#403 — Sanity Check on Trump 2.0

Sam Harris speaks with Jonah Goldberg about the damage Trump is doing domestically and abroad. They discuss Trump's tariffs, Curtis Yarvin and the Tech Right, threats against Republicans who criticize Trump, why the arguments Republicans are using to defend Trump's position on Ukraine are flawed, America's deteriorating moral standing on the global stage, the recklessness of DOGE, why so many CEOs bent the knee to Trump, antisemitism on the Right, Trump's plan for Gaza, worst case scenarios for Trump 2.0, 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. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That's why Sam Harris created the Waking Up https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life's most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 0:51Sam Harris?

  So, um, Trump 2.0. How's it going?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Um, well, you know, it's funny, when, in the waning days of the election, I had arguments with a lot of friends of mine, and they're friends, who were gonna vote against Kamala Harris for Donald Trump. And I, I thought their calculations were wrong. I didn't vote for Harris, but I was certainly not gonna vote for Donald Trump. But I also live in Washington DC, so I didn't think my vote mattered all that much. But, the argument that you heard from everybody was, the best-case scenario was also the most likely scenario. And the best-case scenario for them was that it was gonna be a repeat of the first Trump term, which I thought they were overly nostalgic about, and forgot a lot of things about the first Trump term.

• 1:35Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  But they said, "Look, you know, at the end of the day, what was so bad?" It was sort of a sophisticated version of, "It was a lot of mean tweets, but the economy was great." Right? And I, my position at the time was, that is the best-case scenario, because he's not gonna change. But it is not the most likely scenario. And I think we now know I was right. The first term, whatever successes there were, were largely the result of the fact that Trump didn't know what he was doing, and was constrained by- More sort of normie Republicans.

• 2:03Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Who narrowed his scope of options and warned him off bad things and in some ways undermined him in ways that people can legitimately complain about.

• 2:11Sam Harris?

  Yeah, many of us spoke about guardrails at that point and people didn't seem to care.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Right, institutions are holding and all that kind of stuff, right? And so like, fast forward to today, he has surrounded himself entirely with absolute loyalists whose mission is to enact whatever Trump wants to do rather than push back on it. Rather than say, Mr. President, that's a bad idea or you shouldn't do that. It's all yes, sir, how high kind of stuff. And it's a mess. I think it's a mess.

• 2:40Sam Harris?

  So yeah, let's, let's talk about this. How many closeted normies do you think there are? Cause I'm starting to worry that there are not that many. Like I find that the people I know who voted for Trump and many voted very much in the spirit in which you just described, they, they looked at the first term, they thought that's as, you know, everyone's fears about authoritarianism or corruption or self-dealing or just sheer chaos. All of that was overblown because not all that much happened. I mean, they, these are people who didn't care so much about January 6th for some reason, or his attempt to actually steal an election prior to that, the big lie that the election was stolen from him, et cetera, et cetera.

• 3:22Sam Harris?

  The people I know who voted for Trump heavily discount those indiscretions and looked at his term and said, this is, he was a comparatively normal president whose policies I liked. And obviously we have a problem at the border and obviously the Democrats can't speak honestly about that or about DEI or any of these other things we're allergic to. So there's not much of an issue. And now with all of these loyalists appointed, I mean, when you see someone like Cash Patel brought in to run the FBI or, I debated Ben Shapiro a week before the election and he was assuring me that Mike Pompeo was going to have an outsized role in the administration. You know, this is probably, you know, a month before his Secret Service protection was stripped

• 4:04Sam Harris?

  off in, in an obvious attempt to, you know, cow people.

• 4:10Sam Harris?

  And show you just what kind of price you you could pay if you are not a perfect loyalist. But everyone has just moved the goalposts and now they seem to feel that this is all acceptable. And even quite a hopeful sign that we're going to doge our way into some sort of golden age of American renewal.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a couple of points about that. One, I think bringing up the Pompeo security stuff, John Bolton, the others as well, is is really worth just pausing on for a moment because it's not just that Trump got rid of the security protections. He announced it to the world.

