#83 — The Politics of Emergency
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Summary
Fareed Zakaria is the host of his own show on CNN, and a Washington Post columnist and an editor at The Atlantic. He s the author of several best-selling books, including The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World, and most recently, In Defense of a Liberal Education. He was named by Esquire as the most influential foreign policy advisor of his generation, and Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. He and I had a wide-ranging conversation about politics and partisanship, and our differing opinions about how to talk about the connection between Islam and the sorts of violence and intolerance we see in the world. We didn t agree about everything, but I think you will find that it was a very productive and civil and honest conversation. And now I give you, here, with Fareed, I am here with you, to give you a chance to listen to the first part of this conversation. Sam Harris The Making Sense Podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, who are making possible what we're doing here. Please consider becoming a supporter of what we re doing here, by becoming one of our listeners. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore you won t miss out on any future episodes of the podcast! If you're not a subscriber yet, you'll need to subscribe to our premium membership, which means you'll only be hearing the first half of the conversation! . You'll get access to the full episode next week, where you'll get to hear the second and third parts of the full-length episodes of Making Sense, which will be released next week. Subscribe to the Making Sense and other premium episodes next week! Subscribe and subscribe to the podcast so you won't have access to all the full Making Sense episodes, including the rest of the making sense episodes, coming soon. You won't miss out! Sam and I'll be listening to the second half of this episode next Tuesday. Thanks for listening to this one! - Sam Harris and I hope you'll leave us out there listening to it on your favorite podcatcher, making sense of it. - Your comments and sharing it with your friends and posting it on Insta-tweeting us on Instapaper, Insta: and so we can spread the word to your friends about it! Tweet me or text us your thoughts, and we'll be spreading it around the world!
Transcript
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Fareed is the host of his own show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS.
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He's also a Washington Post columnist and an editor at The Atlantic.
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He's the author of several best-selling books, The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World,
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and most recently, In Defense of a Liberal Education.
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He was also named by Esquire as the most influential foreign policy advisor of his generation, and
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foreign policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers.
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He and I had a wide-ranging conversation about politics and partisanship, and our differing
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opinions about how to talk about the connection between Islam and the sorts of violence and
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We didn't agree about everything, but I think you will find that it was a very productive and
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I have been on your show at least twice, I think, and now I get to play journalist.
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It's a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you about you and your views.
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I'm a little apprehensive, but let's make it work.
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Just to begin with a little background on you, everyone is obviously quite familiar with
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Because you give your own opinions and commentary on policy and current events so often.
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I mean, it really is never far from the next thing you're about to say.
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I'm a sort of strange bird in the sense that I've never been a reporter.
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We had no point in my career, never pretend to be one.
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When I was at Newsweek, there were a bunch of brilliant reporters who worked with me when
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I went into a PhD program, thought I completed it, wrote a dissertation, got a couple of academic
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I had been teaching as a graduate student and then sort of stumbled into journalism.
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When I first got an offer to do something, I hesitated a lot.
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Economists have this wonderful phrase called revealed preferences, which is a fancy way of
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And what I'd done with every summer of my life, really since high school, was work at
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a newspaper or a magazine, you know, done research for an op-ed writer, things that were clearly
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So I took a baby step and I became the managing editor of foreign affairs.
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Then, you know, went as a commentator on ABC News.
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So it's always been commentary, but I was always drawn to the public fora, to being more
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But I still, you know, when I think about how I've been shaped and the way in which I
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think about the world, I think my training as a social scientist and as an academic is
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still very, very much at the heart of how I look at problems.
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The subfield was called international relations at Harvard, 1992.
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Is that synonymous with a political science degree or is that an IR degree?
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So at Harvard, yeah, Harvard, you know, being Harvard once, every other university calls
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But it's exactly, it's a PhD in political science.
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He's the guy who kind of offered me a job when I finished my PhD.
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So perhaps you can remind our listeners of his thesis about the clash of civilizations, which
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I'm wondering how you think that has fared, because it's certainly come in for a fair
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amount of opprobrium, at least on the political left.
