#472 — Strange Days on the Right

Sam Harris speaks with Ben Shapiro about their pre-election debate and the fractures on the right. They discuss Trump's second term surprises, familial corruption, tariff policy, the ideological world of Tucker Carlson, the spread of conspiracism on the right, antisemitism as the ur-conspiracy theory, JD Vance's political calculations, the future of Israel and the Palestinian question, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

• 0:25Sam Harris?

  I am here with Ben Shapiro. Ben, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Good to see you. How you doing?

• 0:30Sam Harris?

  I'm good. How are you doing? It's getting crazy out there. I've noticed from afar that your life has gotten more interesting in the last 12 months or so.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, the old Chinese curse, maybe you live in interesting times, is definitely applying itself. So that's been fun.

• 0:45Sam Harris?

  You appear to be Chinese at the moment. Well, I want to talk about the cleavages in the Republican Party and in the MAGA cult as I think of it. But before we get there, let's, because it is extreme in a way that I think none of us would have anticipated. I think many of the Republicans are, Republicans seem to be divided between those who are Nazi sympathizers and those who think, all things considered, Nazis are probably still bad. But the level of confusion about that is fairly astounding to me. So I want to get your postmortem on that. But you and I last spoke a little over a year ago, I guess a year and a half ago, before

• 1:26Sam Harris?

  Trump's election, when our friend Barry Weiss had us debate like the week before the election. And a couple of things you said there have not aged particularly well. I just want to do a postmortem on that.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  I figured you were going to start here, so sure, go for it.

• 1:40Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, this is not a matter of I told you so, but I actually just want to, I want to understand how you're viewing.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  A little bit, but it's okay. Go for it. You're entitled.

• 1:48Sam Harris?

  The truth is, I knew I was right at the time, so there's very little satisfaction in being discovered to be right now. But I mean, two small things that can kind of give you some kind of landmarks for the conversation. One is that you thought Trump's claim that he was going to tariff people extravagantly was all bluster and we wouldn't see any of that. And needless to say, he's tariffed nearly every member of our species, and not just our species. Tariffed islands that have just penguins on them, apparently. Also, you thought Mike Pompeo would be the Secretary of State. And rather than that, he was properly defenestrated. And I think even his security detail was pulled, even though he's on an Iranian kill list. So those strike me as small things that the big thing, which is really what I'd love you to respond to is that you were very confident that

• 2:32Sam Harris?

  there wasn't going to be much that was fundamentally surprising about Trump's second term. And we could be more or less certain of that because we already lived through a first term. And whereas my main argument was no, the reason why you can't draw that conclusion is that in the first term, there were lots of normal people with normal political reputations to defend serving as, quote, guardrails in the first administration, and those guardrails are now gone. And therefore, you just have loyalists and grifters and maniacs of one description or another, who are not going to protect Trump and the country from Trump's worst impulses. That seems to me to be the crucial difference between the first and second terms. I'm just, I'm wondering, what has surprised you in the last year and a half or so?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  So, I mean, we can start with kind of all of those things. So I was surprised by the decision to tariff the entire world, mainly because I thought that that was a pretty horrible idea and pretty horrible decision. And I was extraordinarily outspoken and critical when he did that, as I continue to be. You know, I think that the only mitigating factor there is that our Treasury Secretary Scott Besant is actually living on the real planet Earth and has been able to mitigate the effects of some of that. And then, of course, I thought very strongly the Supreme Court would strike down so-called liberation day tariffs, which, of course, the Supreme Court did. So my main argument with regard to President Trump for a while has been that the guardrails would largely hold, that it wasn't as though there wouldn't be mistakes or bad ideas that were put into practice,

• 3:53Speaker 02

  but that the guardrails would hold and that his worst mistakes would ended up being mitigated by the pushback of reality. Which is, I think, sort of what happened with the tariffs, is that even the sort of most blustery comments about the tariffs that he made, many of those ended up being walked back. Holes ended up being punched through. Again, I'm not in favor of what he did with the tariffs. I think they've had some pretty disastrous effects, particularly with regard to our relationship with Canada. But I will say that, what, let's put it this way, what he put forward A poster board that had nothing to do with actual tariff rates and everything to do with actual deficits that, again, I'm not sure why I should care that we have a trade deficit with Ethiopia. But, you know, everything that was on that poster board ended up not being what is the reality today. The tariff rates on that poster board are not reflective of today's tariff rates.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  So, put that out there. And again, that's not to say that you were wrong and I was right. I wasn't right. It is to point out that the sort of outcome of everyone gets tariffed at the rates he put out on Liberation Day, that is not what the outcome was. As far as Mike Pompeo, my case was that there wasn't really specifically about Pompeo. I was sort of asked to speculate on who he might pick as Secretary of State. Marco Rubio has done a pretty good facsimile of what Mike Pompeo probably would have done as Secretary of State. So, I'm not sure that that counts as a major miss. As far as the idea that he was staffing up with loyalists who are unlikely to challenge him, I agree with you that he has staffed up with people who are much more loyalists to him than they otherwise would have been in Trump number one. And I think that one of the things that he has found, to his surprise, that many of those loyalists have not turned out to be particularly competent.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And now he is shifting back toward a sort of more professional class of people inside his own administration. And here I would cite the substitution of the Secretary of Homeland Security, really, that Kristi Noem was defenestrated in favor effectively of Tom Homan, who is a significantly more professional figure and has served under both Democrats and Republicans. The same thing, I think, is true of Pam Bondi, who I thought was a bad pick, but has ended up being replaced by Todd Blanch, who's significantly more professional. So, again, I think one of the things about President Trump is that he definitely likes to stick his hand in the fire, and when it burns, he tends to pull his hand out. That is, again, not to suggest that there were no risks at all, but that the actual policy that has emerged from the administration, the actual overall policy, is actually, I

