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CPMMENTARY SAM HARRIS SPEAKS WITH DAVID FRUM Sam Harris: How Bad Is the State of American Politics, Really? (Making Sense #426) PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Po0h6v0Qo
How Bad Is the State of American Politics, Really? (Making Sense #426) Sam Harris 793K subscribers ... 264,145 views ... 5.9K likes Jul 23, 2025 Making Sense Podcast: Episodes You can watch the full episode—and all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast—on YouTube by becoming a channel member here: / @samharrisorg You can also subscribe at samharris.org/subscribe. There, you'll get access to full-length episodes of the podcast, and Sam's Substack, where you can engage with the Making Sense community. We offer partial scholarships for those who cannot afford the full subscription price. Sam Harris speaks with David Frum about the current state of American politics. They discuss the extent of Trump’s corruption, his immigration crackdowns, what’s going well under Trump 2.0, Trump’s support for Ukraine and Israel, U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, Israel’s security and internal political conflicts, perceptions of the war in Gaza, the Trump administration’s professed support for Jews, the fallout of DOGE, Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and other topics. David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of The David Frum Show. He is the author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocracy (2018) and Trumpocalypse (2020). In 2001 and 2002, David was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. From 2014 to 2017, he chaired the prominent U.K. center-right think tank Policy Exchange. He writes for The Atlantic on topics including politics, policy, art, literature, and history. Website: https://davidfrum.com/ X: @davidfrum Become a channel member for full-length episodes: / @samharrisorg Subscribe to the YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... Follow Sam on Instagram: / samharrisorg Follow Sam on Facebook: / samharrisorg For more information about Sam Harris: https://www.samharris.org How this content was made Auto-dubbed Audio tracks for some languages were automatically generated. Learn more Peter Burgess COMMENTARY This was an interesting conversation. Unfortunately it appeared to terminate before the conversation ended. I am not sure Peter Burgess Transcript Intro 0:00 I am here with David from David. Thanks for joining me. Thank you. It's been a while. I I feel like uh we speak more than we do because I 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 I think that's right. Uh since then, I've I've ventured into your domain. I've started a podcast of my own. And I just I want to salute you. Uh I uh I understand I I think I always knew that it was not easy. I didn't know how not easy it was. So, uh, so Maestro, you The Big Picture 0:30 you're you know how it's done, and I I take my hat off to you. Oh, nice. Well, congratulations on the show. It's, uh, the David from show over at the Atlantic. So, um, thank you. That's fantastic. Well, let's let's uh jump into the the current moment. Uh, we're what um six or so months into uh the the second Trump administration. Yeah. Um there's a lot we could talk about where the the the fires of controversy are um currently raging on 1:01 the um about the Epstein case. Uh Trump and his um courters ears have been amazingly inept at uh putting those fires out and I would I would love to know the reasons why you think that that is. But um let's start with just the big picture on the domestic front. H how has it been these last 6 months from your point of view and what what has surprised you? What has um been worse than you thought? What has been better than you thought? Yeah. Well, here is 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 uh imagined or anything that I was ready for from the first Trump administration. Yeah. Um, in the first Trump administration, um, Trump used techniques like, uh, making the Secret Service follow him around to his various resorts. Um, he used techniques like, um, making sure that any Republican candidate who wanted his blessing had to use one of his facilities. He pressed 2:01 foreign governments that needed American 2:02 favor to use his facilities for their 2:04 national day events and um, to stay. He 2:06 would ask diplomats who visited him, 2:08 'Where did you stay last night?' But 2:10 over that probably moved some single 2:13 millions of dollars into his pocket. 2:14 Maybe something over 10 million. There 2:16 are different estimates in the first 2:18 term. So in the second term, he has left 2:20 all we're talking now much faster sums 2:23 of money through the meme coins. Um uh 2:26 as you and I speak, the President Trump 2:28 is about to go to uh Scotland to open a 2:31 new golf course of his own. Um he's got 2:33 golf courses in Vietnam and other 2:35 countries that seek America's favor. So 2:37 all of that is bigger by a factor of 10 2:39 or 100 than it was in the first term. So 2:41 that's one thing that has changed. A 2:43 second thing that has changed is the 2:45 trade disputes of the first term were 2:47 definitely a problem. Um that hurt 2:49 Americans. What before Trump became 2:51 president, the United States was the 2:52 largest exporter of soybeans in the 2:54 world. And over the first Trump term, it 2:55 fell into second place behind Brazil 2:57 because Trump alienated so many soybean 2:59 buyers. But the trade disruptions we are 3:01 seeing and the threat to the American 3:03 economy and the world economy, that's 3:05 much bigger. the damage to alliances is 3:07 is much bigger. Um and of course the um 3:12 shock to America's future standing from 3:13 this enormous debt that Trump is 3:15 incurring through his fiscal measures. 