#413 — “More From Sam”: Trump & Israel, Corruption, Free Speech Violations, the Democrats, & Ezra Klein

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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

This is Sam Harris.

Today I'm answering some more questions that were submitted by subscribers on my Substack page and discussing some current events.

Once again, the voice you're hearing on the other end is that of my manager and business partner, Jaron Lonstein.

We're hoping to continue this series of episodes.

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Most Jews I talk to tell me that they feel safer with Trump in office now.

Why do you think they're wrong?

Well, admittedly, that's kind of a mixed story.

I get it.

If you're a single issue voter and your issue was Israel, I kind of understand that because Biden and Harris were making noises that seemed guaranteed to make you uncomfortable.

Yeah, so I mean, the moral confusion left of center about the war in Gaza and about Hamas and about, you know, the whole peace process with the Palestinians, it's understandable that if that was your issue, you thought virtually anything is better than that, right?

And Trump, you know, in his defense and in defense of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, first time around, did

demonstrate some considerable support for Israel and moving the embassy to Jerusalem.

I mean, all of these things were big moves that other presidents hadn't taken.

The reason why Trump is

not reliable is that

he's not reliable.

He's not a serious person.

He doesn't actually understand anything.

He has allegiances which are vulnerable to the next moment he feels personally slighted by somebody, right?

So I would remind you that the only thing he said in the immediate aftermath of October 7th was something incredibly petty.

I mean,

you're actually psychopathically petty about how Netanyahu had not been sufficiently loyal to him or something.

I mean, it was completely insane, analogous to his first comments after

the World Trade Center came down after 9-11.

And he said, you know, many people say I've got the tallest building in Manhattan now.

I mean, an absolutely disqualifying piece of moral lunacy.

And that's what he was like after October 7th, right?

So he's totally capable of changing his feelings about Israel based on his feelings about how a leader there has treated him.

And he's also capable of pitching his brilliant idea of turning Gaza into Six Flags Magic Mountain and trolling the entire world by releasing.

I think this came from the official White House X account.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

It was either Trump's account or the official White House.

I think it, honestly, I think it was the official White House.

Other things like this have come on that channel.

It's become a pure troll account.

And he released this AI video of, you know, a golden statue of him effectively being worshipped in Gaza.

I mean, it's insane that we have a president who's engaging with this immensity of human suffering and, you danger for the future with this kind of no-nothingism and

just self-absorption.

So he's not a reliable partner to Israel.

He's also probably deeply conflicted with his economic ambitions in the Gulf states.

He would sell Israel out

for a hotel deal in Saudi, I think.

He's just not.

He's not a serious.

But he hasn't.

Those are speculations.

I mean, I understand.

He hasn't, though.

And I think he has been generally better if you are a single voter for Israel.

But I'm not even talking about Israel.

I'm talking about the Jews that I talk to that tell me they just feel safer here in the U.S.

Okay, but the thing they're ignoring is that Trump and his enablers continue to play

well with the scariest anti-Semites in the West, the right-wing anti-Semites.

I mean, if you're talking about anti-Semites who actually want to kill the Jews now, you're talking about not the far left on college campuses.

You're talking about what's adjacent to the far left are the real Islamists and jihadists, right, who have confused them.

But on the right, you're also talking about scary anti-Semites.

You're talking about neo-Nazis.

You're talking about conspiracists who think that the Jews are controlling the world economy and sabotaging it for their own personal gain.

Trump is the guy who will never say anything bad, really, about the far, far conspiracy-adult right, because for some reason, he thinks he needs them.

I mean, it's just all too obvious.

This goes all the way back to his first campaign when David Duke was supporting him, and he pretended not to know who David Duke was when he was pressed on, you know,

would you disavow this support?

He actually knows who David Duke is, right?

It's just, there's a game of FTSE being played with the most odious characters on the far right, all of whom are anti-Semitic lunatics, and Trump is playing that game.

