#407 — Can We Ever Return to Normal Politics?

Summary

Podcast Title: Making Sense with Sam Harris
Episode: #407 — Can We Ever Return to Normal Politics?
Release Date: April 9, 2025
Host: Sam Harris
Guest: Jon Favreau

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1. Introduction to Jon Favreau and His Political Background

In Episode #407 of Making Sense with Sam Harris, host Sam Harris welcomes Jon Favreau, a seasoned political operative with extensive experience in Democratic circles. Favreau provides a comprehensive overview of his career trajectory:

• Early Career: Favreau began his political journey shortly after graduating college, joining John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign as a press assistant. Within two weeks, he advanced to the role of speechwriter.

• Work with Barack Obama: Following Kerry's defeat, Favreau joined then-Senator Barack Obama's team in 2005. He served as Obama's head speechwriter, a position he held through Obama's Senate tenure, the 2008 presidential campaign, and into the White House, where he continued as head speechwriter until 2013.

• Transition to Media: After leaving the White House, Favreau ventured into media, founding Crooked Media in 2016 alongside Obama colleagues. The company's flagship podcast, Pod Save America, evolved into a multifaceted media enterprise headquartered in Los Angeles.

Favreau further elaborates on his current projects, including co-hosting Pod Save America, and leading Offline, a podcast addressing the detrimental effects of the Internet on cognitive functions, mirroring topics often discussed on Sam Harris's platform. Additionally, he hosts The Wilderness, where he engages with swing voters to dissect Democratic Party shortcomings and potential reforms.

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2. The Art of Speechwriting vs. Policy-Making

A significant portion of the conversation delves into the nuanced role of a speechwriter, particularly within the White House:

[02:53] Jon Favreau: "Speechwriting is synthesizing policy, figuring out what parts of policy to emphasize that are going to be most politically effective, figuring out a way to communicate complicated policy topics and issues to the public."

Favreau distinguishes between mere transcribing and active participation in policy discourse, highlighting the collaborative nature of crafting speeches that align with both political objectives and public understanding. He underscores the importance of diplomacy in speechwriting, which involves balancing content to satisfy various stakeholders and political agendas.

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3. Comparing Obama and Trump Administrations

Favreau contrasts his experiences under the Obama administration with observations of the Trump administration:

[06:07] Jon Favreau: "What was different about the Obama administration is... you could trust that when something happened in the world, there were going to be civil servants and political appointees who wanted to do their very best and work very hard to solve as many problems as they could and help as many people as they could."

In stark contrast, he characterizes the Trump administration as being dominated by Trump's personal whims:

[06:07] Jon Favreau: "It's all about him and people's views that they have going into the administration... Everything is about making sure that Trump is happy."

Favreau criticizes the erosion of institutional integrity and the shift towards a personality-driven governance model under Trump, where policy processes are subordinated to the president's immediate desires and approval.

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4. Norm Violations and Corruption in the Trump Era

A critical discussion emerges around the numerous norm violations and perceived corruption within the Trump administration:

[14:45] Jon Favreau: "Donald Trump is crazy. He can't believe this."

Favreau expresses deep concerns over the administration's ethical standards, citing instances such as the enrichment of Trump and his family through ventures like meme coins and questionable business dealings. He highlights the systemic issues arising from a "cult of personality," which undermines democratic norms and institutional checks and balances.

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5. Current Pressing Issues: Immigration and Due Process

Favreau brings attention to alarming immigration practices, particularly the deportation of individuals to El Salvador without due process:

[09:11] Jon Favreau: "The government is disappearing people to this prison in El Salvador with no due process."

He recounts the case of a Maryland man wrongfully deported despite legal protections, emphasizing the government's failure to uphold justice and human rights. Favreau questions the legal authority and ethical implications of such actions, framing them as indicative of broader systemic failures under the current administration.

