Making Sense with Sam Harris - #76 — The Path to Impeachment

Episode Date: May 18, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum and Juliette Kayyem about the unfolding Russia scandal in the White House. 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. 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, a lot going on in Washington. This has been a crazy week. This is a more spontaneous podcast than most. I did not have this on the calendar, but the scandals have been piling up so quickly in the White House that it just feels like something needs to be said. This is the first moment where the path to impeachment has seemed actually open. I have not been one of these people who felt that impeachment was likely, even though I dearly hope for it. But given just how inept Trump and his surrogates have been in containing the bleeding here,

I feel like I'm beginning to see the possibility that this egregious man may not serve his full term. So I decided to reach out to a few experts who have already been on the podcast to give us their take. The first is Anne Applebaum. Anne is a columnist for the Washington Post. She's been writing fantastic pieces analyzing what's going on in Washington. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, where she runs a program called Arena, which deals with the problem of disinformation and propaganda in the 21st century. And she's a real expert on Russia. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Gulag, A History. So she is perfectly placed to think about the unfolding Russia scandal and the fact that we have a president whose

fondness for Russia, and for Putin in particular, remains at best unexplained. And my second guest today is Juliette Kayyem, who is one of the nation's leading experts on homeland security. She was a former member of the National Commission on Terrorism. on Homeland Security. She was a former member of the National Commission on Terrorism. She served in the Obama administration as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, where she handled things like the H1N1 pandemic and the BP oil spill. She's currently on faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and she's a very frequent commentator on CNN as a security analyst. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her columns in the Boston Globe. So both of these women have a real depth of experience in the relevant areas.

And I can't tell you how gratifying it is to be able to reach out to them and bring you their perspective. I'm not really set up to run a news division here, so being responsive to a news cycle that's changing at this pace is difficult to do. I actually had David Frum, who agreed to be part of this episode, had David Frum, who agreed to be part of this episode, but I can't interview him until Saturday, and I think things are changing so quickly. It's Thursday now that I'm going to push that interview off and leave him for another episode. That is, unless something remarkable happens on Friday, which is certainly possible with this president. But I recorded my conversation with Anne on Tuesday and Juliet on Wednesday, and even there, the news had advanced enough so that

more facts were in play. This is why I usually speak to scientists and philosophers. So it doesn't matter when we record our conversations, and it really doesn't matter when you listen to them. Here we have a conversation which will probably not age terribly well. If you're listening to this a few weeks from now or a few months from now, the shape of the scandal may have changed a bit. The general principle, however, may still be worth talking about. And there are general principles here, clearly, of corruption and ineptitude and financial conflicts of interest, all of which I'm confident will become more pressing in the coming months. Today, I bring you an episode that is narrowly focused on the events of this week. The date is May 18th.

Up first is Anne Applebaum. Enjoy. Anne, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. Well, listen, this is an impromptu interview. You were last on, I think, a couple of months ago. It feels like years ago. But, you know, you are one of these topic experts. I guess you have two topics here which are increasingly relevant. You are a journalist who can cover the ins and outs of Washington, but you are someone with real expertise in Russia and think a lot about things like misinformation and propaganda and perverse ways that publics can be persuaded.

great to talk to you again. So last time we spoke, several things had not yet happened. There was not the firing of Comey. There had not been the Russian photo op. And there had not been this recent apparent leak of classified information by the president, nor the chaotic attempts to prevaricate about this by his surrogates. Let's just walk through this a little bit. What the hell is going on, Anne? Well, if I knew that, then I would be able to solve a lot of other problems. I mean, I think the outline of the problem and really the fundamental, the source of this problem really is Trump's relationship, or maybe it's better to say the relationship in his head, his feelings about Russia. Most of what he most of what we know about Trump's relationship with Russia is already public knowledge. I mean, we may or may not learn something more from an investigation if that goes on.

