Making Sense - Sam Harris - #472 — Strange Days on the Right

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00:00:24.960 I am here with Ben Shapiro.

00:00:26.660 Ben, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

00:00:29.060 Good to see you.

00:00:29.540 How are you doing?

00:00:30.400 I'm good. How are you doing? It's getting crazy out there. I've noticed from afar that your life

00:00:35.000 has gotten more interesting in the last 12 months or so. Yeah. You know, the old Chinese curse,

00:00:41.720 maybe you live in interesting times, is definitely applying itself. So that's been fun. 1.00

00:00:45.560 You appear to be Chinese at the moment. Well, I want to talk about the cleavages in the Republican 0.99

00:00:50.600 Party and in the MAGA cult, as I think of it. But before we get there, let's, I mean,

00:00:56.780 because it is extreme in a way that I think none of us would have anticipated. I think many of the

00:01:03.380 Republicans seem to be divided between those who are Nazi sympathizers and those who think all

00:01:09.480 things considered Nazis are probably still bad. But the level of confusion about that is fairly

00:01:16.840 astounding to me. So I want to get your postmortem on that. But you and I last spoke a little over

00:01:22.480 a year ago, I guess a year and a half ago, before Trump's election, when our friend Barry Weiss

00:01:29.660 had us debate the week before the election. And a couple of things you said there have not aged

00:01:36.020 particularly well. I just want to do a postmortem on that. I figured you were going to start here,

00:01:39.240 so sure, go for it. Yeah. I mean, this is not a matter of I told you so, but I actually just

00:01:43.340 want to understand how you're doing. I mean, just a little bit, but it's okay. Go for it.

00:01:47.060 You're entitled. The truth is, I knew I was right at the time, so there's very little satisfaction

00:01:51.820 and being discovered to be right now.

00:01:54.100 But, I mean, two small things that can kind of give you

00:01:56.960 some kind of landmarks for the conversation.

00:01:58.800 One is that you thought Trump's claim

00:02:00.820 that he was going to tariff people extravagantly

00:02:02.900 was all bluster, and we wouldn't see any of that.

00:02:05.180 And needless to say, he's tariffed

00:02:06.560 nearly every member of our species,

00:02:08.500 and not just our species.

00:02:09.820 We've tariffed islands that have just penguins on them,

00:02:12.060 apparently.

00:02:13.140 Also, you thought Mike Pompeo

00:02:14.640 would be the Secretary of State.

00:02:16.480 And rather than that, he was properly defenestrated.

00:02:20.180 And I think even his security detail

00:02:21.660 was pulled, even though he's on an Iranian kill list. So those strike me as small things. The big

00:02:28.160 thing, which is really what I'd love you to respond to, is that you were very confident that

00:02:32.600 there wasn't going to be much that was fundamentally surprising about Trump's second term,

00:02:37.500 and we could be more or less certain of that because we already lived through a first term.

00:02:41.480 And whereas my main argument was, no, the reason why you can't draw that conclusion is that in the

00:02:46.440 first term, there were lots of normal people with normal political reputations to defend

00:02:50.180 serving as, quote, guardrails in the first administration. And those guardrails are now

00:02:54.400 gone. And therefore, you just have loyalists and grifters and maniacs of one description or another 0.88

00:03:00.140 who are not going to protect Trump and the country from Trump's worst impulses. That seems to me to

00:03:05.740 be the crucial difference between the first and second terms. I'm just I'm wondering what has

00:03:09.960 surprised you in the last year and a half or so? So, I mean, we can start with kind of all of

00:03:14.660 those things. So I was surprised by the decision to tariff the entire world, mainly because I

00:03:18.480 thought that that was a pretty horrible idea and pretty horrible decision. And I was extraordinarily

00:03:22.700 outspoken and critical when he did that, as I continue to be. I think that the only mitigating

00:03:28.280 factor there is that our Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is actually living on the real

00:03:32.200 planet Earth and has been able to mitigate the effects of some of that. And then, of course,

00:03:35.820 I thought very strongly the Supreme Court would strike down so-called Liberation Day tariffs,

00:03:40.380 which, of course, the Supreme Court did. So my main argument with regard to President Trump for

00:03:44.040 a while has been that the guardrails would largely hold, that it wasn't as though there

00:03:48.820 wouldn't be mistakes or bad ideas that were put into practice, but that the guardrails

00:03:54.020 would hold and that his worst mistakes would end up being mitigated by the pushback of

00:03:58.420 reality, which is, I think, sort of what happened with the tariffs, is that even the sort of

00:04:03.120 most blustery comments about the tariffs that he made, many of those ended up being walked

00:04:07.700 back.

