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June 17, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
26:17
Episode 47 - Why President Trump Deserves Credit for Progress in North Korea
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Hello everybody!
Come on in here. I've got my periscoping shirt on.
I've got my cup of coffee.
I got some stuff to talk about.
What else do I need?
Just you. Come on in here and grab your coffee.
Alright, somebody says, you have your coffee?
You're ready for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's good.
That's good. So before we talk about why President Trump deserves some credit for progress in North Korea, Let us give some credit to Dennis Rodman.
Now, I don't believe Dennis Rodman has quite done enough to earn a Nobel Prize for Peace.
But he's done a lot.
He's done a lot.
And there's something called the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I believe it is.
It's the highest civilian honor you can get for doing something above and beyond for the service of the country.
Now, no matter what else you say about Dennis Rodman, I'm pretty sure that a big part of why he went to visit Kim Jong-un on his invitation was that he thought it might do something good for the world.
I'm sure he thought it would be fun and interesting and different.
There were lots of reasons to do it.
But I'm pretty sure that doing something good for the world was a big part of it.
Secondly, he had skin in the game.
Going to North Korea is no easy thing, right?
You just don't know what's going to happen when you go over there.
So he took a big personal risk.
And it may have been a contributing factor to world peace, or at least peace in this context.
So I say, Dennis Rodman, Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But let's talk about President Trump's contribution to this.
I say it because I think you're all experiencing the same thing I am, at least on social media, of people who can't wrap their head around the fact that he had anything to do with anything good, and especially something this big.
So, people are literally saying, tell me one thing that President Trump did to make a difference in North Korea.
Come on, it's all President Moon and Kim Jong-un, and maybe it's President Xi, but give me one thing that President Trump did.
And the first few times I heard that, I thought, crazy, isn't paying attention.
But it turns out, That might be the dominant opinion of half the country.
Somehow half the country is looking at this whole situation and doesn't see President Trump's fingerprints on anything, at least not anything productive.
So I put together a quick list, which I'm going to read to you just so we have an audio copy of this.
Some of you saw this online.
So here are just a few things, and I'm going to try to go through them quickly, of things that President Trump did to contribute to progress in North Korea.
So President Trump had this America First approach, which is a pretty good way to go talk to a dictator and say, believe us, we don't want to conquer your country.
It's America first. That's our whole thing.
I got elected because the citizens like that too.
Whatever you thought about us in the past, right now, we're kind of keeping to the home front.
So that was good.
So that was good positioning before he even talked to North Korea.
He already had a base that said, look, we don't want to mess with you.
That's our starting position.
We don't care about you.
That's very important.
He came in with, President Trump has a reputation as a dealmaker.
If you're in a tight spot, as Kim Jong-un has been and is, you want to know that the other person is a dealmaker.
You can work something out so that maybe there's a win for you.
You know, it's not somebody who's just a crazy guy who just wants to kill you and that's it.
You know, can you negotiate?
Well, President Trump is a famous dealmaker.
So your head is in the place of, well, maybe I can make a deal, because I'm dealing with a famous dealmaker.
Those two things are very important.
The fact that it's America first, and he's a famous dealmaker.
They set the table so that Kim could see something that was maybe an off-ramp.
President Trump built great working relationships with China's President Xi, Japan's Abe, and South Korea's Moon.
And they're good relationships.
That makes a difference.
That probably may be better than any relationship we've seen, if you count all three of them together.
Then President Trump ordered General Mattis, who I call the scariest general in the universe, to demonstrate overwhelming force at the border.
Now other people have done that, but we're doing a list of everything the President did do.
Now having a President Mattis...
Is better than having a general Mattis is a better situation than having a general anything else.
Because his reputation is good and scary at the same time.
That's a hard question. Hard mix, right?
We know him to be sane and competent and really good at his job.
Well, pretty darn scary!
That's your perfect situation.
So then President Trump used Syria for missile target practice just in case Kim thought we'd like to save our ammo.
It was a good show of force in Syria that probably had more to do with North Korea than Syria.
Once you show, look, we didn't buy all these weapons just to keep them on the ships.