But most of most of what he he feels about Russia,'s told us. He's been saying it for many years. He feels a closeness to the style of Russian oligarchy and Russian kleptocracy. He feels, I don't know whether it's ideological or aesthetic, he feels that the system appeals to him. He likes the idea of having a relationship with Russia. And he can't really hide that. So his, I mean, there were a number of points that may have been slightly overlooked in the last few days. One is that, you know, the fact that he invited the Russian foreign minister to the Oval Office was already in protocol terms, quite a big concession. I mean, he wouldn't have been invited under Obama. And certainly not after the invasion of Ukraine would we have given, you know, it's a big deal

for a foreign minister to get to meet the president. That's always a gesture because, of course, the foreign minister should meet the Secretary of State and not the president. So he went out of his way to make this gesture. And he and his staff seem to be very lax about who the Russians are and what they represent. So as you as you hinted in your introduction, they invited not just Lavrov, but they allowed a Russian photographer into the Oval Office who promptly after the conversation put his photographs online, which seemed to have surprised the White House, who didn't realize that he was taking pictures for publication. And of course, we don't know what else was in his camera. Maybe it was a recording device, maybe other kinds of equipment. And so it's very unprecedented, both for the foreign minister to be there and for him to be with a photographer. And then we learn from the context of this story about what he said to

the Russians and also from General um, General McMaster's statements today, we learned that he felt very comfortable with the Russians. I mean, he told them some, you know, what he, he may or may not have understood what he was telling them, but he told, he gave them some classified information. Um, he was bragging about his access to intelligence. Um, you know, he, he treated them the way he treats, you know, people he likes to do business with, or he used to like to do business with back in New York. You know, and this kind of behavior, which is, of course, unprecedented in the United States in recent presidential history, has all kinds of consequences. We are you know, we American American intelligence works by a series of relationships with allies. And of course, we have our sources

and methods and so on. But so do others. We work closely with people in the Middle East. We work closely with other nations in Europe. And they exchange information with us on a mutually agreed basis. But the idea that we now have a president who's a security risk, who might blurt out anything in a room where he's with people he feels comfortable with, no matter who they are and what they might do with that information, should be a clue or will be understood by American allies as a danger sign. Be careful what you give to the United States. Be careful what you give to this president. His sympathies are not with his understanding of how intelligence works is minimal.

His ability to, his judgment is terrible. He doesn't know to whom he should say what. He doesn't know who should and shouldn't be let into the White House. He doesn't seem to have any sense of it or any feeling for it. And he may betray you by accident. You know, I often think that the best, you know, conspiracy theories or real ones are actually pretty rare. You know, conspiracy is hard to organize. It requires a lot of people. And, you know, everyone has to be quiet and has to be, you know, much, much more common in life

is the kind of screw up theory of what happened. And more and more, it looks like Trump is governed by a kind of, you know, incompetence, childishness, inability to keep his mouth shut, need to brag, need to show off. And his admiration for rich, powerful people are, you know, like Vladimir Putin, who seem appealing to him and who seem like they should be his friends. appealing to him and who seem like they should be his friends. And that's now the governing ideology of this White House and not anything theoretical, not anything ideological, not anything else. I don't know if you remember the book or the film Being There, but I've been thinking of Trump as a kind of malignant Chauncey Gardner, just this completely vacuous character. And, you know, and can I just say something funny about being there? You know, it's based on a book by Jerzy Kaczynski, who's a Polish writer. And actually the idea of it is an older Polish story.

There's one that, there's a version of that story that was written several decades earlier. And there is something, it's a kind of East European story, you know, in these accidental messy democracies, people accidentally take power. And it's very funny, I mean, funny and sad, I guess, that this happened in the United States. But you're right, it's a very good comparison. So this Russian photo op slash leak happened the day after he fired Comey. The timing is just insane. You would think you could never recover from how bad this looks. And yet this is just one more thing in this cascade of ineptitude and seeming corruption or conflicts of interest. He's firing the guy who's investigating his administration for its possible collusion with the Russians, and then meeting with the Russians, one of whom was the very Russian

