Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion

Produced by Annie Galvin

Yuval Noah Harari on the Mistake Strongmen Keep Making

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

If you look across his mega-best-selling books, like “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” Yuval Noah Harari really has one major topic: cooperation.

The ability to cooperate across scale and time is the fundamental engine of human progress. It’s the way we go from being creatures that absolutely cannot beat a bear or a lion in a fight to being able to create and command the societies we have now.

I think today there’s something interestingly challenging about Harari’s work.

We live in this moment of Trumpism and right-wing populism. One of the messages of these movements is that this emphasis on cooperation, on positive-sum relationships, is a lie — that humanity, that society, is driven not so much by these soft questions of cooperation as it is by hierarchy and dominance.

It’s about winning the transaction, about coming out ahead in the conflict or in the trade. The niceties of liberalism? A lie. Humanity really runs on power — and to forget that is to forget the engine of our progress.

So I’ve been wanting to talk to Harari about this. I think there’s an interesting debate to put him in conversation with. He has a new book for kids, “Unstoppable Us, Volume 3,” that is also about cooperation and how enemies turn into friends.

But this conversation is bigger than that. It’s about liberalism. It’s about Israel — Harari is Israeli. It’s about artificial intelligence, what it’s going to do to us and what it’s going to do to language as the way we work with — and fail to work with — one another.

It is, as we say in the podcast biz, a wide-ranging conversation, and all the better for it.

Ezra Klein: Yuval Noah Harari, welcome to the show.

Yuval Noah Harari: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

I want to begin with a clip of Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, that I began thinking about as I was reading some of your recent work. I’m going to play it here.

Archival clip of Stephen Miller: You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world — in the real world, Jake — that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

Archival clip of Stephen Miller: You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world — in the real world, Jake — that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.

These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

What do you think when you hear that?

That the whole of the history of philosophy and spirituality is an argument with exactly that point of view. That the only reality is power. The only reality is force. And from the viewpoint of a historian, it’s clear that this is not the case.

If the only human reality were brute force, we would still be living in tiny hunter-gatherer bands in the African savanna. Because the whole of human history is about how you get more people to cooperate and to trust each other, and you cannot do that only with brute force.

I want to spend some time on this tension between visions of cooperation as a driving force in human history and visions of power as a driving force in human history.

Because if I’m trying to steel-man the vision that emerges out of the Trump administration and some other political figures like them right now, they would say that the conditions for cooperation have been a mixture of shared national and religious stories and hierarchy, power, domination and subjugation, and that what they’re trying to re-create are these conditions that have allowed the great countries to become great.

I think it’s appealing to people. But the other dimension — your work is so much about the shared story and the story as the operating system that permits human cooperation at a large scale.

Something that people like Donald Trump — or in Israel, Yoram Hazony, the nationalist philosopher — argue is that we need these intense stories of nations, of ethnic solidarity, of religious solidarity. And liberalism and all these nice human-rights-fearing ideologies that emerge have begun to corrode them. So they’re corroding the very conditions for cooperation.

I’m curious, as somebody who has been in these debates, how you think about that.

That’s a different argument. It’s an argument that recognizes that not everything is based just on force and brute power.

Definitely, nationalism has been one of the most successful and also one of the most positive stories that humans have ever come up with. For me, nationalism is not about hating other groups. Nationalism, at its core, is about loving and caring about a large number of strangers whom you do not know personally, but you’re nevertheless willing to make a lot of sacrifices for them.

The nation is not a family. The nation is not even a small tribe. In a small tribe, you know everybody. It’s based on personal relationships.

With nations, one of the most striking things about them is that you don’t know 99.99 percent of the other people in your nation. This is true not only of big nations like China or India; this is also true of Israel. There are about 10 million Israelis. I don’t know most of them. Nevertheless, nationalism makes people care about these strangers enough so that, for instance, you pay taxes so other people in your nation will get good health care and education — and ultimately, in some circumstances, you even risk your life for them.

Sometimes, of course, nationalism veers into hatred of others, but this is not an essential feature of nationalism. Nationalism can exist without hating outsiders. It cannot exist without love for insiders.

Many of the people today who present themselves as the champions of nationalism put the emphasis on hatred, and in many cases, they even create hatred within the nation. They divide the nation against itself. They think they are great patriots if they hate outsiders.

