All we know are the surrounding circumstances. And this is why you don't identify

00:19:46.520 targets. This is why you don't engage in vengeful actions because who right now can have any

00:19:52.020 confidence at all that this investigation is being conducted professionally. The only thing

00:19:57.360 that is keeping me from saying clearly this, this is a politically targeted raid is the fact that

00:20:03.620 federal judges did sign off on these warrants. So there, there was a check there. Now it's easy

00:20:10.700 to get a search warrant. It's not difficult to get a search warrant, but there is at least some degree

00:20:14.480 of judicial review that tells me that a federal judge saw this and thought there is at least some

00:20:19.700 reason for probable cause. So I cannot judge the underlying merits of that search warrant.

00:20:25.160 But what I can do is I can say that when you engage in public vilification of your political enemies,

00:20:31.120 when you do things like Kash Patel spiking the football, what that does is it communicates to

00:20:36.860 everyone that this is a political attack, not that this is the dispassionate, even-handed operation

00:20:43.160 of justice. And then let's say, Sam, that there was actual evidence of a crime. Let's just,

00:20:47.700 for the sake of argument, let's assume there is evidence of a crime. You've just really undermined

00:20:52.780 your ability to get a conviction because if I'm a halfway competent criminal defense lawyer, just

00:20:59.780 mouth-breathingly competent as a criminal defense lawyer, I can walk into a jury and say,

00:21:05.080 this is all political. And I can pull up quote after quote, action after action, note how they deviated

00:21:11.920 from standard department of justice practice. And then I'll turn to the jury and they're going to,

00:21:16.000 I would say, they're going to give you a bunch of complicated mumbo jumbo about how Ambassador

00:21:21.780 Bolton violated these highly technical and highly intricate security clearance requirements.

00:21:27.260 But I'm going to tell you, that's a smokescreen. What's really going on is this, and I can point

00:21:32.580 to comment after comment.

00:21:34.700 So on the front end-

00:21:34.800 The president calling him a low life.

00:21:36.200 Yeah. So you're, you're actually in many ways, you're undermining, undermining the system of

00:21:40.480 justice on the front end and the back end because you're undermining confidence that these

00:21:44.260 investigations are uneven handed and you're undermining your prosecution, even if you uncover

00:21:49.640 criminal wrongdoing.

00:21:50.840 What about the accusations that President Obama is guilty of treason?

00:21:55.980 Treason. If I'm not mistaken, treason, I don't know if it always carries a death sentence,

00:22:01.320 but it can carry a death sentence.

00:22:02.880 It can. Yeah.

00:22:04.020 Yeah. Well, I mean, what are we, what are we to make of, uh, I mean, there's two things. One,

00:22:08.360 the accusation was made. Two, there's so, so much else has happened in the meantime that it was

00:22:14.040 promptly memory hold and it's probably not even in anyone, anyone's top 10 of the most interesting

00:22:19.280 things that have happened in the last six months. But to have a sitting president accused,

00:22:23.920 the prior one of possibly a capital offense, uh, and to say that he's now being investigated,

00:22:30.420 that's a 20 megaton piece of news that would completely subsume the presidency of any other

00:22:35.660 president. Oh, absolutely. It would. And it really does go back to that ban and flood the zone with

00:22:42.380 shit kind of formulation where if you're just, just shoveling outrage into the public, 0.97

00:22:49.100 you do induce fatigue. You do sort of induce this situation where, uh, you know, I'm sure you've 0.98

00:22:55.380 seen that, that Jeff online of Homer Simpson with his eyes wide, just retreating back into the

00:23:01.260 shrubbery. This is the natural human reaction to just nonstop outrage, nonstop crisis, nonstop sense

00:23:09.800 of alarm is a lot of people just back away from that. And so you're exactly right. I mean,

00:23:14.480 we could do this, the whole conversation, we could point to this or that thing that happened four

00:23:19.660 decades ago or 10 days ago or two months ago. And it will feel like five years ago because so many

00:23:25.500 other things have happened. And it just creates a sense of, uh, what you might think of as just

00:23:30.900 almost irresistible momentum that this is just the way things are now. And you either accept it

00:23:38.200 and go along with the tide or resist it and get crushed by it. And I think there's a, this is a

00:23:44.700 very intentional strategy. The difference between Trump one and 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is vast. There's

00:23:51.800 actually a lot of people around him of a specific theory of power and are using Trump's impulsiveness

00:23:58.020 and vindictiveness to pursue that theory of power.

00:24:01.380 Well, let's talk about that theory of power. You've written about the ways in which we're

00:24:06.320 discovering that the constitution has been, uh, an insufficient bulwark against the impulses of a,

00:24:12.780 of a corrupt authoritarian president. And, um, I guess let's touch the, uh, a point specifically,

00:24:19.360 which you raised in a recent New York times piece about why Congress has been so ineffectual.

00:24:25.880 I'm going to read you a quote here. You wrote in, in, in criticism of the, of this notion of

00:24:30.020 co-equal branches of government, which is a phrase that many of us have in our heads.

00:24:34.020 And you wrote, our nation is not supposed to have co-equal branches. Congress is supposed to

00:24:39.500 reign supreme. Yes. The other branches have the power to check Congress. Presidents can veto

00:24:44.160 legislation. Courts exercise judicial review, but Congress alone possesses the power of the purse.

00:24:50.760 Congress alone is supposed to possess the power to declare war. Congress can impeach and remove

00:24:55.620 members of the executive and judicial branches of government, including the president and justices

00:25:00.100 of the Supreme court. This does not seem to describe the Congress that we have. I mean,

00:25:06.200 so, so what is, I mean, you, in this piece, you also recommend that we amend article two of the

00:25:10.720 constitution. Give me a little color on the problem here. Yeah. So if you go back and you read the

00:25:16.460 federalist papers, you will see that the construct is that ambition is made to check ambition. In other

00:25:23.700 words, there's no one collection of people or no one person who can be trusted. If you'd like to

00:25:30.020 continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do,

00:25:35.960 you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 27, 2025

#432 — The Undoing of America

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 27, 2025

#432 &#x2014; The Undoing of America

Episode Stats

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#432 — The Undoing of America