• 6:05Speaker 02

  think, not too wildly far from what I would have expected, having charted out term number one. I don't see a wild kind of swing into Never Never Land in term two as opposed to what we saw in term one.

• 6:17Sam Harris?

  What about the fact that when Trump pulls his hand out of the fire, he often pulls out lots of cash with it? So, take the tariffs, right? I understand that you draw comfort from the fact that the Supreme Court backstopped some basic sanity. With respect to the tariffs, but he nevertheless used this tariff policy and other levers of American state power to wring out an astonishing amount of money from our allies and enemies. I mean, he slaps a 46% tariff on Vietnam. Vietnam gets that reduced by greenlighting a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family. By most estimates, the

• 6:55Sam Harris?

  Trump family has made somewhere between $1.4 and $4 billion now, grifting with their cryptocurrency schemes and other machinations. I mean, this is not, none of this is getting walked back, at least.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yes, no.

• 7:10Sam Harris?

  Not until he gets into prison, but.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  I will, you asked, sorry. I did forget to say, the one thing that has shocked me is the level of familial corruption. I will say that that has surprised me.

• 7:18Sam Harris?

  Well, what amount of corruption would really matter? I mean, what amount is so much that you'd have to say, okay, I disavow this president?

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Well, again, I'm not sure, and I said this sort of last time we talked as well, 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. So disavow Trump in favor of what? I'm happy to disavow his, his behavior with regard to world liberty financial. I was, I think the first conservatives to talk about that on air when it broke, and I've talked about it consistently ever since. That's, it's sort of like saying, you know, what, what level of, you know, corruption would have caused you to disavow Biden when Biden was running against Trump? I mean, the politics is inherently oppositional.

• 8:01Sam Harris?

  No, it is. So it's a lesser of two evils calculation, but I mean, we, we came from a world where had President Obama received a cashmere sweater from some foreign power, it would have been, it would have hit the news cycle as some kind of scandal. And now we're in a world where we're just, you know, we're counting billions and the billions don't seem to matter. I mean, what, what would be so scandalous on this front where you'd have to say, all right, this is incompatible with American democracy and America's role in the world? I mean, so I mean, again, this touches other things, touches foreign policy in my view. I mean, if you ask yourself, had Maduro had the, the wisdom to have purchased a billion dollars worth of Trump's meme coin, do you still think he'd be running Venezuela?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I mean, I can't speak to that since it didn't happen, but I, you know, will say that if he had done that and then the president had suddenly come out in favor of Maduro, I would have thought that that was insipid and insane.

• 8:55Sam Harris?

  Right, I mean, I just, I just think that there's such self-dealing and such corruption and such a focus on self here that it's hard to say that the, that Trump is effectively representing anyone other than himself and his own narrowly construed interests.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think that when, when it comes to the interests that he's been pursuing in, in crypto, I think you're selling past the sale with me, Sam. I mean, you're not arguing with somebody who's arguing with you.

• 9:20Sam Harris?

  No, it's just not, it's not just crypto. It touches everything. Like, so you and I are going to talk, we'll talk about the war in Iran. I think you and I will probably view it in very similar ways, except for the fact that I think you probably will draw a lot of comfort from Trump being in charge and doing the things you think he should be doing, whereas I think he's, because he, in my view, he believes almost nothing, except just gratifying his own rapacious appetites, that he's only accidentally aligned with the interests of Israel or the interests of the West against jihadism. And I think he's capable of selling out anything you think he cares about in favor of self-interest. I think he, I think he would cut a deal with Gulf states. I mean, just take the fact that we're selling Nvidia

• 10:02Sam Harris?

