Making Sense with Sam Harris - #83 — The Politics of Emergency

Episode Date: June 23, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Fareed Zakaria about his career as a journalist, Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations," political partisanship, Trump, the health of the news media, the connection between Islam and intolerance, 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 one. Today I'm speaking with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed is the host of his own show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS. He's also a Washington Post columnist and an editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of several best-selling books,

The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World, and most recently, In Defense of a Liberal Education. He was also named by Esquire as the most influential foreign policy advisor of his generation, and foreign policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. He and I had a wide-ranging conversation about politics and partisanship and our differing opinions about how to talk about the connection between Islam and the sorts of violence and intolerance we see in the world. We didn't agree about everything, but I think you will find that it was a very productive and civil and honest conversation. And now I give you Fareed Zakaria.

I am here with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure, Sam. Well, listen, the tables have turned. I have been on your show at least twice, I think, and now I get to play journalist. It's a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you about you and your views. It's my pleasure. I'm a little apprehensive, but let's make it work. Just to begin with a little background

on you, everyone is obviously quite familiar with you, but how do you view yourself primarily? Do you consider yourself a journalist? Because you give your own opinions and commentary on policy and current events so often. It really is never far from the next thing you're about to say. How do you describe your own job? Yeah, it's a good question. I'm a sort of strange bird in the sense that I've never been a reporter. At no point in my career, I never pretend to be one. I have enormous respect

for reporters. When I was at Newsweek, there were a bunch of brilliant reporters who worked with me when I was editing Newsweek International. But I'm a commentator, and I really am a lapsed academic. I went into a PhD program, thought I completed it, wrote a dissertation, got a couple of academic job offers, was all set to begin an academic path. I had been teaching as a graduate student and then sort of stumbled into journalism. I didn't quite stumble into it. You know, when I first got an offer to do something, I hesitated a lot. And then I looked at my life. Economists have this wonderful phrase called revealed preferences, which is a fancy way of saying, don't worry about what you say, look at what you've done. really since high school, was work at a newspaper or a magazine, done research for an op-ed writer, things that were clearly in the realm of journalism. So I took a baby step and I became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs. Then I started writing a column for Newsweek, then went as a commentator on ABC News. So it's always been commentary, but I was always drawn to the public fora, to being more actively engaged than being an academic.

But I still, you know, when I think about how I've been shaped and the way in which I think about the world, I think my training as a social scientist and as an academic is still very, very much at the heart of how I look at problems. And you got your PhD in government at Harvard. Is that right? Exactly. I got my PhD in government. The subfield was called international relations at Harvard in 1992. Is that synonymous with a political science degree or is it an IR degree? What is government?

So at Harvard, yeah, Harvard, you know, being Harvard once, every other university calls it political science. Harvard calls it government. But it's exactly, it's a PhD in political science. And did you study with Samuel Huntington? Yep. He was my dissertation advisor. He was my closest advisor. He's the guy who kind of offered me a job when I finished my PhD. Yeah. Nice. So perhaps you can remind our listeners of his thesis about the clash of civilizations, which I'm wondering how you think that has fared, because it's certainly come in for a fair amount of opprobrium, at least on the political left. Huntington and also Bernard Lewis have gotten fairly hammered by their association and their influence on neoconservatives in the

run-up to the war in Iraq. Perhaps you can give a kind of potted history of that for our listeners. Sure. I actually have a very personal connection to it because Sam was my dissertation advisor. I went to him one day and said, I have this job offer at Foreign Affairs. Do you think I should do it? And he said, no, absolutely not. You Foreign Affairs. Do you think I should do it? And he said, no, absolutely not. You should take this other job I think you'd be very good at, which is an assistant professor at Harvard. At Harvard, they never offer you a job. Of course, they invite you to apply for it. But he did it in a way that suggested that I thought I had a good chance of getting it. And we talked about it. And I said, no, I think I'm going to take the

Foreign Affairs job. And he said, OK, well, if you do, here's a manuscript I've been working on. Tell me what you think of it anyway. You think it's something foreign affairs would be interested in publishing? Let me know. So I went home and read it. And it was The Clash of Civilizations. And I went back to him and said, I think we would love to publish it. And it was actually the first issue that I edited at Foreign Affairs. I made that really the first ever cover essay at Foreign Affairs. We put it in big bold type above everything else in a way that signaled we thought it was very important. So I think it's a very powerful, interesting set of ideas that have in many ways been very prescient. It has its flaws.