And when you look at the people who are out in Trumpistan, the great influencers of Trumpistan, you know, the Tucker Carlsons of the world, they are playing a game of, you know, Holocaust Holocaust revisionism and denialism that is frankly terrifying and is pouring gasoline on the most dangerous current of anti-Semitism in America.

That's happening on the right.

It's not the left.

It's not the people encamped on Ivy League campuses who are confused about what's happening in Gaza.

So it's a very mixed picture, Trump's support for the Jews, and it's by no means optimal.

though it is understandable that people who are focused on the Israel peace couldn't see it in the run-up to the election.

Okay, so maybe Trump just likes to be liked by a lot of people, but he's also the one who put the anti-Semitism task force together.

And he's also done things that feel, if you're Jewish, that feel like, okay, he's taking action.

He might still keep those lines of communication open and he might, you know, pretend to not know these people, but it does appear, if you're Jewish, that somebody finally has your back.

What are they getting wrong with that?

Why is what they feel or they seem to appear to be witnessing wrong?

You just think it's short-lived potentially?

Well, because he and his team are

not actually ethical and well-informed.

He's surrounded by loyalists and he honestly does not have an ethical bone in his body, right?

So he's bound to get things wrong because he's motivated by something other than clear-sighted moral integrity and ethical principles.

So yeah, on the college piece, yes, it's totally understandable that people would want something like a heavy-handed response to the moral confusion in those institutions.

And there's something satisfying about that.

But because Trump is actually motivated by pure vindictiveness against the so-called elites, and he doesn't actually know what a university is good for, he's not actually a defender of free speech, right?

I mean, though the MAGA cult thinks that, you know, free speech absolutism is one of their principles.

It's simply not.

And so rounding up someone whose only moral infraction was to write an op-ed

castigating the IDF and deport them just for a pure act of speech, that's deeply corrosive, not just to the life of

that specific student immigrant, but to the culture of a college campus, right?

Like this is not what our government should be doing.

Yes, the campuses needed a corrective to their moral confusion and to the outburst of anti-Semitism that they allowed to happen and to their ethical double standards, which were totally self-evident to anyone who was watching those congressional hearings and who wasn't a woke lunatic.

But having the government put this kind of pressure on the institutions and defund the most important science, right, to cut the budgets of not just the soft sciences and the humanities that tend to be more confused on these issues, but the hard sciences and medical research.

I mean, it's been a disaster that what Trump and Doge have been doing to the, you know, the National Science Foundation and to our universities.

And it's, you know, if it stands a chance of, you know, wrecking the stature and even the economy of our country.

You know, I don't think we want Hamas supporting students or immigrants of any kind in this country, right?

So we should be very slow to give visas, student and otherwise, to people before we have vetted them.

And so our vetting process needs to be better and we need to exclude Islamists and jihadists and just

ideologues who have no sympathy for Western values, right?

I mean, the people who want to destroy our society or see it replaced with something else are not people we should be eager to have in this country.

So at the border and in the immigration process, we should have a very fine filter, right?

But once people are here and they're expressing odious ideas, we should have a different standard for deporting them, right?

Like it's not the same gesture.

Not letting them in is very different from showing up in masks in the middle of the night and hauling them out of their dorm room and putting them on a plane to nowhere.

That's a completely different level of intrusion in the lives of normal people.

And forget about the people being deported without due process.

That's awful.

You're going to get the wrong, what does due process mean?

It's the only safeguard against getting the wrong people, getting innocent people.

This is all so totally ill-conceived because we don't have serious, sane, and ethical people in charge.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I, again, I go back to this.

I hear all that and I agree with it.

Most of it, I can't remember everything you said, but there was a lot there.

But I do, I think that people feel like they do have sort of a golem in the White House.

And even if he says things like, you know, if the hostages aren't back by Saturday, they'll be held to pay.

And I guess what I'm wondering is, are you thinking that's just short-lived?

Because...

you know, he could change his mind on something quickly.

No, he's actually harming the universities.

He's harming the culture of free speech that his acolytes imagine he's protecting, right?

And I think the net result of all of this is going to be more anti-Semitism.