Again, looking at Israel as an example, nobody in the history of Israel has divided the nation against itself more than Netanyahu. And in this sense, he has been the worst enemy of Israeli nationalism. Yes, he hates outsiders, but this is not the key test.

Then the question is: How would different nations conduct their relationships? It starts with issues of security and foreign policy. The Trumpian vision, which is all about force and hierarchy, basically says the way to organize the international system is if the weak always surrender to the demands of the strong. Then we have order, and then we have even peace.

So if the United States demands Greenland, Denmark must recognize reality and give Greenland to the United States. If Denmark refuses, and as a result, there is violence, there is a war, there is conflict, this is the fault of Denmark for refusing to recognize the reality and giving the strong what they demand.

This is their logic. This is how they see the world.

Now, leaving aside the issue of morality, you still have a big problem. The big problem is, first of all, that all nations are then driven to become strong, because you cannot survive as a weak nation in such a world. And then all nations are forced to invest more and more of their resources in their military.

For most of history, a lot of the budget of every kingdom, empire, republic, city state was invested or wasted on soldiers and fortresses and warships and things like that and nobody felt safe.

One of the miracles of the international systems of recent decades — and this is not about writing pacifist poetry, it’s about government budgets: You look at the budgets, and you see that on average, in the early 21st century, about 6 to 7 percent of the government budget went to defense, to the military, compared with 10 percent on average that went to health care.

It’s the first time in history that humanity spent more on health care than on defense. They felt more secure than in any previous time in history because there was this taboo on invading and conquering other countries by force.

If we now break this taboo, it will force everybody to arm themselves to the teeth at the expense of health care, education, welfare and so forth — and nobody will feel safer as a result.

Because countries and leaders constantly miscalculate.

In the Vietnam War, the Americans thought they were stronger. It turned out they were wrong.

Putin was convinced he would crush Ukraine in 48 hours. He was wrong.

So this vision of basing the peace and order of the world on a hierarchy of strong and weak, with the weak always obeying the strong and thereby buying peace, it has been tried over thousands of years, and we know where it leads.

It leads, on the one hand, to empire — and on the other hand, to endless wars.

We are more on that road again than I think we’ve been in my lifetime.

You’ve talked about the global liberal order as, I think you called it: the most amazing political and maybe moral achievement of humankind.

And today I don’t think it feels that way to people. It has been consumed in the language of budgets, in the reality of bureaucracy.

What was the story liberalism as an international force once told, and what do you think happened to it?

The basic story is about shared experiences and interests and cooperation.

In the 20th century, you had basically three big stories.

You had the fascist story, which said that history is a competition, a conflict between nations or races. It’s decided by strength. Ultimately, the strongest nation or the strongest race will defeat all the others and conquer the world. This was the fascist story.

Then you had the Communist story, which agrees. But it’s not between races or nations — it’s between classes. There is an inevitable conflict between different classes that will be violent and end with the victory of the working class, which will establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Then liberalism came and said that history does not have to be about conflict at all, not conflict between nations and not conflict between classes. It can be about cooperation. Why? Because all humans, no matter which race or nation or class they belong to, are essentially the same.

There are some small differences in how we look and in our languages and religions and so forth, but essentially, we are the same species. We all have the same biological needs. We all have roughly the same psychological needs, at least the deep ones: to be loved, to be recognized and so forth.

We have shared interests, and if we recognize these shared characteristics and interests, in many cases, it just makes more sense to cooperate than to compete and to fight. And by cooperating, we can build a world that will be better for everybody. This was the basic liberal story.

As of 2026, we can look back and say it’s failing. It hasn’t failed completely. According to many measures, we are still living in probably the best time in history. But it’s collapsing.

It’s like this amazing house in which all of humanity is living, and the systems are still sort of running — like the water, the sewage. Nobody takes care of them anymore, but they were built in such a robust way that even though we don’t maintain them, they still function. But within a year, five years, 10 years, if you live in a house and nobody maintains it, eventually it collapses, and then it’s too late.

Something you had said was interesting to me, which is that the two major competitor ideologies of the 20th century both believed in an end to conflict. It wasn’t just conflict — it was that at some point there would be victory.