3:17 That's much bigger. 3:18 Yeah. And and also some of those those 3:21 uh indiscretions are linked. Right. So 3:22 the trade disruptions seem in many cases 3:26 to be motivated by Trump's personal 3:29 corruption. Right. I mean you you you 3:31 cited Vietnam, right? See, so the reason 3:33 to slap a 46% tariff on Vietnam is that 3:38 their remedy for that is to immediately 3:40 greenlight a 1.5 billion dollar Trump 3:42 family resort deal. 3:43 Right. Exactly. 3:45 Um I I'm speaking to you right now from 3:46 Canada, which has been a special target 3:48 of Trump's animosity. And a lot of 3:50 people in Canada are sort of baffled 3:52 like what what what the hell happened 3:54 here? What what did Canada do? Um 3:56 Canada's linked to the Canada signed all 3:58 these trade agreements. It signed a new 3:59 trade agreement with the United States 4:01 that was signed by Donald Trump. He's 4:02 just ignored that. And I think a big 4:04 part of the Canadian problem is the 4:06 Trump Organization had two hotels in 4:08 Canada, one in Toronto and one in 4:10 Vancouver. And they both went bust. Uh 4:12 the Toronto Hotel, Trump just licensed 4:14 his name, and it went bust for sort of 4:16 semi-objective economic reasons during 4:17 the Great Recession or soon after. But 4:19 the Vancouver Hotel went bust. Trump 4:22 owned it and operated it. It went bust 4:23 because Vancouverites wouldn't set foot 4:25 in his building during his first round. 4:27 and he seems to be really mad about that 4:29 and is blowing up the North American 4:31 common market or the North American uh 4:34 trading zone to punish Vancouver for not 4:36 liking his hotel more. The Problem 4:38 So why is it in your view that um half 4:44 of America appears not to care about 4:46 this? 4:47 Is it that they like so is the problem 4:50 that people don't 4:53 know any of the facts? you just um uh 4:57 elucidated or they they've heard about 5:00 them but they think it's fake news or 5:03 they understand exactly the shape and 5:06 scope of this corruption. They they 5:07 understand that the memecoin is a is a 5:11 device for the pain of bribes directly 5:14 to the first family. uh they know that 5:18 really there is no precedent in American 5:20 history for a president to use US trade 5:24 policy and foreign policy as a mechanism 5:26 by which to extract 5:29 uh tribute from foreign governments and 5:32 essentially he's running a protection 5:33 racket. Um, and it's both it's it's both 5:35 internationally where he's putting the 5:38 the global economy at risk for his 5:40 personal gain and it's domestically 5:43 where he's shaking down uh some of our 5:46 largest corporations. I mean, we we have 5:48 um news organizations uh settling 5:52 spurious lawsuits that they were almost 5:53 certain to win, but this is a way of 5:56 just funneling money in Trump's 5:57 direction and hopefully uh getting his 6:00 favor on on future deals. Is it that 6:03 people know all of this and simply do 6:06 not care? What what's your 6:08 interpretation of of half of the half of 6:10 America that still supports Trump? 6:12 Well, I don't think we should be so 6:13 surprised that this would happen. Look, 6:15 American politics has always been deeply 6:18 tribal. This has been a two-party 6:19 system, more or less, for almost all of 6:22 its political existence. Now, who's in 6:24 the tribes changes from time to time, 6:26 and the tribes are always remaking 6:28 themselves, but they're they're two big 6:29 tribes. And I I think the way to think 6:31 about how strong these tribal loyalties 6:33 are. So 1932 is probably one of the 6:35 worst years in American history. Bottom of the Great Depression. People are literally Americans are literally going hungry. Incumbent President Herbert Hoover who presided over the disaster ran for re-election in 1932 and got 38% of the vote. So 6:51 uh 6:52 there's a there's a core 35% that's just 6:54 unmovable. Yeah. 6:55 It's called the base for a reason. It 6:57 doesn't move. And if you ask people in 7:00 1932, look, you know, things are 7:02 terrible. Why are you voting for 7:03 President Herbert Hoover? They would 7:04 have deep reasons of identity. Well, my 7:07 grandfather was at Antidum under Grant 7:10 and I we vowed we will always vote 7:12 Republican no matter what. Or the 7:14 Democrats are the party of the Catholic 7:15 Church or the Democrats of the party of 7:17 liquor. Um, and so we don't care about 7:20 these economic facts. We are voting for 7:21 the union against against the Catholic 7:23 Church, against liquor. Um, and that's 7:25 why this household votes Republican in 7:27 1932. and you could tell the same story 7:30 about about Democrats. So I I don't 7:32 think the question is not uh so 7:34 elections are always decided at the 7:35 margins and I think that's one of the 7:37 reasons that Donald Trump is so freaked 7:39 out about the Epstein story because that 7:41 is one of those rare events that can 7:42 shake up the tribal structure and move 7:44 people from column A to column B because 7:47 Trump has already told them and Trump 7:50 talkers and validators have told them 7:52 this is the biggest scandal in the 7:53 world. is the most important scandal in 7:55 the world and uh only Donald Trump can 7:58 get to the bottom of it. And it's as if 8:01 I'm going to borrow an analogy from my 8:02 son. It's as if they built a giant 8:04 device of paranoia and fear and rage and 8:08 hatred and never thought to ask in whose 8:11 basement are we building this device? 