SAM HARRIS Topic #51 1

SH-Topic #51 - THE MOST POWERFUL CLOWN

Well, it has come to pass. President Trump, a man who many of us treated as a buffoon and
only took seriously as a threat at the eleventh hour, will be the forty-fifth president of the United
States, with a Republican Congress behind him, and at least one vacancy, probably more, on
the Supreme Court to fill.

So…what went wrong? And how bad is this?

Well, I think there are two parts to this story. First is unambiguously depressing, and this is the
part that has been seized on by most liberals. But it’s only half the story, and it is this: Trump has
ascended to power despite showing every sign of being dangerously unfit for it and by exposing
in himself and in the electorate the worst that America has to offer: racism, sexism,
antisemitism, a contempt for the most vulnerable among us, intimations of fascism, a positive
love of bullying, total disdain for our democratic institutions, a willingness to make threats of
political violence just for the fun of it, a contempt for science, and a love of conspiracy theories. I
mean, I could run through it all again, the crazy things he’s said and the toxic alliances he’s
made.

The irony is: If he had been merely half as bad, he would have seemed worse. He would have
been more recognizably dangerous. But there were so many awful moments that the media
couldn’t focus on them for long enough, or weigh their significance. And the big things were as
big as they get, right? “Climate change is a hoax.” “Why can’t we use our nuclear weapons?”
“Maybe nuclear proliferation is a good thing. Let the Saudis and the Japanese and the South
Koreans build their own nukes.” “Who’s to say we should support our NATO alliances? What
have they done for us?” “Putin is a great leader.” “Maybe we should just default on our debt, cut
a better deal.” Any one of those things should have ended it.

But of course, the little things were just as weird, and should have been just as disqualifying. I
mean, we have just elected a president who has bragged about invading the dressing rooms of
beauty pageant contestants, so that he could see them naked, when they were effectively his
employees—he owned the pageant. And then he even bullied some of these young women
publicly, some on social media in the wee hours of the morning while campaigning for the
presidency. And then he denied doing any of these things when no denial was even possible.
We had all seen his tweets. And in response to the astonishment of the media, he looked the
American people in the eye, and said, “No one respects women more than I do. No one.” And
half the country accepted that as, what, the truth? As good theatre? As sketch comedy? I mean,
there are really no words to describe how far from normal we have drifted here.

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described the situation the night of the election in
a piece entitled, “An American Tragedy.” Now, I’ll read a little of that, so you get a sense of what
the liberal elites were thinking at 3am:

“The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American
Republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces at home and abroad of
nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the
presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On
January 20th, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American president, a man of
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integrity, dignity, and generous spirit, and witness the inauguration of a con, who did little to
spurn endorsement by the forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react
to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.”

And then he goes on:

“In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe
their readers and viewers with thoughts about the ‘innate wisdom’ and ‘essential decency’ of the
American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel
decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with
the populist rhetoric of blood and soil.

[…]

“The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the
bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign influence of Russian intelligence, the
free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump
by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count
on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to reign
themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as ‘smug,’ ‘disconnected
from suffering,’ as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and
misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump
and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and yes, Paul Ryan
—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump
was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of
law. He was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it
cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.”

I think most of that’s true, unfortunately, but it’s not the whole truth, and the parts that are true
are probably not worth dwelling on at this point. I’m not sure how useful it will be to stay in the
well of blame and despair and to resist “normalizing” the situation. But it is true that the
normalizing seems like an act of prayer. I mean, just consider Trump’s victory speech, which
was alarming for how un-Trumpian it was. I mean, it read like it was written by Van Jones on
Ambien. It was the most anodyne bit of fence-mending. But you could feel the desperation in the
media to read into his surprisingly gracious notes the normalcy that Remnick is talking about
here. I mean, maybe we were all just wrong about him, right? Maybe he’s a nice guy after all.

What are the chances of that? Is it possible that an ethical person merely pretended to be a total
asshole for eighteen months? It seems somehow far-fetched. But what are we to make of the
fact that Trump has nothing but nice things to say about Clinton? I mean, what happened to
“Lock Her Up?” Does anyone care that the Trump who spoke on the night of the election was
totally unrecognizable? Who did his supporters think they had elected? Were his supporters
surprised to see him merely praise Hillary? Is it all theatre? Who is this guy? Will he attempt to
do anything he promised to do? Does anyone know? Does Ivanka have any idea what her dad
will do as president?