So the basic thesis of The Clash of Civilizations, which I think is true, was that at the end of the Cold War, as the Cold War waned, the dominant motivating force of the Cold War had been political ideology. It had been the great dividing line. So whether you were communist or capitalist, whether you were communist or democratic, whether you were part of the American sphere or the Soviet sphere, that was really how you figured out international politics, you figured out the fault lines of the world, and that that was obviously over. This was 1992-93 that we published, I think it was January 93. The new fault line, he argued, was this thing he called civilizations. But at the heart of civilizations was religion. And his argument was that human beings have lost

their identity as ideological beings, and states have lost their identity as ideological beings, you know, in the East Camp or the West Camp. So they are regaining or finding again their identity, which is based on culture, on civilization, and on religion. I think that piece of it is incredibly powerful. And I think one only has to look at the return of these ideas of culture and religion, not just in the Middle East, but in places like India and Russia. Even a place like Israel has become more deeply conscious of its religion. Sometimes it takes the form more of culture than of religion, but in many cases, religion is at its heart.

So I think that piece of it, Sam really powerfully and early on identified, and he identified that there was a particular problem in the world of it, Sam, really powerfully and early on identified, and he identified that there was a particular problem in the world of Islam, which I think, again, has proved to be, you know, very powerful impression. Where I think he went wrong was he got very enamored with the idea of the civilizations and the clash of civilizations. And so he had this, he imagined this world in which Western civilization was going to clash with Chinese civilization and Islamic civilization. And he almost viewed them as in big interacting, you know, kind of billiard balls on a global billiard table. But in fact,

what we discover is, you know, the world is very messy there. You know, where does Latin America fit into that framework? How do you deal with the fact that the big conflicts of the world is very messy. Where does Latin America fit into that framework? How do you deal with the fact that the big conflicts of the world are really mostly within the world of Islam, between the Shiites and the Sunnis, between the moderates and the radicals? In fact, I think that the last five years, if you look at the number of people who've been killed by Islamic terrorism, 95, 98% of them have been Muslims, Muslims killing each other. So he got too enamored with this idea of civilizations and the idea that they cohere. And so I think that part of it has never really worked. You don't notice that, like Saddam Hussein,

when he invaded Kuwait, didn't notice that they were both Arab, both Muslim, both Sunni countries, that was old-fashioned geopolitics. So that piece of it I don't think has worked as well. But the core insight, I still think that it's important to remember, in 1992, not a lot of people were saying the next big source of identity, conflict, power is going to be culture and identity. And he got that exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about Islam and hopefully I'll ask you a few questions about China as well. And I think Huntington might come back in about half an hour or so. But now,

how do you view yourself politically at this moment? How would you describe your political biases such as they are? You know, I think of myself sort of fundamentally as a classical liberal, somebody who looks at the 19th century tradition of liberals, by which I mean people who were dedicated to the idea of human liberty, the preservation of liberty, free speech, free thought. But like many of those people, I think you learn as you go along, as it were. And I think that I would describe myself as a kind of moderate or reformed classical liberal, by which I mean I can see that there are excesses within capitalism, which does not allow for a pure free market, that a pure free market ends up often being the rule of the strong or the well-connected, you know, that the game is in some ways rigged and that people don't have

perfect information or perfect knowledge. So you have to play a role there. I think that, you know, traditional liberals had too benign a view of international conflict. You know, they tended to all believe that if everybody just became democratic, that we would all live in peace for the rest of our lives. And I think this power matters, geopolitics matters, geography matters. So, you know, where does that place me in today's political spectrum? When I was in college, I was very enamored of Reagan. I was kind of a right winger. I liked, I think part of it was I grew up in India, and I came from essentially a socialist country. And I liked Reagan's emphasis on freedom and free markets. I liked his frank talk about the Soviet Union as an evil empire, which I liked.

