#403 — Sanity Check on 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 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 Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me. Hey. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. So, Trump two point o. How's it going? Well, you know, it's funny. When in the waning days of the election, I had arguments with a lot of friends of mine and their friends who were gonna vote against Kamala Harris for Donald Trump. Mhmm. And I I thought their calculations were wrong. I didn't vote for Harris, but I was certainly not gonna vote for Donald Trump. But I also live in Washington, DC, so I didn't think my vote mattered all that much. But the argument that you heard from everybody was the best case scenario was also the most likely scenario. And the best case scenario for them was that it was gonna be a repeat of the first Trump term, which I thought they were overly nostalgic about and forgot a lot of things about the first Trump term. Yeah. But they said, look, you know, at the end of the day, what was so bad? It was sort of a sophisticated version of it was a lot of mean tweets, but the economy was great. Right? And I my position at the time was that is the best case scenario because he's not gonna change, but it is not the most likely scenario. And I think we now know I was right. The first term, whatever successes there were, were largely the result of the fact that Trump didn't know what he was doing and was constrained by more sort of normie Republicans Yeah. Who narrowed his scope of options and warned him off bad things and in some ways undermined him in ways that people can complain about. Yeah. Many of us spoke about guardrails at that point and, people didn't seem to care. Right. Institutions are holding and all that kind of stuff. Right? And so, like, fast forward to today, he has surrounded himself entirely with absolute loyalists whose mission is to enact whatever Trump wants to do rather than push back on it, rather than say, mister president, that's a bad idea or you shouldn't do that. It's all yes, sir, how high kind of stuff, and it's a mess. I think it's a mess. So, yeah, let let's let's talk about this. How many …