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6. Media's Role and Public Perception of Corruption

The conversation addresses the media's focus on sensational scandals over substantive policy issues:

[12:32] Jon Favreau: "It's appearing against a background of so many indiscretions and norm violations... it's very hard to focus on."

Favreau critiques the media's prioritization of surface-level scandals, which overshadows more critical issues like governmental corruption and policy missteps. This trend, he argues, contributes to public desensitization and a diminished capacity to hold leaders accountable.

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7. Future Concerns for U.S. Politics and Democracy

Concluding the discussion, Favreau outlines several pressing concerns for the future of American politics:

• Economic Stability: Ongoing trade wars and economic mismanagement threaten both domestic and global economic health.

• Erosion of Democratic Norms: The persistent norm violations and corruption risk undermining democratic institutions and public trust.

• Public Disengagement: A significant portion of the electorate remains disengaged or apathetic, believing that political corruption is ubiquitous and beyond individual influence.

Favreau warns that without meaningful reform and a return to principled governance, the United States may face profound challenges to its democratic fabric and societal well-being.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• On the Nature of Speechwriting:

  “[02:53] Jon Favreau: Speechwriting is synthesizing policy, figuring out what parts of policy to emphasize that are going to be most politically effective...”

• Contrasting Administrations:

  “[06:07] Jon Favreau: What was different about the Obama administration is... people would do their very best to solve problems.”

• On Trump’s Behavior:

  “[14:45] Jon Favreau: Donald Trump is crazy. He can't believe this.”

• Immigration and Due Process:

  “[09:11] Jon Favreau: The government is disappearing people to this prison in El Salvador with no due process.”

• Media's Focus:

  “[12:32] Jon Favreau: It's appearing against a background of so many indiscretions and norm violations... it's very hard to focus on.”

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Conclusion

Episode #407 of Making Sense with Sam Harris offers a profound exploration of the deteriorating state of American politics through the lens of Jon Favreau's extensive political experience. The dialogue underscores the urgent need to address systemic corruption, restore institutional integrity, and recalibrate media priorities to foster a healthier democratic society.

Transcript

[Sam Harris]

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 [e-mail] there you'll also find our scholarship program where we offer free accounts to.

[Jon Favreau]

Anyone who can't afford one.

[Sam Harris]

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.

[Jon Favreau]

I am here with Jon Favreau. Jon, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Sam, nice to finally meet you.

You too.

Seen you working your magic in Democratic circles for many years, but our paths have never crossed.

I know.

Maybe can you summarize your background in politics and media at this point?

Sure. I started on the Kerry campaign, on John Kerry's campaign in 2004, two weeks after I graduated college. I started as a press assistant there and then I ended up becoming a speechwriter. And then after Kerry lost, I worked for then Senator Barack Obama when he got to the Senate in 2005. I was his head speechwriter and I stayed with him through the Senate through the 2008 campaign, went on to the White House to be head speechwriter there. And I left the White House in 2013 and then in 2016 started a podcast about the 2016 election with some Obama colleagues as a hobby. And then after Donald Trump won, which we did not expect, like many others, it became a full blown media company called Crooked Media. And the POD is now POD Save America. And now we have many podcasts and a big company and we're all based in Los Angeles.

Nice, nice. And you're on more than one podcast at this point, right?

Yeah, I co host POD Save America and I also host Offline, a podcast about how the Internet's breaking all of our brains, which I know you like to talk about as well.

It is doing.

And then I also host a podcast called the Wilderness where I do sit down and do focus groups with swing voters and talk about what's wrong with the Democratic Party and how to fix it, which lots to talk about there.

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's get into it. But your experience as a speechwriter, I'm interested to know that job, how is it demarcated from actually thinking about weighing in on policy? I mean, are you simply transcribing what the President and other Advisors tell you they want to express, or are you in the weeds and actually trying to think of what they should be saying and doing in the first place?

