Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion | The Ezra Klein Show

What are the conditions that enable a country to become great — or great again? The Trump administration — and other right-wing movements in other countries — offers a vision of greatness based on power and domination abroad, and a mix of shared national and religious stories at home. And that vision is clearly appealing to a lot of people. Liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere have been struggling to tell a story that can compete.

What story would Yuval Noah Harari tell? One of the through lines of Harari’s best-selling books — “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus,” “Nexus” — is the huge role that stories play in shaping the arc of history, driving humans to cooperate on a grand scale to achieve great things, or divide violently against one another.

So I wanted to ask him about the stories that the U.S. and Israel, in particular, seem to have embraced right now. What does history tell us about the power of this story? And why does the liberal story seem so weak right now?

00:00:00 Intro
00:02:05 Power vs. cooperation in history
00:07:13 The Trumpian vision of force
00:16:40 Why fiction is more powerful
00:20:30 The U.S. Constitution as a story
00:28:11 Morality and acknowledging suffering
00:38:07 The American Jewish schism
00:41:23 What do you do with power?
00:56:04 Why do deeply held stories shift?
01:01:17 Social media: a technology of fracture
01:06:00 Is social media illiberal?
01:13:22 A.I. hacks our emotional weaknesses
1:53:15 Book recommendations

Read the full transcript here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-yuval-noah-harari.html

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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

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