Now, I’ve gotten a fair amount of grief from people at this point for having been “wrong” about
the election. I’m not sure what they mean. I admit I did jinx it by posting a suitably repellant
picture of Trump on Twitter early in the day and saying, “Bye, bye, Donald.” Of course, that
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wasn’t a prediction. I was simply saying how nice it would be to never think about him again. Of
course, when I sent that tweet, the polls were giving him around a 20% chance of winning. Now,
whether the polls were wrong or not is anyone’s guess at this point; a 20% chance of winning is
not nothing, right? Spend a few minutes with some dice and see how often a 20% chance
comes up. It comes up quite frequently, sometimes on the very first roll.

So, I jinxed the election—sorry about that. But, surely it can’t have been a failure of judgment to
have trusted the most reputable polls. Basically everyone was doing that. What else was there
to trust? The torrents of hatred I saw on social media? But the story about what happened with
the polls will be interesting in the weeks and months ahead, and the truth is I always had a bad
feeling about the election, and that’s why I talked about it so much on this podcast. I could tell
that Hillary’s flaws as a candidate were causing people to ignore Trump’s flaws as a human
being. Well, we’re about to find out how high a price we and the rest of the world will pay for
that.

Speaking personally, I can say I feel I left more or less everything on the field. I know I alienated
many of you in how fully I disparaged Trump, and I kept doing it at the risk of boring those of you
who actually agreed with me, because I thought it was so important. So I don’t honestly see how
I could have done any more, and at this moment that’s actually a good feeling. I was preparing
myself for this moment. And I certainly know many scientists and businesspeople and writers
who can’t say the same. But who knows? The fact that they held their tongues may appear fairly
prudent at this moment. We’re about to see an astonishingly vindictive man sweep to power,
with not many checks on his power, and he has threatened to go after his enemies: to jail
Hillary, to sue the women who accused him of sexual assault, to change our libel laws, to go
after the Washington Post. Again, this is not a normal moment in American history.

Now, many people have asked me whether I regret not backing Bernie Sanders. If I’m so
trusting of polls, why didn’t I trust the polls that showed him to have a better chance than Clinton
against Trump? Because Sanders was totally untested. He’d never been subjected to opposition
research the way Clinton had. We knew what the Republicans were going to say about Clinton
—who knows what they would have done to Sanders? It’s true that he would have drawn some
of the isolationist and anti-establishment vote that went to Trump, and perhaps he would have
turned out more voters than Clinton did, and it looks like that could have been decisive. It seems
that Hillary got 6,000,000 fewer votes than Obama did in 2012 and 10,000,000 fewer than he
got in 2008.

So, Democrats didn’t show up, and I hope all those Bernie supporters who stayed home or who
voted for a third party will be paying attention over the next four years. But I share the view that
the election was generally a repudiation of the Left and of political correctness in particular, as
much as it was just a vote for change. It was a repudiation of black and brown identity politics by
white identity politics, and it’s important to point out that this isn’t the same as racism. I don’t
believe that a majority of the people who voted for Trump were motivated by racism. There are
people who voted for Obama twice who voted for Trump. Racism cannot be the best way to
explain that.

And this is where the prevailing analysis on the Left is wrong, of the sort that I just read from
David Remnick in the New Yorker. Yes, we have just elected a man who was officially endorsed
by the Ku Klux Klan, so you can be sure that every white racist in the country voted for Trump.
But there are millions of other decent people who have reasonable concerns about a movement
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like Black Lives Matter, and most of these people probably voted for Trump, too. These people
are not racists. They were simply recoiling from charges of racism and from a toxic brand of
identity politics.

Much of what has been coming out of the Left—not everything, but much it, particularly about
race and about law and order, and about Islamophobia and terrorism, about issues that are
fundamental to the security of our society—has had all the moral clarity and intellectual honesty
of the OJ verdict, which is to say none at all. And I’m confident that many people who don’t
perceive Trump to be a dangerous conman in the way that I do probably voted for him out of
sheer exasperation. They were sick of being called racists for not worrying about Halloween
costumes on our Ivy League campuses. So, millions of these people, along with real racists, told
all you [?] social justice warriors at Yale and Brown to go fuck yourselves.

