Making Sense with Sam Harris - #472 — Strange Days on the Right

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

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

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please consider subscribing today. I am here with Ben Shapiro. Ben, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Good to see you. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you doing? It's getting crazy out there. from afar that your life has gotten more interesting in the last 12 months or so. Yeah, you know, the old Chinese curse may live in interesting times is definitely applying itself.

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

the election. And a couple of things you said there have not aged particularly well. I just want to do a post-mortem on that. I figured we're going to start here. So sure, go for it. Yeah. I mean, this is not a matter of I told you so, but I actually just want to, I want to understand how you're a little bit, but it's okay. Go for it. You're entitled. So I'll, I'll do you. I know I was right at the time. So there's very little satisfaction in being discovered to be right now. But, I mean, two small things that can kind of give you some kind of landmarks for the conversation. One is that you thought Trump's claim that he was going to tariff people extravagantly was all bluster, and we wouldn't see any of that. And needless to say, he's tariffed nearly every member of our species,

and not just our species. We've tariffed islands that have just penguins on them, apparently. Also, you thought Mike Pompeo would be the Secretary of State, and rather than that, he was properly defenestrated, and I think even his security detail was pulled, even though he's on an Iranian kill list. So those strike me as small things. The big thing, which is really a very important, what I'd love you to respond to is that you were very confident that there wasn't going to be much that was fundamentally surprising about Trump's second term, and we could be more or less certain of that because we already lived through a first term. And whereas my main argument was no, the reason why you can't draw that conclusion is that in the first term, there were lots of

normal people with normal political reputations to defend serving as, quote, guardrails in the first administration. And those guardrails are now gone. And therefore, you just have loyalists and grifters and maniacs of one description or another who are not going to protect Trump and the country from Trump's worst impulses. That seems to me to be the crucial difference between the first and second terms. I'm just, I'm wondering what has surprised you in the last year and a half or so? So, I mean, we can start with kind of all of those things. So I was surprised by the decision to tariff the entire world, mainly because I thought that that was a pretty horrible idea and pretty horrible decision. And I was extraordinarily outspoken and critical when he did that as I

continue to be. I think that the only mitigating factor there is that our Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is actually living on the real planet Earth and has been able to mitigate the effects of some of that. And then, of course, I thought very strongly the Supreme Court would strike down so-called Liberation Day tariffs, which, of course, the Supreme Court did. So my main argument with regard to President Trump for a while has been that the guardrails would largely hold, that it wasn't as though there wouldn't be mistakes or bad ideas that were put into practice, but that the guardrails would hold and that his worst mistakes would end up being mitigated by the pushback of reality, which is, I think, sort of what happened with the tariffs is that even the sort of

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

that's not to say that you were wrong and I was right. I wasn't right. It is to point out that the sort of outcome of everyone gets tariffed at the rates he put out on Liberation Day. That is not what the outcome was. As far as Mike Pompeo, My case was that there wasn't really specifically about Pompeo. I was sort of asked to speculate on who he might pick as Secretary of State. Marco Rubio has done a pretty good facsimile of what Mike Pompeo probably would have done as Secretary of State. So I'm not sure that that counts as a major miss.

As far as the idea that he was staffing up with loyalists who are unlikely to challenge him, I agree with you that he has staffed up with people who are much more loyalists to him than they otherwise would have been in Trump number one. And I think that one of the things that he has found, to his surprise, that many of those loyalists have not turned out to be particularly competent. And now he was shifting back toward a sort of more professional class of people inside his own administration. And here I would, I would cite the substitution of the Secretary of Homeland Security, really that Chrissy Noem was defenestrated in favor effectively of Tom Holman, who is a significantly more professional

figure and has served under both Democrats and Republicans. The same thing I think is true of Pam Bondi, who I thought was a bad pick, but has ended up being replaced by Todd Blanche, who's significantly more professional. So again, I think one of the things about President Trump is that he definitely likes to stick his hand in the fire and when it burns, he tends to pull his hand out. That is, again, not to suggest that there were no risks at all, but that the actual policy that has emerged from the administration, the actual overall policy is actually, I think, not too wildly far from what I would have expected having charted out term number one. I don't see a wild kind of swing into Never Neverland in term two as opposed to what we saw in term one.

