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May 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
16:25
Episode 538 Scott Adams: President Trump Walking out of Chuck/Nancy Meeting
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here. Let's talk about that infrastructure meeting that didn't go as planned.
Soon as we get a thousand people in here, I'll jump into the topic.
Only take a moment.
Hey everybody! Hey Gary, Leo, Jeremy, and Alex.
So, this will be just a short periscope on one topic.
I'll tell you, historians are someday going to give President Trump more respect than people give him now.
And this is one of those situations.
I could not love more The fact that Trump walked out of the infrastructure meeting with Chuck and Nancy.
If you haven't seen the news, there was a follow-up infrastructure meeting in which Schumer and Pelosi and Trump were going to meet and talk about how to pay for things that largely people on both sides want to do in regards to infrastructure.
But the president showed up, made it a three-minute meeting in which he said that you can't have two tracks.
You can't have a permanent investigation track at the same time that you're doing real work.
And so he excused himself to go do real work.
He didn't say it that way, but that's kind of what happened.
Now, here's everything I love about this.
Let us start on the factual level first, which doesn't matter to anything.
If I've taught you nothing, the facts don't really matter.
The reason, the rational, the thought, we can talk about those, but then I'm going to dismiss them.
So let me say right off front, Of course the government can have two tracks at the same time.
That's what a government does.
It has lots of things that it does at the same time.
Of course Trump could, if he wanted to, do infrastructure at the same time that there are investigations.
So on a logical, factual, rational level, what the president did makes no sense, and I would not be the one to defend it.
But this is what makes him special.
He knows that doesn't matter.
I mean, he knows that the rational, factual part is just not the important part.
The rational, factual part is that he saw an opening and he took it.
And the opening was this.
I think he was probably waiting for this.
I'm not going to read his mind, but I think, you know, at least one possibility is that he was looking for an opening to do something like what he did.
And like what he did, He framed the Democrats in a new way.
The old framing had been the witch hunt.
So the witch hunt framing says that you're a victim and people are coming after you.
So that's what the president has been under for the last three years.
Now, a witch hunt is actually an improvement over what the public was thinking, at least a lot of the public, is that he was guilty of colluding with Russia.
So when the president reframed colluding with Russia to a witch hunt, that was an upgrade.
A witch hunt, it's better to be the victim of a witch hunt, assuming that you don't actually get burned at the stake.
It's better to be chased on false charges, way better, than it is to actually have committed treason.
So he reframed it to the best he could do, which was to call it a witch hunt.
And now he just took it to another level.
Because the witch hunt thing, even though it was better than the alternative, still frames him as a victim.
This is not really the president who likes being framed as a victim.
It doesn't really work with his brand.
He likes to be on offense.
And so he saw the opening and he took it.
And he has just reframed the Democrats, thanks to the fact that the Mueller report is out and there's enough out that he can tell the story.
That the investigation has been done and anything else you do is just incompetence.
So he's reframed it from Hey, you may or may not be guilty of treason against your country up to, well, this is a witch hunt and he sold it.
He sold it. Most of the country sees now.
Certainly not the hardcore left, but most of the country sees that it was closer to a witch hunt than anything else.
And now he's taking it to the next level because he had this opportunity and he's reframed it another time.
And the new reframe is that they're completely incompetent And they can't even work on the business of the government, and he's not even going to be in a room with people this useless.
Now remember, on the logic, the facts, the reason level, none of this makes sense.
Of course he could be in the meeting.
Of course he could sit at the table.
Of course he could make infrastructure decisions.
But man, was this a good time not to do it.
Wow! It was so good!
Now he uses this imagery of the two tracks.
Which is another Trump signature move.
It's visual. You literally see two tracks.
He goes, you can't be on two tracks at the same time.
And you say to yourself, well, yeah, if I were trying to be on two tracks at the same time, I'm only one person.
How can one person be in two places?
Makes no sense at all.
But it's still persuasive.
This is a persuasion trick.
Reasons that don't have real reasons are actually very persuasive.
It's the thinking behind what I call the fake because.
If you say you should do X because, you don't even have to have a good reason after because.
Simply framing it in the form of a question makes people think that the because means something.
So the fact that Trump says you can't be on two tracks at the same time, and your mind goes to a physical place where you actually couldn't put your body in two places at one time, you say, huh.
Yeah, I guess you can. You can't really be in two tracks at the same time.
Completely ridiculous imagery, because being in a meeting talking about infrastructure is not a track.
You can certainly have a meeting, but you still uncritically process it like it's impossible.
You can't be in two places at one time.
So persuasion-wise, it's really strong.
And Pelosi and Schumer were caught off balance, and they were left hanging again.
It's like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football.
I mean, Trump basically rebranded Schumer.
And Pelosi, as Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, and Trump is like, hey, hey, Nancy, hey, Chuck, you want to kick the football?
This time I'm going to keep it here.
No, I'm not going to move it.
No, we've got a meeting.
We all agree on infrastructure.
Who would disagree on infrastructure?
Come kick my football.
Here you come. Here you come. Whoops.
Okay. You know that Trump is always playing on several levels at the same time.
One of the levels he plays on is that he is literally and consciously, and this part I know for sure, entertaining his base.
He is literally entertaining us.
Were you more amused by anything that happened today than the first time you heard that Trump once again walked out of a meeting with Chuck and Nancy?
Was there anything that made you happier today?
Nothing! If you're a Trump supporter.