00:04:08.480 Holes ended up being punched through.

00:04:10.140 Again, I'm not in favor of what he did with the tariffs.

00:04:11.940 I think they've had some pretty disastrous effects, particularly with regard to our relationship

00:04:15.220 with Canada. But I will say that that what let's put it this way, what he put forward in a poster

00:04:20.760 board that had nothing to do with actual tariff rates and everything to do with actual deficits

00:04:26.120 that, again, I'm not sure why I should care that we have a trade deficit with Ethiopia.

00:04:30.060 But, you know, everything that was on that poster board ended up not being what is the reality

00:04:34.880 today. The tariff rates on that poster board are not reflective of today's tariff rate. So put that

00:04:39.300 out there. And again, that's not to say that you were wrong and I was right. I wasn't right. It is

00:04:43.800 to point out that the sort of outcome of everyone gets tariffed at the rates he put out on Liberation

00:04:47.980 Day, that is not what the outcome was. As far as Mike Pompeo, my case was that there wasn't really

00:04:54.060 specifically about Pompeo. I was sort of asked to speculate on who he might pick as Secretary of

00:04:57.640 State. Marco Rubio has done a pretty good facsimile of what Mike Pompeo probably would

00:05:02.000 have done as Secretary of State. So I'm not sure that that counts as a major mess. As far as the

00:05:06.380 idea that he was staffing up with loyalists who are unlikely to challenge him. I agree with you

00:05:11.280 that he has staffed up with people who are much more loyalists to him than they otherwise would

00:05:16.580 have been in Trump number one. And I think that one of the things that he has found to his surprise

00:05:20.760 that many of those loyalists have not turned out to be particularly competent. And now he's shifting

00:05:24.400 back toward a sort of more professional class of people inside his own administration. And here I

00:05:28.860 would I would cite the substitution of the secretary of Homeland Security, really, that

00:05:34.140 Chrissy Nolan was defenestrated in favor, effectively, of Tom Holman, who is a significantly

00:05:38.920 more professional figure and has served under both Democrats and Republicans.

00:05:41.960 The same thing, I think, is true of Pam Bondi, who I thought was a bad pick, but has ended

00:05:46.120 up being replaced by Todd Blanche, who's significantly more professional.

00:05:48.880 So again, I think one of the things about President Trump is that he definitely likes

00:05:53.340 to stick his hand in the fire, and when it burns, he tends to pull his hand out.

00:05:57.060 That is, again, not to suggest that there were no risks at all, but that the actual

00:06:00.860 policy that has emerged from the administration, the actual overall policy is actually, I think,

00:06:05.660 not too wildly far from what I would have expected having charted out term number one. I don't see

00:06:11.780 a wild kind of swing into never never land in term two, as opposed to what we saw in term one.

00:06:17.820 What about the fact that when Trump pulls his hand out of the fire, he often pulls out lots

00:06:21.840 of cash with it. So take the tariffs, right? I understand that you draw comfort from the fact

00:06:26.360 that the Supreme Court backstopped some basic sanity with respect to the tariffs, but he

00:06:31.860 nevertheless used this tariff policy and other levers of American state power to wring out an

00:06:39.920 astonishing amount of money from our allies and enemies. I mean, he slaps a 46% tariff on Vietnam.

00:06:47.920 Vietnam gets that reduced by greenlighting a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family.

00:06:54.040 By most estimates, the Trump family has made somewhere between one point four and four billion dollars now grifting with their their cryptocurrency schemes and other machinations.

00:07:06.500 I mean, this is not none of this is getting walked back, at least.

00:07:09.620 Yes. No, it's a prison. But you asked it.

00:07:12.620 Sorry, I did forget to say the one thing that has shocked me is the level of familial corruption.

00:07:16.780 I will say that that has surprised me.

00:07:18.900 What amount of corruption would really matter?

00:07:23.280 I mean, what what amount is so much that you'd have to say, OK, I disavow this president?

00:07:28.420 Well, again, I'm not sure. And I said this sort of last time we talked as well.

00:07:32.240 I'm not sure what it would mean to disavow because politics is a sort of choice of lesser of two evils in terms of the policy that I wish to see.

00:07:39.780 So disavow Trump in favor of what? I'm happy to disavow his his behavior with regard to world liberty financial.

00:07:46.780 I was I think the first conservative to talk about that on air when it broke.

00:07:49.840 And I've talked about it consistently ever since.