What about the fact that when Trump pulls his hand out of the fire, he often pulls out, lots of cash with it. So take the tariffs, right? I understand that you're, you draw comfort from the fact that the Supreme Court backstop some basic sanity with respect to the tariffs, but he nevertheless used this tariff policy and other levers of American state power to ring out an astonishing amount of money from our allies and enemies. I mean, he slaps a 46% tariff on Vietnam. Vietnam gets that reduced by green lighting a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family. By most estimates, the Trump family has made somewhere between $1.4 and $4 billion now, grifting with their cryptocurrency schemes and other machinations. I mean, this is not, none of this is getting

walked back, at least. Yes, no, so Sam, but. I will, you ask, sorry, I did forget to say, the one thing that has shocked me is the level of familial corruption. I will say that that has surprised me. What amount of corruption would really matter? I mean, what amount is so much that you'd have to say, okay, I disavow this president? Well, again, I'm not sure, and I said this sort of last time we talked as well, I'm not sure what would mean to disavow because politics is a sort of choice of lesser of two evils in terms of the policy that I wish to see. So disavowed Trump in favor of what? I'm happy to disavow his behavior with regard to world liberty financial. I was, I think the first conservatives to talk about that on air when it broke. And I've talked about it consistently ever

since. It's sort of like saying, you know, what level of, you know, corruption would have caused you to disavow Biden when Biden was running against Trump? I mean, politics is inherently opposition. So it's a lesser of two evils calculation. But, I mean, we came from a world where had President Obama received a cashmere sweater from some foreign power, it would have been, it would have hit the news cycle of some kind of scandal. And now we're in a world where we're just, you know, we're counting billions and the billions don't seem to matter. I mean, what would be so scandalous on this front where you'd have to say, all right, this is just incompatible with American democracy and America's role in the world? I mean, again, this touches other things. It touches foreign policy,

in my view. I mean, ask yourself, had Maduro had the wisdom to have purchased a billion dollars worth of Trump's meme coin, do you still think he'd be running Venezuela? I mean, I can't speak to that since it didn't happen, but I, you know, will say that if he had done that and then the president had suddenly come out in favor of Maduro, I would have thought that that was insipid and insane. I mean, I just think that there's such self-dealing and such corruption and such a focus on self here that it's hard to say that Trump is effectively representing anyone other than himself and his own narrowly construed interests. When it comes to the interest that he's been pursuing in crypto. I think you're selling past the sale with me, Sam. I mean, you're not arguing

with somebody who's arguing. It's just not just crypto. It touches everything. So you and I are going to talk, we'll talk about the war in Iran. I think you and I will probably view it in very similar ways, except for the fact that I think you probably will draw a lot of comfort from Trump being in charge and doing the things you think he should be doing, whereas I think he's because he, in my view, he believes almost nothing except just gratifying his own rapacious appetites. that he's only accidentally aligned with the interests of Israel or the interests of the West against jihadism.

And I think he's capable of selling out anything you think he cares about in favor of self-interest. I think he would cut a deal with Gulf states. I mean, just take the fact that we're selling Nvidia chips to UAE, even though they do, you know, military exercises with China, and this poses obvious security concerns.

That's just so... That was a World Liberty Financial deal, right? that seems to cut against our interest. Well, so here's sort of my question, is you are using his intent to try to discern future pathways for his behavior. And the point that I'm making is that if that were the case, you probably could not have predicted many of the things that he has done on the foreign policy front, including his action in Iran, based on just pure self-interest.