who torpedoed the career of Mike Flynn. Walk us through this a little bit more. And it's also true that the thing he is supposed to have leaked, again, not based on any apparent strategy to divulge secrets, but just because he's bragging about what good intel he gets. This is the sort of thing that wasn't even disclosed to our own senators. Talk a little bit about the context here, and perhaps this would be a good moment to get your view on the significance of the Comey firing. this would be a good moment to get your view on the significance of the Comey firing. Well, the Comey firing, you know, once again, the most amazing thing about the Trump phenomenon is most of what we know about him is stuff he tells us, you know, he's telling us what he's doing. I mean, he has admitted in essence, in the course of his tweets, that he fired Comey because he

didn't like this investigation. He didn't like seeing Comey on TV talking about him. He didn't like the fact that Comey wanted more resources, apparently, for the investigation. You know, and he thought, OK, in his sort of cartoon-like vision of the world, he thought, OK, if I get rid of this guy, the story will go away. You know, I can make this, I can get this man off my TV. I can fire him. And again, that appears to have been impulsive. It appears to have been not, it wasn't consulted with anybody else in the White House. The White House communications staff were totally unprepared for it. And so while, you know, I don't, I don't have any very strong feelings about Comey myself,

and I think he has made, he'd make some mistakes during the election. The manner in which he did this was almost, you know, it was sort of so, so screamingly obvious that it makes one, you know, this is why people immediately afterwards began to talk about mental illness or some kind of pathology. You know, he fired him to get rid of the story, didn't like the story. He was getting too close to comfort. It had taken over some of his staff and he wanted it off. And then, as you say, then the amazing thing was that it didn't occur to him to cancel the Lavrov meeting the following day. You know, he didn't seem to see the connection between these two things. I mean, this is another oddity of Trump that he, you know, it's almost like, you know, as you mentioned, being there, I mean, one also thinks of, you know, people with amnesia or people who are unable to make connections between events. Did he not understand that people

would link the firing of Comey to the Russian story? Did he not understand that having Lavrov in the White House the next day would seem creepy? You know, did he, does he not make the connections between these things? And, you know, one is beginning to think he doesn't. He doesn't see the world. He doesn't link events. He lives each event as if he was in that particular moment. And he doesn't see what its relationship is to other things. Why people around him don't see that is mysterious, you know, but he obviously doesn't. I mean, it may be that they have concluded that the best way to deal with this Russian story is to brazen it out, you know, just pretend it's not happening, you know, go on making policy the

way they want to, you know, being loud in their conversations and their associations with Russia. Maybe they think that's how they're going to put it to an end. Of course, it may also have the opposite effect. You know, an interesting point for you, something that one might think about is what the Russians think is going on, which is apparently they find it all hilariously funny, which is also disturbing. You know, in a way, the way, the worst moment for me of that day of Lavrov at the White House was, I don't know if you saw, there was a moment when he had a meeting with Tillerson in the morning at the State Department with the Secretary of State. And he came out of the meeting with Tillerson and appeared in front of, there were some journalists, and one

of the journalists shouted at him something, they shouted at both of them something about Comey being fired, and Lavrov, who speaks excellent English and is a profoundly cynical person, turned around and said, was he fired? What do you mean? I don't know anything about him being fired. And then he sort of, he stuck his head back and made a sneering gesture. And that was the Russian political elite saying, we think your press is ridiculous. You know, we think your rules and your laws and your democracy are ridiculous. You know, we're going to you know, your president thinks you're fake news and we're going to go along with that. So we have we've in a sense, you know, this whole process has encouraged, you know, has just encouraged the Russians.

