#402 — The Geopolitics of Trump 2.0

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can afford one. 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. I am here with Neil Ferguson. Neil, thanks for joining me. It is a pleasure to be back with you, Sam. It's been too long. Yeah. Yeah. And it has not been boring as we were just remarking on. It's an immense pleasure to be able to reach out to you at a moment like this because there's just so much going on and this is obviously, your wheelhouse as a historian and as a, as a commentator on current events. We're gonna do this, there's just so much to talk about and I know you have a hard out here because you're going to a talk so I'm gonna be, more operational than is than is normal. How has the first month of, Trump's second term struck you thus far? I think it's a bit like being in 1933, but I don't mean in Germany in 1933. I mean, in The United States in 1933 because there hasn't been a presidency that has started with this much of a a bang since Franklin Roosevelt's first term. The difference is it's like the new deal with the sign reversed. You've got this frenetic activity, executive orders coming at us like bullets out of a gun, and that was very much the pattern with the beginning of Roosevelt's presidency. There was also a barrage of legislation, which we're not yet seeing because Trump does not have the great majorities that Roosevelt had in the senate and house. But in terms of act activity, it's comparable. Roosevelt still holds the record for number of executive orders per year of any president. Trump could beat it in this rate. But the signs reverse because the goal of the New Deal in 1933 was to expand the federal government substantially as you came out of a depression, the worst economic shock in American history. The goal of Trump two point o is to shrink the federal government as you come out of the post COVID boom. So it's a a kinda new deal, but with the sign reversed. That's how I think about it. And so far, I think that's been a good framework. There are other analogies, but that's the one that strikes me as most relevant to the first the first month. And how do you think the last, month, month and a half has seemed to …