8:14 Oh, it's the basement of the guy we 8:17 think we're supposed to be following. 8:18 It's in his basement. And when it blows, 8:19 it blows him up, not the people we 8:21 wanted to blow up. Immigration Crackdown 8:22 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to get to 8:24 Epstein because um it is it's the one thing that the one controversy that seems to be doing him some damage with the with the base or with certainly parts of the base. Um but before we get there, let's linger on this uh litany of abuses you have uh you have um put forward. I mean, there's there's there's the additional problem of of how um needlessly provocative and cruel the the uh immigration crackdown has been. Um, again, I I feel like there are 9:02 many people who voted for Trump who in the abstract supported some of these policies and and would have been even insientent about his corruption because they just think, oh, well, it's it's more or less the same thing all politicians do. You know, Nancy Pelosi made some stock trades that are hard to explain, etc. So, it's they just put it all in the same bin. I mean they're they're insensitive to the scale of the problem, right? A million dollars is the same as a billion dollars really if you're going to look at it um that lazily. But um I think people are are many people are genuinely surprised by the optics of the immigration crackdown. How how has um how's has the imple implementation of this policy struck you? And why does it seem um it I mean frankly seems re reckless. I I would I would I'm surprised by how ruthless and chaotic they are. They seem 10:02 to want to be in the implementation of this policy. Yes. Um no, that's a very important question. I should have mentioned it at the opening and it's it's one that hits me especially hard because I I have been arguing for a long time that America needs a stronger border policy. And this is before the surge of 2020. This is before even the surge of 2014. I've been writing this since the 1990s. Um because my view has always been immigration if done right is a great benefit to a country. So it's very important to do it right because if you will get if you do it wrong you will get a backlash and the backlash will be even worse than a failed immigration policy. I I'll remind you of your own famous line. I mean many of us have made this point but you made it most sententiously. You said I believe if if liberals won't police borders fascists will. Right. Right. and and you get Brexit and you get other forms of self harm. So, it's been and so I was my first article about about the Biden administration when it took over in January of 2021 was 11:02 they be began undoing many of the Trump restrictions on the border that had kept people from flowing across. I said this is the first and biggest mistake they make. If they get if they undo this, they are courting a lot of damage because the the whole world wants to come to the United States and and if you don't police the border, you'll have the problem. The answer people like me insisted was the way you enforce the border is not at the border, it's at the workplace. Um, and what you should have a system where when uh when an employer is looking is looking to hire people, um, there's an requirement the employer check that they're legal in the country the same way that the employer should check that they're not a minor. Um, in the same way the employer should check that they actually work the number of hours that are legally allowed to be worked. Um, and that there should be consequences for the employer. If you should treat immigration as another aspect of labor law and if employers get the message that the government is checking whether the employees are legal, there will be less incentive for people to enter the country in the first place. And the reason I was so emphatic 12:00 about this over many many articles was if you start because the alternative is are walls and roundups and the country won't stand for it. We are seeing scenes that shock the conscience. We've got this network now of camps that are being built uh in which people have not been convicted of any crime who are just here illegally in the country which is not a crime. It's a it's a violation of status but it's not a crime to be in the country illegally. It's against the law but a lot you know so is uh driving recklessly. It's not necessarily a crime. They're they're rounding up people. They're removing status from categories of people like Venezuelans and and others who were granted temporary protected status who who thought they did the right thing and who now find themselves without status and subject to being dragged to a camp. The country won't wear this and Trump is going to create a situation where in addition to all of the terrible suffering that people have done nothing really wrong other than try to other than break a labor law to make a better life, they're in camps. He's also going to change the political structure about 13:01 immigration in this country in a way that is going to be to his own harm and those of the people who follow him. Will the country put up with it 13:06 Do do you actually think that the country won't put up with