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I mean, Huntington and also Bernard Lewis have gotten fairly hammered by their association
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with, and their influence on neoconservatives in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
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Perhaps you can give a kind of potted history of that for our listeners.
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I actually have a very personal connection to it, because Sam was my dissertation advisor.
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I went to him one day and said, I have this job offer at Foreign Affairs.
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You should take this other job I think you'd be very good at, which is an assistant professor
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But he did it in a way that suggested that I thought I had a good chance of getting it.
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And I said, no, I think I'm going to take the Foreign Affairs job.
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And he said, OK, well, if you do, here's a manuscript I've been working on.
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You think it's something Foreign Affairs would be interested in publishing?
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And I went back to him and said, I think we would love to publish it.
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And it was actually the first issue that I edited at Foreign Affairs.
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I made that really the first ever cover essay at Foreign Affairs.
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We put it in big, bold type above everything else in a way that signaled we thought it was
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So I think it's a very powerful, interesting set of ideas that have in many ways been very
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So the basic thesis of The Clash of Civilizations, which I think is true, was that at the end of
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the Cold War, as the Cold War waned, the dominant motivating force of the Cold War had been political
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So whether you were communist or capitalist, whether you were communist or democratic, whether
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you were part of the American sphere or the Soviet sphere, that was really how you figured
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The new fault line, he argued, was this thing he called civilizations.
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But at the heart of civilizations was religion.
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And his argument was that human beings have lost their identity as ideological beings.
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And states have lost their identity as ideological beings.
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So they are regaining or finding again their identity, which is based on culture, on civilization,
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I think that piece of it is incredibly powerful.
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And I think one only has to look at the return of these ideas of culture and religion, not just
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in the Middle East, but in, you know, places like India and Russia, even a place like Israel
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has become, you know, more deeply conscious of its religion.
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Sometimes it takes the form more of culture than of religion.
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So I think that piece of it, Sam really powerfully and early on identified.
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And he identified that there was a particular problem in the world of Islam, which I think,
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again, has proved to be, you know, very powerful impression.
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Where I think he went wrong was he got very enamored with the idea of these civilizations
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And so he had this, he imagined this world in which Western civilization was going to clash
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with Chinese civilization and Islamic civilization.
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And he almost viewed them as in big interacting, you know, kind of billiard balls on a global billiard
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But in fact, what we discover is, you know, the world is very messy there.
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You know, where does Latin America fit into that framework?
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How do you deal with the fact that the big conflicts of the world are really mostly within
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the world of Islam, you know, between the Shiites and the Sunnis, between the moderates
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In fact, you know, I think that the last five years, if you look at the number of people
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who've been killed by Islamic terrorism, 95, 98 percent of them have been Muslims, you
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So he got too enamored with this idea of civilizations and the idea that they cohere.
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And so I think that part of it has never really worked.
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You know, if you're you don't notice that like Saddam Hussein, when he invaded Kuwait,
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didn't notice that they were both Arab, both Muslim, both Sunni countries that he was there
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So that piece of it, I don't think has worked as well.
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But the the core insight, I still think that it's important to remember in 1992, not a
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lot of people were saying the next big source of identity, conflict, power is going to be
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Well, we'll talk about Islam and hopefully I'll ask you a few questions about China as
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And I think Huntington might come back and in about half an hour or so.
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But now, how do you view yourself politically at this moment?
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How would you describe your your political biases such as they are?
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You know, I I think of myself sort of fundamentally as a classical liberal, somebody who looks at
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the 19th century tradition of liberals, by which I mean people who were dedicated to the idea
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of human liberty, the preservation of liberty, free speech, free thought.
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But but like many of those people, I think the world you learn as you go along, as it
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And I think that I've you know, I would describe myself as a kind of moderate or reformed classical
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liberal, by which I mean, I can see that that there are excesses within capitalism, which
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does not allow for a pure free market, that a pure free market ends up often being the rule
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of the strong or the well-connected, you know, that the game is in some ways rigged and
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that people don't have perfect information or perfect knowledge.
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I think that, you know, traditional liberals had too benign a view of international conflict.