00:07:52.280 It's sort of like saying, you know, what level of corruption would have caused you to disavow

00:07:56.980 Biden when Biden was running against Trump?

00:07:59.300 I mean, politics is inherently oppositional.

00:08:01.380 So it's a lesser of two evils calculation.

00:08:04.240 But I mean, we came from a world where had President Obama received a cashmere sweater

00:08:09.720 from some foreign power, it would have been it would have hit the news cycle of some kind

00:08:13.580 of scandal.

00:08:14.260 And now we're in a world where we're just, you know, we're counting billions and the

00:08:19.380 billions don't seem to matter. I mean, what what would be so scandalous on this front where you'd

00:08:25.640 have to say, all right, this is incompatible with American democracy and America's role in the

00:08:31.900 world. I mean, so, I mean, again, this touches other things, touches foreign policy, in my view.

00:08:35.680 I mean, ask yourself, had Maduro had the wisdom to have purchased a billion dollars worth of

00:08:42.220 Trump's meme coin, do you still think he'd be running Venezuela? I mean, I can't speak to that

00:08:47.260 since it didn't happen, but I, you know, will say that if he had done that and then the president

00:08:51.940 had suddenly come out in favor of Maduro, I would have thought that that was insipid and insane.

00:08:56.360 So, I mean, I just, I just think that there's such self-dealing and such corruption and such

00:09:00.680 a focus on self here that it's hard to say that the, that Trump is, is effectively representing

00:09:07.740 anyone other than himself and his own. I mean, I think that when, when, when it comes to the

00:09:13.520 interest that he's been pursuing in in crypto i think you're selling past the sale with me sam i

00:09:18.040 mean you're not arguing with somebody who's arguing it's just not it's not just crypto it

00:09:21.940 touches everything like so you and i are going to talk we'll talk about the war in iran i think you

00:09:25.760 and i will probably view it in very similar ways except for the fact that i think you probably will

00:09:31.240 draw a lot of comfort from trump being in charge and doing the things you think he should be doing

00:09:36.280 whereas i think he's because he in my view he believes almost nothing except just gratifying

00:09:42.820 his own rapacious appetites, that he's only accidentally aligned with the interests of

00:09:48.120 Israel or the interests of the West against jihadism. And I think he's capable of selling

00:09:52.420 out anything you think he cares about in favor of self-interest. I think he would cut a deal

00:09:58.500 with Gulf states. I mean, just take the fact that we're selling NVIDIA chips to UAE, even though

00:10:04.260 they do military exercises with China, and this poses obvious security concerns. That was a world

00:10:11.820 liberty financial deal, right? That seems to cut against our interests.

00:10:15.920 Well, so here's sort of my question is, is you are using his intent to try to discern future

00:10:21.920 pathways for his behavior. And the point that I'm making is that if that were the case,

00:10:27.660 you probably could not have predicted many of the things that he has done on the foreign policy

00:10:30.960 front, including his action in Iran, based on just pure self-interest. The only thing I can do,

00:10:35.960 I try not to do this just generally, is attribute motive to people because motivism is a great way

00:10:40.860 to shortcut politics and actually prevent sane conversations because you can always attribute

00:10:44.440 motive to somebody's political position. Somebody may be in favor of instituting Obamacare because

00:10:49.940 they believe that it's going to save lives or somebody may be in favor of Obamacare because

00:10:53.380 they believe that it's going to end up with money in their pocket. The bottom line is,

00:10:56.220 is the Obamacare policy good or bad? So I try not to do this too much. I try to do this actually

00:11:00.240 with Democrats and Republicans as well. Try not to go to why are they doing this? Is it for

00:11:04.920 nefarious purposes or is it for good purposes? Because to me, when it comes to politics,

00:11:09.260 the intent matters a lot less than the actual efficacy of the policy or the through line of

00:11:14.460 the policy. I think with with President Trump, even if you want to make the case that what he

00:11:18.420 does is driven by self-interest, I would say that there's some complexity to self-interest

00:11:22.240 in President Trump. I think, first of all, many people are driven by self-interest in different

00:11:26.600 ways. There's monetary self-interest. There's also the self-interest of popularity. There's

00:11:30.880 the self-interest of notoriety, of attention. And I think that you see many of those things

00:11:35.660 emerge with President Trump in a wide variety of different ways, sometimes in conflict with

00:11:39.620 one another. But the only thing that I can adjudicate at the end of the day is whether

00:11:42.740 a policy or an idea is good or bad. And am I getting more of that or less of that from this

00:11:47.420 president? And again, this I think goes to maybe unfortunately what politics has become for me and

00:11:53.080 for a lot of other people, which is the president is not a moral paragon. In my view, the president

00:11:57.680 has not been a moral paragon for a long time, and that's not President Trump only. I think that it's

00:12:01.220 been a long time since we've looked to presidents as our moral paragons. The president is a plumber.