We got weapons.
We'll use them. This is very important mental prep.
If you're talking to somebody who's worried that you might use a weapon, using the weapon is a pretty convincing display of your willingness.
Then, of course, Trump got the UN to agree on sanctions.
That's, you know, that's a big part of it.
I also said that Trump resisted pressure to go full-on anti-Putin.
He had all the reasons to do that, but Putin was presumably somebody who at least didn't want you to stop progress with North Korea.
You didn't want him to be an obstacle.
You had to strike that balance where you're a little bit tough on Russia, but you're not so tough that they'll screw you on North Korea.
And he was always walking that balance.
And people kept saying, why are you doing that?
Why aren't you just tougher on Russia?
Well, North Korea might be part of the answer, because it's helpful to have Putin at least not be in the way.
And of course, this was a big deal.
Trump kept pressure on China for sanctions, and he did it again and again.
When it looked like not enough was being done, he kept the pressure on publicly.
And so he did it with complete respect, and he used the risk.
So Trump used the risk of shame at the same time as the hand of friendship.
So that China had the carrot and the stick working at the same time, and it looks like something good happened there.
President Trump offered no concessions whatsoever prior to having a real deal that really would get rid of nukes.
So he's given away nothing. And you see some concessions, if you can call them that, on the other side, which probably is more of an indication that a deal is done.
But we don't see any concessions on our side, at least nothing public.
President Trump also did not believe that the best deal we could get is a freeze on their nuclear stuff.
From day one, he was get rid of every one of them.
You've got two ways to lose your nuclear weapons.
The easy way and the hard way.
But those are the only choices.
The freeze, that's not on the table.
We're not talking about a freeze.
You have two ways to lose your nuclear weapons.
This is, again, good persuasion.
Two choices. They're both the ones we want.
One is far better than the other, of course.
Of course, Trump used the good cop, bad cop persuasion.
President Moon was good cop.
President Trump and Mattis were bad cop.
Here's the big deal.
Trump went to war against individual companies.
In the past, we would rely on the home country to try to stop their own, I guess you'd call them sanction-breaking vessels and whatnot.
And that doesn't work.
For whatever reason, the countries wouldn't or couldn't crack down on their own citizens who were breaking the sanctions.
So President Trump said, all right, I gave you plenty of chances.
It couldn't have been more chances for you to do it yourself.
Now we'll do it. And he would go after individuals and individual companies in other countries.
I think that's unprecedented, at least at the scale we did it, and certainly for this purpose.
That was probably one of the biggest deals.
And then he strengthened that by showing the satellite pictures of the captured cargo ships or tankers.
Visual persuasion is very good.
And we showed him, look, we can see you from space.
Here's a picture of your ship.
You only have to take a few of those ships and then suddenly the economics of being a sanction breaker doesn't work anymore.
Because, you know, you're not going to take a 20% chance of your whole company going out of business just to get a little extra margin on some sanction breaking.
All right. President Trump, of course, added military unpredictability to the mix.
Kim Jong Un never really knew and still doesn't know what President Trump is capable of.
This is intentional.
He talks about it all the time.
President Trump does. And probably was important on the psychology of the situation.
President Trump made the risk to Kim feel real and immediate.
The fire and fury comment is really good persuasion.
Fire is something that you kind of see and feel and you can visualize really easy.
Fury is one of those great words that just allows you to imagine whatever's the worst thing you can imagine and there's fire there at the same time.
And it's also unusual language coming from an American president.
So it sticks in your head and you're like, I can't stop thinking about fire and fury.
That's really good persuasion from the president.
President Trump did something called pacing, which is where you match the person you're trying to influence.
In this case, he matched Kim Jong-un insult for insult.
And they were kind of funny insults.
You know, they were serious and funny at the same time.
And what President Trump did that looked like it was crazy when people were watching it, but never was, was he took this what was this dangerous rhetoric and he made it silly.
He just turned it silly because he was a little over the top with Rocket Man and then the dotard came back and I'm not going to call you short and fat.