• 4:45Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  He effectively put a target on these people's back and said, you have a free shot now, which is just despicable in all sorts of ways. If you tried to do that in a movie, everyone who recognized it immediately is immoral and villainous. Look, we don't know each other that well, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the people you talk to tend to be on the overly intellectual side. There are people who deal with words and images and concepts, and they're very good at intellectualizing and rationalizing things. And among that crowd, I think you're exactly right that this has happened. There is something that happens to people when they make bad decisions, rather than own up to it and say, my gosh, I was wrong.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  They say they look for new reasons to convince themselves first and then others that know in reality they were right. And that's where the goalpost moving goes. I think that critics of Trump, right, which we both are, need to work on being careful about conflating those people. Some of them are good people. I just think they're wrong, right? Those people, the sort of Trump, the professional Trump apologist class with the median Trump voter, right? The the voters that gave Trump a narrow victory, and I, you know, I keep hearing about all this landslide stuff. It was a significant victory. It was a decisive victory. All that swing state stuff matters, right?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  The county movement stuff matters, but let's keep it in perspective. It was the 44th biggest electoral college win in American history.

• 6:13Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  And he won the popular vote by what, a one and a half, two million votes or something like that? So in the history of American politics, it's a pretty narrow win. The people who made that majority, the Hispanic mechanic who felt besieged by COVID and inflation and all that kind of stuff, they're not paying attention to, they weren't paying a lot of attention when he was president the first time, and they're not paying a lot of attention to this stuff now. The idea that they all endorse everything that he's doing, you can get that impression by listening to the Fox News crowd, but if you actually like, look at the polling, you know, his pardoning, which I thought by itself was an impeachable act on his first day, his pardoning of the January 6 rioters is not popular. It's just not polling well. And so in some ways, I mean, just as a matter

• 6:58Speaker 01

  of rank punditry, you can make the case that Trump is already repeating some of the mistakes that Biden made, which is thinking he's got a much bigger mandate than he does. I think the concept of a mandate is garbage to begin with, but thinking is a much bigger mandate than he does, and that he has a mandate for these boutique, you know, demagogic authoritarian moves that the guys who are voting on egg prices and inflation and maybe the border weren't voting for Cash Patel and Dan Bongino to run the FBI. They weren't voting for purges in the Justice Department. And to think that he's got the endorsement of the people, even all of his voters for all that stuff, I think is a political miscalculation. It

• 7:40Speaker 01

  doesn't get us out of the problem that he's president and nobody else is, but I just don't think that outside of his core base, the very online crowd and all of that, that he has got the kind of popular support that people want to, you know, for either to support him or to criticize him or to catastrophize about him. I don't think he's got that level of support that he thinks he does, whether, and that the people who are the most scared or the most happy about what he's doing, think he does.

• 8:07Sam Harris?

  What do you make of the influence of people like Curtis Yarvin and other seemingly fringe, certainly idiosyncratic figures on the tech bros and oligarchs who are now facilitating this second administration?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  So it's funny, I kind of ignored Curtis Yarvin for years, and then I listened to the New York Times interview with him. And to say I was underwhelmed by his arguments is a wild exaggeration.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  There's intellectually, I think there's very little there there. Not that everything he says is wrong. I agree with some of his sort of subsidiary points. I just don't think they back up his major conclusions that, you know, we need a monarch. I think that's ridiculous. I think that, so I don't take him very seriously. I really don't. I wanted to, I was, I, I look for intellectual and interlocutors that I can really fight with. But I, I find his arguments so specious and sort of silly.

• 9:08Sam Harris?

  But what do you make of the fact that people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and all of these other people who have quite, have been quite instrumental in, in building Trump 2.0? I mean, they, they arguably introduced J D Vance to Trump. And if Vance becomes the future of the party, well, then they, they certainly will largely own that. And they are really, you know, just they're not even hiding it. They're quite influenced by Yarvin and the people he reads. And some of the people he reads are actually Nazis.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as I was saying, I was about to say, I don't take him seriously. I take it very seriously that, that important people take him seriously. That is very disturbing to me. The red pilling of the sort of tech bros has been sociologically fascinating and I think really problematic. I have a theory, I got it from a friend of mine, that, you know, Peter Thiel, I used to really admire a lot of Peter Thiel's stuff. I like the C-stetting, you know, techno libertarian stuff. Let's get jet packs, all that kind of thing. And I think that he basically, and a bunch of people around him have decided that the country is going to be run by oligarchs. That oligarchy is the future, even though we really should call them plutocrats because oligarch just means rule of the few.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  And if that's the way things are going, better to be an oligarch than not. And, and then, so I think that J D Vance, it's, it's funny, like, J D Vance has been making a name for himself on the sort of, on the far right for years endorsing industrial policy, saying nice things about Lena Kahn and Elizabeth Warren and all these things, saying, you know, 10,000 cheap toasters isn't worth one American job and other economically illiterate stuff. And yet, when he gave his big speech in Europe about, about ...regulation in free markets. He was like a Reaganite free market guy about AI and big tech, but nothing else. And to me, that seems like, okay, he is carrying water for that constituency,

