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July 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
17:16
Episode 143 - Trump/Putin Press Conference
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Let's talk about the Trump-Putin press conference, shall we?
Let's wait until we get a thousand people in here.
It's probably going to happen pretty quickly.
Wow, was that interesting.
That was one of the most interesting press conferences.
If you haven't flipped back and forth between the Fox News coverage and the CNN coverage, you're really missing the show because the difference in the coverage is quite striking.
Yeah, George Soros' name came up.
All right.
Alright, so I was watching CNN when the analysts and Anderson Cooper were sort of giving their first reaction to the press conference.
I'd like to give my impression of everybody at CNN who just watched the press conference between Trump and Putin.
And it goes like this.
Oh my God!
Ah! Ah!
Scene. I think, what did Anderson Cooper call it?
Embarrassing to the country?
Now, here's my take on it.
You shouldn't take...
Too much stock in what either of them said publicly.
Because you can't really know what they really believe versus what they think they need to say.
Let me give you, in no particular order, some of my impressions.
Number one, when a reporter asked Putin if he had any compromising information on Trump, Do you know what Putin did not say?
No. He left out no.
So when Putin was asked, do you have any embarrassing, compromising information on Trump, he said, well, let me tell you the story about there were lots of billionaires who came.
I didn't know he was in the country at that time, which wasn't the question.
The question wasn't Did you know Trump was in the country before he was running for president?
That wasn't the question.
The question was, do you have any compromising information?
And he completely ignored the question.
Now, that would have been an easy question to say no to.
And you'd think that he would just say no to it.
So it's possible he wants to leave the impression that maybe he does.
Because if you didn't, it would still be useful to have somebody thinking, well, maybe I do.
Now, do you think that the United States has embarrassing and compromising information about Putin?
Probably. Don't you think?
Don't you think that all the major countries...
Have compromising personal information on all the other leaders?
It feels like they probably do.
So I would say that Putin's response to that was as obviously deceptive as you could possibly be.
Which is not to say that he has anything under president that means anything or would make any difference.
But as a normal course of business, of course they're looking for that stuff.
And if you were looking hard in President Trump's history, would you find anything that would be embarrassing, like a Stormy Daniels kind of situation that we don't know about?
Probably. Probably.
But that doesn't mean it would be useful to them.
So Russia may know full well that if they were to have something of that nature and then also exploit it, that that would not be a good thing for them.
So it could be that they just have mutually assured destruction and everybody has something on everybody.
That's entirely possible.
But he certainly didn't answer the question.
Another amazing points were when the president said that both countries have made mistakes.
Both countries have made mistakes.
And of course, if you're CNN, you say to that, he's a traitor.
He's saying bad things about the United States.
That's one way to look at it.
The other way to look at it is as pacing and leading.
When you pace somebody, you match what they're thinking.
And you try to not be a dick on every single item.
You try to find some place where it looks like you're meeting them halfway, you're matching them, you're going along.
So you find something that's not terribly important to agree with.
And one of the things that the president did to at least half of the country's horror is he paced him.
In other words, he did exactly what you would want to do if you were trying to influence somebody.
You would first agree with some of the things they say, not all of them, because you have more chance of influencing them on the important stuff if you agree with them on some of the little stuff.
So the little stuff is, hey, have you done any bad things?
We've done some bad things.
You've done some bad things.
I guess we've all done some bad things.
So it is completely a good form.
To admit that your side is not perfect because that gives you a little bit of agreement with the other side and then it allows them to say, well, okay, we could have done better too.
So, in terms of persuasion form, very good.
In terms of how CNN and his critics will treat it, it's the end of the world.
It's the end of the world to say something that's both true and honest and helpful.
End of the world.
I'm going to make this point tie into the press conference.
Have you seen the polls of how the opinions in the United States about Russia, at least within the Republican Party, have moved from very anti-Russia to far more favorable to Russia?
Have you seen the polls showing that, at least within the Republicans, they're more pro-Russia?
Now people ask me, hey, why is it you keep saying President Trump is persuasive?
Well, there's a pretty good example.
President Trump's persuasion is quite directly aimed at creating a more favorable Russian opinion, and he succeeded.
He actually moved the public, or at least the Republican part of the public, quite substantially.
So what you're seeing...
Is the president using his persuasive powers in a way that nobody's ever used them before?
Because he's violated a whole bunch of norms.
One of the norms would be you've got to act consistently like everything we do is good and everything the other side does is bad and has to change.
And we must pressure them, pressure them to change because it's the only way, it's the only language they understand.
They only know force.
So that's sort of the old way and those were the rules.
Now how far do you get with those rules?
If those are the rules you're playing...
That everything your side does is right, and everything the other side does is wrong, what do you get?
Well, you get our current situation, where two big countries with nuclear weapons are causing trouble for each other for no particularly good reason.