And can you really blame them? I mean, safe spaces? Trigger warnings? New gender
pronouns? Getting Muslim student groups to deplatform speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Bill
Maher? Was that the cause of your generation? That’s the trench you are willing to die in?

So, the question is, Would a Democratic campaign that leaned even further to the left have
prevailed in this situation? I doubt it. And does Sanders have anything sensible to say about
foreign policy? Would he have been able to address fears about terrorism? It certainly didn’t
seem that way at the time. And I suspect that this really is the crux of the issue. At least it’s the
main reason of why even those who saw Trump’s flaws didn’t care about them. The problem
that worried me the whole time is the Left’s total failure to speak honestly about Islam and
terrorism and the refugee crisis in Europe. And this, I think, was decisive. Certainly it was one of
the things that, had it gone the other way, would have given us a different result.

Admittedly, it seems strange to cite polls at this point, but what else can I do? The exit polls
show that the people who said their primary concerns were terrorism and immigration voted
overwhelmingly for Trump, whereas those who were concerned about the economy or foreign
policy voted for Clinton. So, it wasn’t the economy, stupid, this time around, though economic
fears certainly played a role. And it wasn’t just poor whites who supported Trump. The median
income of Trump voters was $72,000. And I think that in this election, concerns about terrorism
and immigration largely boil down to a concern about Islamism and to the fear and distrust
provoked by liberal lies about it. Immigration means other things, of course, but I don’t think it’s
mainly that there were a lot of white people whose median income is $72,000 who want to pick
strawberries for a living. If my collisions on social media told me anything over the last year, it’s
that many people were nearly single-issue voters when it came to Islam. I would bet that this
accounts for many more people than voted for a third-party candidate, which was also probably
decisive.

The fact that we have a president who wouldn’t even use the phrase “Islamic extremism,” who
could even say things like “Terrorism has less to do with Islam than any other religion,” and the
fact that Clinton seemed to embrace this delusion, even though she did on occasion use the
phrase “radical jihadism,” as though that made any sense—that was a terrible problem. And of
course the fact that she and her husband had taken tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis
and other Islamist regimes didn’t help. Couple that with this unexplained desire to increase the
number of Syrian refugees by 550% without ever acknowledging what is going wrong in Europe
—this was a dealbreaker for many people, and I heard from these people endlessly over the last
year.
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And the problem, of course, is that people are right to be worried about Islamism and jihadism.
And all the Left has offered on this point are lies and sanctimony and charges of racism and
bigotry. Worrying about Islam more than any other religion at this moment is not a sign of racism
or bigotry. Muslims themselves should be worried more about Islam at this moment than about
Mormonism or Anglicanism or Judaism. This is basic human sanity, and most people know it.
But Clinton was the sort of politician who in the immediate aftermath of the Orlando massacre
spoke only about gun control, and then issued grave warnings about a rise in Islamophobia
when we had just suffered another jihadist atrocity on American soil. This was unforgivably
stupid, and I knew it at the time that this was the sort of stupidity that could pave the way for
Trump. I even wrote a section of a speech I thought Clinton should give about Islamism and
jihadism and put it on my blog. It would have been so easy for her to have made sense on this
issue and to have differentiated a sane understanding of jihadism from bigotry against Muslims
in general. But she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it.

All of these things contributed to her loss and to the rise of Trump. So the question now is, How
do we move forward, having declared the next president to be an absolute jackass and a sexual
predator and, as I said in a previous podcast, a liar of a sort one would only expect to find in a
mental hospital? How do we move from making jokes about placing the nuclear codes in the
hands of a dangerous narcissist to actually placing the nuclear codes into his hands? Well, I’m
afraid we just do. And we hope that this man who appears to lie about everything has also been
lying about how awful a person he is. Let’s hope he isn’t who he has seemed to be. Let’s hope
that he really is a cipher. Let’s hope that he was only pretending not to believe in climate
change. Let’s hope that he was only pretending to admire Vladimir Putin. Let’s hope that he was
only pretending to believe the sorts of conspiracy theories that helped get him elected. Let’s
hope he really is a conman without any core commitments other than to maintain his own fame
and glory. Because then there’s a chance that knowledgeable people might be able to influence
him.