And liberalism, in one guise, believes in cooperation. And in another guise that we don’t talk about as much anymore, one of its central tenets is that there will always be conflict. There will always be disagreement.

The differences in society are not resolvable and would not, should not, be resolvable to an end state. The question is how we live together, both inside a nation and even as a global community, amid that difference, making room for it to exist without it turning into war, into oppression, into persecution.

Yes. That’s a very, very important point. Liberalism does not believe in redemption. You look at the grand historical visions of religions like Christianity or Islam or Judaism, you look at secular ideologies like fascism and Communism — they all believe in redemption. They all believe that eventually history will reach a final destination where everything will be perfect.

Liberalism does not believe it. There is no redemption, at least not on Earth. There will always be problems and tensions and conflicts, and the question is: How do we live with them?

This is also why liberalism invests a lot in building what I think is the most important thing in every large-scale human system, which is a self-correcting mechanism.

If you believe that your view of the world was given to you by God, it cannot contain any error. You do not need a self-correcting mechanism because there are no mistakes.

Liberalism starts with the assumption that it’s just human beings trying to do the best we can, and there will be mistakes, there will be errors, so we need strong self-correcting mechanisms.

The most famous mechanism is, of course, elections. Every four years or five years or whatever, the people can say: Hey, we made a mistake last time. Let’s try something else this time.

All these very complicated systems of checks and balances and independent courts and freedom of the press and all these are just a complicated way to ensure that a country has a robust self-correcting mechanism.

You make an argument that fiction is often better for cooperation than truth.

First of all, the truth is costly. To know the truth, to produce a true story, you need to invest a lot of time and energy in investigating it. Fiction is very cheap, and fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be.

People like simple stories, these simplified narratives like good against evil. We are 100 percent good. We have never done anything bad in our history. They are 100 percent evil. They have never done anything good in their history. Very simple, very attractive.

The truth is not just complicated. The truth is often painful.

Fiction can be made as flattering as you would like it to be. Again, for example: We have never done anything bad to anybody. We are perfect. We are wonderful.

So this is why fiction tends to be far more powerful as a story. Also, when you try to motivate people for action, you don’t want them to have doubts. You need them to be fired up, 100 percent committed. Fiction is easier to work with in this respect.

Does that imply that if societies, political movements, institutions become too truth-seeking, given the importance of cooperation, they become at a long-term disadvantage? I mean, to have no truth is a problem.

But I think this implies a little bit that to have too much truth can be a problem, too.

Yes. An absolute commitment to the pursuit of truth is a spiritual practice, but it’s a very, very difficult political program.

There is a difference between lying and fiction. You lie when you know something is not true, and you nevertheless say it or support it. In many cases, I think the ideal is to recognize that we are using fictions to maintain our society.

This is the difference, I would say, for instance, between the United States and many other powerful countries in history.

If you look at the U.S. Constitution, it starts with: “We the people.” We the people have come together and agreed on this text, on these principles. It is coming from our mind. It is our creation.

Now, it doesn’t use the word “fiction,” of course — but when I say “fiction,” I mean something that is not objective. It doesn’t come from the laws of physics. It doesn’t come from God. We invented it.

The U.S. Constitution very honestly says: We invented these principles, which I think are good, but because we recognize that we invented them, we the people, then we also include in the Constitution an amendment mechanism.

We recognize we are just human beings. Maybe we came up with something that is suboptimal. Maybe things will change later on. So we have a mechanism to change the story later on.

And we, the founding fathers, for instance, think that slavery is OK, but in the strange situation that maybe somebody in the future will think it’s not OK, they have an amendment mechanism.

Now, you compare that to religion, and let’s take the example of the Bible or the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments starts not with: “We the people of Israel.” It starts with “I am the Lord your God,” and it has no amendment mechanism because of that.

If you look carefully, you will see that the Ten Commandments endorses slavery. The Tenth Commandment: Thou shalt not covet. What shouldn’t you covet? It has a list of things you shouldn’t covet, like your neighbor’s field and your neighbor’s ox and also your neighbor’s slaves. The Ten Commandments tells people it’s OK to have slaves. It’s just not right to covet the slaves of somebody else — then God will be angry.