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You know, they tended to all believe that if everybody just became democratic, that we
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would all live in peace for the rest of our lives.
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There's geopolitics matters, geography matters.
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So, you know, where does that place me in today's political spectrum?
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When I was in college, I was I was very enamored of Reagan.
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I liked I think part of it was I grew up in India and I was I came from a essentially a
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And I liked Reagan's emphasis on freedom and free markets.
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I liked his frank talk about the Soviet Union as an evil empire, which I liked.
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I never bought the the social conservative agenda.
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And then I found that the to my mind, the the Republican Party went right and right and
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And, you know, particularly I remember the Clinton years where, you know, they were on
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this kind of insane crusade to impeach Clinton and the Democratic Party had moved to the center.
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So I found a lot that I liked among liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.
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And I would say politically, that's sort of still where I am.
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I tend to think I didn't move as much as the country moved.
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But my overall effort has always been to try to look at every issue, you know, on its own
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So I try not to start with the assumption if the Republicans propose this, it must be
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If the Democrats propose it, it must be a good idea.
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I try to look at, you know, these things just literally are they do they make sense?
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So Trump just proposed the privatizing the FAA, the the the you know, the airline traffic
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And it's sort of essentially been been dead on arrival on the left.
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So I just kind of looked at it and I came to the conclusion it's actually a pretty good
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But they did it in Canada, which is not exactly a bastion of crazy libertarian ideas.
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And it allows for the kind of technological upgrade that we really need.
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So, you know, I know that's a very small bore one.
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But I was struck by how even that got subsumed with the kind of partisanship that we have
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And I want to attempt, however, vainly to inoculate our audience against the sense that we are
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merely expressing partisanship when we talk about Trump, as we inevitably will.
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Now, I don't know if you've listened to any of my podcasts where I've spoken about Trump,
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but I have now it has to be at least 10 hours of me railing against the president.
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I mean, both, you know, as a candidate and now as a president.
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And I've had people like David Frum and Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan and Juliette
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Kayyem and people who who are quite critical of and worried about Trump in the Oval Office.
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And we have just gone to town on him ad nauseum.
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And this very much to the consternation of some significant percentage of my audience.
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But every time I've done this and more and more, I have tried to make it very clear that
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It's hard for people to really take these facts on board.
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But one point I now often make is that anything I or my guest says in this context, which seems
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to be hoping for impeachment, is, as a matter of fact, a hope for a president, Mike
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Now, Mike Pence is not someone who I would ever have thought I would want in the Oval
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But insofar as I go down the road of impeachment, that's the goal.
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Hillary Clinton is no longer on the menu, as should be clear.
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And also, it should be clear that most of the guests, virtually all of the guests I've
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had talk critically about Trump have been Republicans, for the most part, their entire lives, or the
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It's not a Bernie Sanders-style critique of Trumpism.
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I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time on his flaws, because I don't think there
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But let's begin with this issue of partisanship and how it has seemingly increased at this
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moment for us, and how it's made talking about political reality and just terrestrial reality,
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just talking about facts, talking about climate change, talking about, in the example you just
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raised, whether privatizing the FAA could be a good idea or not.
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It's made it impossible to do that without this toxic miasma of partisanship and tribalism
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So before we jump right into Trump and what concerns you there, talk a little bit about
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I think the most worrying thing about where we are politically is what seemed to be the
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core of how we have now begun to define ourselves as political beings.
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So again, if you go back to that Huntington distinction, it did used to be, it seemed to
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be that people viewed themselves more in ideological terms, liberal, conservative, that the issues
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were really essentially around, you know, the kind of the role of the state in our lives.
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So you are left of center or right of center, depending on largely on your view of the role of
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the state in our, in the economic life of the nation.
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And that divide was very important, but it was one that you could talk about, you could
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argue about, you could negotiate over and you could split differences.
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You know, there was, you wanted to spend more money.