it? I mean, haven't we put haven't we shown an inclination to put up with it uh thus far? are I mean obviously there are people you know a handful of people in the streets of Los Angeles who at least for a time showed some signs of not putting up with it but in terms of the the way the rest of the country views the the so-called sanctuary cities where these raids are happening I feel like there's there's a um it's not even an acquiescence there's basically a a at least perceived full acceptance of it is this is this is what you you liberals get. I mean, you you wanted your nannies and your housekeepers and your gardeners to be as cheap as possible. Uh we don't have the same black market economy and that kind of labor over here in Ohio or Pennsylvania. Um you you're getting what you deserve 14:01 and we wanted these people out of the country. Well, I I'm I as I said, the base doesn't change, but here are two things to keep in mind. uh one is there is a lot of polling about how uh the uh attitudes toward immigr immigration which hardened during the Biden administration are softening under Trump quite dramatically. So and the second thing to keep in mind is one of the reasons that Donald Trump won the presidency with an actual plurality of the vote in 2024 unlike 2016 was that quite a number of Hispanics especially Hispanic men moved in his direction. Yeah. Um, now I'm going to forget the statistic off the top of my head, and I probably shouldn't quote statistics off the top of my head anyway, but what percentage of Hispanic voters have a relative who is in the country without status, but it's high. Um, and uh, Hispanics do not are not immigration single-issue v voters. That was a big mistake that Jeb Bush made back in 2011 and 12 to believe or uh, sorry 1516 to believe that uh, they would be single-issue voters on immigration. That's not true. Um, and many Hispanics welcome more enfor 15:01 enforcement, but if you're rounding up their mother-in-law and putting her in a camp, uh, you're going to um, that's going to be a problem. And it's going to be a problem with people with voters that were trending Trump and that Trump needed to keep. Do you think we're just getting started in um, in the unveiling of this ugliness, or is this uh, have we seen the sort of the peak of of what is morally outrageous? Uh, and in the immigration, we've built a new bureaucracy. Um, ICE is soon to be bigger than the Marine Corps, if I read the numbers right. Um, and it's not, and you can't build up a law enforcement agency that fast without terrible risks. So, the bureaucratic machinery that is built is going to keep chomp chomp chomping and there will be more and more terrible stories. And first, people will read about them and then they will hear about them and then they may feel them. Um, and then you'll have cases where um, a family, some of whose members are in the country legally, has other members who are in the camps. Um, and so it's not just going to be the 16:00 Fox News audience. It's not just going to be um, you know, the the diehard voter for one side or another. It's going to be people who were potential Republicans who are going to say, 'Well, I would have been, but now my mother-in-law is in a camp. I'm not voting for that.' H. What else is surprising 16:15 So, um, what else strikes you as surprising from the first six months? We've got three I'll remind you we have three and a half years left, right? So many I I I have to remind myself of this because I keep um noticing that I that I'm uh living with a with a kind of political illusion that like the the shape of the thing is already fully manifest whereas it's obviously evolving hour by hour and who knows what we're going to be talking about a year from now. Yeah. Well, let's start with some things that are not as bad as they they could be. Um, so so we don't sink too deep into the gloom. 17:00 Ukraine is still fighting. Um, Trump is obviously not sympathetic to Ukraine. Vice President Vance even more hostile to Ukraine. U, but he's not stopped the Ukrainian forces from fighting and information and weapons and support do continue to trickle to Ukraine. They're interruptions, but they're getting something and it looks like they may get some more stuff. Again, not enough. Not as much as they should have. not maybe enough to win, but enough not to lose. Um I I have to say as a supporter of the state of Israel, I have been impressed and grateful uh that the Trump administration has um improved the already generous support for Israel that the Biden administration gave. Um and that that has led to some um to some decisive results. Um I think also the kind of I had thought the uncertainty that Trump was creating about trade would move us faster to recession, but the opposite seems to be happening. It's because Trump, he does something dumb and then he retracts it. He does something else dumb and then he retracts it. And the mark I thought the market would say, well, in that case, we have to stop investing alto together because who knows what the future is. But the market keeps hoping for the best and 18:01 paying more attention to the retractions of the dumb policy than the dumb policy. So, we're not in a recession, it looks like, right now in the summer of 2025. I it doesn't seem so. Um, and we hope that maybe we can get through the rest of this year without too much of a recession. Um, so that that would be a good thing if we could avoid that. Although it does seem on its face completely irrational that the