Making Sense with Sam Harris - #413 — “More From Sam”: Trump & Israel, Corruption, Free Speech Violations, the Democrats, & Ezra Klein
Episode Date: May 6, 2025Sam hopped back on with his manager and business partner, Jaron Lowenstein, to talk about current events and answer some of the questions you all submitted on Substack. They discuss whether Jews in th...e U.S. are safer under Trump, due process rights and free speech, what Trump is doing to universities, the Trump family’s latest corruption scandals, Sam’s updated views on Bill Maher’s dinner at the White House, what Sam got wrong about wokeness and the 2024 election, Pete Buttigieg’s appearance on Andrew Schulz’s podcast, Gavin Newsom, and Ezra Klein. Produced by Griffin Katz 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. 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 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.
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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 sub stack
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, Jaren Lohenstein.
We're hoping to continue this series of episodes.
So if you're a subscriber to the podcast, you can submit topics over on Substack.
And if you're not a subscriber, you can become one at samharris.org slash subscribe.
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 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, 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.
And 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. So I would remind you that the only thing he said
in the immediate aftermath of October 7th was something incredibly petty.
I mean, 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, here, 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 ex-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 a golden statue of him
effectively being worshiped in Gaza.
I mean, it's insane that we have a president
who's engaging with this immensity of human suffering
and danger for the future with this kind of no nothingism
and just self-ism and just,
you know, self absorption, right? So it's not,
he's not a reliable partner to Israel.
He's also probably deeply conflicted with his,
his economic ambitions in the Gulf States. You know, he's,
he would sell Israel out to for a hotel deal in Saudi, I think.
I mean, he's just not, he's not a serious, serious moral act. Those are just not a serious moral actor. 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 US.
Okay, but the thing they're ignoring is that Trump
and his enablers continue to play well with the scariest antisemites
in the West, the right-wing antisemites.
If you're talking about antisemites
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
or 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-add old 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
the support?
He absolutely knows who David Duke is, right?
It's just there's a game of footsie being played with the most odious characters on the far right,
all of whom are antisemitic lunatics,
and Trump is playing that game.
And when you look at the people who are out in Trumpistan,
the great influencers of Trumpistan,
the Tucker Carlson's of the world,
they are playing a game of 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
who are focused on the Israel piece 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 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 who's only, you know,
moral infraction was to write an op-ed
and, you know, 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.
This is not what our government should be doing.
Yes, the campuses needed a corrective
to their moral confusion
and to the outburst of antisemitism that they allowed to happen there 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 then medical research.
I mean, it's been a disaster that what Trump and Doge
have been doing to the National Science Foundation
and to our universities.
And it stands a chance of wrecking the stature and even the economy of our country.
I don't think we want Hamas supporting students or immigrants of any kind in this country.
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.
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.
I mean, forget about the people being deported
without due process, that's awful.
You're gonna 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, 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, it'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 and.
No, he's actually harming the universities. He's harming the culture of free speech that
he, that his acolytes imagine he's protecting. And I think the net result of all of this
is going to be more antisemitism.
Quite literally everything is wrong with this
except the initial impulse to feel like
we have to do something about the problem of antisemitism
on these campuses and more generally,
the problem of ideological capture by Islamists
and far left lunatics.
So it's not just anti-Semitism, it's basically a repudiation of Western values, Enlightenment
values, free speech, any kind of sane political and moral order over there.
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 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.
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 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?
I mean, 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 Brigo Garcia down as sort of
one of the worst human beings on the planet
and the left, some of the left.
Whoever he is, whoever he is,
without due process, it doesn't matter.
Right, right.
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 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 symbols on his knuckles?
Trump thought that was actually on his skin?
I mean, 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.
I mean, 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 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, he's effectively trying to renegotiate the Obama deal that it was that he, 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, 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.
I want to thank everyone for submitting their topics and questions over at Substack.
And if you're not a subscriber and would like to become one, please go to samharris.org
slash subscribe.
That was a very Ben Shapiro of me.
All right.
Okay, Sam, I want to ask you about going.
No, you have to sell some gold, don't you?
That's not 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 Buttigieg 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?
Yeah.
Again, this is, who knows what's gonna 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 president who is using US foreign policy, right?
I mean, and he's putting a stick in the wheel
of the entire global economy, right?
He's using US 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 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 box sheesh.
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 DC.
We have you on the waiting list.
Yeah, I opened this with David Sacks, 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?
I just, 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 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.
Whatever normal president we get someday,
that person's job is gonna 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 his laptop.
I still haven't heard anything that was important on that laptop.
If that laptop was really as significant as...
It wasn't anything we just talked about.
Was there anything on there that we should care about?
It's unbelievable.
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 a 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 pizza gate 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 Ackman's of the world and the, you know,
the, the Ken Griffins and the serious people who just thought they were going
to get lower taxes and de-woke-ify 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, 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.
Many of these figures appear comical
until it's far too late, right?
And this was true of Hitler.
This was true of every degree of this.
Hitler is 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, they are comical figures a lot of the time.
And let's put this in the file of Marx, 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, 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, and in some cases,
I've been criticizing them as a 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.
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 talking about Rogan not doing his homework
and 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 gotta 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, speaking truth to power aside,
it seems just unambiguously good to try to build bridges
between the, 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 3000 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, right?
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, however charismatic,
however discordant it is with his public persona
or however concordant it would be.
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 too much of anything.
So I stand by what I said there,
especially because the one thing
that 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.
I don't know 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.
Any version of this is evil in my view, or at least adjacent to evil.
So it was just bound to be a misdefined communication
for Bill's audience.
And so I'm not surprised by the reception,
but I just don't think, the big miss for me was,
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 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.
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