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What has happened in those very good research from the Harvard Kennedy School, this woman,
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Pippa Norris and Roland Engelhardt have done, which shows that people about the 1980s, this
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began to happen in significant numbers, started to define themselves not by the, on over economic
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You know, their identity derived not from their economic class, but from national origin, race,
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And so we, we've organized ourselves almost more into tribes and those, those identities
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And so the problem with that is it's very hard to negotiate or to compromise or to even
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It's, you know, it's, it seems as though you are one person is assaulting the other side's
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They're looking down on, they viewed one side or the other is immoral.
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And all the battle line issues tend to be like that, you know, abortion, gay rights, even
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things like immigration is really a debate over national identity.
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And what that has done is it's made it impossible for there to be that open common space.
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I mean, the, the liberal tradition, and now again, I just mean liberal, small l, meaning
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really the democratic tradition assumes you can have debates because there are common facts
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We are assuming, you know, each side is amenable to changing their views, but we have become
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in America more like Sunnis and Shiites, you know, where we're like, you, you, you can't
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really have a debate because one side views the other as then insulting them.
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And then, uh, and there's no compromise possible because you'd be surrendering your very identity
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Each side in a sense thinks that to let the other one win would be to dramatically change
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Now, if we are locked in that kind of a debate, it's not even a debate into a kind of a cultural
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It makes one despair at the prospects of liberal democracy, which does depend on reasoned debate
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This is what's been so destabilizing about him and his surrogates.
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Obviously, the people like Kellyanne Conway or Sean Spicer, who will get on television
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There's no pretense of making your lies square with common reality so that it's just this...
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It's really, and it's appealed to people saying, don't forget we're a team and those guys are
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You know, as you're right, they don't even pretend to have a very good explanation or
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In this case, it's hard for me to understand what the tribe is because it's not a religious
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tribe, although some numbers of religious people have gotten behind Trump.
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I mean, all of the policies to which they seem to have been committed in the campaign, any
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Like, if when Trump goes back on a promise, people seem to sort of just shrug and say,
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well, you know, of course he was going to go back on a promise.
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I don't know what the value is to which everyone is captive here, apart from just the theater
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The fact that this is good television or that he has destabilized the system in a way that
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It's almost like a nihilistic attitude with respect to the status quo.
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People just want to see this wrecking ball swing freely through the system.
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Do you have any more insight as to what you think is going on there?
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Because I can't get people to make reasonable noises in defense of Trump when he either does
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something crazy and impulsive on his side or even just reneges on a promise that yesterday
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his fans or supporters said was important to them.
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But the only thing I would amend is you keep saying people support him.
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So we know now a lot about the people who support him.
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And now I'm not talking about the people who voted for him.
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He got basically the same percentage of Republican support as Romney did.
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But if you look at his core support, the 35 percent approval rating he has now, those people
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And the tribe is a kind of white working class or non-college educated, non-urban group that
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believes that they have been passed by, despised, condescended to, overlooked, that the America
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they see is one that is filled with uppity working women and minorities who may be getting ahead
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because of affirmative action and immigrants who are coming in and technologists and financiers
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That series of cultural resentments is very powerful and very real.
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There's, you know, there are some real economic basis for it.
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There are some, you know, some of it is just stoking prejudice.
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And those are the people Trump really knows how to play with and Steve Bannon knows how
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So I don't think it's completely, you know, it's not just all the theater and the celebrity.
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There is a very, there's a real core here, which is, you know, about more about social
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Some of it to do with race, some of it to do with religion.
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And you see something similar in Britain with the pro-Brexit, anti-Brexit.
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Again, you found that education and urban-rural were the two big divides.
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And it is, when you talk to these people, as I have, we're doing a documentary called
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And what's interesting, what's really, you sense is the feeling of resentment, the feeling
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that they have been condescended to, the feeling that they have been, you know, that the
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How do you feel that journalism is faring now in the aftermath, in the era of fake news?
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I think it's pretty plain to see that journalism was culpable for treating the election and the
00:24:02.020
whole campaign season as a horse race and giving Trump, I don't know, it's been estimated
00:24:09.400
But it seems to me that in the aftermath, the attitude of journalism has changed noticeably.
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So first, on the first point, I have to defend CNN a little bit in the sense that, you know,
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people forget that Trump very early on became the Republican frontrunner in the polls.