• 11:05Speaker 01

  but for no other constituency that believes in free markets. He's free markets for us, but not for that other stuff. And I think that's a sort of a sign. And what can actually come of this? I don't know. I think that the most dismaying stuff to me is not the threat necessarily to liberty right now, although there are some things to be worried about. It's just the corruption of it, like the meme coin corruption, the crypto corruption, the special dealings and special pleadings. One of the attractions that people don't seem to really understand why Trump loves tariffs so much is that historically tariffs are the biggest driver of political corruption. Because every single interest goes hat in hand and either asks for an exemption to tariffs

• 11:49Speaker 01

  or asks that their their competition get tariffed. It is a way to beseech those in power for special pleading. And that, I think, is the that is the economic philosophy of this administration.

• 12:01Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that's a point that's made not often enough. Tariffs are often criticized as just bad economics, but it really is a bottleneck that Trump can construct so that he can dole out favors. I mean, it really enables a kind of mob boss style of rule.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Right. And I think the mob boss thing, just dwell on that for a second. I recently wrote about this at the Dispatch, but like the mob boss thing is real. One of the biggest influences on Trump was this crooked Democratic machine, mobbed up mob, uh, party boss in Brooklyn. And his whole approach to politics was punish you if you're an enemy and reward you if you're a friend. Trump's approach to macroeconomics is exactly that. But also, like, you look at the Ukraine deal where, you know, he's like, no security guarantees, but we need a piece of the action. You know, you need to give us a chunk of your resources just to make us whole. And in fact, he said, We're going to get our money back plus, right? So he wants to make a profit off of Ukraine.

• 13:05Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  His view of foreign policy, you can get very egghead-y, and I'm happy to do it if you want, about spheres of influence theory and Carl Schmitt and all of these kinds of things, and our 19th century understanding of great power relations. But really, it's Tony Soprano approach, right? He thinks NATO is a protection racket, and they're not kicking up enough. He, it explains why he's so nasty to our allies, but so deferential to our adversaries. Because the adversaries are, in effect, heads of the other five families, and they deserve respect as equals, because he's a boss and they're bosses. But his underbosses, his capo regimes, his button men, you know, England, all, Canada, all those guys, they aren't showing enough respect to the Don, as it were.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And that colors his entire approach to our relationship with allies and our relationship to adversaries, is that our adversaries deserve respect because they're strong men like him, and our allies are weak, and they're, they're living off of his teat and not showing him enough respect.

• 14:06Sam Harris?

  Hmm. Yeah, well, let's drill down on that, because I think that's the center of my concern. We're having this conversation about, six days after that debacle in the Oval Office. Many people have analyzed it. I think there are two diametrically opposed views of what happened there. It seems to me, more or less axiomatic, that if they're high-fiving in the Kremlin and shouting for joy on Russian state television, whatever Trump and Vance thought they were up to, they're, on some level, they're not serving American interests. I mean, I just, I don't, I don't see how anyone looks at, at this alignment with Russia,

• 14:48Sam Harris?

  when Russia and, you know, Putin himself have been explicit enemies of the United States for so long. I mean, Russia, Russia has, you know, Putin and, you know, his surrogates on Russian television have explicitly threatened us with nuclear annihilation for our support of Ukraine. These are not our friends, to leave aside everything else they've been doing to try to undermine, you know, American democracy.

• 15:15Sam Harris?

