Making Sense with Sam Harris - #416 — “More From Sam”: Biden's Big Lie, Review of Tapper Interview, Trump, & a Case Against Israel's Actions in Gaza

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Sam 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 the Biden cover-up and how it compares to Trump’s transgressions, Sam’s latest episode with Jake Tapper, whether Tapper had a journalistic responsibility to share what he knew about the cover-up sooner, and criticism from the audience about Sam’s views on Israel’s actions in Gaza. Produced by Griffin Katz  

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. 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. Okay, we're back, Sam. Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you. Yeah. Yeah. What's going on? Okay, you ready? Anything happening? Oh, nothing happened in the world, but you know, maybe there's some, maybe there's some topics I can hit you with if you're okay with that. Yeah, let's do it. All right.

You've been concerned about Donald Trump due to his refusal of a peaceful transfer of power as a threat to democracy. But now we're beginning to see just how massive this Biden coverup was. And in the past, we also saw Bernie pushed out by the Democratic elite in 2016. Aren't these also threats to our democracy?

And maybe these aren't even threats. Aren't these actual moments where we didn't have democracy? I mean, there's certainly a corruption of our democracy. I mean, they're not ideal. The details of, you know, what went into Biden running for a second term and just the level of delusion and hubris and dishonesty that birthed that project. I think that was reading Jake's book, that was very troubling to discover just how deep that went and how unrepentant they all still are. I mean, we had an awful choice. It's a choice that I think explains how corrupt and corruptible the Democrats and

the media were from essentially 2016 on. We had a choice between, I think, a genuinely evil candidate, right? I mean, certainly perceived to be evil by half of our society. I mean, I see, you know, this is, he's, he's really is the banality of evil because his, his evil is incredibly banal. But nonetheless, I think he's so outside the norm of what should be acceptable to us politically, that it's easy to see that everyone perceived this as a five alarm fire. I mean, we are now, I'll point out living in the midst of that fire. We're four months into it. But you can't destroy or erode democracy

while trying to protect it, right? No, but I mean, it's not so clear as all that. It's just that you have to ask the questions, why would anyone prefer a nearly comatose president to Donald Trump? Well, that's a measure of how bad people perceive Donald Trump to be. And I can say that I would prefer a comatose president

to the president we now have. But that's slightly less than half the country feels that way. What about the other half? Well, the other half is voting for Trump, right? And for reasons that are, in many cases, also delusional. I mean, you had a QAnon cult behind Trump who thought that Biden was not only too old to be president,

but that he was a pedophile and siphoning off the adrenochrome of children in basements. I mean, this is the fever swamp of right-wing politics that got Biden's infirmity right. Okay. But look at everything else they threw against the wall. Right. It's completely nuts over there. So yes, the mainstream media has a lot to atone for in not being more

interested in just how far from compos mentis Biden has been at various points. Um, I mean, toward the end of his term and during the campaign. I mean, what I take from Jake's book, and I think this is one of the appropriate lessons to take from it, is that there was a successful coverup. It's not that, I mean, everyone knew he was too old. I mean, certainly he was not an ideal president or much less an ideal candidate.

I mean, he was not actually a viable candidate in the end. And many of us saw that with increasing clarity over the years, but something was revealed that night on the debate stage when the wheels completely came off. And to say that we knew it all along is to make the claim that nothing was learned during that debate.

And that's just not true. Right. It may, you know, maybe Alex Jones, who also thought Biden was a pedophile also knew that he wasn't going to be able to complete a sentence during the debate, but most people thought this was, um, but I don't think it's that I did reveal something. I don't think people felt like they learned it for the first time. I felt like they were watching that saying, okay, this is impossible to hide now. This is no longer possible.

Well, you know, but the magnitude of it, the gravity of it, the fact that it was non-recoverable, right, that was revealed that night to most people. Now, the scandal, the real scandal is that there were, undoubtedly, there were people, and we know this from Jake and Alex's reporting in that book were undoubtedly, there were people, and we know this from Jake and Alex's reporting in that book, undoubtedly there were people close to the president

who saw that sort of thing before, and many times before, going back years. That's the scandal, that's the coverup, and that is a genuine coverup, because they're hiding that, they're lying about that, they're protecting him from exposure so as to avoid any public viewing of that. He's not having cabinet meetings,

he didn't have cabinet meetings for nearly a year, and the cabinet meetings he had prior to that were scripted and weird, and the cabinet members are sworn to secrecy on some level to not talk about that. That's the cover-up. To say that there was no coverup and say this was all in plain view is just not true. It's just the fact that right of center,

they were whinging about this for years doesn't mean that there wasn't effective coverup because there obviously was. There was effective coverup, but I think what happened was I think a lot of people are claiming that they saw this all along. They were being convinced that what they were seeing with their own eyes wasn't the case. And not only that, they were being told they were being assholes for even pointing something

like this out. And, yeah, I think all of that's bad. That's obviously bad. But crucially, it was bad to the point of masochistic self-immolation for the Democrats, right? It's not like it worked out well for the Democrats. It destroyed the Democratic chances for the presidency. And beyond. I mean, the Democrats have a problem for a long time now. So it's like the idea that this is, how much of this is intentional if it's synonymous with hitting a brick wall at

a hundred miles an hour, right? I mean, it's just, with hitting a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour, right? I mean, it's just, it was a disaster for the Democrats. So the Democrats screwed up. And I think the honest accounting of what happened there is that like almost everything else we're complaining about in public these days, it was a coordination problem. I mean, that you had all these people who couldn't get on the same page

about this obvious slow motion train wreck, right? How could they get Biden to not be a candidate when he was adamant that he was fine to run for a second term? There's no good way to do it. And they're all living in this hall of mirrors where the first person to express doubt about his viability is the first person to show disloyalty and will be fatally compromised in their career prospects thereafter.