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There were a bunch of people like Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and pundits who were saying,
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don't pay any attention to the polls because the polls don't actually predict who's going
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It's actually money and it's organization and endorsements.
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But Trump, remarkably early on, became the dominant figure in the polls.
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And two, he started very early on to say completely outrageous things and propose completely
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outrageous policies that nobody had ever proposed.
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I mean, he was proposing, you know, mass deportations of 11 million people.
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He spoke sort of favorably of the internment of the Japanese Americans.
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You know, you may not like it, but you have the Republican frontrunner proposing stuff that
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no presidential candidate has proposed in 75 years.
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And, you know, we can't pretend it wasn't news.
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Now, all that said, I agree with, I think, what you're saying, which is that we got caught
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And look, just remember, the print media, the media, the television media in particular,
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If we are putting something on, chances are you want to see it.
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It's on because there is a public appetite for it and it's a very competitive industry.
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But on your larger question, look, I do think now the media, if you want to look for some
00:26:01.940
good news, I would say the resilience of the American system has been somewhat satisfying
00:26:07.400
to me to watch, which is the courts are functioning well and are not being cowed, despite the fact
00:26:13.240
that you have a president who, in an unprecedented way, is attacking the judiciary and often actually
00:26:18.320
attacking judges by name, which I really don't think has happened, the non-political bureaucrats
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that make up the kind of, you know, the heart and soul of government, whether it's the FBI,
00:26:30.300
the Justice Department, they are holding up pretty well.
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I think you're seeing a renaissance of real investigative journalism.
00:26:42.500
I think conservative intellectuals, for example, you mentioned a few, like David Frum, have really
00:26:47.180
risen to the occasion, even though it has cost them.
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I mean, George Will was, as far as I can tell, essentially fired from Fox because he was
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And I think that that piece of it, the media, I think, has handled pretty well.
00:27:05.880
So the way I think about it, there are three sort of baskets of things you're trying to,
00:27:12.180
One is, what are the things Trump is actually proposing and how do you evaluate them?
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I said, you know, like the FAA thing or whether it's the tax policy.
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And, you know, I think you have to try to evaluate those fairly by saying, are they good?
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A lot of what he proposes is very weird, haphazard, badly thought through.
00:27:31.500
But you still have to ask yourself, OK, but, you know, is this, if it were properly laid
00:27:38.540
So there's that one cluster of things, and a lot of it is surprisingly not very populist.
00:27:43.340
It's actually pretty standard, fair, Republican stuff.
00:27:47.060
The second is the circus of Donald Trump, the sheer kind of weird, you know, bizarro way
00:27:55.200
in which he operates, the vulgarity, the personal attacks, you know, and that has a kind of seductive
00:28:04.600
But then there's the third part, which you focused a lot on, which I think is the most
00:28:10.120
And unfortunately, it is the fact that Trump is, in many of his actions and rhetoric, a
00:28:17.640
And, you know, when I talk about the third, I try not to forget the first and the second,
00:28:23.700
but it does overwhelm because the fact that you have a president who is willing to routinely
00:28:29.980
do things like attack the independence of the judiciary, attack the free press, talk about
00:28:36.580
prosecuting journalists, talk about maybe we should be changing the protections that
00:28:44.280
Clearly, talking to various members of the investigative branches of the federal government and trying
00:28:50.320
to get them to bend to his will, you know, whether or not it constitutes obstruction of justice,
00:28:56.120
all of which is, strikes me, patently, obviously, dangerous for democracy, dangerous for liberal
00:29:02.680
democracy to have a president, you know, having nine meetings with the director of the FBI in the
00:29:07.680
hundred days he was in office when Obama had two meetings with that same director in the, you know,
00:29:14.560
It tells you something and it's doesn't, and it's, it's not something pretty about America.