  How is it possible that your friends and aristocratic friends in the Republican Party have lost sight of the fact that one Putin is actually a dictator who kills his political opponents and or jails and kills them as well as journalists? He launched an actual war of aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine is a country that we convinced to give up its nukes. I mean, one unfortunate lesson of this whole episode is that, you know, no one can look at this and think it was a good idea to give up your nukes because this is what happens to you. Again, are these, are most Republicans closeted and sane now?

• 15:57Sam Harris?

  Or they have just actually taken the firmware upgrade of their brains offered by Trump and Vance? And I mean, what do you think Mark Rubio thinks is actually going on here?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Well, you know what Nietzsche said, to look into Mark Rubio's soul, soul, look back into you. Be careful about that. Yeah, you know, you asked this before, and I didn't really answer the question about like, how many normie Republicans are left, right? Their numbers are shrinking for sure. I mean, just as a matter of just head counting, the number of Republicans in Congress who were there prior to 2017 has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, right? Because a lot of the normies, you know, it's like, I don't want to quote Yates, but like the best lacked all conviction and got the hell out of there and were replaced by the worst in a lot of cases. And so, you know, there's a reason why my podcast is called The Remnant for, you know,

• 16:46Speaker 01

  but I think there are still an enormous number or a significant number of Republicans, including Republican voters, right? You know, Ukraine is still like, I did the numbers recently, like 60, 70% favorable views from Republican voters, while Russia is like 20%. It's, some of this is a manifestation of being way too online and only listening to your biggest fans, which is a form of corruption. But the problem is, is that while there are still significant numbers of normies, they lack Courage and they and you know and they'll say, look, I have to pick my battles. You know, I've talked to Republican senators who I think are who agree with us very, you

• 17:30Speaker 01

  know, broadly and actually narrowly on all of these sorts of issues when it comes to Ukraine and a lot of other things. But they're like, look, I'll, I'll lose a primary. I, there are only so many fights I can take. Some of them are legitimately, this gets under reported, but there are, there are Republicans who are elected Republicans who are literally afraid for their personal safety.

• 17:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  You know, with the Pete Hegseth nomination, you know, Joni Ernst was one of the holdouts. And there are a lot of, there's a lot of talk about how like, what she was put through, the death threats and all of that were one of the things that tipped her over. There are a lot of decent people who are friends of mine who left in part because they're like, why am I risking my family, like literally my family's lives for a tenth of what I can make in the private sector, right? I mean, and so some of it is well-founded lack of courage. But nonetheless, the, it is, if you stick your head up in this environment and actually speak with conviction about some of these things, you, your political career could end very quickly. The intimidation, you can be vilified and you can be physically scared for your safety.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And that's very scary. And I don't know, you know, I, I don't know how to judge it because I'm so, sometimes I'm too close up to this. I know the personalities well enough that it's hard for me to say, oh, this guy's a terrible person when he's, you know, under all these pressures. And at the end of the day, politicians are politicians and they go, you know, the spirit of there go the people, I must go with them for I am their leader, has defined the Trump era for a very long time. And I can't tell you how many politicians I know who were totally freaked out when they started going to Republican events in the first term, never mind now. People who'd been, you know, representing in a district for, for 10 terms, 20, you know, 20 years, all of a sudden not recognizing anybody in the room because Trump has brought

• 19:22Speaker 01

  in all sorts of new voters to the party who aren't conservative. You can call them right wing, but they're much more populist nationalists than they are anything like, you know, the William F. Buckley conservatism I grew up in.

• 19:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah. So let's talk about this, this alternate perspective on what happened vis a vis Ukraine and, and you know, what happened in the Oval Office last week. I mean, there's, you know, I've heard it in various pieces. I did a podcast, actually just before that Oval Office incident with Neil Ferguson, who was surprisingly open-minded about the wisdom and probity of the Trump administration. We had, you know, I pushed back on many of his general points, but many people felt that I let him get away with murder simply because, you know, we pitched that episode into the chaos of what happened in the Oval Office. And we had recorded it the day before, but then released it. And

• 20:16Sam Harris?