So what does President Trump do, which he does in every domain he enters?
The first thing he does is says, what are the rules, and which ones are Well, he shook the hell out of this box.
And one of the rules that you're not supposed to break is to go in front of the world and criticize your own country.
That's a rule. You're not supposed to do that.
So he did it. He didn't do it just because he likes breaking rules.
He did it because it was an unproductive rule.
Following that rule of everything your country does is awesome and everything your competitor does is terrible and bad and they have to change and we're going to force them into it, that wasn't working so well.
So he shook the box and he said, how about both sides screwed up?
Maybe both sides need to do better.
That changes how Russia is perceived.
Changes how they feel.
Changes how aggressively they think they need to punch back.
Those people who say that Russia already won because he got elevated to the center stage and is being treated nice by the President of the United States.
So some people say, The President Trump has already been played.
He's been played because Putin got all this attention and he got to be on the public stage.
Here's the other way to look at these same set of facts.
President Trump isn't just elevating Putin.
He is elevating him.
He did elevate him to the center stage and put him on literally the same stage as President of the United States.
So he is elevating him.
That part's true. But there's another thing he's doing.
He's authoring him.
Putin is becoming what Trump needs him to become in order to get to the next level.
Trump Putin is molding Putin like a little piece of clay in order to create a Putin that he can deal with and get a good result.
Because right now he has a broken Putin, a Putin that you can't deal with because, you know, the friction and blah blah blah.
So he is authoring himself a new Putin.
In the same way that he authored Putin, A new Kim Jong-un.
Do you remember the old Kim Jong-un?
He was a crazy dictator and he didn't know anything and he was an evil madman and all he could do is cause trouble and aim his nukes at us.
And President Trump authored a new Kim Jong-un.
He built a new one.
The new one writes love letters to the president saying, Your Excellency, I sure hope we can work together.
Let me help you find the remains of your Korean War veterans.
Let's work together with South Korea.
Yeah, well, you know, there'll be some hiccups, but we're now friends working toward a common good.
So remember when...
When I first told you that the president was authoring Kim Jong-un, that didn't seem real, did it?
Well, you watched it.
You watched it happen right in front of you.
Kim Jong-un, his brand, and this is a good way to look at it, his brand is now completely different, and it's a brand that's now useful.
Because that brand works really well with our brand.
It works well with South Korea.
So now he's got a good brand, Kim Jong-un does, one that's useful.
That doesn't mean he hasn't done terrible things.
We're not forgiving any of that.
But his brand was completely broken.
There was nobody you could talk to, nobody you could deal with.
You had to fix Kim Jong-un's brand, and then you had somebody to talk to.
You're watching exactly the same play with Putin.
While CNN will be saying, my God, this is disgraceful and we've never been so embarrassed.
We've never been so embarrassed about this president who criticizes his own country and his own intel agency right in front of the world while Putin is standing right next to him.
That's an accurate statement.
Of what you're seeing. There are a lot of people in the United States who feel embarrassed.
And he did elevate Putin to the level.
So, address John Brennan.
I don't know what John Brennan is saying, but I assume it's his usual John Brennan stuff.
So, what you're watching is a Putin that is now defining...
He's beginning to be defined by Trump.
And one of the ways that would make Putin a brand we can't deal with is if we made a big deal about their cyber actions and interference with the election.
It seems to me that if Putin continued to do that sort of thing with elections in the future...
And why would he, by the way, especially if he likes having a President Trump?
So it feels like even the critics would agree that Putin prefers a President Trump.
So if Russia interfered, I don't know why they would need to at this point.
You admit interference and Trump won't.
Yeah, I believe that we interfere with their stuff, they interfere with our stuff, and that the best way to deal with that interference, mutual, I'm sure, is that you don't talk about it in a press conference.
So it does seem to me that Russia and the United States have certainly had frank conversations by now, whether it was today or through other channels, in which we've said, if you do this, there's going to be real trouble.
So it does make sense for President Trump to downplay Russia's past behavior.
It's just a good play.
And it does make sense for them to, you know, still say we got issues and it's not perfect, but we're moving in the right direction.
I kind of liked Putin's play of saying, Mueller can come over here and talk to our citizens, and as long as we can go talk to some of your citizens about some of our problems.
And CNN dismissed that as, well, that's just Putin being Putin, his usual obtuse way to answer a question, just making it sound like there's some bureaucratic this or that.
But I thought to myself, well, that actually sounded kind of practical to me.
And did you see how Putin described the company?
I think he was talking about the company that was alleged to have done the ads.
The ads that were supposed to be affecting the election.
And Putin basically said, hey, there are rich guys in our country and they do stuff.
That doesn't mean they're working for the government.
Do you remember when I said, I looked at those ads by the troll farm, the Russian troll farm, and I said to myself, well, there's one thing we can say for sure.
The Russian government isn't behind this because they were so bad.
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