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Jan. 24, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
10:55
Episode 387 Scott Adams: President Trump’s Tweet Saying he Would Wait
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Hey everybody!
And when I say everybody, I mean there won't be many of you, because I'm doing this at night.
It's a rare coffee with Scott Adams without the coffee!
Hello everybody!
We're doing a water tonight.
So we're just going to pop in and do one topic, and then I might hit it again tomorrow.
Would you like to join me for the simultaneous sip of water?
It's a good time for water.
Mmm. Okay, if you don't already know it, President Trump tweeted that he will accept Pelosi's suggestion of waiting to do the State of the Union until after the government shutdown is ended.
And, of course, tomorrow there will be lots of chatter about that, about, oh, he blinked, or she won, and he gave it, and things like that.
But I wanted to give you a little context.
You probably won't hear if you don't hear from me.
Number one, timing.
Timing is everything.
A week ago, If I have my time correct.
I think about a week ago, I suggested when this first came up, when Pelosi first said he was disinvited, I and many other people said, hey, so what?
He can just go do his own thing, do a rally.
It's more fun.
He won't be constrained by the State of the Union stuffiness.
It'd be a great time.
But something happened.
Between the time that it seemed like a good idea to just go off and do a great rally and get some attention that way, something happened.
The Covington kids.
And the Covington kids makes it impossible for him to do a rally right now.
Do you see it yet?
If the president gave an off-site rally, open to, let's say, you know, just supporters, or anybody who wanted to come, but it would end up being supporters, what would they wear to the rally?
That rally would be full of red hats.
Even people who didn't think they would wear one before might be tempted to wear one just in solidarity.
How would the media spin the visuals?
The visuals would be spun like it was a KKK event.
Now, a week ago, I don't think it would have mattered at all because he's done lots of rallies.
People wear the hats.
It's one of the more normal sites that we're used to.
But because the press has taken advantage of this Covington situation To completely ruin the symbolism of the hat and turn it into literally a racist symbol, which of course it was never intended to be, but the persuasion game of the Dems is solid.
If I'm going to be consistent and compliment the president when he makes a good persuasion play, I'm going to do it for both sides.
The Democrats and their teammates, the media, have actually turned the most successful campaign symbol of all time, the MAGA hats.
And I think you'd agree, right?
Wasn't it the most successful branding and campaign symbol of all time?
I think. I think that's fair to say.
And they actually succeeded In destroying it.
They destroyed it.
I'm not sure it can come back.
And I think the president would be wise to pick a different design, maybe something, you know, more flag related or something for the next one.
So, somebody's saying, this is a BS argument.
So I think those who are resisting what I'm saying are probably saying to themselves, nobody can tell us what hats to wear.
And that's true.
Nobody is suggesting that the law be changed.
You know, you've got freedom of speech.
You can wear a hat.
But... Because it's so close to this Covington situation and the hats became sort of the focal point of all the hatred, at this point, a big visual with nothing but Trump supporters wearing that hat would be the absolute worst thing that this president could ever do.
It would be the most immense persuasion mistake of all time.
I mean, it would be epic.
And I gotta say that none of that would have been true except for the Covington story so close to this event.
So our minds kind of conflate the two and one story bleeds into the next and it all becomes one big continuum.
But beyond that, beyond the fact that it really wasn't possible, so there just wasn't an option anymore to do that rally because of the Covington thing, So he took probably the best option that was still available, which was the high ground maneuver.
So instead of calling Pelosi names or giving her a nickname, instead of...
And by the way, I heard the president say he was talking about Pelosi, and he goes, I call her Nancy.
And I thought, he doesn't even have an insulting nickname for her.
He's completely playing it like he's showing respect.
What the president has done is he's taken the high ground because there was this childish tit-for-tat with the, you know, canceling the flight to Afghanistan.
She cancels the State of the Union.
So instead of just doing more tit-for-tat, she abandoned the high ground with her latest move of canceling the State of the Union.
So the high ground was just open.
There was nobody at the high ground.
She had joined him in the mud.
And completely abandon the high ground.
And the high ground was he just respects that she's the Speaker of the House, and that the House gets to decide, and he's respecting the tradition, and he's respecting that the government is closed, and he's respecting that people are getting paid, and he's respecting that maybe you should wait.
So all of the things that you think Trump isn't, He just did.
You think he's impulsive and crazy.
You think he doesn't respect anything.
You think he's a dictator.
Whatever. Whatever the critics are saying about him.
Simply by accepting that, yes, you get to decide.
You get to decide if I'm invited or when.
So we'll do it later as you suggest.
So he's becoming the adult in the room because there weren't any.
He sort of dragged the Democrats down as he often does.
But once they got down to his level, they had abandoned the high ground.
So it turns out it was his only path because he couldn't really do a rally because of the visuals.
So here's why I wanted to do this tonight.
This move is so reasonable, so reasonable, that the critics are going to have to, you know, be against it, and it's going to make them look like petty children.
They're going to be talking about who did this or that.
They're going to be talking about what he's really thinking.
But they're going to be sort of bickering in the weeds.
And he's just not even going to be part of that conversation.
Because he just said, yeah, it's your decision.
That's it. That's it.
I respect the tradition.
I respect the House. I respect Pelosi's decision.
Now, there's one other possibility here.
And I want to just sort of put this out here.
There is one other possibility that he might not want to do the State of the Union really soon.
And that possibility is that there's something bigger percolating.
And I don't mean bigger on this same topic.
I don't mean about the border, necessarily.
And I don't mean about the State of the Union.
It feels like maybe he needed to clear his schedule.
So that's just one hypothesis.
That's not a prediction.
But there are a couple of reasons that he might do what he's doing.
And one of them might be that there's something bigger he needs to spend his time on.
So I would make a prediction that there might be something going on somewhere in the world.
Could be Middle East.
Could be Venezuela. Could be China.
Could be North Korea.
North Korea is always a good guess.
So there just might be something bigger percolating and he might need to work on that.
And he didn't want to have a rally anyway because the red hats were just going to be a bad visual this week.
Maybe in a month.
Nobody cares about that.
But this week it would be super divisive.
Can you imagine a State of the Union which is supposed to bring the country together?
It's the one thing everybody agrees, at least its intention, is to try to get people on the same page.
But if he did it as a rally, it would just be his supporters.
And it would send exactly the wrong message.
So as much fun as it would have been to do a State of the Union Trump style in full entertaining mode, it would have been great.
But it just couldn't work this close to the Covington thing and the visual with the hats.
Alright, that is why I wanted to get on at night to get ahead of some of this.
And that's all I wanted to talk about.
I'll talk to you in the morning.
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