  it was perceived very much that lens as this is our response to what had happened here. And, you know, it was, it did not age well, you know, even by the, by the hour. But I think, I think Neil would say, again, forgive me Neil if I'm getting you slightly wrong, but based on what, what he said last week in our podcast, and I've certainly heard other people say as much since, that what's happening here is that the Trump administration has recognized that the US cannot fight multiple wars now. We can't fight a war with Russia, and then also maybe fight a war with China, and then also maybe help Israel fight a war with Iran. And we, we actually have to triage our commitments here. And the charitable

• 20:57Sam Harris?

  analysis of what's happening with Ukraine is that Trump has recognized that we have to really put our entire focus on this, this rising risk of, of a collision with China. And so we have to get out of the business of policing Europe, let Europe take care of Europe. Ukraine is not a crucial American interest, even if, you know, you might think we have some moral obligation to support a democracy that has been attacked by a, a true enemy of democracy. We're just doing triage here, and we're, we're now pivoting to Asia. What's wrong with that analysis?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  So this is one of the great frustrations I have in the Trump era. And Neil Ferguson is a friend of mine, so I'm not ascribing this necessarily to him. First of all, this, the goalpost moving you referenced at the very beginning of the conversation among your friends, you know, there's a lot of that in the intellectual classes, in part because a lot of people want to be relevant, to have influence in the administration, to be part of the conversation. And you just see that, again, I'm not ascribing this to Neil, but like, it's, it's replete across vast swaths of the world I live in. This idea that somehow you can define reality slightly differently and get, as a defense of, both a defense of Trump and an inducement to get him to do something.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  And, or to make the best of the policy. And I've seen a lot of that about the, the mineral deal with Ukraine, where people are just sort of wish casting about it. But in the abstract, right? You, the case that you lay out, that is a, that is a, on its face, an intellectually defensible argument. It is, you know, foreign policy requires making, governing is, govern is to choose, right? And in a world of scarce resources, you put your resources where they are most needed for the, the problems ahead. And I get all of that. My first problem with it as a defense of what Trump is doing, is that it's not a defense of what Trump is doing. Um, it's this, you know, you hear it all the time, oh, what Trump is doing, he's giving

• 23:06Speaker 01

  tough love to NATO, for NATO to fix itself. The idea that Trump really wants NATO to become robust and strong is just nonsense, right? It's not, it's not his goal. He feels like, he sees the world stage in this very zero sum way. He's a real estate guy. And he thinks if, if, if, if they win, we lose. That, you know, he thinks the EU was created, he said it just the other day, it was EU was created to screw America.

• 23:31Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  It's just, it's ahistorical bullshit. And you can go down a long list of these kinds of arguments that are pretextual rationalizations for what Trump is actually doing. You know, like when he calls Zelensky a dictator, he doesn't actually care. He doesn't, in his own moral universe, he doesn't think dictator is an insult. He just thinks that's the nearest weapon to hand that is usefully insulting against adversaries. When he was asked if Putin was a dictator, like two days later, he says, I don't like to use that, I don't use that language lightly. Yeah. It's just all nonsense, right? And so I think that it is good that Europe is rearming and, or apparently is rearming.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I think it's good that Germany is doing this. I think Britain has been negligent in all sorts of ways about its national security and all that. But at the end of the day, part of my fundamental problem with this supposedly new realism, and I've long believed that realism is kind of nonsense. It's basically the best working definition of a realist, of a foreign policy realist, is an ideologue who lost an argument. It is a way, it's a rhetorical trick of being able to say, oh, those ideologues are screwing things up. And if you'd listened to me, where I actually understand the facts and I have an empirical grasp on reality, everything would be different. And, but the problem with that is that it is a fact of realism rightly understood

• 24:58Speaker 01

  that national honor matters, that we have made commitments to allies, that, that when we betray those allies, when we betray our commitments, when we break our word, that has consequences for us going forward in all sorts of ways. And if you, if you want America to remain, if you want the US dollar to remain the world's reserve currency, pissing off basically all the other rich friends we have is not a way to do that, right? I mean, China doesn't want the dollar to be the reserve currency. Europeans and the Japanese, they go along with it because they're our allies and they're part of the international order we created. When we tell them, you can't trust us, that we are going to look for maximizing, literally maximizing.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Profit over your misfortune. The idea that you're going to get them to cooperate and all cooperate in all these other institutions is just not is fantasy. And it's also just it's it's undermining. I don't want to get too poetic, but it undermines the country in all sorts of sort of almost spiritual ways. When you tell people that the best way to conduct foreign policy is to belittle your friends and allies and make friends with your enemies and to say that all that stuff about freedom and and and liberty and leading the free world, that was all BS and we don't care about that. What Americans think about their own country starts to change. And I just one small example of this, because I thought it was just so evil.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  When we bullied Israel into voting with us in the UN, where we voted with North Korea and China and Russia and all of that. You know, Israel has a vested, deep and abiding national interest in maintaining the idea that the world should come to the aid of scrappy little democracies fighting for their survival.