You know, if the Americans are going to be more brazen, then the Russians will be more brazen too. And that's, that's another one of the side effects of this series of stories. There's a lot there. One of the things I find so depressing about Trump's presidency thus far is, and this is again, like everything about him, this was predictable. And this is a point you've made again, you've just made it, I think today in a recent piece in the Washington Post. There are no surprises here, and yet our capacity for astonishment seems undiminished. But one of the most malignant things about him and his influence on the world is that everyone in his orbit seems to catch this virus of dishonesty and delusion. I mean, it's like all of his surrogates are like Baghdad Bob, Saddam Hussein's spokesman

during the war in Iraq, where he's denying that anything is happening. And you can see American tanks passing by in the background. Obviously, people like Sean Spicer, it's just this tragic comedy to see an otherwise seemingly sane person try to put a brave face on the lies and delusions of a man-child in the Oval Office. But it's spreading to serious people like Tillerson, and they keep having to cover for him. And then he comes out and says, they're actually lying. I did it for the reasons that have been alleged, which seems to have just happened in this case.

Well, this is what he's done several times now. He did it with the Comey firing. He said, you know, the line from the White House was he fired Comey because of something to do with Hillary Clinton and her case. And then he said on Twitter, no, actually, I fired him because, you know, I didn't like him. And, you know, he was spending too much time on this story. And he did the same thing today where he was. There was an article yesterday saying that he leaked a piece of classified information in his conversation with Lavrov. And the White House came out and said, no, no, that's absolutely not true. And then this morning he said, well, yes, actually, I did. It's my right to do it. So you're right. He's he

continues to he stabs them all in the back, betrays them and and they keep going. I mean, you know, this this isn't totally I mean, this is pretty new behavior in American politics. It's not unknown. You know, this is the kind of atmosphere you get in a in the court of a dictator. I mean, you know, Lavrov himself plays this role for Putin. You know, I've seen him do it, you know, when after the invasion of Ukraine, you know, Lavrov would get up on a panel and he'd say, no, we haven't invaded Ukraine, you know, or he would, you know, he'll deny looking you straight in the eye or looking the camera straight in the eye. He'll deny something that we know and he knows is absolutely true. And this is the kind of behavior you get in

kind of dictatorial courts where, you know, people feel they constantly have to show their loyalty in order to stay in their jobs. You know, maybe, you know, certainly there are some there are some honorable people in the White House, and it may be that some of them still feel they should be there to prevent Trump from doing anything worse or because, you know, they they feel some sense of patriotism and I need to help the country. Um, but you're right that at a certain point people become really profoundly compromised. Um, and then you have to ask why they're doing it. Um, you know, after the end of the day, you know, this is the United States, it's not Uzbekistan and nobody's going to shoot you if you resign. I mean, you can just resign. And one of the

questions now is why more people haven't resigned. I mean, what are they getting out of doing this? That's increasingly hard to see. Yeah, I think that's a very strong line to push. David Frum keeps making this point. Where are the resignations? Where are the people with principles and a conscience who just won't submit to having their reputations entangled with this moral and political catastrophe. But this is a point that I keep making. It would seem much worse. It would seem as bad as it in fact is if it were not as bad. If he did one-tenth the idiotic things that he does, he would seem worse. But we just can't even keep up with

the cascade of scandal. The news cycle just can't absorb it. It just keeps changing. He'll do something crazy tomorrow, and we'll forget what we were even talking about today. It's very funny, you know, because I live in Europe. You're calling me. I'm speaking to you from London. And sometimes these things happen in the evening. So I'm asleep, you know, and then I wake up in the morning to pick up my phone or my laptop and look at it. I said, oh, God, you know, and then you're right. I have to spend 30 minutes catching up on this. Another brand new scandal that I that I wasn't ready for. But, yeah, I mean, this is another this is a danger. I mean, the danger is that, you know, we become overwhelmed by the stories. There's a constant kind of fire hose of disinformation and fake stories and twisted

versions of what just happened coming out of the White House. And to some extent, coming out of a part of the press. I mean, I think Fox, you know, you talk about people inside the White House. I think some of the reporting on Fox News bears some responsibility for some of this, too. And you know, there's a fire hose of stuff. It's very hard to sort through it and deal with it and think it through, you know, and people will. The real danger is that people just give up and they'll say, well, God, you know, this all this all stinks. This is terrible. I don't want anything to do with it. I hate politics. You know, get me away from here. I'd rather go terrible. I don't want anything to do with it. I hate politics. You know, get me away from here. I'd rather go sailing or I don't know, I'd rather go for a walk.