00:12:05.660 Is he going to fix my toilet or is he not going to fix my toilet?

00:12:08.600 And then I have to make a judgment as to whether this president fixing my toilet is either

00:12:12.500 effective and if he's overcharging me and what the alternative would have been for the

00:12:16.540 clumber next door to fix my toilet.

00:12:18.120 Would he have been effective or would he have charged me more or would he have left footprints

00:12:21.380 on the floor?

00:12:22.360 Okay, we take something like the reframing of January 6th as a day of love, right?

00:12:27.300 I mean, this is a I mean, you once said this was the most horrifying thing I've seen in

00:12:31.200 American politics in my lifetime.

00:12:32.500 You called it inexcusable, unjustifiable, awful on every level, disgusting on every level, and just terrible.

00:12:38.300 But Trump has since pardoned everyone involved.

00:12:41.360 He called these people, many of whom were caught stabbing police officers in the face with flagpoles, great patriots, and he referred to them as hostages when they were in prison.

00:12:51.000 And now we have an official White House website that reframes this day in the most Orwellian and delusional way and that advertises this reframing to the entire world as the view of our country, the view that our country officially has of it.

00:13:05.440 Again, for me, these are moral and political errors that are so catastrophic as to be disqualifying, and yet you seem to have declined to pass any further judgment on this.

00:13:16.500 What's your sense of that?

00:13:17.820 again in in what way you keep coming back to this word disqualifying and the question is

00:13:22.060 disqualifying in what sense well i just say that almost any anyone else in office would be better

00:13:28.740 than this when i'm focusing on this particular outcome right i mean no other president would

00:13:34.080 have done this that we could have elected i mean i agree to a certain extent the only reason i say

00:13:38.720 to a certain extent is because i think that reframing of of things that i consider to be

00:13:42.520 pretty dark moments in american history have been reframed in the past but not to that extent i will

00:13:46.560 agree uh the the thing that i'm pointing out here is that when you say disqualifying the question is

00:13:52.560 against whom okay well i'll just run i'll run through it the toilet needs to be fixed you don't

00:13:57.380 have to you you're making again sam you seem to want to make well you seem to want to make the

00:14:02.100 case to me that donald trump is a bad man who thinks bad things and has said bad things and

00:14:06.960 therefore is incumbent on me to support kamala harris or to support john ossoff or to support

00:14:13.040 whomever else is put up in place of president trump number one he's not eligible for election

00:14:18.040 again number two in the last election cycle i did not support him in the primaries number three

00:14:22.680 when it was him against joe biden then that was a binary choice and it was him against kamala

00:14:26.800 harris it was a binary choice and again the question to me was which one of these presidents

00:14:31.080 is going to be more likely to mirror my policy preferences not whether on a raw level i would

00:14:36.460 have donald trump babysit my children or maintain my trust there's more there's more that you could

00:14:41.260 be doing in your commentary to acknowledge the changing political landscape, I think. So for

00:14:46.960 instance, I agree with you. You only had a choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump a year and

00:14:51.880 a half ago. And you might still be able to defend, I mean, though, you know, we disagreed about it at

00:14:57.200 the time, obviously, because we had that debate, you might still be able to defend that choice

00:15:00.900 in retrospect, saying, given what I knew then, it would seem to me to be the rational and ethical

00:15:05.960 choice to pick Trump. Again, I think January 6th was the bridge that once crossed, completely

00:15:11.840 obviated that decision. But again, I mean, you seem to imply that I have an obligation to regret

00:15:18.000 my vote for President Trump. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org.

00:15:24.080 Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.

00:15:28.880 The path forward lies in normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a form of a government

00:15:34.740 in the Gaza Strip, partially governed by some of those Abraham Accords countries.

00:15:39.600 Is there a resolution to the war in Iran that doesn't include regime change?

00:15:45.620 I do not think that a victory, long scale, requires a firm, total regime change.

00:15:52.180 If the United States were to take Harga Island and chokehold it,

00:15:55.460 and then the president were to call it a day,

00:15:57.340 that would certainly count as a victory in my book.

00:16:04.740 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 24, 2026

#472 — Strange Days on the Right

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