• 26:47Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  But when you force Israel to vote with us, and the basically the pitch was, yeah, you got to put all that stuff aside because in reality, you rely on us to keep you around. And and so the Israelis were left with an impossible choice. Be loyal to an abstract rhetorical principle that is in their interest or piss off an administration that they desperately need help from right now. And so we to bully them into doing that, we didn't even let them abstain, was a perfect example of basically making dishonor a linchpin of our foreign policy.

• 27:19Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I think this is a crucial point, and it puts the lie to this this traditional opposition between realism and idealism or, you know, moralism or so or some other variant of it. I mean, because ideals and moral principles have real consequences. So if your realism has to embrace the causal efficacy of having people trust you, having people admire you, having people want to help you because you're the good guy. You know, you're really, you really are. It matters if you really are the good guys. You know, and because there really are bad guys out there. And that's the thing I just can't understand in this analysis. It's Yeah, I mean, for years, for as long as we've been alive, virtually, the enemies

• 28:02Sam Harris?

  of democracy, and now Putin is, you know, Exhibit A in that cast of characters, have been trying to advance the claim that all of our ideals, you know, wanting to support the liberal democratic order because it's a good thing, it's better than the alternatives, all of that is bullshit, right?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:22Sam Harris?

  There really are no deeper ethical principles that govern the relationships among nations. There's just raw power. There's just bullies and aspiring bullies. And Trump, in, you know, a few short weeks, seems to have fully ratified that view of America. And, I mean, he's just revealed us to be totally transactional and extractive in our relationships with our allies, and even extortionate. I mean, but, you know, Zelensky effectively has a gun to his head, and, as you point out, you know, Trump and Vance waltz in there and start demanding, you know, mineral rights

• 29:03Sam Harris?

  and even a profit on the war, and then, you know, hector him for not, you know, dressing appropriately and saying thank you, obsequiously enough. It is a complete immolation of our moral stature on the world stage, and yet, the Republicans I know who voted for Trump simply don't care. They don't think any of that matters on some level.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least they don't care now, right? But, look, I mean, this gets to the point we were talking about before, about the importance of courage, right? I was listening to an interview with, man on the street interview with a Ukrainian, I guess it was on NPR the other day, and he was making the point, like, look, we, there are reasons for hope. Donald Trump isn't a king, he was saying. He doesn't, he doesn't speak for all of America. We know Americans are on our side, and, you know, and we have hope that, you know, there will be pressure put on the administration to change course. I think that, that hope is, alas, going to be somewhat in vain, but if you don't speak up... Right? If you don't actually lend actual evidence to that hope that that Trump doesn't

• 30:12Speaker 01

  speak for all of America, if you just go along with it, then it becomes true, right? And so I wish more Republicans would speak up. I wish more conservatives would speak up. I wish they would. They don't necessarily have to say, I was wrong about Trump and he's a horrible person, but they just have to say, look, there are good guys and bad guys in this story. And the, you know, the tests are so small. I mean, it's something out of, it's a very Orwellian sort of Stalinist kind of thing where you force people to lie. That's the key, right? You make them lie and then you kind of own them. And so forcing people to lie about whether or not they think Russia started the war is just a way to signal

• 30:54Speaker 01

  that truth will not save you, right? That you cannot tell the truth, you cannot have the courage of your convictions and speak honestly. And that creates an environment that I think makes it easier for people, the ones that are really frustrating you, and I know lots of people just like the ones you're describing, to convince themselves, right? I mean, one of the reasons I ultimately left Fox was that I was basically not allowed to criticize Trump on air. Now, no one told me that. I was just never asked a question where I, and my whole thing is I don't lie, right? You know, you ask me a question and I'll answer honestly. So if you only ask me questions about what I think of Nancy Pelosi, and you never ask me what I think about Donald Trump, it'll sound like I'm on board.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And the way Fox operates, the way, you know, the, the, most of the MAGA echo chamber operates, and the Republican Party now operates, is that silence is taken as approval and consent. And you create an environment where breaking that silence gets punished. And

• 31:54Sam Harris?