And this is a real danger. And this, by the way, is another thing that happens in authoritarian societies. You know, people become apolitical. They say, right, I can't take this. This is all craziness. I can't listen to it. I'm going to retreat into my private world. And I think we may begin to see that, possibly begin to see that in the United States too. Actually, that is an impulse I've felt myself. It's just, there's something so seemingly ineffectual about keeping score day after day here. It's just, it's more of the same thing. And again, as you point out, it was all foreseeable. I know your time is short, Anne, and I want to ask you a couple of quick questions. First,

is there a danger here? I think we spoke about this last time, but it seems more pressing. Is there a danger in this narrow focus on collusion with the Russians, in the end, exonerating Trump for things that he really should be held accountable for? Because it's quite possible, it seems likely, that the worst about what is true of him and the administration may not, in fact, be illegal. And by narrowly focusing on collusion or appointing a special prosecutor when we could be doing something more broad, like an independent commission, we could actually just miss the actual target. Is that something you're thinking about? Look, so I've said it or I've said it just now. I mean, I think that the worst aspects of the Trump-Russia relationship are the ones that we know about. I mean, it may be that an investigation is going to find more. And it looks pretty clear just from what, you know, what we

already know, that there were at least informal contacts between some of his campaign staff and some people and, you know, various probably Russian PR companies, but also some Russian diplomats and others. But the worst, the worst aspect of it is his admiration for them. The fact that he this is the society he likes the most. This is the country he doesn't criticize. This is the political leader who who he feels, you know, most who he finds most appealing, who he's just did this big favor for. He accepted his farm meeting with his foreign minister. He tells, you know, he tells them intimate stories while they're inside the Oval Office. That's the that's the story. And that's, you know, that's not going to be plum. We don't need a special prosecutor to plumb that. We can see it. And, you makes money out of both. He admires that political system. He likes the brutality. He seems to even like the idea, maybe, you know, getting rid of some journalists. Well, that's something he'd like to do, too.

Of course, you know, famously, Putin kills journalists. Not all of them, but select ones have been murdered in mysterious ways in Russia. And this is open. This is the American president, you know, who instead of, you know, and this is, by the way, somebody who knows very little about our own constitution, you know, and our own political system, and indeed our own history, as we also know from many things he's said over the last few months. But his goal, his, you know, his greatest admiration is for this kind of political system. And I think that's the biggest scandal. And that's the thing we should focus on.

What kind of a person is this? There's no American tradition of admiring autocracy or trying to bring elements of it to the United States. This is new. But Anne, is there anything we can do with that focus? I mean, so that is, for lack of a better word, a political liability for him as distinct from a criminal one. What can be done with that at this point? Can you impeach someone on the basis of their fondness for despots? Well, look, impeachment is, you know, impeachment is political. I mean, at the end of the day, Trump will be impeached if enough Republicans feel that he's a political liability. I mean, Full control is impeachable because, you know,

as president, the Constitution says you're not supposed to get emoluments, which can be interpreted in the modern sense. He shouldn't be getting any revenues from his foreign businesses, but he is. So if you want to do impeach him, you could do it now. So it's really, impeachment is going to be, if it happens, which it still may not, would be a political decision. impeachment is going to be, if it happens, which it still may not, would be a political decision. So I think focusing on the deeper, you know, the deeper political problems, you know, and the implications of what kind of a person he is and what kind of how he's running, how he's running the White House and attempting to propagate those and discuss those and, you know, help people to understand them who don't

seem to get it, which would be his supporters both in Congress and in the country. I don't think that's a lost cause. At the end, if Congress wants to do it, they can do it. There's enough there already. The question is, what will motivate them? And I think they'll only be motivated by politics. Well, on that point, I have a question that may seem a little out of left field. But I mean, you know about the rumors that there's apprentice outtakes of Trump using the N-word with an impressive lack of self-consciousness, and that these tapes were not leaked by Mark Burnett and others there based on some political calculus. I happen to know, to a moral certainty, that those tapes exist. I can't really say how I know that, but I'm willing to say this publicly.