If you're a Trump supporter, nothing made you happier today than knowing he did that.
That was for us. That was like, he pays us back.
When people support him, he pays back.
It's a very conscious decision to give you back a little entertainment.
But it was more than that.
It was functional. It reframed Chuck and Nancy.
And here's the best part.
They didn't have time to prepare their responses.
So if you saw their responses individually, Pelosi and Schumer, their responses were so bad.
So Pelosi tried to turn this and she tried to go back to one of the old attacks.
So she described it as bizarre.
It was just bizarre.
So bizarre. So she was trying to sell it as Trump is unstable, crazy, unpredictable, whatever.
So she was trying to go back to that old there's something wrong with his personality thing.
But I don't think anybody sees it that way.
Because for me, walking into a meeting saying I can't work with clowns like you and walking out is sort of the opposite of being crazy.
It's sort of...
Sort of perfect. So Pelosi just failed hard because she just didn't have anything except it was bizarre.
It was weird. I didn't know what to do.
Yeah, it's the first time anybody walked out of a meeting.
Never saw that before in the history of humanity.
Schumer was even funnier because he tried to sell it as part of a clever plot by the president to avoid saying where he would find the money for the thing he wants to do.
Do you think this president can't find money for something he wants to do?
You know, maybe they have a disagreement about where to find the money, but both sides want infrastructure and they know it costs money.
That was the weakest Defense by Schumer to say, I think he's just trying to distract.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, yeah, I'm going with this.
He's trying to distract from the fact that nobody has figured out where to get the money, and he didn't want to say where to get the money.
Credibility level, zero.
Trump just slapped them down so hard.
And I have to say, persuasion aside, just as a citizen, I so support this.
I so support the president walking out of that meeting and telling them he's just not going to deal with them when their primary job is to destroy the government.
And we have a country that's running pretty darn well right now.
And they're trying to stop whatever good is happening with their small machinations.
Now, the other thing that's sort of new-ish is that there's definitely some kind of investigation fatigue.
And I'm pretty sure that even the Democrats are getting exhausted looking for things and waiting for things and praying for things and imagining for things and then not getting any things.
So I think the country doesn't care enough, doesn't pay attention to the small ball.
You know, the lawyer said something to a lawyer that might not have been true.
It's like the same story over and over again.
You just change the name of the lawyers.
Let's change the name of this lawyer and just rerun the story.
It's the same story. We just change the names of the lawyers.
So he knows that the country is exhausted.
And by the way, one of the reasons that this president understands the mood of the country so well is exactly the thing that he's criticized for the most, which is watching a lot of CNN and Fox News on television.
If you are trying to understand the mood of the country, reading a deep investigative report in the New York Times won't do it.
It'll just tell you what one reporter and some editors thought about a topic.
That's it. But if you want to understand the mood of the country, if you want to know how people feel, skipping back and forth between CNN and Fox News will really give that to you pretty quickly.
And I think this president is brilliant for knowing that that's the lever that moves the world.
It's the thing that touches our emotions the most.
If you can understand those two views of the world, and you have to see both, No fair just watching Fox News or just CNN. You have to watch them both or you don't get the mood of the country.
I think he has properly deduced the following about the mood of the country.
Number one, everyone agrees we need more infrastructure improvements.
Number two, Nobody's quite sure what these infrastructure improvements would be or exactly how they would affect their lives personally.
It's sort of a big, vague thing that you know is important, but you can't put a picture on it.
There's not a person or a face involved with it.
It's just this big concept.
It was the perfect meeting to walk out of.
If he had walked out of a meeting about How do we negotiate with North Korea?
That would look like the end of the world.
If he'd walked out of an ordinary budget meeting, you'd say, well, who's running the country?
Somebody's got to come up with a budget.
If he'd walked out of most other kinds of meetings, people would have said, Trump, do your job.
Get back in the meeting. Your job is to be in that room.
Go back in that room. But because it's infrastructure, which people know is important, but not exactly how.
I don't know. Will my pothole go away?
I don't know. Am I going to get faster internet?
Something like that? What's going to happen with this infrastructure?
A better bridge?
I haven't seen one fall down in my lifetime, at least not personally.
I know they fall down. So he picked the exact right spot.
To humiliate and rebrand the Democrats as the worthless party that is so worthless you can't even sit in a room with them.
You can't even sit in a room with them because they're so worthless that they're so busy trying to destroy the government that they can't even do their job.
Now again, none of that is true.
None of that is rational.
None of that is reasonable.
Anything I just said about the functioning of the government or people doing their jobs.
People can do all this stuff at the same time.
We do it all the time. We can walk and chew gum, as they say.
But in terms of how this feels and looks, it looks like the president just reframed from witch hunt up to so worthless they can't even sit in a room without messing it up with investigations.
So I love everything that the President did on this.
I'm 100% supportive.
And by the way, I'm pretty sure I would say this if the parties were reversed.
I know that's not true of most people, but in my case, I would definitely say if the situation were reversed, let's have fewer investigations.
And in fact, when Bill Clinton was being investigated for all of his Many, many issues.
I also said, how about less of that because we don't care about the sex life.
So I've been consistent on this.
And I think most of the country would like a lot fewer lawyers in the news and a lot more, you know, progress in the news.
All right. That's the only thing that...
I wanted to say that he made a brilliant reframing, and I think history will record that nobody ever did this sort of thing better, and it's very impressive.
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