I never bought the social conservative agenda. I've always been a social liberal. And then I found that, to my mind, the Republican Party went right and right and right and right after Reagan. And, you know, particularly, I remember the Clinton years where, you know, they were on this kind of insane crusade to impeach Clinton. And the Democratic Party had moved to the center. So I found a lot that I liked among liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. And I would say politically, that's sort of still where I am. I tend to think I didn't move as much

as the country moved. But my overall effort has always been to try to look at every issue on its own merits. So I try not to start with the assumption, if the Republicans propose this, it must be a bad idea. If the Democrats propose it, it must be a good idea and I came to the conclusion, it's actually a pretty good idea. You have to be structured carefully, but they did it in Canada, which is not exactly a bastion of crazy libertarian ideas. And it seems to be working pretty well. And it allows for the kind of technological upgrade that we really need. So, you know, I know that's a very small bore one, but I was struck by how even that got subsumed with the kind of partisanship that we have now, where nothing

is viewed on its own terms. Yeah, well, I want to talk about partisanship. You've written about it recently, and I want to attempt, however vainly, to inoculate our audience against the sense that we are merely expressing partisanship when we talk about Trump, as we inevitably will. Now, I don't know if you've listened to any of my podcasts where I've spoken about Trump, but I have now, it has to be at least 10 hours of me railing against the president, both as a candidate and now as a president. And I've had people like David Frum and Ann Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan and Juliette Kayyem and people who are quite critical of and worried about Trump in the Oval Office. And we have just gone to town on him ad nauseum. And this is very much to the consternation of some significant percentage

of my audience. I actually don't know how large a percentage. It's a very vocal minority. But every time I've done this, and more and more, I have tried to make it very clear that partisanship is not the motivation here. And there are easy ways to see this. It's hard for people to really take these facts on board. But one point I now often make is that anything I or my guest says in this context, which seems to be hoping for impeachment, is, as a matter of fact, a hope for a President Mike Pence. Now, Mike Pence is not someone who I would ever have thought I would want in the Oval Office, but insofar as I go down the road of impeachment, that's the goal. Hillary Clinton is no longer on the menu, as should be clear. And also, it should be clear that most of the guests, virtually all of the guests I've

had talk critically about Trump have been Republicans for the most part their entire lives, or at the very least center-right. It's not a Bernie Sanders-style critique of Trumpism. So in any case, I want us to talk about Trump. I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time on his flaws because I don't think there are so many surprises there. But let's begin with this issue of partisanship and how it has seemingly increased at this moment for us and how it's made talking about political reality and just terrestrial reality, just talking about facts, talking about climate change, talking about, in the example you just raised,

whether privatizing the FAA could be a good idea or not. It's made it impossible to do that without this toxic miasma of partisanship and tribalism seemingly subsuming everything. So before we jump right into Trump and what concerns you there, talk a little bit about partisanship in the current moment. I think the most worrying thing about where we are politically is what seemed to be the core of how we have now begun to define ourselves as political beings. So again, if you go back to that Huntington distinction, it did used to be, it seemed to be that people viewed themselves more in ideological terms, liberal, conservative, that the issues were really essentially around,

you know, the kind of the role of the state in our lives. So you are left of center or right of center, depending on largely on your view of the role of the state in the economic life of the nation. And that divide was very important, but it was one that you could talk about, you could argue about, you could negotiate over, and you could split differences. You know, there was, you wanted to spend more money, I wanted to spend less. Well, there was a number in the middle. What has happened, and there's very good research from Harvard's Kennedy School, this woman Pippa Norris and Roland Engelhardt have done, which shows that people about the 1980s,

this began to happen in significant numbers, started to define themselves not on over-economic issues, but over cultural issues. Their identity derived not from their economic class, but from national origin, race, gender, sexual orientation. And so we've organized ourselves almost more into tribes. And those identities are more ascriptive identities. They're given identities. And so the problem with that is it's very hard to negotiate or to compromise or to even talk about these issues. It's, you know, it seems as though you are one person just assaulting the other side's identity.

They're looking down on, they view one side or the other as immoral. And all the battle line issues tend to be like that, you know, abortion, gay rights, even things like immigration is really a debate over national identity. And so it's not easy to compromise. And what that has done is it's made it impossible for there to be that open common space. I mean, the liberal tradition, and now again, I just mean liberal, small l, meaning really the democratic tradition, assumes you can have debates because there are common facts to which we have access. We are assuming, you know, each side is amenable to changing their views. But we have become in America more like Sunnis and Shiites, you know, where we're like, you can't really have a debate because one side views the other as then insulting

