Making Sense with Sam Harris - #80 — The Unraveling

Episode Date: June 4, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with David Frum about political partisanship, recent security leaks, Trump's foreign policy, the Russia investigation, Kathy Griffin's joke, 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.

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 Today I bring you a conversation with a person who agrees with me, and I with him on this point. David Frum is going to walk us through current events once again. There is just no way to keep up with the cascade of scandals. up with the cascade of scandals. We had this conversation a day before Trump announced that he would be pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accord. I think I will reserve comment about that for a future podcast. I'm sure I'll have a climate change expert on at some point to talk about this. Let's just say it's another way in which Trump seems to be forcing our country into a kind of exile among developed nations.

It's as though his only goal is to diminish our stature in the world. But David and I spoke before all that. David, as you recall, is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine. He's a former speechwriter for George Bush. And he's someone who's been unusually clear-eyed about the problem of Trump in office. So I bring you David Frum. I am here once again with David Frum. David, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. What a pleasure. As I was saying to you David, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having me. What a pleasure. As I was saying to you offline, you are a true road warrior here. You were doing this interview from an airport. You have found a reasonably quiet corner of a lounge. So I apologize in advance for any imperfections in the sound we're going to be treating our listeners to. So thanks for doing this. And we are jumping into another conversation about politics to the consternation of the, I think, small percentage of my listeners who are diehard Trump supporters. I want to start as I attempted to start my last conversation with you, and I think I do this really every time I touch the subject now,

I want to attempt to anchor this to some basic understanding that partisanship is not what is motivating this conversation. You know, I think there are a few simple moves we can make to at least establish that to a moral certainty for any reasonable person in the audience. And one is to say that, you know, the implication of everything we're going to say that is probably urging impeachment proceedings along is that we are eager to have a President Mike Pence, right? So that this is not, we're not talking about a choice between Trump and Hillary now. We're talking about everything we say that suggests he's unfit for office, he's ushering in a Republican replacement, and one who I'm really not at all sanguine about, given my concerns about the influence of religion in politics. And perhaps there are other ways to do it, but that is a fairly simple one.

Can you think of anything to say, apart from just referencing your obvious background as a Republican, that can cut through this allegation of partisanship before we start? The rule I try to follow, don't always live up to it by try, is no arguments about arguments. So somebody will make a point. A comedian should not make a sketch about the assassination of a president. To which the response will be not to engage with that, but to say, well, did you comment in a similar way about a situation that I personally believe is to be analogous? And you get this infinite regress where arguments turn into arguments about arguments. So with the present president, your statements about him

are either true or false, and you may have good or bad motives, but they're either true or false. So it's either true or false that he's behaving in a certain way, that he's a man of a certain character, that he's doing certain things to our alliance structure, or it's not. And these constant attempts to sort of go to the argument behind the argument, I think in the case of Trump in particular, they are desperation moves. Trump is a very hard person to defend on the merits. So it's hard to say that, it's hard to acquit him on the Russia matter. It's hard to suggest that he is a person who lives up to the ethical and character standards that we've accepted of past presidents. And so you get these moves where they say, well, let's not talk about him. Let's talk about you. Frankly, I'm not that interesting. So I don't think anybody wants to talk about me. We

want to talk about Donald Trump, who's the most powerful man in the world and probably one of the more interesting men in the world. Okay. Yeah. Well, I think that's good enough. I went out on Twitter a couple hours ago asking for the hardest and most sane questions in defense of Trump for us. And honestly, I didn't get much. I will read some of those questions. Many of them focus on the problem of information siloing and fake news. And it is alleged that you and I are the victims of fake news and conspiracy theories. The whole Russia conspiracy is a conspiracy theory.

I can come up with a much better argument in his defense. Oh, I'd love to hear it. Prop him up for me. Okay. Well, this is not an argument actually exactly in defense of him, but it's an argument that works in his defense, which is all the disturbing things we know, or many of the disturbing things we know about him, we know because people entrusted with public secrets have broken their oaths and released into the public domain information that is meant to be private within the government. And this information often involves real compromising of really important secrets. I mean, the Russians are not babies. The Russians

do not have their important conversations on open lines. They have their conversations on lines or by modes that they believe to be secure. So every time that somebody from the NSA or CIA or National Security Council releases something about what the Russians are saying with Trump or about some conversation between the Trump camp and the Russians, they reveal to the Russians that something the Russians had thought was secret is not in fact secret. And that is a real loss to the United States. And what somebody might say to me is, you were very angry at Edward Snowden and Bradley slash Chelsea Manning for betraying secrets. Here are secrets being betrayed. Why aren't you equally angry? That's the best argument. I view that as the way in which