Quite literally, everything is wrong with this except the initial impulse to feel like we have to do something about the problem of anti-Semitism on these campuses.

And more generally, the problem of ideological capture by Islamists and far-left lunatics, right?

I mean, so it's not just anti-Semitism.

It's basically a repudiation of Western values, Enlightenment values, free speech.

I mean, any kind of sane political and moral order over there, right?

I mean, that is a problem that we have to address.

But to have people who know nothing, who are self-dealing jerks, right, who are launching meme coins to enrich themselves and are literally, this is the most corrupt administration anyone could imagine.

The idea that they're going to do something well in this area should be quite literally unthinkable to you.

And it's so obviously not going well immediately.

The repudiation of due process is insane.

I mean, the only thing that safeguards our democracy from a slide into actual authoritarianism and tyranny is due process.

If people can arrest you and send you to a torture room in El Salvador, right, without having taken the necessary steps to figure out who you are, right?

And once they admit having made errors, they just laugh about it and do nothing to get you back.

That's the end of the line, right?

And there's just, there is no further slide that we need to worry about into authoritarianism.

That's it.

Right.

Well, it seems the right out there has Brego Garcia down as sort of one of the worst human beings on the planet and the left, someone like that.

Whoever he is, whoever he is, without due process, it doesn't matter.

So again, generically, we can all agree that we don't want any MS-13 gang members in the United States.

If they're citizens, we want to watch their behavior.

And the moment they commit a crime, we want to throw them in prison.

If they're not citizens, we want them out of the country.

Everyone should be able to agree about that.

But if you can't take the steps to figure out who anyone is, because you're in such a rush to make a political point, and you're so callous that when it's obvious you're making errors, you don't care about the suffering you're causing.

Our country is now unrecognizable.

Did you see the picture of him having that nice latte at the restaurant?

Yeah, did you see the picture that was obviously photoshopped that Trump thought was

the aerial font of MS-13 on the guy's knuckles that had been photoshopped there to

illustrate the meaning of the of the symbols on his knuckles.

Oh, God.

Trump thought that was actually on his skin.

I mean, this is, forget about the corruption.

Forget about the lack of just moral integrity.

The level of incompetence on display here.

I mean, it's signal gate all the way down.

It's people who just aren't serious.

Yeah, it should be terrifying to people.

The problem is no one right of center is keeping score.

It's like, yes, okay, Trump is this great defender of Israel, right?

And what's Israel's real problem?

It's Iran.

Well, what's Trump doing with Iran now?

He's effectively trying to renegotiate the Obama deal that

on his account was the worst deal ever signed by our country.

It remains to be seen what's going to happen with Iran, but Trump is not thus far behaving in a way that should console any of the hawks who think that the regime change in Iran is our only plausible goal.

He's not, again, we don't know.

I don't know what's going to happen because he could change his mind in five minutes, but he's not acting like someone who understands what the problem is there.

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That was very Ben Shapiro of me.

All right.

Okay, Sam, I want to ask you about going.

No, now you have to sell some gold, don't you?

Isn't that the way we...

No, VPN.

I don't know what it is.

Okay.

I want to ask you about the ongoing tariff negotiations.

Bird flu.

I want to talk about Pete Boutige a bit more on Bill Maher's White House dinner.

That seems like it was a year ago now.

I want to talk about Trump's son's latest venture and more.

But before I want to get into, have you seen how Vietnam has responded to the 46% tariff that Trump hit them with?

This is the first time.

Yeah,

again, this is who knows what's going to happen in the end, but their immediate response was to

invite Starlink to give them their country's internet coverage and to green light a, I think it was a $1.5 billion

development deal.

You've been making this exact joke.

Like, Trump will do anything as long as he gets a resort there.

And now.

Yeah, I mean, it's so, this should be the only story.

I mean, there's a thousand things, any one of which should be the only story.

I mean, everything should stop.

The whole machine should stop on this point, right?

We have a a president who is using U.S.

foreign policy, right?

I mean, and he's putting a stick in the wheel of the entire global economy, right?