The only thing I can do, I try not to do this just generally, is attribute motive to people because motivism is a great way to shortcut politics and actually prevent sane conversation. because you can always attribute motive to somebody's political position. Somebody may be in favor of instituting Obamacare because they believe that it's going to save lives or somebody may be in favor of Obamacare because they believe that it's going to end up with money in their pocket. The bottom line is, is the Obamacare policy good or bad? So I try not to do this too much. I try to do this actually with Democrats and Republicans as well. Try not to go to why are they doing this. Is it for nefarious purposes or is it for good purposes? Because to me, when it comes to politics, the intent

matters a lot less than the actual efficacy of the policy or the through line of the policy. I think with President Trump, even if you want to make the case that what he does is driven by self-interest, I would say that there's some complexity to self-interest in President Trump. I think, first of all, many people are driven by self-interest in different ways. There's monetary self-interest. There's also the self-interest of popularity, the self-interest of notoriety, of attention. And I think that you see many of those things emerge with President Trump in a wide variety of different ways, sometimes in conflict with.

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

effective and if he's overcharging me and what the alternative would have been for the clumber next door to fix my toilet, would he have been effective or would he have charged me more or would he have left footprints on the floor? Okay, we take something like the reframing of January 6th as a day of love, right? I mean, this is a, I mean, you once said this was the most horrifying thing I've seen in American politics in my lifetime. You called it inexcusable, and justifiable, awful on every level, disgusting on every level, and just terrible. Now, but Trump has since pardoned everyone involved. He called these people, you know, many of whom were caught stabbing police officers in the face with flagpoles, great patriots, and he referred to them as hostages when they were in prison.

And now we have an official White House website that reframes this day in the most Orwellian and delusional way and that advertises this reframing to the entire world as the view of our country, The view that our country officially has of it, again, that for me, these are moral and political errors that are so catastrophic as to be disqualifying and yet you seem to have declined to pass any further judgment on this. What's your sense of that? Again, in what way? Do we keep coming back to this word disqualifying? And the question is, disqualifying in what sense? In the sense that I would have preferred somebody. that almost any anyone else in office would be better than this when I'm focusing on this particular outcome, right? I mean, no other president would have done this that we could have elected. I mean, I agree to a certain extent.

The only reason I say to a certain extent is because I think that reframing of things that I consider to be pretty dark moments in American history have been reframed in the past, but not to that extent, I will agree. The thing that I'm pointing out here is that when you say disqualifying, the question is against whom? I'll just run through it. The toilet needs to be fixed. You don't have to, you're making, again, Sam, you seem to be, you seem to want to make the case to me that Donald Trump is a bad man who thinks bad things and has said bad things and therefore is incumbent on me to support Kamala Harris or to support John Ossoff or to support whomever else is put up in place of President Trump.

Number one, he's not eligible for election again. Number two, in the last election cycle, I did not support him in the primaries. Number three, when it was him against Joe Biden, then that was a. binary choice, and it was him against Kamala Harris, it was a binary choice. And again, the question to me was, which one of these presidents is going to be more likely to mirror my policy preferences, not whether, on a raw level, I would have Donald Trump babysit my children or maintain my trust account. There's more that you could be doing in your commentary to acknowledge the changing political landscape, I think. So, for instance, I agree with you. You only had a choice between Kamala Harris

and Donald Trump a year and a half ago. And you might still be able to be able to, you might still be able to defend, I mean, though, you know, we disagreed about it at the time, obviously, because we had that debate, you might still be able to defend that choice in retrospect, saying, given what I knew then, it would seem to me to be the rational and ethical choice to pick Trump. Again, I think January 6th was the bridge that once crossed, completely obviated that decision. But, well, again, I mean, you seem to imply that I have an obligation to regret my vote for President Trump. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org. Subscribers get a private at RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.

The path forward lies in normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a form of government in the Gaza Strip, partially governed by some of those Abraham Accords countries. Is there a resolution to the war in Iran that doesn't include regime change? I do not think that a victory, long scale, requires a firm, total regime change if the United States were to take Harga Island and chokehold it, and then the president were to call it a day, that would certainly count as a victory in my book.