our political norms are eroding under what I'm increasingly viewing as a failed pressure testing of our system. I mean, so the fact that you and I can be sanguine and even greedy with respect to leaks of classified intelligence that do our society harm. I want to say I'm not sanguine about this. I mean, I think one of the tragedies of the Trump presidency, Trump's advent to the presidency is itself a terrible blow to the institutions of the United States. And the things the society is having to do in an effort to defend itself against him, which may or may not ultimately be successful. I'm not saying that Trump won't ultimately prevail over these institutions, but themselves

come with terrible costs. No, I was granting that. I mean, I'm saying I want those leaks to continue because I think Trump is so bad, but no, I'm not downplaying the costs at all. I think it's fairly terrifying that we're in this position. Look at what's happened with... I'll give you another example of the cost at all. I think it's fairly terrifying that we're in this position. Look at what's happened with, I'll give you another example of the cost. The action of the courts in striking down Trump's, I don't know, are we allowed to call it a Muslim ban? I mean- Yes. You can read the fine print on that. Yes.

Let's call it that. A Muslim ban. It's a Muslim ban. The courts are, these judicial decisions, I mean, I think I basically agree with what they're trying to do, that you can say these actions by the president are obviously capricious. They're obviously motivated by animus. They're obviously stupid and irrational. However, the president's authority over immigration is plenary. He is clearly acting within what would have been thought of as his rights until six months ago. Because he's so flagrantly using this power for ill and for malice and without a basis in an indiscriminatory way, the courts are telling him he can't do it. But, you know, the courts are overstepping.

Let me give you one more example of a price of Trump. And this is maybe the most serious one of all. Everyone's laughing over this funny fake the most serious one of all. Everyone's laughing over this funny fake tweet that he did last night. You know, the mangled thing that then it was a typo and it stayed up for six hours. Okay, so what it looked a lot like happened, like was the president was tweeting while falling asleep, had some kind of spasm with his fingers, tweeted something nonsensical, passed out so he didn't notice it, and nobody found him for six hours or noticed the tweet or did anything about it. That's very amusing. Well, it can happen. He's an older man. Maybe he takes sleeping pills.

This is a man who also has the power with his other fingers to launch a nuclear war. We all are wondering whether the people who execute his commands would take an order from Donald Trump about a nuclear war in the same obedient way they would take an order from a Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. And I think we all kind of hope that they wouldn't. But what do we call societies where military people don't defer to the civilian leadership? Banana republics? What do we call them? Yeah, right. The point is that we are not coming out of this whole.

However this story ends, we are going to have major losses for our institutions. Yeah, well, so let's talk about how the story might end. I want to talk about the Russia investigation, but first, let's talk about some of these losses we've already noticed. How is Trump's foreign policy going? He just got back from this trip. And I noticed that you reacted to the McMaster op-ed, which seemed to rescind just what really has been a multi-generational vision of a world where established democracies cooperate in ways that aren't guided by narrow self-interest. And apparently, we're no longer into that.

In the world before World War II, countries behaved like selfish entities, and they regarded the world as basically a competitive enterprise. The United States, the other great powers, small powers too. It was a Habesian world of all against all. And after World War II, our parents and grandparents decided we're not doing that anymore. And what we're going to do, this can't apply to the whole planet because there are a lot of authoritarian regimes, there are a lot of backward societies. But among the advanced democracies, we're going to build new kinds of structures where international politics begins to look a lot like domestic politics. So if an American company and a German company have a dispute, that gets settled in more or

less the same way as if two American companies had a dispute. If there's even a trade dispute between the German and American government, or between the United States and the EU, that gets settled in a way that looks a lot like a domestic. There's a set of rules that are agreed upon in advance by the two sovereigns. The rules are then arbitrated by a neutral adjudicator. That arbitration is binding. And you can then enforce it inside the court system of either country. You can then enforce it inside the court system of either country from in this sort of zone of peace and cooperation that's, you know, the NATO countries plus Japan, plus Australia, New Zealand, plus a few others. International and domestic politics blur to a great extent. I regard that

as one of the most signal political accomplishments of the human race. So the Trump people went to Europe and they said, as far as we're concerned, that's over. We regard the countries of Europe, and first, we don't even acknowledge there is such a thing as the EU, and we regard the countries of Europe as power competitors in exactly the same way that we would regard Russia or China or Uzbekistan or Congo. And we call you our friends, but we think our relationship is regulated entirely by interest, not by values, and interest in the most short-sighted way. So when we have a trade dispute, we go to bat for the American company. We don't ask the question, who's right or how do we sustain a long-term regime? We just say, our guys win, your guys lose.