them, and there's no compromise possible because you'd be surrendering your very identity to this other side. Each side, in a sense, thinks that to let the other one win would be to dramatically change our core conception of what the country is. Now, if we are locked in that kind of a debate, it's not even a debate, into a kind of a cultural contest, conflict, it makes one despair at the prospects of liberal democracy, which does depend on reasoned debate with common facts. This is what has worried me most about Trump. It's this erosion of the norm around facts. This is what's been so destabilizing about him and his surrogates. way that is so childlike. I mean, it's the way that Trump lies. There's no pretense of making your lies square with common reality. So that it's just this... It's really an appeal to tribalism, I think. It's really, and it's appeal to people saying, don't forget we're a team and those guys

are bad. And you know, as you're right, they don't even pretend to have a very good explanation or answer. It's just an appeal to tribalism. In this case, it's hard for me to understand what the tribe is because it's not a religious tribe, although some numbers of religious people have gotten behind Trump. It's not an establishment Republican tribe. It doesn't even seem, I mean, all of the policies to which they seem to have been committed in the campaign, any one or a collection of them seem fungible. Like if when Trump goes back on a promise, people seem to sort of just shrug and say, well, you know, of course he was going to go back on a promise. That was just an opening negotiation gambit. I don't know what the value is to which everyone is captive here apart from just the

theater of it. The fact that this is good television or that he has destabilized the system in a way that continues to be entertaining, it's almost like a nihilistic attitude with respect to the status quo. People just want to see this wrecking ball swing freely through the system. Do you have any more insight as to what you think is going on there? Because I can't get people to make reasonable noises in defense of Trump when he either does something crazy and impulsive on his side or even just reneges on a promise that yesterday his fans or supporters said was important to them. Well, I think you're absolutely right. But the only thing I would amend is you keep saying people support him. So we know now a lot about

the people who support him. And now I'm not talking about the people who voted for him. Republicans are very loyal. He got basically the same percentage of Republican support as Romney did. We really have become two teams. But if you look at his core support, the 35% approval rating he has now, those people are overwhelmingly non-college-educated white. And what Trump, you know, the tribe is a kind of white working class or non-college educated, non-urban group that believes that they have been passed by, despised, condescended to, overlooked. They see as one that is filled with uppity working women and minorities who may be getting ahead because of affirmative action and immigrants who are coming in and technologists and financiers who have rigged the system of meritocracy. That series of cultural resentments is very powerful and very real. As you know, there are some real economic bases for it. Some of it is just stoking prejudice. powerful and very real. There's, you know, there are some real economic bases for it. There are some, you know, some of it is just stoking prejudice. It's some weird combination of all

that. But that's, it seems to me, the core. And those are the people Trump really knows how to play with and how Steve Bannon knows how to play with. So I don't think it's completely, you know, it's not just all the theater and the celebrity. There is a very, there's a real core here, which is, you know, about more about social class than we like to talk about in America. Some of it to do with race, some of it to do with religion, but it's this whole combination of feelings. And you see something similar in Britain with the pro-Brexit, anti-Brexit. Again, you found that education and urban-rural were the two big divides. And it is, when you talk to these people, as I have, we're doing a documentary called Why Trump Won. And what's interesting, what's really,

you sense is the feeling of resentment, the feeling that they have been condescended to, the feeling that they have been, you know feeling that the whole country is being run by other people. How do you feel that journalism is faring now in the aftermath, in the era of fake news? I think it's pretty plain to see that journalism was culpable for treating the election and the whole campaign season as a horse race and giving Trump, I don't know, it's been estimated more than a billion dollars free television. But it seems to me that in the aftermath, the attitude of journalism has changed noticeably. But how do you think we're faring now? So first, on the first point, I have to defend CNN a little bit in the sense that, you know, people forget that Trump very early on became the Republican frontrunner in the polls.

There were a bunch of people like Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and pundits who were saying, don't pay any attention to the polls because the polls don't actually predict who's going to get the nomination. It's actually money and it's organization and endorsements. But Trump, remarkably early on, became the dominant figure in the polls. So that's number one. He was the Republican frontrunner. And two, he started very early on to say completely outrageous things and propose completely outrageous policies that nobody had ever proposed. I mean, he was proposing, you know, mass deportations of 11 million people. He was talking about building a wall. He spoke sort of favorably of the internment of the Japanese Americans.

