Sam Harris: Vote Kamala Harris

Last week, we hosted the best debate of the election. Sam Harris is voting for Kamala Harris. Ben Shapiro is voting for Donald Trump. They spoke for two hours, with Bari moderating, about why. Click here to listen to, watch, or read it.

Today, we’re happy to publish an essay by each of them, in which they distill their closing arguments. Read Ben’s here, and scroll down to read Sam’s, which originally appeared on his Substack.

There is a positive case to be made for the candidacy of Kamala Harris, but it is not as compelling as the negative one that has been building these last nine years against her opponent, Donald Trump. When I think of Harris winning the presidency this week, it’s like watching a film of a car crash run in reverse: the windshield unshatters; stray objects and bits of metal converge; and defenseless human bodies are hurled into states of perfect repose. Normalcy descends out of chaos. In the same way, many of the reasons to hope for a future Harris administration bear the signs of a peculiar, counterfactual origin: the appalling prospect of Trump winning a second term as president of the United States.

For anyone who spent the last nine years mostly ignoring Trump, while watching in horror as the Democratic Party slid ever leftward toward the precipice and the Great Wokeness beyond, the positive case for Harris must be made carefully, and with some casuistry. But it is simple enough to do. The truth of the matter is that the good woman was for every reasonable thing before she was against it—and she’s for these things again now, you can be sure. In fact, much the same can be said about the Democratic Party. I am willing to bet that there is not a single person within the Harris campaign, wielding authority sufficient to produce a cup of coffee, who has any doubt about whether we have a problem along our southern border. Nor will you find anyone willing to defund the police or to fund gender-reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in detention. And there is probably no one on Earth who still believes that advancing a lab-leak hypothesis for the origins of Covid is “racist.” The spell cast in 2019 by blue-haired lunatics who identify as blue-haired lunatics has finally broken.    

If Harris loses tomorrow’s election, I might blame her and her team for avoiding a necessary series of “Sister Souljah moments”—where she could have made it clear how the pendulum of sanity had swung back, both within her brain and across the platform of the Democratic Party. And yet for anyone willing to see, it was clear from the beginning of her campaign that Harris had pivoted to the center of our politics. Despite the widespread psychosis on our college campuses, no one seriously confused about the events of October 7 was invited to address the Democratic National Convention—rather, the parents of an American hostage were, and they received a standing ovation. And though she would be our first woman president, there has been scant mention of this fact from Harris or her surrogates. Vice President Harris is not campaigning for the presidency like a left-wing activist, and there is no reason to believe that she would govern as one. If she wins on Tuesday, her first calls will probably be to allies like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Mark Cuban, and there will be no celebration with Rashida Tlaib or the rest of “the Squad.” However, if Harris loses, I have no doubt that the pendulum will swing outward again—because among his many pernicious influences on our society, Trump stands as living confirmation of the worst fears of the far left. Anyone who yearns to see our institutions break the grip of progressive orthodoxy should understand that the provocation of another Trump presidency is precisely what we do not need.

The positive case for Harris is simple: She will be a normal president, surrounded by normal experts, seeking normal political ends. The scientists she consults will be real scientists. The doctors, real doctors. Her administration will not be a 4chan thread come to life. Her foreign policy will not be made in consultation with podcasters who hock gold, ivermectin, and MREs. The notion of banning some vaccines will not receive serious consideration. Grifters and lunatics like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens won’t be short-listed for weekends in the Lincoln bedroom. The final stage of her campaign wasn’t organized and funded by an increasingly erratic billionaire who hallucinates about the strategic replacement of white America, and she will owe him no debt of gratitude. The positive case for Harris is easy to make: She is a sane public servant who will be committed to the rule of law and the betterment of our society.

There is more to say about her opponent. . . 

There is one fact about Donald Trump that not even his most devoted fans can dispute: He is one of the most prolific liars our species has produced. The man lies about everything, great and small. He lies compulsively, incoherently, pointlessly, impossibly. Yesterday, Trump assured the audience at one of his rallies that there were no empty seats at his campaign events, when they could see with their own eyes that the arena in which they sat wasn’t full. Many people have claimed that there is a method to this madness—but there is no method, only madness.

I am well aware, of course, that Steve Bannon declared the method was to “flood the zone with shit”—the desired effect of which is to produce a state of panic, and finally futility, in one’s political opponents (and, above all, the media). I will grant the reality of the effect, but not the intentionality of any method. Trump simply vomits lies in all directions, exhausting anyone who would try to make sense of him. The fact that this has proven to be politically expedient in late-stage America doesn’t suggest that it is a conscious strategy. Trump lied with the same astonishing velocity long before he entered politics, and he just never stopped.

I believe the truth about Trump is simpler and less Machiavellian: There is something wrong with his mind. During his four years in the White House, The Washington Post counted more than 30,000 of his lies and misleading statements. It’s an impressive number, but it doesn’t begin to indicate how corrosive Trump’s dishonesty has been to our politics.

It was Salena Zito who first observed that the media took Trump “literally but not seriously,” while his supporters took him “seriously but not literally.” However, it seems to have been Peter Thiel who transformed this clever phrasing into a formula for mass delusion. And it did not take long for a reflexive discounting of Trump’s stated desires, fears, beliefs, and intentions to destroy the Republican Party.