I know they exist. So you can imagine something analogous to the Mark Furman tapes during the OJ trial. Imagine something analogous to the Mark Furman tapes during the OJ trial. Would that be enough to't be so PC, you know, or there's a part of his support that doesn't that isn't going to care about that. I mean, the people, you know, 60 percent of the country will be outraged if they're not already. And then there's a part who will once again reject it because it doesn't bother them. So I'm not sure that that would be the tipping point. I mean, it might have been during the election, but hard for me to see now. I mean, the other danger is, by the way, that there are other kinds of tapes in other places.

You know, I know that this was a rumor that was unproven, you know, about Russian tapes, but, you know, Trump has been around for a long time doing discreditable things in many places, you know, including a lot of countries ranging from, I don't know, Azerbaijan to Dubai to Turkey, places where he has investments. And in a lot of those places, he will have been taped. And there may be we don't know what's floating around out there. So there may be there may be more eventually. So what do you think it's going to take? Because this is the thing that I find above all so depressing about what his existence is doing to American society. I mean, it's just uncanny to continually hear from Trump's defenders who seem completely oblivious to his flaws. No matter how awful you imagine Hillary Clinton to be and how much you wouldn't want her president, it seems to me that you have to admit that Trump is showing

some signs of a dangerous unprofessionalism, at least. And so what do you make of the fact that there seems to be no path from where we are through the brains of Trump's defenders to an admission of what should be obvious, that this person is unfit for office. What would he have to do, do you think, to actually turn the tide? I mean, you know, it may be a combination of promises not kept. You know, you may begin to get people disappointed with him. There's a little bit of that on the right. I mean, on the sort of far right that supports him. If you begin to get a different tone on the most important media

sources, you know, the television that people watch, which is mostly Fox, and the websites and, you know, and Twitter feeds and others that Trump supporters support. If you begin to get a different tone, you might be get, you might get some change. But, you know, we're confronting something that others, you know, this is a, this is a kind of cult. You know, it's not a normal political movement. People aren't moved to be part of it by argument. It's something to do with identity. These are people who, you know, they want to call themselves real Americans. That's why they use that expression.

They want to, they've created almost an online tribe. You know, some countries have real with one another, stick together, you know, interpret the world in similar ways and find some kind of, you know, there's some form of, I don't know whether it's security, you know, or a feeling of being part of a gang or a crowd, something that people are getting out of being inside that group and feeling themselves to be beleaguered, you know, by, I don't know, by the mainstream media or by the elites. And they, you know, they find some kind of new identity being part of this group. And so it's not really logical. And so all the logical, rational arguments that you could make are the ones that used to normally we think move people in politics aren't working,

because it's not a normal political movement. It's tribal. And, you know, incidentally happening in other countries at the same time, too. I mean, I think it's one of the many unexpected side effects of the Internet and particularly of social media is that people can now organize themselves differently online. And one of the things that happened is that people who feel the same way about Trump are all in a single group now, and they reinforce one another. You know, it may be that to change them will have to be, you know, it won't be rational arguments. It will be emotional things that happen. Or it may be, as I said, it may be a change of tone of some of the leaders. It may be

that you have to deal, find out who the most influential Trump supporters are. But no, I don't have an instant answer for you. I think it's going to be very difficult because it isn't normal politics. It's interesting that any criticism of Trump is perceived by these people as mere partisanship, whereas it's just it's so clearly not. What many of us would pay to have Mitt Romney in the Oval Office. Well, even odder than that, like, you know, I mean, it's not a choice anymore between Trump and Hillary. Hillary's not going to be president now.

It's a choice between Trump and Mike Pence. Exactly. You know, whether or not you like Mike Pence, he's not, you know, he's not, you know, he's not childish. He's not a braggart. He's not, you know, unstable, which the president is. So why aren't, you know, I mean, this is what I don't understand about the Republicans. Isn't this the moment to say, right, we prefer Mike Pence? Yeah, yeah.