Might makes right. The stronger imposes his will on the weaker. And we're counting on ourselves to be the stronger for a long time to come. Yeah, you have a great passage in this op-ed, quote, perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Trump presidency is the way even its most worldly figures, in words composed for them by its deepest thinkers, have reimagined the United States in the image of their own chief, selfish, isolated, brutish, domineering, and driven by immediate appetites rather than ideals or even long-term interests. And I think that just puts it perfectly. It really is. And this is the character of our

country too, which should be our greatest concern. But the way in which defenders of Trump have to basically, you put it this way in a tweet, people who defend Trump become just like Trump. And I said something similar a few days before, just watching how otherwise serious people with, I mean, the most serious people in his administration, the people who we were relieved to see appointed because finally there are a few grown-ups at the table, you have them just jettison their credibility and their ethical gravitas insofar as they could maintain it for an hour in the current administration. They just perform a kind of moral self-immolation trying to defend him. They immediately start lying or speaking in Orwellian euphemisms. Just the sickness spreads. That's one of the

most worrying things about what's happening in Washington right now. I agree. And the tragedy of McMaster, this is happening with H.R. McMaster. I mean, in his case, it really is, it's like an opera, because I'm sure he took the job with a view to minimizing the harm that Donald Trump would do. And I'm sure in all kinds of ways that we won't know for 20, 30 years, he is minimizing the harms that Donald Trump would do. I'm sure he's playing a very public-spirited role and sacrificing his own reputation in the process, which is kind of noble in a way. But at the same time, he is called on to tell lies about petty things, and he's doing it. So one more question on foreign policy here, because this genuinely surprised me, and I'm sure there's some way of seeing it where it would just have been obvious he would behave this way. But I was not expecting Trump to behave the way he did with the Saudis, where he really just became like a lickspittle to the Saudi regime. I mean, he talked tough during the campaign.

You can see tweets of his where he talks about their abuse of women and human rights and their responsibility for terrorism and exporting the Wahhabi worldview to the ends of the earth. I mean, he seemed to be aware of just how beyond the pale much of what they do is and has been for a long time. And yet, he didn't make a peep about this and then singled out Iran as though they were the true engine of jihadist terror. Can you explain what happened there? I can't, actually. I'm sure there is an explanation. I don't have the information to assess how much of this is driven by crass business dealings, how much of this is driven by the ideology of the people around him, how much of this is driven by certain kinds of domestic

political considerations that he's... Trump balances a lot of the pretty obvious anti-Semitism in his entourage with kind of championing of the foreign policy views of certain parts of the right wing of the Jewish community. Some of that may be in play. There may just be, by the way, slothfulness and lack of attention where because he was flattered that he got dragged into endorsing the Saudi side of an internal sectarian war in the Islamic world. I can't assess all of those things. And look, there are also serious reasons why the United States will go and has gone easy on Saudi Arabia and will continue to do so,

so long as oil remains an important fuel. One of the things I think is sort of exciting with the time we live in, there are a lot of bad things, is within the life of the younger listeners to this podcast, I think that day, they will see the end of that day. But I don't think I will. That's something we should be going full speed ahead on, obviously. Okay, so the Russia investigation, how is that going? I was going to have you on the episode I did last week with Anne Applebaum and Juliette Kayyem, but then we had scheduling issues and your interview got pushed like another 36 hours in the future. And the news was changing so fast that I got the sense that if we just waited a few more days, all of a sudden,

we would be in a completely different news cycle with new facts to worry about. And indeed, that has happened. Since I had that conversation with Anne and Juliet, we now have Kushner and his back channel, as well as the ham-fisted response to that disclosure on part of the administration. So talk to me about how things are going now in this investigation. Well, Ann, of course, has always been a great teacher of mine. So people who got to hear her, I think really, I know how much I benefited from her wisdom on these issues over the years. And I hope that your listeners would agree with me about that, because she really has been at tremendous personal risk, and doesn't tend to talk about this, but she has herself been a target in

her family of Russian active messengers and disinformation, and it has taken a terrible price from her. And she's not one to complain about it, but it's true and needs to be recognized. Yeah, she's fantastic. On the Kushner matter, we still don't know exactly what happened. I think it's important in all of these cases not to get ahead of the story, because you can see how rumor can easily overspread, and you can disillusion people. They expect bigger news than they get.