The former president now says that if elected to a second term he will use federal troops to forcibly expel as many as 20 million undocumented immigrants from the country. When I recently pointed out to a Republican friend how vicious and idiotic such a purge would be—because most of these people are performing essential work in our society, and millions of them have children who happen to be American citizens—he sought to put my mind at ease, deploying words one often hears in Trumpistan: “He’s just saying that. He’s not really going to do it.” (If Trump suddenly declared an intention to raise everyone’s taxes, I suspect the spell might break. Some statements can only be taken literally and seriously.)

The problem, of course, is that just saying that should count for something. (Must I really spell this out?) Even pretending to aspire to so dystopian a project—separating families by the millions and herding doomed spouses, parents, and grandparents into internment camps, at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, while their American relatives weep—should be disqualifying in a presidential candidate.

But neither this observation, nor hundreds like it, has any effect on my friend. I’m now convinced that if Trump promised to round up millions of undocumented immigrants, kill them in slaughterhouses, and turn them into dog food, my friend would respond with the same breezy rebuttal: “He’s just saying that. He’s not really going to do it.”

I’ve had nearly a decade to contemplate this transformation in our politics, and I remain completely mystified by it.

If we cannot believe what the former president says, can we believe what others say about him? Of course not. And so, when the vast majority of Trump’s former cabinet members decline to endorse him, we can draw no conclusions at all. We shouldn’t care that nearly everyone who advised him during his four years in office, especially on national security, has condemned him as unfit to serve as commander in chief. These people include Jim Mattis (secretary of defense), Mark Milley (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and H.R. McMaster (national security adviser)—and those are just the M’s. These men have told us what Trump is like behind closed doors—that he is “a moron” and “a fascist,” and that he expects our military leaders to swear loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution. These were the proverbial “adults in the room” who prevented Trump from doing despicable things, like ordering federal troops to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters “in the legs.” Some of the most respected military leaders of their generation, like four-star admiral William McRaven (commander of United States Special Operations), have been sounding the alarm about Trump for years. In a letter addressed to the president, published in The Washington Post, McRaven wrote: “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.” This isn’t a controversial opinion among those who served during Trump’s first term.

But half the country does not take such warnings literally, seriously, or in any other way, believing them to be just more partisan noise. (Strangely, this noise is coming mostly from lifelong Republicans and members of the military who have every professional and personal incentive to keep silent.) So, once again, half the country intends to grant Trump more power and responsibility than anyone else on Earth, despite knowing that his second administration would be staffed by loyalists, election deniers, and sycophants who have no reputations for competence or integrity to protect.

It is amusing in this context, with their powers of discernment so blissfully in eclipse, to watch Republicans find reasons to despise Vice President Harris. Trump escapes their merely mortal judgment like some force of nature, while Harris’s every word and glance are weighed with Talmudic severity and found wanting. If her laugh isn’t perfectly disqualifying, they detect a fatal difference in “authenticity” between the two candidates. I will admit that Harris can seem evasive in interviews, while Trump sometimes appears to be authentically what he is—a terrible human being.

But enumerating Trump’s many flaws leaves one vulnerable to charges of “elitism.” It seems that the moment we travel right of center in our politics there is no longer any place to stand from which to observe the obvious: that the former president embodies the kind of vanity, ignorance, lechery, and avarice encountered only in fairy tales—or scripture. Add to these foundational sins the man’s boundless capacity for lying, his obsession with celebrity, his casual cruelty, and his achingly bad taste—and most of your work still lies ahead of you. . . 

We mustn’t ignore the stench of the carnival that follows Trump from room to room—for the former president is the very archetype of the impostor, the confidence man, the crackpot, and the peddler of quack cures. The sheer fraudulence of his every endeavor, reaching back decades, is breathtaking. His fake businesses, fake charities, fake university, and fake tan seem to be mere embellishments of some deeper deception lurking at the very center of his being. Trump wouldn’t hesitate to sell his farts in bottles if he could only find the time—but they would be fake farts and fake bottles.

Add to all his wheeling and dealing the multiple bankruptcies and countless legal entanglements—and all the groping and bullying and wheedling and chiseling—and wrap this sad frenzy of self-promotion, self-praise, and self-deception in a bad suit, made to measure for a rhinoceros, and there he is, hunching and scowling—the man in full.

Donald Trump is a game show host who was relentlessly marketed on television as a business genius for 12 years, and half the country bought the lie. The fact that he became president of the United States, and may yet do so again, is surely the greatest imposture in American history.

But, again, my “elitism” is showing. It is now considered indecent to demand a modicum of integrity, or even moral sanity, in a presidential candidate.  

Of course, the gravest problem with Trump is that, as president, he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He then made every effort to steal the 2020 election—while claiming, against all evidence, that it was being stolen from him. Anyone who watches the HBO documentary Stopping the Steal should recognize Trump’s election denial for what it is: one of the most malignantly selfish acts in the history of our country. And the fact that Trump persists in denying the outcome of the 2020 election—and is clearly preparing to reject the result of the current one, should he lose again—represents a continuous provocation to political violence.

I can only say, as I contemplate the fragile miracle of our democracy on the eve of this election, that I find it impossible to believe we will return this man to power.

But we will soon see what happens and know the truth about ourselves. . . 

Sam Harris is the New York Times best-selling author of five books, including The End of Faith. He also hosts the acclaimed Making Sense podcast, which you can follow on X @MakingSenseHQ. Subscribe to his Substack.

Watch his debate with Ben Shapiro on Honestly and read Ben’s closing argument, on why you should vote for Donald Trump, here. 

For more coverage of the 2024 election, click here.

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