He's using U.S.

foreign policy to negotiate deals that are explicitly advantageous to his family and his friends.

How is this remotely acceptable to anyone, left or right?

I just don't.

I don't understand it.

I don't understand how anyone with a reputation to preserve in the Republican Party isn't aghast aghast at this behavior.

Because again, it's all in plain view.

The only problem,

which Steve Bannon brilliantly realized years ago, is that there's so much of it that nobody knows how to respond, right?

You just flood the zone with shit and you win because no one can keep all of these awful things in view simultaneously.

But I mean, this one thing alone, a $1.5 billion Trump organization deal in Vietnam being greenlit as a way of reducing the tariff burden that our country is imposing on that country.

That's completely insane.

It's beyond, I mean, forget conflicts of interest.

This is just pure corruption.

This is pure bakshish.

But it's not that one thing alone.

Eric and Don Jr.

are aggressively expanding international business deals, especially in the Middle East and Europe, using the Trump brand for real estate, crypto ventures, and a new $500,000 membership club in D.C.

David Sachs, right?

Nothing corrupt about this.

Pay 500 grand to hang out with Trump and his sons.

We have you on the waiting list, unfortunately.

Yeah, yeah.

The thing that's endlessly mystifying is how no one cares, right?

And caring,

apparently, there's nothing to do, even if you do care, right?

It's like, where is Congress?

Where are the courts in this?

Clearly, we don't have the laws we need that would be automatically triggered by these reports because it's just people should be going to jail for this, right?

I mean, this is just like, this is not, this is not normal.

And if it's only, if the fact that it's not normal was only guaranteed by norms rather than laws in the past, we need new laws.

But whatever normal president we get someday, that person's job is going to be to do a post-mortem on this period of American history and try to figure out how we can never have this happen again.

Is this what you had in mind when you said you didn't care what was on Hunter Biden's laptop?

Exactly.

I still don't care what was on Hunter Biden's laptop.

I still haven't heard anything that was important on that laptop, right?

Like if that laptop was really as significant as

anything on there that we should care about, right?

It's unbelievable.

I mean, we're talking about a Republican Party.

that thought we should care about John Podesta's emails about pizza orders, right?

Because they were code for pedophile rape, right?

Like this is the fever dream this period of American history has been subsumed by.

We quite literally have the people who gave us Pizzagate waltzing into the Oval Office and helping the president decide policy.

It's unbelievable.

Right.

And it's so I don't see how the Bill Ackmans of the world and the, you know, the Ken Griffins and the serious people who just thought they were going to get lower taxes and de-wokify the Ivy League.

I just don't see how they're not keeping track of this and recognizing the magnitude of their error.

Yeah, well, I mean, there is something wrong in the psychology because it does, I don't know why it feels gross when Hunter Biden does it.

It feels like it's hidden in secret.

And the Trumps, they're just doing it right out in front of you and it doesn't feel as bad, even though it's just much worse.

There's just something that doesn't feel dirty about it.

Yeah, I mean, this is a, it's a moral illusion that I don't think we completely understand, but it's something we have to figure out how to correct for.

I mean, I agree.

I perceive it as well.

I mean, there's something, this is not just our experience.

I mean, this is kind of a famous

artifact of fascism and authoritarianism generally.

I mean, many of these figures appear comical until it's far too late, right?

I mean, this was true of Hitler.

This was true of

every degree of this.

Hitler's obviously the extreme case, but Berlusconi, I mean, lots of these people who erode the democratic norms of their society to one or another degree, and in some cases fatally, Chavez in Venezuela, Venezuela, they are comical figures a lot of the time.

Right.

And

let's put this in the file of marks that we're entertaining ourselves to death.

I want to pick up on Bill Maher's White House dinner.

I know it already feels like it happened a long time ago, but I do think his intentions should matter here.

And even if he found himself in an unwinnable situation, when we last discussed it, I don't think we gave him enough credit for pushing back on Trump.