I hope we can be friends. He took it from this literally deadly serious mode to what's happening here?
You can imagine Kim Jong-un saying, all right, what did the president who's got his arsenal aimed at me, what is he saying?
I won't call you short and fat.
What's happening here? The what's happening here moment is deeply important because it just took them from whatever mindset they were in to, what's happening here?
I thought I knew the situation.
I think we're supposed to say evil things, make shows of force, say we'll never back down.
I don't know what's happening here with these tweets.
So suddenly your mind goes to just a different place and that opens up options, keeps them off balance.
Somebody just said, exactly.
It just created options because it put minds in different places.
President Trump's 20 tweets were personal messages to Kim.
So instead of talking about North Korea, he talked directly to Kim in public.
In a weird way, that treated him like a peer.
He sort of took Kim Jong-un to the presidential debate level publicly.
Which in a weird way is showing him respect, even though they were insulting each other.
I suppose you would have to be male to fully understand the psychology of this.
But when men do locker room talk to each other, it's...
It's sort of a weird bonding exercise.
And I think that this taunting back and forth, you know, we'll know someday when we hear what Kim Jong-un says about it.
But I think in some way it humanized both of them and put them on a talking level and just made them imagine they could talk to each other.
They showed that they were the same person in terms of, you know, some of their approaches to public discourse.
Here's a big one. Trump expanded the discussion, meaning the peace discussion, from nuclear weapons or no nuclear weapons, which had always been the question.
The question had only been nukes or no nukes.
And we had often said, that's all we care about.
We don't care about anything else, just nukes or no nukes, limited to that.
But that's not many variables.
It's hard to make a deal when you have so few variables.
But President Trump either expanded or agreed to allow it to expand, it could have been somebody else's initiative, to turn it into a conversation about reunification.
And that might have been Kim Jong-un, which was kind of brilliant on his part, I think.
Because once you've got reunification...
And a denuclearization question, suddenly all the problems of denuclearizing are lessened.
Because if you're doing so many things to reunify, it just makes trust easier.
It makes it clear what direction everybody wants to go.
It tells you what's in everybody's minds.
You don't have to guess.
Everybody's on the same path.
Why would you destroy the country that you're trying to reunify, right?
So many of the problems of verification, trust, and all the things that are hard to do with a nuclear program, they just sort of become non-problems when reunification is on the table and serious.
So that was a big, big deal.
The other thing Trump did is he squeezed the North Korean economy in escalating steps.
So he started with, you know, a little squeeze, didn't work, better squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.
And what he did was he created this mental pattern where North Korea could look at the squeezing and say, uh-oh, every single time it changes, it gets worse.
There's a pretty clear pattern here.
It's just going to get worse.
Until there's nothing left over here.
So President Trump went to a ruination level sanctions and I don't think North Korea thought that would happen.
I imagine that they thought we wouldn't go to the point of literally just destroying North Korea economically.
But Trump made it pretty clear that was on the table.
Complete economic destruction and fairly soon.
It looked like it was going to happen this year.
Nobody did that before.
And then, fire and fury.
Let's talk about that. I talked about what great visual persuasion is, but it's just one of those things you can't get out of your head.
It becomes almost a brand.
Did you see how cleverly you branded North Korea with the fire and fury?
Like, you can't get that out of your head.
I imagine how many times that phrase was mentioned in North Korea in whatever translated form.
Alright, so those are a sample of things that President Trump did to get progress in North Korea.
We're just going to call it progress because we hope it ends well.
Looks like it will. And I'm creating this Periscope as well as you saw me tweet, and then I just did an easier to read version of the same list that I just read on my blog, just so there's a permanent record.
I would like to give permission to any other outlets or media people.
If you'd like to copy my list, you have my permission to copy.
And you can take it word for word if you like.
Because I think this is one of those situations where I'm not looking for the copyright credit.
I'm just looking for an agreement that something happened here that we could all see.
Now, you may have seen my exchanges with Chris Silliza.
I think I'm pronouncing that right.
Of CNN.
He would be one of the president's biggest consistent critics.
And he's still on the stormy, stormy, stormy story.