So it's an incentive structure that fucked everyone up, but it was not this calculated and effective deception. It was a pathological process and everyone left of center should be unhappy about it. But what happens now? What happens to those people, the advisors that were in charge? Well, I mean, as I wrote after the debate when he was being slowed to drop out of the race,

I wrote this in one of those articles on Substack that were increasingly shrill. I said, but if he's not out of the race by Monday, I forget, I think it was the day I called, All we're going to want to know are the names of the people who have enabled this atrocity so that they can, they'll never work in politics again. Right? I don't think these people should ever work in politics again. I mean, it's a disaster. The people who covered for Biden, the people who thought he should run even after that debate, should never work in politics again.

They have discredited themselves fatally. That's absolutely the case. And you read about them in Jake's book. It's mind boggling the level of self-deception that's expressed in that book. Yeah. I mean, I just, I find it, I'm embarrassed. I'm humiliated by it. I mean, the amount of times I've had to lean on CNN to explain something that, where they

helped me. I obviously see with my own eyes, I'm being told, guys, there are people that are talking. I guess my point with Jake is that he could have been a little bit more of an intrepid journalist and asked more of the questions. I know he said, I wish I would have done that more, but I feel betrayed. I feel like I um, I relied on many of those sources to get this information and get it right. And again, when I saw it in my own eyes, but you have to, I mean, I, it's true. I mean, I think there's, there's enough embarrassment

to go around in the mainstream media, but it is also true that Biden was effectively hidden to a degree that is unprecedented. Well, why aren't you asking every single day? Where is he? Where is he? Where is his cognitive test? Where is the man? If that were Trump, they would have done that every single day.

They would have said, every day, where is he? I think some of that was happening. I mean, you know, the fact, you know, I remember whenever there was something important for the president to communicate about, and he wasn't communicating about it. I mean, post October 7th, there were many moments when we needed a president who could come forward and make the case for why the US was standing with Israel in the conflict with Hamas.

And we did not have, I mean, I think he made some attempts at communicating about that, but it was clear that his deficits as a communicator were actually causing problems for society at that point. And I think I said as much in some context, probably on my own podcast. I mean, yes, the separation between the two parts

of the job, the decision-making component of the job and the communication slash persuasion component of the job, yes, the decision-making component of the job is important. And I think, as I said, when I was talking to Jake, and as I said, I think some years before when we were all talking about Biden being compromised, it's at least intelligible to say,

okay, he's not a good communicator. He was never a good communicator. He's only getting worse, right? You can't reliably stick him in front of a microphone and trust that something good is gonna come out of his mouth. But the truth is, is that when you sit with him and deliberate about the war in Ukraine or anything else, he is compos mentis.

He is, he clearly understands the issue as well as he ever did. He just doesn't, he's just not a fluid speaker. And he's less and less fluid by the hour, right? That is a neurologically speaking, that is an intelligible claim to make about a person. That's what I assumed was true. The, because of how effective this coverup was, I no longer

believe that to have been true, right? I think it's quite possible that he was just checked out to a degree that, that I did not suspect at the time. But to close the loop on this whole scandal, even that is preferable to me and to, I think, many Democrats than having someone who we consider to be genuinely evil, genuinely 100% purposed to serving himself

in the office of the presidency. I would rather have a president in a coma where the office of the presidency, I would rather have a president in a coma where the duties of the presidency are executed by a committee of just normal people, right? Okay, but that would be different if they communicated. People pick at random out of a Starbucks, I would prefer to an evil president. And that's the choice that many of us believe was before us.

And so therefore not much materially changes once you reveal just how insane and despicable this coverup of Biden's infirmities actually was. But Sam, but how you get there matters. And it would be one thing if those people told the American people, hey, he's not Campos Mentis, we're gonna take it from here. We know what we're doing.

We're fine. But that didn't happen. And I mean, just the scale of things, Trump's out there making hotel deals. And I know that's embarrassing, and this is a bit of a Sophie's choice, but you really would rather not have been betrayed by your own president than have somebody out in the open just, you know, with his kleptocracy, getting he and his friends rich? No, but the problem with Trump runs much deeper than that. I mean, that is totally disqualifying in a president.