You know, Hillary's not an issue anymore. So that's the stranger question to me. Just to spell that out so that it can't possibly be ignored. Everyone who is hoping for impeachment is hoping for President Pence. Now, given my job description, President Pence is a nightmare scenario. And yet he's so much to be preferred to Trump. He's a balanced person. I mean, he thinks logically.

He connects events together. He doesn't have this bizarre thing that Trump has of not remembering from one day to the next what he said. And he doesn't seem to lie. I mean, at least not like Trump lies. He doesn't build his whole existence on completely false views of the world. So in that sense, he's reassuring. But I mean, there are other problems with him. But that's the choice now, Trump and Pence, Trump and Hillary. No, I mean, he's got the background problem of real ideology. And I view him as a kind of theocrat. His level of Christian fundamentalism is disconcerting. But it does come down to, as you say, his temperament, his personality. I mean, there's something wrong with Trump as a person.

And this has been obvious for decades. And it's the reason why he got elected in some sense. I mean, you know, people love this about him. They love the grandiosity and the sense of his own competence in areas where he is so clearly incompetent he can't even appreciate his incompetence. I mean, it may be that people like the entertainment. Look, you know, we, you know, national news has suddenly become a reality show. You know, we crash from one bizarre story to the next, you know, each day trying to figure it out. I mean, it's a, it's practically, as you say, it's a full-time occupation just to keep up with it. You know, that's how people feel about soap

operas or reality television. You know, it's how people feel about soap operas or reality television. You know, it's now a, it's a pastime and that might appeal to people. Well, let's hope we don't entertain ourselves to death. I agree with you. Yeah, well, listen, thank you for the recap. I hope to never speak to you again on this subject. Let's have a better subject next time.

Let's do something subject next time. Let's do something different next time. But somehow I think that's not on the cards. Keep it up, Anne. Thanks a lot. You're indispensable. Juliet, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Oh, it's my pleasure. I think, although given the subject matter, it's difficult times.

Although, given the subject matter, it's difficult times. thrown up in defense of the indefensible. And there was this adorable moment I caught a few days ago, I think, which I don't know who you were talking to, but someone who was essentially in defense of Trump playing the usual obscurantist game began to kind of interrupt you. And you said, no, no, no, no, no, don't interrupt me today. This is actually important. You're at the big boys table now. And it's like, we all know how this game is played, but right now the American people need to hear some facts and I'm going to give them the facts. Yeah. Well, I, I appreciate this. It's, it's, uh, um, you know, when, when Trump won, um, for a lot of us who, you know, I care about public policy, I'm in safety and security,

which, you know, obviously there are Democrats and Republicans, but we, we, you know, I care about public policy. I'm in safety and security, which, you know, obviously there are Democrats and Republicans, but we, we, you know, we, we tend to be agree on more rather than less. Um, you know, a lot of us struggled with what's our role in this day and age and, and, you know, some people, you know, hit the streets, which is great. And, and some people file lawsuits and, and I took a little while to figure out sort of what lane would be helpful to people. And I appreciate you saying that because, you know, maybe it's working, which is just, you know, there's, I just sort of call out the BS quota, but also make it clear that a lot of this stuff really is significant. This is not a test. This is the real thing. And the actions by the president in what we're talking on a Wednesday, what really is only a

10-day period, starting with the Sally Yates hearing, is just remarkable for its disruption to our norms, its dissolution of respect for institutions and where it heads. I can't answer that. No one can answer that right now. But we can certainly talk about it. Well, I want to walk through all this. And again, we're talking about events that have moved really quickly. But I think we should start on this issue of partisanship because there's something truly perverse about the allegation of partisanship that gets hurled against anyone who spots any sort of problem here

with the president's behavior. My criticism of Trump from the beginning has been just about this. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, The criticism of Trump from the beginning has been just about as... conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.