market seems to have drawn the lesson that there's actually less uncertainty now than there was before so-called liberation day, right? I mean, all of this lurching back and forth seems to have convinced the market that this is this is better than it was four months ago. Yeah. Well, the Trump trade policy has failed to and has predicted to do what it pretended to want to do. What what it's pretended to want to do uh is to bring back manufacturing to the United States. And and that that is doomed to fail for two reasons. One is if you're producing something where your costs are higher uh than a Chinese or Vietnamese competitor. And the government says, 'Okay, we'll 19:00 we'll protect you from the competition uh you're safe. uh you can it doesn't matter that you have your costs are 20% or 30% or 40% higher than the Chinese or Vietnamese. We're going to put up a wall to protect you to which the investor will say okay but the investment I'm contemplating is a very big one and it's going to take quite a lot of years to pay itself off. Are you can you assure me that this protection is going to be in place for the next 15 years? Yeah. Because I'm not making this investment unless I'm guar uh I'm guaranteed 15 years of protection and obviously Trump can't protect that. And so we have seen business investment not responding. The second thing and this is a point that the Trump people cannot will not understand and that you can't get protectionists to understand every product is also an input. So when you raise the price of a product, you are making uh of one step in the industrial process, you're raising every price. Um so fine, when you protect steel and protect it from foreign competition and you then say we also want to bring back shipping to the United States. What do you think ships are made of? Yeah. 20:00 Uh you've raised the cost of the ship. So you pretty soon it's like the house that Jack built. And when America was more protectionist back in the 19th century, this was all that politics was about. The wool people would want protection. So the coats would need protection, the coat people would get protection. So every industry that used coats would need protection and so on forever. And one of the reasons that the United States changed and abandoned the protections policy was to say you can't protect everything, but you must protect any everything if this is going to work. And the whole thing is crazy and dysfunctional and um expensive, so don't do it. Silver linings Well, as you said, there there are a few um uh if not silver linings. There are there are things that are not as bad as uh one would have feared. I mean the the change of posture with respect to Ukraine since that awful Oval Office meeting with Zilinski has been good although it's it hasn't been principled. I mean the there's been this deterioration in his in his love affair with with Putin simply because Putin 21:00 keeps humiliating him. And so we're we're seeing again um US foreign policy get bent by the the brain chemistry of of the lone maniac in the Oval Office uh and who perceives everything through the the politics of of personal slights and and flattery and um the payments of tribute etc. So, you know, who who knows what policy will change as a result of the next insult or the next piece of of flattery. One one hopes that there's there's a a more principled stance uh uh underwriting his his um support for Israel. I mean he has you know on balance always been of quite supportive of Israel and that that would explain the his popularity there except that he has shown signs of again just being pushed around by any perceived 22:01 slight I mean I remember in the immediate aftermath of October 7th I I really think I think the first thing he had to say about that atrocity was something petty about you know Netanyahu not, you know, treating him well. Um, so I mean, I mean, one can only imagine had the Mullers in Iran offered him a sufficiently large golf course deal, we might have a different policy with respect to the Middle East right now. I think we have another big problem with coming with Iran, which is um look, we all hope I think we all hope that the Trump actions against Iran were decisive and that the and we've reached the end of the story, that he's done significant damage to their nuclear program um and that and and we can close the books on this for a long time. But what if that's not true? uh what if either the damage was not uh as total as Trump said or the will have other tricks to play whether that's regional, whether that's global 23:00 terrorism, whether it's something what if this is a problem that requires more work than just press a button, collect the collect the accolades, forget about it. Um the the whole Trump foreign policy idea is you do something once and then it's over and you're a winner and you give yourself a parade. But foreign policy doesn't work that way. And and one of the things that um one of the ways I think we should consider when we're trying to think how serious are the threats to the United States from what's happening today. One of the questions ask is how difficult will it be to undo. So the good news about the Trump corruption is actually you can as happened in the 1970s you can have a period of cleanup. So you could have a four or five years where both Congress and state legislators say, 'Okay, we we have the corruption got out of hand and we're going to pass rules to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.' Um, you can you