Whatever concerns I think we may have had seem to potentially have been unwarranted given the way he's been speaking on his recent episodes.

I don't know if you had any updated thoughts here you wanted to share on that.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's actually something I regret.

I mean, first, let me say I've been spending a lot of time criticizing friends and former friends and a few people who are now enemies, kind of official enemies like Elon.

I mean, so it's, it's, um,

and in some cases, I've been criticizing them as a group, group, right?

I've been bouncing between talking about Rogan and Lex Friedman and people I haven't met, other podcasters.

I haven't met Andrew Schultz, right?

I mean, so Dave Smith.

And when I'm stringing a lot of people together like that in a sentence, it can seem like I'm criticizing them all to precisely the same degree and for precisely the same thing.

And that's just not true.

I mean, Lex got very pissed off that I seemed to criticize him in the exact same vein as

I was criticizing Rogan.

I was, you know, I was talking about Rogan not doing his homework.

He doesn't know that he's talking to a Holocaust denier or a revisionist when he's talking to Darrell Cooper, who's recycling David Irving.

But obviously,

Lex does a tremendous amount of homework for his interviews.

And so he pushed back, I believe, on X around that.

I got to say, I think I've been a little sloppy

here, and it's

in part just because it's just impossible to be speaking in footnoted sentences endlessly.

But

with Bill,

I think I was quite sloppy not to acknowledge that

in his post-mortem on that dinner, he made it very clear that he, to use his term, spoke truth to power, right?

He said many uncomfortable things to Donald Trump's face.

And that was part of what that errand was about, in his view.

I think that's great.

Again, I understand how tempting it was for him to go to that dinner.

I mean, it seems, you know, speaking truth to power aside, it seems just unambiguously good to try to build bridges between the, you know, to cross the divide in this country, right?

Like Bill's line, I think, was, what, are we supposed to just keep shouting at each other from 3,000 miles away or something like that?

And the answer to that, I think, obviously is no, except I do think his dinner with Trump was just doomed for all the reasons I alleged in my previous criticism, right?

I think it was.

I think it was probably possible to know in advance, but it's understandable that it wasn't obvious in advance.

I just think there's no way to come away from that dinner.

There's no lesson to be drawn from a private experience with Donald Trump, you know, however charismatic, however discordant it is with his public persona, or however concordant it would be.

I mean, there's just no, there's no variant of it which sheds any light on the actual harm he's doing in the world.

I mean, those harms are what they are.

They require their reaction, you know, as Bill knows, you know, as he has demonstrated, he'll continue to react to those harms.

So I just think the having had this experience with Trump in private and reporting on it was just bound to be confusing to his audience.

It was bound to be controversial in a way that I think was just not helpful to Bill's job or to really to much of anything.

So, I mean, I stand by what I said there, especially because the one thing that was was really confusing about it is that it's just, it's not clear ethically to me which is worse.

I mean, if Trump is just as much of a maniac behind closed doors, or if he's actually a normal and completely, you know, genial and orderly and rational guy behind closed doors.

It was not clear to me.

And I don't know that if it's clear to Bill, which of those is worse.

I mean, to be able to just perform like this psychopath in public, or to actually just be the psychopath who's helplessly being one in public, or to be such a psychopath that you can perform like a perfectly normal person in private, right?

And yet be the psychopath you really are in public.

I just like any version of this is evil in my view, or at least adjacent to evil.

So it was just bound to be a mystifying communication for Bill's audience.

And so I, and I, so it's not, I'm not surprised by the reception, but I just don't think the big miss for me was, you know, as a friend of Bill's, it was just a mistake for me not to emphasize the good parts of what he attempted to do there, which, you know, which you pointed out.

Well, that apology and acknowledgement might throw off this next question a bit, but you get criticism from time to time from some who claim you never admit when you're wrong.

But here's another thing I think you got wrong.

Before the election, you predicted that if we got Trump for four more years, we'd get even more wokeness, but we didn't.

Almost immediately after he was elected, it felt like the wokeness took its last breath.

Sam, what do you have to say for yourself?

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