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July 15, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:01
Episode 598 Scott Adams: Trump’s “Go Back” Tweet, Possible Iran Nuclear Deal
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So, I haven't checked the news.
Is there anything in the news about President Trump that I should know about?
out.
Let me check.
Checking the news.
That's right.
President Trump has stirred the pot.
Bye.
He's the troller in chief.
He's at it again.
So, in case there are two or three people in the entire universe who are not aware, the president did some tweeting.
He did some tweeting.
And I'm going to read you the entire three-part tweet.
I'm going to read you the whole thing in case anybody has to.
And then we're going to talk about it.
Because it seems that people's hair is on fire.
All right. So this is what the president tweeted.
So interesting to see, quote, progressive Democrat congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.
The worst, most corrupt, and inept anywhere in the world, if they even have a functioning government at all, now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States that the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run.
Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came?
Then come back and show us how.
It is done. These places need your help badly.
You can't leave fast enough.
I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements.
All right, so how does CNN cover this story?
Well, CNN covers the story the way they cover all stories about President Trump.
The way they cover the fine people hoax.
The way they cover the feeding the goldfish story.
You could probably think of a few more.
The way you cover this story is you leave out stuff.
Because if you don't leave out stuff, it doesn't sound nearly as bad as if you do leave in stuff.
So let me translate for you.
What this tweet means.
Now, a lot of people have been translating it from English into racist.
And I'd like to translate it into one additional language.
And it's called New Yorker.
I want to show you how this works.
We'll go to the whiteboard.
So this is what these words mean.
If you were to say, go back where you came from, and that's all you said, That would be racist, by general agreement.
You know, we don't know what you're actually thinking, but society would generally say, well, that's sort of racist, if the person you're talking to happens to be a different race than the speaker.
However, if you say what the president said, go back where you came from, fix it, and then come back and show us how it's done, that's called New Yorker trash talk.
New Yorker trash talk.
Alright, so if you include the entire quote, and I'm paraphrasing here, but that's the essence of it, it's New Yorker trash talk.
And it doesn't mean anything, really, because he's not actually telling her to go back, or telling anybody to go back anywhere.
Nobody's literally being told to go anywhere, because that's ridiculous.
It would be ridiculous.
Nobody's going anywhere. Nobody's expected to go anywhere.
Nobody is going anywhere.
It's New Yorker trash talk.
But if he'd said it the way CNN reports it, without the second part, go back where you came from, well, I think we'd all agree that that would be a little bit too far, wouldn't it?
So, with great interest, I decided to check CNN's reporting to see how often they add the second part.
Where he says, come back, after you figure it out, come back and fix it for us.
You would think that the come back part would make it pretty clear that this is just, you know, regular New York trash talk.
Somebody says, Scott, you're going down if you back this one.
I'm going to delete you.
You are gone.
I just don't like the gloominess.
Will I go down if I back this?
Here's why I deleted him.
I don't back things.
If your framing of this situation is who is backing somebody or who is not backing somebody or who is endorsing the tweet or not endorsing it, I don't want to talk to you anymore.
Because you have a frame that's bad for the world.
Bad for the world.
So if somebody wants to tattoo this tweet on me, you're welcome to do it, because it's a terrible world full of terrible people.
But I'm going to block you, okay?
All right. So let's talk about this strategically.
What we can't know is what the president is thinking.
But we can know that there's a reasonable interpretation and an unreasonable one.
The reasonable one is that he's just trolling.
He knows exactly what this tweet is going to do.
And we'll get to the strategy behind it in a moment.
But he had to know I think it's fair to say.
Would you all agree on the following statement?
The President had to know this would be super provocative and that he would be accused of exactly what he's being accused of.
Would you agree that that part we probably all agree on he knew what the outcome would be?
So let's see. Let's look at this tweet in terms of how it played out and how it's likely to play out.
Now, if I describe...
What happened and is likely to happen, you understand, you're all smart enough to know, that's different from saying, I embrace the message, or it's my message, or I'm backing him.
I'm simply describing it, then I'm describing what might happen.
We're all adult enough to simply describe things, right?
To understand them. Let's do that.
So, what's the first thing that this tweet did?
After it's set your hair on fire, it took all of your attention.
If you go to CNN... Well, let me do that.
Let me go to CNN, and I want to just take a peek at what they're...
Okay, my browser's not working for some reason.
Come here, browser. Let's go to CNN, top page, and see what they're talking about today.
I'm looking for the news about the ICE raids.
Because that's pretty big news, right?
Seems like just before this tweet came out, that was the biggest thing going on.
And maybe that wasn't the best thing for the president, so let's see what happened.
Oh, it's about the president's racist tweets.
Oh, second thing is about AOC responding to it.
Next thing is about a Fox News host laughing off his tweet.
Brian Stelter is left speechless about the tweet, there's an analysis about the tweet, and then there's an opinion about the tweet, and there's Trump tweeting again.
So that's the top left of CNN. So did you see how much of that was about the ICE raids?
None? Zero?
But let's keep going, because the middle column on their top page is sort of the news that's not as important as the top left, but still pretty important.
Ken Kuchila on Trump's racist tweets.
Okay, we're still on that.
And then acting immigration chief says he doesn't know the details of the ICE raids.
That's not much. Oh, and then way down, Biden unveils his health care plan.
Biden unveils his health care plan.
It is so far down the news funnel that it's like it doesn't even exist.
I actually read the news this morning before I got on this Periscope and I didn't even see That the leading Democrat announced his plan for fixing one of the leading issues in the entire nation.
And it just doesn't matter.
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares. All right.