It's illegal. I think it is the very definition of unconstitutional, given the Emoluments Clause. I think he should be impeached for it, right? I mean, I don't have any expectation that he will be, but the liability of having Trump in the White House, in my view, runs much, much deeper than that. And I've spoken, there's probably a hundred hours of me talking about this on my podcast and others. I just, I think to have an

empty Oval Office would be better. I mean, that's to say that there's lots of other normal career politicians who have been deputized in the State Department and other parts of the executive branch to make normal decisions that are not thinking about their hotel deals and their meme coin, that it's normal politics, the swamp. I would return to the so-called swamp over what we have now and for good reason.

And that's been obvious for now 10 years. So all the problems with Hillary Clinton, all the problems with Kamala Harris, I've never been shy to acknowledge those. All the problems with the democratic machine as it is, yes, it screwed Bernie Sanders, price all of that in. I think it is worse to have a president who values nothing but loyalty in the people he appoints to run our government. I mean, the fact that we've got Cash Patel running the FBI and the FBI is now weaponized against private citizens who are being quote investigated and

thereby bankrupted simply because they were against president Trump at some point in the past, you know, that's the road to fascism, right? That's much worse than having, having normal people pulled out of a Starbucks who would be appropriately awed by the responsibility given to them, run the country. Yeah. I just want to take a quick comedy break. We used to cash for tell, did you see that video with he and Dan Bungie, you

know, having to defend that Epstein, no, no, you didn't see it. No, no, I just want to take a quick comedy break. We said, Cash Patel, did you see that video with he and Dan Bongino having to defend that Epstein? No, no, no. You didn't see it? No, no, I missed it. Oh, you got to see it. They basically are. Watch it with pleasure and horror, no doubt. Well, they're now on the other side having to defend themselves from the conspiracy theories.

They're literally saying things like, look, I know a suicide when I see one. Oh, really? That's delicious. Both he and Dan Bongino. Oh, it's, it's,. Oh, it's happy watching. Yeah, anyway, I'm sorry I derailed this, but I wanna get back to it because there's just something we talked about last time

where I just, I said this last time, there's something more off-putting and gross to me about lying and in secrecy than there is out in the open. And I know that's probably more of an irrational, an emotional thought than a rational. But it's not is out in the open. And I know that's probably more of an irrational, an emotional thought than a rational. But it's not all out in the open. There's a lot out in the open and you have to imagine that that's the tip of the iceberg of corruption, right?

To grade Trump on a curve so fully that the visibility of his sins are exculpatory, right? It's just pure delusion, right? You have no idea what you don't know about what he's into. And we already know he lies more than any other person that can be named, right, anywhere in public life. So the idea that he's not covering anything up is just doesn't fly.

Again, I mean, the Trump lies to me. I don't know why. And, and we'll have to understand this or get some psychologists of some, or sociologists or someone to explain this, but it just feels like when he's called, it says he's got a building that's 20 stories tall and it's only 10. I just don't really care. Or some of the other lies they just feel of course it's corrupt to be both the policymaker and the deal maker. He deports someone to a torture room in El Salvador and then laughs about it at the Oval Office and

says he can't get him back, right? Yeah, I'm not defending that. That's a lie. It's a lie that he can't get him back. He can get him back in an hour, right? It's a sociopathic level of detachment from the real suffering he's causing, admitting that this person was sent in error to El Salvador and admitting that the process was so haphazard that we've probably sent 50 people who we really don't know whether they're innocent or guilty in the first place

because there was no due process. I mean, there's just layers of this, the layers of the damage done to our society, to our system, the way we've edged toward fascism just by throwing due process out the window, all of that's an unacknowledged harm. Yeah, okay, but the damage to our system, you're right, the big lie was terrible. The big lie was about one person lying about becoming president versus the Biden lie, which is a person lying about being president. That's a big problem. But again, you have to acknowledge the clarity and obvious malice of the first lie and the ambiguity and the kind of the slow rolling nature of the other lie. I mean, okay, Biden is probably not well placed to understand his deficits

because he's the one with the deficits, right? I mean, this is just the classic case of somebody, somebody for obvious reasons, not wanting to admit that they're no longer competent to drive anymore. And now you have to have the conversation with them that it's time to take the keys from them for the rest of their lives, right?

That's famously hard negotiation for most people with their parents. And it's completely understandable that there's a lot of self-serving bias and delusion creeping in on the side of the person who thinks that, no, no, nothing much has changed and I can still drive. So that's- But Sam, it's the same thing you're talking about. This is the president of the person who thinks that, no, no, nothing much has changed and I can still drive. Right, so that's- But Sam, it's the same thing you're talking about.

This is the president of the United States. And I know you're not talking about Biden himself. And I know you're gonna go into, well, it's the people around him. But this is a grave sin. This is a big problem that it's not just like grandpa taking away the keys. This is the country.

But there's no bright line. It's not a lie that has a bright line. Because if you see him, you wouldn't be a bright line. Everyone could see it. Everyone could see it. And people around them could see it on the debate stage. Okay, but I don't know. But it was enough what we saw that the excuses we made was enough that we saw that we should have said, okay, this guy's probably not at his best. So it was absolutely obvious to me that after that debate what should have happened is that he should have resigned and handed the presidency to

Kamala Harris, right, and then she should have campaigned as president for a few months. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.