Then he comes up with the Muslim ban. So that's news. You know, you may not like it, but you have the Republican frontrunner proposing stuff that no presidential candidate has proposed in 75 years. And, you know And we can't pretend it wasn't news. Now, all that said, I agree with, I think, what you're saying, which is that we got caught up in the theater of it. And look, just remember, the media, the television media in particular, is not a nonprofit charity. If we are putting something on, chances are you want to see it. It's on because there is

a public appetite for it, and it's a very competitive industry. If you don't do it, somebody else will do it. So that would be my defense of the media. But on your larger question, I do think now the media, if you want to look for some good news, I would say the resilience of the American system has been somewhat satisfying to me to watch, which is the courts are functioning well and are not being cowed, despite the fact that you have a president who, in an unprecedented way, is attacking the judiciary and often actually attacking judges by name, which I really don't think has happened, the nonpolitical bureaucrats that make up the kind of, you know, the heart and soul of government, whether it's the FBI, the Justice Department, they are holding up pretty well. They have not been intimidated. And the media is rising to the occasion. I think you're seeing a renaissance of real investigative journalism. You're seeing people, commentary, I think conservative intellectuals, for example, you mentioned a few like David Frum, have really risen to the occasion, even though it has cost them.

I mean, George Will was, as far as I can tell, essentially fired from Fox because he was outspokenly anti-Trump. And I think that that piece of it, the media, I think, has handled pretty well. There is a problem on the Trump phenomenon. So the way I think about it, there are three sort of baskets of things you're trying to, I at least am trying to figure out. One is, what are the things Trump is actually proposing, and how do you evaluate them? I said, you know, like the FAA thing, or whether it's the tax policy. And, you know, I think you have to try to evaluate those fairly by saying, are they good? Are they bad? A lot of what he proposes is very weird, haphazard, badly thought through. But you

still have to ask yourself, OK, but, you know, is this, if it were properly laid out, would this be a good idea or a bad idea? So there's that one cluster of things. And a lot of it is surprisingly not very populist. It's actually pretty standard, fair Republican stuff. The second is the circus of Donald Trump, the sheer kind of weird, you know, bizarro way in which he operates, the vulgarity, the personal attacks, you know, and that has a kind of seductive theatrical aspect to it. But then there's the third part, which you focused a lot on, which I think is the most important part. And unfortunately, it is the fact that Trump is, in many of his actions and rhetoric, a danger to American democracy.

And when I talk about the third, I try not to forget the first and the second. But it does overwhelm, because the fact that you have a president who is willing to routinely do things like attack the independence of judiciary, attack the free press, talk about prosecuting journalists, talk about maybe we should be changing the protections that journalists and the free press have. the protections that journalists and the free press have, clearly talking to various members of the investigative branches of the federal government in trying to get them to bend to his will, you know, whether or not it constitutes obstruction of justice, all of which is, strikes me patently, obviously, dangerous for democracy, dangerous for liberal democracy to have a president, you know, having nine meetings with the director of the FBI in the hundred days he was in office when Obama had two meetings with that same director in the, you know, six years that they were, they overlapped. It tells you something and it's doesn't, and it's, it's not something pretty about America. So

how do you talk about that third cluster of events in a way that doesn't sort of overwhelm everything. That's been one of my challenges. It's a real challenge because the moment you begin talking about it, honestly, you begin to sound like one of the hyper-partisans we just complained about, where you're calling the other side dangerous or immoral or un-American. And it seems like these are not the kinds of claims about the other side that seem open for compromise or negotiation or a meet-in-the-middle approach, because we are talking about someone who is undermining the norms of our democracy, as you say, and that is dangerous. And yet anyone who's just either not paying attention or on the other side, understandably thinks it's dangerous to talk

about the president this way. It's hyper-partisan to talk about the president this way. But you can only walk on eggshells for so long here before you have to concede that he is not a normal person in the role of the president. He is someone who is not observing the most basic criteria for being informed, caring about whether or not he's informed. To take one thread among a dozen we could take here. But however the Russian hacking investigation comes out and whether collusion between the Trump campaign or Trump himself and the Russians can be proved or not, leave all of that to one side. What is unambiguously so is that we have a hostile foreign power that worked mightily hard to undermine our democracy. And we have a president who has either denied that

to be so or has more or less ignored it and done nothing to really get to the bottom of it, simply because he's concerned about how it makes his electoral victory look. And he's never said a bad word about Putin, right? who is, you know, someone who has his political foes and the occasional journalist locked up or killed. If he had done nothing else wrong in his career as president, those facts alone are so alarming that we're nowhere near normal here. And so to talk about this in terms this stark is not yet another example of hyper-partisan demagoguery. Yeah, it's a very, very interesting point, which is how do you convey that this really is, this is different, this is not normal, this is a violation of standards, this is not

within the historical range. I mean, if you, you know, one of the ones I think we don't pay enough attention to is you have the president of the United States who is essentially in no significant way disassociated himself from his various, many, many, many commercial enterprises, continues to benefit from them, and is actively promoting many of those commercial enterprises. We have now dollar and cent figures on the 30, 20, 30, 40% rises in revenues for all these clubs that he keeps attending, that he keeps going to. What he's in fact doing is essentially commercial advertising for Mar-a-Lago and for the Bedminster Club and things like that.