I thought President Obama struck the right note yesterday. We all must hope for Trump’s
success at this point. We want his presidency to be a good one. It’s as if we’re all on an airplane
together, and the real pilot has died, and now a man who has never flown an airplane has taken
the controls and is attempting an emergency landing, and we’re all stuck in the back of the
plane. So we’re rooting for the man in the cockpit. Of course, before he got his hands on the
controls, some of us complained about how unqualified he was. There were a few other people
back here with a lot of time spent flying planes, but this guy stormed the cockpit, and now he’s
in the pilot seat, and the runway is in view, and we are out of time. So, let’s hope he’s talking to
the people in air traffic control. But the problem, of course, is that it actually matters who’s in the
tower. Just think about who Trump has surrounded himself with: Rudi Giuliani, Chris Christie,
Sarah Palin, Mike Pence—this is a clown car of ideologues and incompetents, with a couple of
religious maniacs thrown in. Again, we want him to land this plane, and it doesn’t have to be
pretty. It doesn’t matter if we all wind up covered in vomit. We will be grateful just to be alive.
And I will be very grateful if after four years Donald Trump hasn’t set back human progress a
generation.

This all may sound like hyperbole, but who knows what sort of mistakes this man is capable of?
And if you said that about Clinton, you are just wrong. Even with all her flaws, we have no idea
who Trump is or what he will do. He probably doesn’t even know. But we do know that he has
less understanding about the responsibilities he’s about to assume than any president before
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him. Indeed, he has less understanding than any candidate most of us have ever conceived of.
So, let’s hope he’s a quick study, and let’s hope there are thousands of good people who are
willing to work for him.

Which brings up a point I saw raised on social media by a few people. No matter how horrified
you are by this result, no matter how judgmental you are of the people who enabled him, people
like Paul Ryan, you have to hope that the best people available will come forward now and be
willing to serve in Trump’s administration. People with good reputations and real expertise. So
we can’t afford to question the motives or integrity of anyone who would join this administration.
We want the best people who can get in the door. And we have to hope that being president of
the United States brings out the best in Donald Trump. Campaigning for the presidency brought
out the worst. It shows what he’s like as an embattled narcissist and fabulist and demagogue.
But now he’s won. Now he will be surrounded by people seeking the warm glow of his power.
Now he will inspire fear, actual fear, not merely scorn, in his critics. He is no longer just a clown.
He’s the most powerful clown on earth. We have to hope that winning to this degree will pacify
some of his demons.

Is there a historical or psychological precedent for this? I have no idea. But we’re about to find
out what happens to a man with a famously, palpably, visibly unhealthy ego who suddenly
triumphs over everyone who ever doubted him. This was a man when he voted in New York at
his polling place got jeered by a crowd on Tuesday, in a city that voted 87% against him. And
one day he’s going to ride back into town on Air Force One.

Imagine the way his ego feels right now. Just imagine the satisfaction Trump will feel when he
takes possession of the White House and shows President Obama the door. The first black
president who humiliated him in front of all the Washington elites at the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner. (Go watch footage of that.) All those laughs at his expense. Trump has
been a punchline for decades. He’s been the Rodney Dangerfield of billionaires. But that
moment with Obama at the podium was the worst. And now he gets to tell Barack Hussein
Obama to get out of his house, and then tear his legacy to shreds. You’ve got the first black
president being shown the door by a man who always questioned his legitimacy in racist terms
and who has now been officially endorsed by the KKK. Only Shakespeare could do this moment
justice.

So, while Trump seems like he could become some sort of Caligula with an iPhone, we have to
hope that our democratic institutions will restrain him, that the awesome responsibilities thrust
his way, the responsibility of running a superpower, will bring out the better angels of his nature
—if he has any. So I think normalizing this mess might be the best we can do for the time being.
Needless to say, a pendulum swing into left-wing identity politics will not be helpful, but it seems
extremely likely to occur. In fact, it’s already happening, with these ridiculous protest we’re
seeing under the banner of “Not My President.” Good luck with that.

How many of you voted for a third party, or didn’t vote at all? What we need are smart, ethical
people in the political center who can defend freedom of speech and science and the norms of
civil discourse from their enemies on both the Right and the Left. And insofar as I can do
anything useful in that area, I will do my best. That’s part of what this podcast is for. And if you
guys have any ideas about who I should talk to on the podcast about the fate of civilization, I’ll
be very happy to hear your ideas. And I promise I will be getting to interesting topics totally
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unrelated to politics. In fact, I will mostly do this, because what I say about politics doesn’t seem
to do much.