It's a great question. And I think there was a difference between when I was a speechwriter in the Senate and the campaign. When I was a speechwriter in the White House, in the campaign and in the Senate, it's less about policy, but obviously, there are a lot of policies that I was writing about there, but it's more poetry than prose. In the White House, you know, there was access to every single policy advisor and smart person you could imagine. And, you know, we obviously started the presidency in the middle of the financial crisis. I am not an economic expert, but I was able to learn from Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, all the top advisors. And a lot of it is speechwriting is synthesizing policy, figuring out what parts of policy to emphasize that are going to be most politically effective, figuring out a way to communicate complicated policy topics and issues to the public. And I was also lucky to work for a president who very much was involved in the writing and conception of his speeches, especially the big speeches. Obviously, President speaks many times a day, so sometimes we just wrote him a speech and he made a couple edits and gave the speech. But on the big speeches, the president and I would sit down and he would have many thoughts. We'd sit down with the policy advisors, we'd sit down with the political and communications advisors. And then, you know, I always say that speechwriting is a lot of diplomacy as well. So it's figuring out, you know, what to put in the speech, what to cut, who to make happy, whose ego you have to massage, and all that stuff.

So, given your experience in working for one president and knowing how the communication happens, knowing how policy gets translated into action and how it gets sold to the public politically, what's your experience of watching this happen in the Trump administration? I'll add you one other piece, not to lead the witness to fully, but I noticed President Obama the other day making a point that many of us have made on his behalf now for years. I don't know what the venue was, but he was on stage and he was saying, can you imagine if I did any of this? And then he started to list the things, and he didn't even list the most egregious, grotesque, and unthinkable things. We all remember the scandal that absorbed the news for at least 24 hours over his wearing a tan suit. I think there was a bad salute with a latte in one hand, that also captured us for a full news cycle. I think there might have been a. A report that he asked for Dijon mustard somewhere or something like that. That was the level of scandal. And now we have a president and his family enriching themselves to the tune of presumably billions of dollars with a meme coin. That is a mechanism by which they can be bribed in a covert way by anyone on earth. And that's one of maybe 10,000 indiscretions we could list. Give me the veteran of the Obama administration view of the current norm violations and what just passes, what is even beneath comment now in a news cycle.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's horrifying and sometimes I've been now talking about Donald Trump almost every day for the last since 2015, and he never ceases to. It stops being surprising, but it is still shocking. And it's the norm violations, obviously. It's also just this sense of constant chaos that is. It reminds you of the fragility of not just democracy, but, you know, the whole country. And he does things and the administration does things. And especially in the second term, I think where you think, you know, everything could fall apart and it wouldn't take much. And what was different about the Obama administration is, or one of the many differences is, is like I knew that there were serious people in charge and people who were trying to do their best. And that did not mean that they didn't make a whole lot of mistakes. It didn't mean that they made the wrong judgments at some times, that people are human. They do that. It did mean that you could trust that when something happened in the world, when news broke, when there was a crisis, when there was a disaster, that there were going to be civil servants and political appointees who wanted to do their very best and work very hard to solve as many problems as they could and help as many people as they could. And in the Trump administration, and we saw this in the first White House and the. And now in the second White House, you know, it's all about him and people's views that they have going into the administration. Doesn't matter if they have their own views or they think a policy is crazy or they think something's bad. Everything is about making sure that Trump is happy. Everything is about trying to retrofit your views to whatever Trump is thinking at the moment. Entire policy processes are processes. Sorry, are basically, you know, I don't, I don't get the sense that there are many. I get the sense that it's just sitting around and whatever Trump wants, they do. And, you know, I was just like watching Scott Besant on TV this week as we were talking about tariffs. And, you know, you can tell that Scott Besant had a view of tariffs before he came into the Trump administration, where he said, yeah, I guess they can be used as a tool for negotiation. And now we're getting reports that, you know, Besson doesn't necessarily agree with how far they've gone on tariffs and wants the president to be making more deals and negotiate. But he can't say any of that because he's probably thinking to himself, all right, I'm an adult. I'm gonna try to push policy in the right direction here, but if I go too hard or I make him too angry, then I'm gonna get fired and the person who replaces me is gonna be worse. And he's right about that. And so this is the dynamic you have, which is it's a cult of personality. And when you have a cult of personality and that's responsible for running the entire country and relations with the entire world, it's pretty scary.