  Well, the case you just referenced is even stranger and in some sense, more depressing than that. I mean, I agree with you that Trump and, you know, authoritarians generally put up a series of loyalty tests and you, you, you fail them at your peril, at least political peril. But in this case, his claim that Ukraine started the war, I don't know if you noticed this, but it struck me this way at the time. And then I heard John Pothoritz on the commentary podcast say that this is how it struck him.

• 32:28Sam Harris?

  When Trump said that Ukraine started the war, it was almost like he misspoke. And then he just couldn't take his foot out of his mouth. And then he just doubled down, he doubled down on it. And then everyone was forced to insist that the emperor has clothes.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:43Sam Harris?

  After that, but it's like, he actually wasn't making the claim in any kind of straightforward way that, that no history is, other than you think it is, Ukraine actually started the war. He was just started, he was sort of riffing. He was saying, you had, you've been, you've been fighting for three years. You shouldn't, you, you, you should have put an end to it. You shouldn't have started it. And he, he sort of blurted out the phrase, you shouldn't have started it and was anchored to it. And then, then you watched the ripples through the, the epistemology of the Republican Party where people had to figure out how to, how to construe that utterance as anything other than, than delusional.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, I, I think you're exactly right. John's a good friend of mine. Um, I think he's right about that. You know, I mean, there's a dynamic, there's that old joke about how you never want to be the first person to stop clapping.

• 33:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  When Stalin, when Stalin enters the room, right?

• 33:37Sam Harris?

  You know, there was that, I, I, it might be apocryphal. I don't know if it was, uh, Solzhenitsyn or, I think it's from the Gulag Archipelago, but there's a story of, you know, like people clapping to the point of just excruciating pain, like clapping continuously for 20 minutes. And the first person who stops was actually killed. Right? I mean, that's, that's, uh, yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I mean, and so again, we're not there, but that's the emotional temperament that we're kind of talking about. I mean, I'll give you a just small, very small anecdote about this. You may probably, probably don't even remember, but very early in his first term, he butt tweeted something.

• 34:13Sam Harris?

  Uh huh.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Kofefi.

• 34:14Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And it was like, just, it was obviously just like a stupid typo butt tweet kind of thing. And I made some jokes about it in the, in a column or something. And one of the, right, I can't remember if it was the Federalist or National Greatness, but one of those sort of turd polishing, Trump is great in all things, things, wrote an entire piece condemning me for not understanding that it was possible.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  That what Trump was really doing was tweeting a message to the persecuted people of the Middle East that he was on their side and that they should rise up because Kofefe is only a couple of letters off of some word in Arabic that would and it's like you the work you guys are going to give yourselves hernias trying to make his it was like the the Sharpie thing with including Alabama and the hurricane and everyone oh you know he was right and I was like you're not doing him favors politically I mean forget characterologically that ship has sailed but like if you surround yourself only with people who think every brain fart is brilliant when you actually do something

• 35:24Speaker 01

  stupid or wrong that's very scary because no one's going to have the courage or the political muscle to say Mr. President back off on that and in an environment where everybody is told that the first test I mean like the job interviews for a lot of positions in government you are asked who won the 2020 election and if you answer wrong you don't get the job or you get fired or you don't get promotion or whatever and if you answer wrong to the one of the other questions that's been reported was who were the real patriots on January 6th?

• 35:52Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  He wants a government full of people who either are so lacking in integrity that they're willing to lie about those kinds of basic fundamental things or so deluded that they actually believe the correct quote unquote correct answers either way it's just no way to actually run a government.

• 36:09Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, well, let's talk about how you trim a government. What's your impression of what Elon is doing and the Doge efforts?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  So I've tried really hard to be case by case about a lot of this stuff and I have some criticisms for how the media the Democrats are treating some of this as making the real story.

• 36:35Sam Harris?

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