There is just no mechanism to change that because it pretends to not be a human creation but a divine revelation.

I think there’s an interesting tension in there, and you can make a critique of liberalism, or at least where it is now, that it is good at building mechanisms, institutions, rules, bureaucracies, and it is intrinsically bad at creating enduring stories — in part because, at least in its modern form, it often is fairly secularized.

Religion has been a tremendous source of cooperation, keeping people bound together both at a moment and then working toward a future that they may not even live to see.

There are questions of nationalism and the national story, which liberalism as a self-correcting ideology often creates critique of, and then you lose some of that national coherence as you’re arguing about the past of your country and what it has done right and wrong.

You are a person who thinks very deeply about stories. To you, is this a weakness of advanced, secularized, liberal democracies? Are they losing the cohesion that keeps them, in the long run, competitive to ideologies that maybe can’t build bureaucracies, maybe cannot govern effectively? But they sure as hell can tell a story.

Yes, this is a central problem of liberalism.

On the other hand, I would not fall into the trap of imagining religions as this primeval cohesive force that keeps people together. I’m a medievalist. My original field of study was the Middle Ages.

At least in terms of the percentage of population that died in the war, probably the worst war in European history was the Thirty Years’ War. Very complicated, but to make a long story short, it was a war between Protestants and Catholics in Central Europe. Catholics and Protestants were willing to slaughter each other because of tiny differences in the way they interpreted the religion of love.

Liberalism rose, in part, out of the frustration that people had with religion because it constantly created more and more conflicts and divisions.

If you look at Germany today, almost nobody cares if the person running to be chancellor is a Protestant or a Catholic. In this sense, liberalism is a better basis for uniting a large-scale and diverse group of people just because it’s more flexible.

Again, it’s a complicated story. There is no redemption in the end. It’s not based on some charismatic leader. It’s based on these very complex, impersonal, self-correcting mechanisms and bureaucracies and institutions. So in this sense, it’s less appealing.

We are living in a moment of crisis for liberalism. One of the reasons is that over the last few decades, liberalism has kind of lost touch with something that was a close ally for many generations, which is nationalism.

In the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism went hand in hand.

If you look at some places in the world today, like Ukraine, they still go hand in hand. The Ukrainians are fighting at the same time for their national survival and independence and for liberal democracy. There is no contradiction between the two.

I would say that since 1789, nobody has managed to think about anything new in the political realm. The French Revolution came up with this ideological package, which was complex: liberty, equality, fraternity.

People tend to forget the third one: fraternity. Fraternity is the national community. And you can say that the whole of political history since 1789 has been experimenting with different combinations of this trio.

Every movement that tried to completely abandon one of these three failed.

Fascism was all about fraternity, no equality, no liberty. Communism also emphasized equality at the expense of liberty and, to some extent, fraternity.

One of the explanations of what is happening to liberalism in recent decades is that liberalism focused on equality and liberty but tended to forget fraternity, and this proved to be untenable.

It’s so interesting to me that you’ve gone here. It’s funny, I’ve been circling something somewhat similar in my own podcast and work on liberalism, which is that the early virtue associated with liberalism is liberality — which, I would say, is very much a cousin of fraternity, this ethic of mutual respect and generosity toward your fellow citizens.

One thing that you’re adding to that story is that it has to be based on some kind of national story, that there is a difficulty in maintaining cohesion in a national community, maintaining those bonds of a fellowship, once you have stopped believing in the connection you have to each other.

Yes. I think that the important thing to emphasize here is the reason that liberalism lost touch with fraternity is that some people told a very negative story about fraternity, seeing it primarily in terms of conflict with other communities — that fraternity is about hating and fighting with other nations.

If we remember that, as we said in the beginning, the essence of fraternity is caring and loving a certain group of people, this does not require hating outsiders. But it does mean that you have a special relationship with a certain group of people, that you share a common history, a common culture, a common language.

Trying to imagine it away just ignores history. Yes, we have certain commitments to all of humanity, but this does not preclude having special commitments toward a segment of humanity, just as you have certain loyalty to your family — which is over and above what you owe your fellow citizens or foreigners.

I’ve seen you make the argument that the limiting question on the stories we tell should be: Does anyone suffer because of this story?

I think that morality is ultimately about suffering — and........

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