What are your biggest concerns for the next few years?

I'm, of course, concerned about what's going to happen with the economy here at home and globally if this trade war continues. What I've been really concerned about over the last several weeks is the fact that the government is disappearing people to this prison in El Salvador with no due process. And I say this as someone who, after the last election thought, you know, what Democrats from 2020 on our position on immigration at times was too far to the left. I think Joe Biden, you know, made real mistakes on border security. And so, you know, and I, and I spoke out about that after the election, and, you know, I got some shit from the left on that. But it is so beyond immigration policy, what is happening right now. Because if they can, if the government can, as the government thinks it can and is arguing in court that it can round someone up with no due process, ship them off to El Salvador, and even if they make a mistake, now they're arguing that they can't bring him back. They can't bring the person back from a prison that is known for human rights abuses.

Yeah, that's an astonishing detail. And I haven't, frankly, followed it to its source. But they've admitted that they got the wrong guy. They've sent an innocent person into a gulag, essentially, and that why are they saying they can't bring this person back?

They're saying they don't want to. They're also saying they have. Well, so we're paying. The United States government is paying $6 million a year to El Salvador, to the government. And this is, you know, Bukele runs El Salvador. He's a dictator, calls himself a dictator. And so we're paying $6 million to this dictator a year to house these detainees. Under what authority? I don't know what authority the United States has to not, of course, the president has wide authority to deport people who aren't here legally, even people, even legal residents and green card holders, if they really want, they can figure out a way to deport with due process. But under what law can they just lock someone away in a prison who hasn't been convicted of anything? We don't know. That issue remains to be adjudicated. But this, this man from Maryland, he had legal protections from being deported back to El Salvador because there was a credible threat to his life. And so a judge gave him legal protections. There was Years before, in 2019, he was caught up with police, and because he was wearing a bull's hoodie and because some informant thought that he was part of a chapter of Ms. 13 in a state where he never lived in western New York, and that based on one anonymous informant that never came forward, they decided that he was Ms. 13. And that is now what the government is arguing, that that is all the evidence they need, that this man, who has committed no crimes and has been in no trouble since he got here in 2011, father of three, has a job, protections from being deported back to El Salvador, is now in prison in El Salvador indefinitely, no access to a lawyer, nothing else. And they admitted in court that they sent him there in error because of he had this legal protection. But they're saying, well, we can't order a foreign government to do anything. And the courts, by the way, shouldn't get involved in what is a national security foreign policy matter. And the courts have asked, okay, well, provide some evidence, and they won't do it.

Okay. So again, it's one of those stories where the details are so awful, it convinces you that it's a kind of moral emergency. And yet it's just one story. And I think it's appearing against a background of so many indiscretions and norm violations and accruals of risk of a sort that we find very difficult to price into our vision of the future that it's very hard to focus on. Right. It's like this is the problem we started with with Trump. I mean, if all he did was wear a tan suit. Well then maybe we could talk about that. Right? But since he's done 10,000 things, no thing really survives the contest with all the other things to sustain our attention again, the Meme coin. I just can't believe the world didn't stop spinning when they launched the Meme coin. Right? Like that's like we should have been talking about nothing else for the last 60 days or whenever that happened.