can dial it back. That's that you can fix it up. American politics is sometimes more clean, sometimes less clean. We're in a dirty period. You can have a clean period. The damage to world trade is not so 24:01 easily fixed. If Ukraine goes under, that's not fixed. Um, if you get a long-term conflict with Iran, uh, that's bigger than the one we've had. And above all, and this is the most important thing, if American leadership is questioned by the allies who benefit from it, by the adversaries who used to fear it, um I don't know how quickly you get that back. That's a hard thing to reassert. Yeah. I don't know how you get it back given that whatever we do to get it back. I mean, just imagine the next president who's presumably if he did this or she did this would not be JD Vance. Uh just offers this this omnibus mayulpa on behalf of the nation saying we're terribly sorry we did this to you. Uh Trump was a was a monstrosity. He he was a gift to our enemies and a and an enemy to our friends. Um, we we we want a hard reset of of all of our relationships and uh and we're going to resume something like a normal role of leadership and and uh 25:02 collegiality with um all all other liberal democracies. Um the problem is that there there's one bell that cannot be unrgung here which is that we have announced to the world that within any four-year political cycle we are capable of reneggging on everything. were capable of producing a tsunami of corruption and stupidity and the likes of which no one could have expected and and comp just just I mean there's there's there's no it's it's impossible to exaggerate. We can we can befriend dictators. We can claim that that the victims of a of a war of aggressions actually started the war. uh I mean there's just up is down and down is up and we can we are capable as a nation of do given you know all the protections against this or that one would have thought existed against this 26:00 we are capable of doing this on a dime in response to a 51% vote uh and we might and who knows when we're going to do this to you again and it's happened twice right um so let me give you some concrete examples of things that I think are are going to be with us for a long time um with the European allies whom Trump is so hostile to. There are deep commonalities of history, of culture, legal systems. Um, you know, uh, the British, the Germans will they'll probably forgive the United States sooner or later. Um, but the great challenge to American power in the next in this coming century, in this present century, will be China. And of course, China's neighborhood is very different. Uh the allies you need to balance China are countries that don't have that kind of affinity with Vietnam has no sentimentality about America's role in Vietnamese history. The Indonesians don't have much. Uh the Indians have zero. The uh the Filipinos may have like a little but not much. Um so what all these people are wondering about is can we The Chinese are close. You're far uh 27:02 the Chinese and you are about equally strong. How you say you will protect us if things get tough. Can we trust you? And and the American answer is about 50% of the time, yes. Yeah, we're good for 50% of the time. And you never know in advance which 50% it's going to be. So the Vietnamese are going to think, and not just the Vietnamese, but even more congenial countries like Australia are going to think we need to hedge our bets here. We can't be so close to the United States because they're not so reliable. Or here's another concrete problem. Um uh Trump has used American weapon sales um as a tool of in not only strategy but personal irritation. So one of the big questions that the Europeans have is the European Union economy is at least equally big to the United States. Um Europe does not have an arms industry competitive with the United States and the French government has always said the Europeans should buy European even if the European weapons are at the moment quite as good as the American weapons because then they'll be they won't have to worry about being cut off. 28:00 So when Trump is saying, you know, we we in we've got a kill switch in every weapon, whether that's true or not, uh that he's the best salesperson the French arms industry ever had. If you're a German, if you're a pole and you think, should we buy the French system? I I was in a I won't use the specifics here. I was in a NATO country um the earlier part of this year and had dinner with the defense minister who was contemplating a major weapons purchase, at least major by the standards of that country. And they had they had a series of of bids, one from American uh the United States, one from France, one from some other country. The American system was clearly the best, most capable, but it was also the most expensive. And they also had lost confidence that they could trust it. They they had bought they had heard about this kill switch rumor. Trump hadn't said it yet, but they had heard about it. They were worried about it. And they were going to lean instead to a French or South Korean system because at least they could trust that system. And after all, while it wasn't as good as the American system, it was still better than the Russian system. Yeah. Yeah. So, are you anticipating 29:00 a um a new wave of nuclear proliferation as a result of what's happened of late, especially our our on again offagain support of Ukraine? It seems to me that [Music]

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