We have no idea what the nature of his meetings with foreign leaders is. But what we do know is, again, he has not disassociated himself from much of the kind of licensing operation that takes place. The Chinese award 35 trademarks and one day to him, 15 to his daughter. To talk about all this is not to be partisan. It is to say this is really something Mitt Romney and John McCain and George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush did not do, would never have dreamed of doing, and is something that we have to talk about because this is how a banana republic runs and we don't want to adopt those. We don't want to define these standards down so much

that they go away. Part of what I think I'm in the job of is the kind of preservation job, that is the preservation of these norms of liberal democracy because I don't want to create a situation where we get so used to it that the next guy who comes around says, oh yeah, you know, I don't need to resign from any of my companies.

I don't need to release my tax returns. I don't need to do any of this. And, you know, my wife and my daughter and son-in-law can be my principal advisors. No, no, no. We have to make sure that Trump is an aberration, not the beginning of some kind of, you know, kind of Gaudismo rule in the United States. are many more pieces we could talk about. But just take two things. The fact that he still has all of his business dealings up and running, whether he's personally paying attention to them or not, and the fact that he has never said a bad word about Putin. Is there a fundamentally benign explanation of all that? You know, the one that I wonder about sometimes is the business side, I can't quite see the benign explanation because, you know, there are many easy ways. George W. Bush's ethics lawyer outlined how he could put stuff in a blind trust.

I mean, there are things you could do, and clearly they're consciously not doing them. On the Russia thing, I think the odd thing is I can imagine a benign explanation involving collusion, which is to say that Trump ran a very disorganized, chaotic, and kind of corrupt campaign, by which I mean it was a crazy mom-and-pop fly-by-night operation. He couldn't get any of the big consultants. Remember, there were 15, 16 other candidates. All the serious consultants had gone to them. So he's dealing with the riffraff of the Republican world, and he's dealing with a lot of unsavory characters. And they're running, they're kind of doing almost a freelance operation. And in that context, the Russians are trying to penetrate, and maybe his guys played footsie with the Russians, but he didn't know about it.

I think that's a perfectly plausible, benign explanation on the collusion part. The part I don't understand, and for which it's harder to find a benign explanation, is what you've pointed out a few times, which is really the central puzzle. Donald Trump has said for almost all his life that he thinks that the one thing that he's sure about is that the rest of the world is constantly screwing the United States, and we need to get tough on all these SOBs. And he said that from the 1980s when he was talking about the Japanese and the NATO allies, and then he talked about the Chinese and how they were raping our country, and how Saudi Arabia was a country that we had to pull the rug from under everybody except the Russians. He has only said nice things about Putin, only said nice things about how wouldn't it be great if we could get on with the Russians.

Now, you know, there is a school of thought that feels that it tends to come more from the kind of hard left than from anywhere else in historical terms. But it really makes no sense given Trump's worldview. So that to me is in a way the central intellectual puzzle that leads me to think, maybe there is something going on here, because why is he so consistently benign in his reading of everything Putin does? You know, even that meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the White House, it was so much more pally than anything we've seen. The contacts that took place during the campaign, perfectly fine if they were what they said they were. But what I'm struck by is we have no record of any such conversations with the French ambassador, the German ambassador, the British ambassador, the Chinese ambassador, you know. So what is going on with Russia is, I think, is a fair question to which some of Trump's own rhetoric points you. So, Farid, I want to switch gears here and talk about Islam and, you know, the current challenge in even talking about it and the role it's playing in

creating so much chaos in the world, and as you rightly pointed out, mostly for Muslims. You and I have disagreed both in public and in private about how to talk about the problem of Islamic extremism. So I want to see if we can make a little progress on this disagreement here. And so let's just come to it in a kind of stepwise fashion. First, I noticed that recently you've written that you are a Muslim, but you're not a practicing Muslim. And I think that was very much a response to that. 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,

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