And look, and that, and that is still very much relevant and it could be even more relevant now that the President has decided he's going to negotiate one off deals with every country over these tariffs. Right. So you can imagine any one of these countries trying to curry favor with Donald Trump in multiple ways. The government itself has put the White House put out a policy sheet that said, yeah, you can reduce tariffs as part of a deal, you can reduce non tariff barriers. And also the last option they gave other countries is you can just cut a check to the United States government that we can spend on the public good. That was actually in a White House fact sheet. So the whole tariff regiment. Who knows exactly why he's doing it? Because it's hard to get inside his head. But one consequence of that is he is going to be able to, you know, scam people, you know, scheme like he always does, do the mob boss thing and he can, you know, if someone wants to invest in his meme coin as some foreign leader in some country, they'll be able to do that.

Yeah, I mean it's. I don't know what to think about the people who see all this and find these details totally uninteresting. Do you have any friends who voted for Trump?

My close friends, yeah, I have some family members who did. And I do have some really close friends who didn't vote for Trump but couldn't bring themselves to vote for Kamala Harris and thought that was okay cuz they're in blue states. And it's interesting because, you know, one of my close friends did this and lately he's been like, this is crazy. Donald Trump is crazy. I can't believe this. He's like, but you know what, I just can't pay attention to it. I can't get myself worried about it. I followed it for so many years in the first term and I can't get exercised about this. I gotta just focus on my job and my family and not pay attention to it.

Yeah, yeah, well, that's more verbose than I get from my Trump voting friends. On this point alone, the corruption thing is just so obvious. It's such an obvious liability. It's such an X ray into the character of the President and the prospect of the unraveling of democracy. And it started immediately. I mean, it started before the meme coin or before the. Actually, I guess the meme coin happened right before inauguration, but right in that week, I think Amazon paid Melania $40 million for the film rights to her presumably unreadable memoir. I mean, just that's totally legal. It's totally like, I'm sure there's someone at Amazon who can defend that with a straight face. But it's so obviously backsheesh to the Trump crime family. And it's one of hundreds of things. I mean, it's just the spend that is happening at his golf courses by the Saudi funded golf association. It's just, you know, we should be able to dimly remember a time where presidents and other politicians were expected to have no conflicts of interest financially. Right. And this is just like there's only conflicts of interest.

I think a challenge is, and this is what may make this ultimately quite politically damaging for Trump, is when you talk to voters, voters have, most voters have for some time believed that all politicians are corrupt and that both parties are corrupt. And even when you had a very ethical administration that wasn't corrupt. I think, like as you pointed out, the Obama administration, we didn't have corruption scandals in our administration. And that was because the President worked very hard to make sure that we had no corruption scandals and that people would be fired if there were and had all the right ethics lawyers in place and all that. But regardless, because of the media environment, because of politics, because of a loss of faith in institutions, that is a much bigger issue that we've been dealing with for the last several decades. People think that everyone's corrupt. So if you ask people, is Trump corrupt, is Trump making himself money on the job? You probably get a lot of people, including people who voted for Trump, say, yeah, I think that's true, but it's okay if he's gonna make himself rich, as long as he makes me rich too, or as long as I'm making money, you know, And I think if that's sort of like the corrupt bargain that some Trump voters have struck, and I think that if the economy goes south and if this trade war continues and we have a recession or worse, then people are gonna start looking at all of the corruption and all of like the Trump family enriching themselves over and over again at every chance they get. I mean, as the markets were wiping away trillions of dollars of wealth over the weekend. You know, he's hosting the Saudi backed golf tournament in his beach club, making a bunch of money on that while the markets are tanking. I do think that has the potential to be quite damaging because then people say, all right, you're getting rich, but I'm getting poorer. And that's not the deal.

Do we know how much exposure he and his family have to the stock market? Is that something that is journalistically findable?

I mean, I think they had to put everything in a blind trust when he took office, but I don't know how much exposure they actually have.

Right, right. That would be interesting to know. So what should the Democrats do at this point?

Yeah, I mean, this is. I think this is probably the most difficult spot that the Democratic Party has been in as long as I can remember, because I think the last time we had this little power it was when I started working for Obama in 2005.

[Sam Harris]

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