And I think we all need to be very cognizant of the terrible, terrible example of Louise Minch, who is just, I don't know if people listening to this podcast are aware of her, but Louise Minch, she was a British conservative member of parliament. She's had a very exotic career in a lot of ways. And the latest, she's no longer in parliament, and the latest chapter of her career, she's become a disseminator of the inverse of RT. latest chapter of her career, she's become a disseminator of the inverse of RT. It's like if there were an anti-RT that is very anti-Russian in its tone, but just like RT in its method, in its total disregard for knowledge and fact and making up stories and circulating wild rumors. In this struggle for the character of the country, being careful with what you know and being careful about what you say is an important moral principle, not just a prudential principle. You don't want to be like

the people who abuse the credulity of their audience. So I'm waiting to see if, is the story, what is the dimension of this story? We've heard many explanations of what could have happened. I have to tell you, the answers that come from Kushner's spinners don't sound very plausible. And the idea that the president's son-in-law, with no military experience, proposed to go into a Russian compound to have a secure conversation about military dispositions in Syria, that's just, we have an entire Pentagon. If anyone is going to talk about, well, how do we make sure that we avoid plane crashes? It's not going to be Jared Kushner. It's going to be the people in the Pentagon. And they have lots of ways of communicating with their Russian counterparts

and in ways that are much more secure, both technically and also making sure that you don't reveal more than you want to reveal. So that story doesn't seem right. On the other hand, the darkest version of the story, which is that Kushner was seeking some kind of personal financial advantage, which was suggested by a Bloomberg report, we don't know that to be true either. There are some stray hints about that, but that shouldn't be taken as written. All we know is this story is exceedingly strange, very difficult to justify, and there has been no credible effort to justify it.

And it is behavior that if not justified, should lead to the loss at least of a security clearance and maybe outright resignation and possibly even harsher sanctions. Yeah, and the effort to justify that I've seen most commonly is that it relies on equivocating on this term back channel, the claim that back channels are a kind of standard operating procedure, as though this sort of back channel is equivalent to the other kinds of back channels people are talking about. That is a truly specious move, isn't it? Yeah, well, the people who make this point, they throw out this word as if they know what it means, and if they know what it is. Look, what is a back channel? That term gets applied to two kinds of conversations.

The first is a conversation where in an effort to explore with an adversary, the government of the United States will send somebody who is connected to the adversary, but deniable by the United States. A business person, a retired military person, somebody who, if the conversation goes wrong, the United States. You know, a business person, a retired military person, somebody who, if the conversation goes wrong, the United States can say, hey, he was just gassing. He wasn't talking for Mission Impossible. You know, if your mission fails, of course, the secretary will deny any knowledge. So the first reason you have a back channel is in order to have deniability. So Jared Kushner would be the absolute last person in the world you would choose to set up a back channel of that kind, because he's obviously acting for the president,

undeniably so. The second kind of back channel that you get is the kind of back channel that the Obama administration had at the beginning of its approach to Iran, which is in an effort, again, to explore what is possible. You can set up a three-way conversation. In that case, the intermediary was a man. The United States would talk to the government of Oman. The government of Oman would talk to the government of Iran. And messages would be sent back and forth that way. And only after a certain point would the conversation become more direct between the United States and Iran.

Some preconditions were dealt with first. I'm not endorsing, by the way, the Obama-Iran policy, but this is how it worked. Now, it's not impossible that the Trump people broke through those rules and norms and tried to do it a different way. But you just can't get past the fact that he went to them. Let me give you one last example drawn from American history about how these things work. Henry Kissinger, when he was national security advisor, had an informal set of contacts with the then Russian ambassador to the United States, a guy named Dobrynin. Dobrynin would come to Kissinger first at the NSC. First, they would meet in various neutral places. And then ultimately, when Kissinger became Secretary of State, he would come to

the State Department. In fact, he even had a reserve parking space at the State Department, which is a big bone of contention. But the point was, there was no question about the security of their conversation. One of the big questions that we have about this is, did Kushner not understand that he was putting himself in a position where the Russians could generate a transcript of his talk, alter that transcript in various embarrassing ways, and release that or used that as a weapon against him. He was putting his head inside their noose. Did he not understand it? Why was he doing it? What motive could have been so strong or was he so stupid as to have taken such a terrible risk for himself and his administration or his administration to be that he had in office? So now what do you expect of the coming Comey testimony?

I keep using the line, 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, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. Thank you.