  chips to UAE, even though they do, you know, military exercises with China, and this poses obvious security concerns. That's just, that was a world liberty financial deal, right? That seems to cut against our interests.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Well, so here, here's sort of my question, is, is you are using his intent to try to discern future pathways for his behavior. And the point that I'm making is that if that were the case, you probably could not have predicted many of the things that he has done on the foreign policy front, including his action in Iran, based on just pure self-interest. The only thing I can do, I try not to do this in, just generally, is attribute motive to people, because motivism is a great way to shortcut politics and actually prevent sane conversations, because you can always attribute motive to somebody's political position. Somebody may be in favor of, of instituting Obamacare because they believe that it's going to save lives, or somebody may be in favor of Obamacare because they believe that it's going to end up with money in their pocket. The bottom line- Is the Obamacare policy good or bad?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  So I try not to do this too much. I try to do this actually with Democrats and Republicans as well. Try not to go to, why are they doing this? Is it for nefarious purposes or is it for good purposes? Because to me, when it comes to politics, the intent matters a lot less than the actual efficacy of the policy or the through line of the policy. I think with President Trump, even if you want to make the case that what he does is driven by self-interest, I would say that there's some complexity to self-interest in President Trump. I think first of all, many people are driven by self-interest in different ways. There's monetary self-interest. There's also the self-interest of popularity. The self-interest of notoriety, of attention. And I think that you see many of those things emerge with President Trump in a wide variety of different ways, sometimes in conflict with one another.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  But the only thing that I can adjudicate at the end of the day is whether a policy or an idea is good or bad and am I getting more of that or less of that from this president? And again, this, I think, goes to maybe unfortunately, what politics has become for me and for a lot of other people, which is the president is not a moral paragon. In my view, the president has not been a moral paragon for a long time. And that's not President Trump only. I think that it's been a long time since we've looked to presidents as our moral paragons. The president is a plumber. Is he going to fix my toilet or is he not going to fix my toilet? And then I have to make a judgment as to whether this president fixing my toilet is either effective and if he's overcharging me and what the alternative would have been for the plumber next door to fix my toilet. Would he have been effective or would he have charged me more or would he have left footprints on the floor?

• 12:22Sam Harris?

  Okay, we take something like the reframing of January 6th as a day of love, right? I mean, this is a, I mean, you once said this was the most horrifying thing I've seen in American politics in my lifetime. You called it inexcusable, unjustifiable, awful on every level, disgusting on every level and just terrible. Now, but Trump has since pardoned everyone involved. 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. 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.

• 13:05Sam Harris?

  That 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. What's your, what's your sense of that?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Again, in what way? You keep coming back to this word disqualifying. And the question is, disqualifying in what sense?

• 13:23Sam Harris?

  Well, I just, just to say that almost any, anyone else in office would be better than this. When I'm focusing on this particular outcome, right? I mean, no other, no other president would have done this that we, that we could have elected.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I agree to a certain extent. The only reason I say to a certain extent is because I think that reframing of, of things that I consider to be pretty dark moments in American history have been reframed in the past. But not to that extent, I will agree. Uh, the, the thing that I'm pointing out here is that when you say disqualifying, the question is against whom?

• 13:53Sam Harris?

  Okay, well, I'll just run, I'll run through it.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  The toilet needs to be fixed.

• 13:56Sam Harris?

  This is, this is all.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  You don't have to, you're making, again, Sam, you seem to, you seem to want to make, well, you seem to want to make the case to me. That Donald Trump is a bad man who thinks bad things and has said bad things. And therefore is incumbent on me to support Kamala Harris or to support John Ossoff or to support whomever else is put up in place of President Trump. Number one, he's not eligible for election again. Number two, in the last election cycle, I did not support him in the primaries. Number three, when it was him against Joe Biden, then that was a binary choice. And when it was him against Kamala Harris, it was a binary choice. And again, the question to me was, which one of these presidents is going to be more likely to mirror my policy preferences? Not whether on a raw level, I would have Donald Trump babysit my children or, or maintain my, my trust account.

• 14:40Sam Harris?

  There's more, there's more that you could be doing in your commentary to acknowledge the changing political landscape, I think. So for instance, I agree with you. You only had a choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump a year and a half ago. And you might still be able to defend, I mean, though, you know, we disagreed about it at the time, obviously, because we had that debate. You might still be able to defend that choice in retrospect, saying, given what I knew then, it would seem to me to be the rational and ethical choice to pick Trump. Again, I think January 6th was the bridge that once crossed, completely obviated that decision, but.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Well, again, I mean, you're, you seem to imply that I have an obligation to regret my vote for President Trump.

• 15:20Speaker 00

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• 15:28Speaker 02

  The path forward lies in normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a form of government in the Gaza Strip, partially governed by some of those Abraham Accords countries.

• 15:40Sam Harris?

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

• 15:45Speaker 02

  I do not think that a victory long scale requires a firm total regime change. If the United States were to take Harga Island and chokehold it, and then the president were to call it a day, that would certainly count as a victory in my book.