#426 — How Bad Is It?

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. 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 David Frum. David, thanks for joining me. Thank you. It's been a while. I feel like, we speak more than we do because I just consume your stuff over at the Atlantic. So I I know what you're thinking about, but I think it's been some years since we've done a podcast together. I think that's right. Since then, I've I've ventured into your domain. I've started a podcast of my own, and I just I wanna salute you. I I think I always knew that it was not easy. I didn't know how not easy it was. Right. So, so, Maestro, you you're you you know how it's done, and I I take my hat off to you. Oh, nice. Well, congratulations on the show. It's, the David Frum Show over at The Atlantic. So, that's fantastic. Well, let's, jump into the current moment. We're, what, six or so months into, the second Trump administration? There's a lot we could talk about where the the fires of controversy are, currently raging on the, about the Epstein case. Yeah. Trump and his, courtiers have been amazingly inept at putting those fires out, and I would I would love to know the reasons why you think that that is. But, but let's start with just the big picture on the domestic front. How has it been these last six months from your point of view? And what has surprised you? What has, been worse than you thought? What has been better than you thought? Yeah. Well, here's the thing that has been worse than I thought. And this is one of the two or three biggest stories, which is the corruption has been on a fantastically larger scale than anything I imagined or anything that I was ready for from the first Trump administration. Yeah. In the first Trump administration, Trump used techniques like, making the secret service follow him around to his various resorts. He used techniques like making sure that any Republican candidate who wanted his blessing had to use one of his facilities. He pressed foreign governments that needed American favor to use his facilities for their national day events. And, to stay, he would ask diplomats who visited him, where did you stay last night? But over that probably moved some single millions of dollars into his pocket. Maybe something over 10,000,000. There are different estimates in the first term. So in the second term, he has …