00:29:19.100
So how do you talk about that third cluster of events in a way that, uh, that, that doesn't
00:29:29.900
It's a real challenge because the moment you begin talking about it, honestly, you begin to sound
00:29:36.760
like one of the, the hyper-partisans we just complained about where you're, you're calling the
00:29:42.920
other side dangerous or immoral or un-American. And it seems like these are not the kinds of
00:29:51.200
claims about the other side that seem open for compromise or negotiation or a meet in the middle
00:29:57.180
approach, because we are talking about someone who is undermining the norms of our democracy,
00:30:02.420
as you say, and that is dangerous. And yet anyone who's just either not paying attention or on the
00:30:07.960
other side, understandably thinks it's dangerous to talk about the president this way. It's hyper-partisan
00:30:14.400
to talk about the president this way, but you can only walk on eggshells for so long here before you
00:30:20.060
have to concede that he is not a normal person in the role of the president. He is someone who is
00:30:29.060
not observing the most basic criteria for being informed, caring about whether or not he's informed,
00:30:37.660
to take one thread among a dozen we could take here. But however the, the Russian hacking investigation
00:30:45.060
comes out and whether collusion between the Trump campaign or Trump himself and the Russians can be
00:30:51.020
proved or not, leave all of that to one side. What is unambiguously so is that we have a hostile
00:30:57.720
foreign power that worked mightily hard to undermine our democracy. And we have a president
00:31:05.740
who has either denied that to be so or has more or less ignored it and done nothing to really get to
00:31:14.900
the bottom of it simply because he's concerned about how it makes his electoral victory look. And he's
00:31:22.140
never said a bad word about Putin, right? Who is, you know, someone who has his political foes and
00:31:27.280
the occasional journalist locked up or killed. If he had done nothing else wrong in his career as
00:31:33.560
president, those facts alone are so alarming that we're nowhere near normal here. And so to talk about
00:31:41.140
this in terms this stark is not yet another example of hyper-partisan demagoguery.
00:31:48.640
Yeah, it's, it's a very, very interesting point, which is how do you convey that this really is,
00:31:55.680
this is different. This is not normal. This is the, these are, this is a violation of standards. This is
00:32:02.260
not within the historical range. I mean, if you, you know, one of the ones I think we don't pay enough
00:32:07.240
attention to is you have the president of the United States who is essentially in no significant way
00:32:12.980
disassociated himself from his various, uh, many, many, many commercial enterprises, uh, continues to
00:32:21.760
benefit from them and is actively promoting many of the, those commercial enterprises. We now have,
00:32:28.300
you know, we have now dollar and cent figures on the 30, 20, 30, 40% rises in revenues for all these
00:32:36.460
clubs that he keeps attending, that he keeps going to. You know, what he's in effect doing is essentially
00:32:42.240
commercial advertising for Mar-a-Lago and for the Bedminster club and things like that. We have no
00:32:47.720
idea what the, the nature of his meetings with foreign, uh, uh, leaders is, but what we do know is,
00:32:54.160
again, he has not disassociated himself from much of the, the kind of licensing operation that takes
00:32:59.920
place the Chinese award 35 trademarks and one day to him, 15 to his, uh, to his daughter to talk about
00:33:06.620
all this is not just, you know, to be, to be partisan. It is to say, this is really something
00:33:11.220
Mitt Romney and John McCain, uh, and, and George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush did not do, would never have
00:33:18.920
dreamed of doing, uh, and is something that, you know, we have to talk about because this is how a, you know,
00:33:25.700
this is how a banana Republic runs and we don't want to adopt those. We don't want to define these
00:33:31.580
standards down so much that they go away. You know, part of what I think I'm in the job of is
00:33:36.560
the kind of preservation job. That is the preservation of these norms of liberal democracy,
00:33:41.260
because I don't want to create a situation where we get so used to it that the next guy who comes
00:33:48.160
around says, Oh yeah, you know, I don't need to resign from any of my companies. I don't need to,
00:33:51.900
uh, release my tax returns. I don't need to do any of this. And I,
00:33:55.700
you know, my, my wife and my daughter and, uh, son-in-law can be my principal advisors.
00:34:00.460
No, no, no. We have to make sure that Trump is an aberration, not the beginning of some kind of,
00:34:05.880
you know, kind of, uh, Gaudismo rule in the United States.