And I may have lost my temper a little bit on social media.
You know, here's my issue.
And And I said this in my follow-up tweet to him, in which I was unkind.
But consider the real, what appears to be the situation.
Now, I can't say this is 100% accurate, but it's looking 95% accurate, so I'm willing to say it.
Without President Trump as our president, I believe we would be in a very bad situation with North Korea.
It's not clear to me that President Clinton could have gotten us to this point because President Clinton is sort of the old way of thinking that got us to the bad point.
So I'll use my favorite saying, the old way of thinking got us to where we were.
Was Hillary Clinton going to add a new kind of thinking?
Probably not. And we're talking about nuclear war here.
So, when I started talking favorably about President Trump very early in the process, and I know nobody's going to believe this, but those of you who have watched me long enough maybe have some trust that I wouldn't lie about this.
It's exactly the sort of thing that somebody would lie about, and I have no way of proving it, but I think I have a little bit of credibility with some of you.
A big, big part of what I saw as the potential of President Trump is this, the North Korea thing.
It looked to me like it was a dealmaker's problem and not a military problem.
And I thought, what the hell?
I know Trump is going to break some dishes.
Nobody supported President Trump and thought to themselves, well, he's going to ballet through that china shop and he'll never touch a dish.
No, nobody thought that.
Everybody thought he was going to come in with both elbows, knocking dishes off of both sides of the aisle.
But that he could do a few things that just weren't doable by regular mainstream politicians.
So the North Korean situation was, in my mind, always number one on the reason to have a President Trump.
Let's get back to Chris Silliza.
He and his CNN buddies, many of them anyway, seem fairly obviously trying to remove the President and have since Inauguration Day.
Now, in a normal situation, there are sides and people are biased and, you know, it's just a normal situation.
It doesn't make much difference. In this case, had Chris Silliza, let's say, broken a great story or framed it right, and let's say he'd done his job so well that he actually removed President Trump before this North Korea progress.
We're talking about CNN employees who could have literally destroyed the country in a nuclear fireball.
Am I exaggerating?
Isn't it true that CNN almost destroyed the country in a nuclear war?
Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me that Chris Silliza, specifically, because he is sort of a, I would say he's maybe the most prominent voice on the anti-Trumpers of the people who are there every day.
A lot of the talking heads come and go.
But of the people who are there every day.
He's probably the strongest anti-Trump voice.
If he had gotten his way, and it's pretty obvious that what he would prefer is the removal of President Trump.
He would not be alone in that.
That's half the country, probably.
If he had gotten his way, we would be in nuclear peril with no hope of fixing it.
And you look at the size of that.
And I think here's what touched me off a little bit.
Those of us who put our necks out for this president, we did it for this.
And you know who I'm talking about, because many of you are in the same position.
Those of us who lost our friends, those of us who...
There are people who got divorced over this.
People who their careers suffered.
There are people who got beaten, beaten in the streets for supporting this president.
Now, some might say we did it so he would lower our taxes.
Well, that's fine. Taxes are real.
They affect people. That's not why I did it.
I did it for this.
This is why I did it.
So, you're welcome.
For all those people who have been trying to stop this from happening, meaning progress in North Korea, you are on the wrong side.
And I don't think it could be any more clear at this point We still hope that it ends in a good result, and it looks like it will.
But a lot of us took a lot of abuse for two years.
A lot of abuse.
And we did it voluntarily.
Nobody had to be here.
Every one of you is a volunteer.
We all volunteered.
For years of abuse to get this.
So, too early to celebrate, and I'm not going to ask you to.
But we did this for a reason.
This wasn't random, and it wasn't because we thought we wanted a big ol' racist Hitler president.
I've never even met anybody who thought like that.
So it's an interesting time, and perhaps the beginning of the Golden Age.
So, that's enough on that point.
I've got a bunch of work I need to do today, and I'm going to go do that.
So, congratulations to all of you, pre-congratulations, for being part of something that may be just a gift to the world.
And you know what I say about success in North Korea?
Let me tell you. This is what I say about success in North Korea.
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