00:34:10.660
Now, is there any benign explanation of all of this? Take the two pieces that you and I have put
00:34:18.420
in play here. And again, there's, there are many more pieces we could talk about, but just take two
00:34:22.980
things. The fact that he still has all of his business dealings up and running, whether he's
00:34:28.660
personally paying attention to them or not. And the fact that he has never said a bad word about
00:34:34.500
Putin. Is there a, a fundamentally benign explanation of all that?
00:34:39.580
You know, the one that, that I wonder about sometimes is the, the, the, the, the business
00:34:45.400
side, I can't quite see the benign explanation because you, you, you know, there are many easy
00:34:50.600
ways. George W. Bush's ethics lawyer outlined how he could put stuff in a blind trust. I mean,
00:34:56.440
there were, there are things you could do and clearly they're consciously not doing them.
00:35:00.080
On the Russia thing, I think the odd thing is I can imagine a benign explanation involving
00:35:06.080
collusion, which is to say that Trump ran a very disorganized, chaotic, and kind of corrupt
00:35:13.060
campaign, by which I mean, uh, it was a crazy mom and pop fly by night operation. He couldn't
00:35:18.720
get any of the big consultants. Remember there were 15, 16 other candidates that all the serious
00:35:23.740
consultants had gone to them. So he's dealing with the, the, the riffraff of the Republican
00:35:28.400
world and he's dealing with a lot of unsavory characters and they're running, they're kind
00:35:33.360
of doing a, almost a freelance operation. And in that context, the Russians are trying
00:35:37.880
to penetrate and, and maybe his guys played footsie with the Russians, but he didn't know
00:35:42.840
about it. I think that's a bit, that's a perfectly plausible benign explanation on the collusion
00:35:47.980
part. The part I don't understand and for which it's harder to find a benign explanation
00:35:53.060
is what you've pointed out a few times, which is really the central puzzle. Donald Trump
00:35:58.020
has said for almost all his life, that he thinks that the one thing that he's sure about is
00:36:03.340
that the rest of the world is constantly screwing the United States and we need to get tough on
00:36:08.680
all these SOBs. And, you know, he said that from the 1980s when he was talking about the
00:36:13.360
Japanese and the NATO allies. And then he talked about the Chinese and how they were raping our
00:36:18.080
country and how Saudi Arabia was a country that we had to pull the rug from under. Everybody
00:36:23.380
except the Russians. He has only said nice things about Putin, only said nice things about how
00:36:29.700
wouldn't it be great if we could get on with the Russians. Now, you know, there's a, there is a
00:36:34.160
school of thought that feels that it tends to come more from the kind of hard left than, than from
00:36:40.220
anywhere else in historical terms. But it really makes no sense given Trump's worldview. So that to me
00:36:47.920
is in a, in a way, the central intellectual puzzle that leads me to think maybe there is something
00:36:53.680
going on here because why is he so consistently benign in his reading of everything Putin does?
00:37:00.280
You know, even that meeting in, with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the, in the
00:37:04.820
White House, it was so much more pally than anything we've seen. The, the contacts that, that took place
00:37:11.260
with during the campaign, perfectly fine if they were what they said they were. But what I'm struck by is
00:37:16.300
we have no record of any such of conversations with the French ambassador, the German ambassador,
00:37:23.200
the British ambassador, the Chinese ambassador, you know? So what is going on with Russia is,
00:37:28.160
I think, is a fair question to which some of Trump's own rhetoric points you.
00:37:34.360
So, Fareed, I want to switch gears here and talk about Islam and, you know, the current challenge in
00:37:40.720
even talking about it and the role it's playing in creating so much chaos in the world. And as you
00:37:46.640
rightly pointed out, mostly for Muslims, you and I have disagreed both in public and in private about
00:37:53.080
how to talk about the problem of Islamic extremism. So I want to see if we can make a little progress
00:37:58.360
on this disagreement here. And so let's just come to it in a kind of stepwise fashion. First,
00:38:03.440
I noticed that recently you've written that you are a Muslim, but you're not able to practice it.
00:38:09.360
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