So the first thing that the president did was he erased the rest of the news.
There is other news, but he erased it.
Nobody's going to care about the rest of the news for a while.
All right. So if he was trying to distract from the ICE raids, which were getting pretty bad publicity, it worked.
Unless you think that this new thing is even worse than the ICE raids, in which case you'd have to say, well, then it didn't work.
You made things worse. You made it twice as bad.
You added a problem to a problem.
But here's what we know.
President Trump's approval rating among Republicans just hit something like 90%.
Does anybody believe that Republicans who have supported the president up to this point are going to bail out because CNN won't report the entire tweet?
Maybe. A few.
I think some people will say, this is the last straw.
I backed him up until now, but now I'm going over the edge.
Somebody's saying 94%.
94% approval?
That would be pretty spectacular.
So, I would say that Republicans are trained.
We are trained to know that the news is not reporting the entire quote, and if they did, you would see it completely different.
Because you know what racists don't say?
Here's what racists don't say.
Make sure you come back.
If you leave out the second part of the quote where he says go back to wherever he came from and fix it and then come back and show us how, if you leave out the come back part, sounds pretty bad.
Of course, CNN will leave that out continually, and they will not apologize.
All right, so you're seeing exactly the same play as the fine people hoax and the feeding the goldfish or whatever he was feeding in Japan.
Same as the Covington kids.
Give me some more examples. What are some more examples where the story, the entire story is from only showing half of the quote Yeah, the koi pond.
I'm sorry, not goldfish.
It was a koi pond and the koi fish he was fixing.
He had the comeback hoax.
Somebody's saying we should call this the hashtag comeback hoax.
Maybe so. All right, so here's the first question you should ask yourself.
Would Trump have said the same thing to Peter Thiel?
If Germany was a mess, and more of a mess than it is, let's say if Germany was a basket case of a country, and Peter Thiel was, he's not.
I'm just using this as an example.
Peter Thiel does not rip on the United States.
But suppose he did.
Suppose he ripped on the United States.
Could you imagine trash-talking President Trump under those conditions, Saying to Peter Thiel, hey, why don't you go back where you came from, fix that, and then, you know, whether you're so smart, come back and fix it here.
Could you imagine him saying that to someone who is not a person of color?
Yes. Yes, you could.
Could you imagine that President Trump would use a birtherism attack against a white candidate?
You don't have to imagine.
He used it against Ted Cruz.
So obviously he spreads the love around.
But none of this will matter, right?
Nobody's going to say, well, hypothetically, if it had been Peter Thiel in a universe where Peter Thiel says bad things about the country, he doesn't.
And in a world where Germany was more of a basket case, it isn't.
But if it had been, it would be easy to imagine.
Now you also have the fact-checking.
Because apparently only one of the squad, as they're called, you know who I'm talking about, the Fab Four, the squad, I think Tucker Carlson calls them the four morons of the apocalypse, but they have lots of names, but you know it's the four freshman congresswomen, and only one of them was born in another country.
Representative Omar was from Somalia, and I guess she became a citizen at 17, but probably came to the country even younger.
Now, one assumes that this is mostly about Somalia, but since he said congresswomen, what was he thinking?
What was the president thinking when he put it in the plural, when in fact only one of the four congresswomen was from another country?
Well, probably the same thing most of you thought.
Let's check this in your comments.
How many of you thought that at least one other of the Fab Four was from another country, or at least born in another country?
So let me see the comments.
How many of you believed that at least one other person besides Omar of the Fab Four was born in another country?
And I'm seeing in the comments, some people are saying that Tlaib, I don't know if I can pronounce it yet, Tlaibi?
So, I looked it up.
Let me look it up again.
Where was...
Probably everybody's looking at this today, because I think she was born in...
She was born in Detroit, Michigan.
Alright, but how many of you thought that Rashida Tlaib was born in another country?
I did. I did.
Now, I was wrong.
Look how many people in the comments believe that Rashida Tlaib was born in another country.
Quite a few. Do we think that the president knew the facts and was just pretending he didn't?
Well, probably not, because if you look at the comments, most of us thought she came from another country.
But here's the fun part.
She didn't. What does it tell you That you think an American congresswoman was born in another country.
Part of why you think that is that you think that she's acting in an un-American way.
That's part of the reason, right?
Nobody's looking at, you know, nobody's looking at other members of Congress and wondering where they were born.
There's something about her actions which mislead you.
There's something that feels un-American about the way she presents herself and the way she talks about the country that fools you into thinking that maybe she wasn't even born here, because it feels to you it's incorrect, this is not true, but it feels to you like there's a lack of loyalty to the country.
That would be hard to explain if you were born here and brainwashed like the rest of us to, you know, salute the flag and love your country.
Now, I've talked quite a bit about the impact of brainwashing our youth so they become good citizens.
And I would speculate that if somebody came after the brainwashing phase, in other words, if somebody came to America at age 19 or whatever, that they would have missed the brainwashing.
Now, they might actually be better Americans than the brainwashed because in many cases they would choose to come here because they liked it.
So if I had to decide who's more American, somebody who made a decision to sacrifice to come here versus someone who got brainwashed and they were just born here, I would say I'm pretty favorable about the person who made a decision to come here.
Because that was an adult decision.
An adult decision to love the United States.
I'm okay with that.
I love that. But you miss some of the brainwashing.
So it's easy to imagine that you maybe didn't get socialized or brainwashed the same way.
Maybe you have a little lack of patriotism.
I would say it's certainly not true if you made an adult choice to come here.
But say you were, you know, hypothetically this does not apply to any of the congresswomen.
But if you came here as, let's say you came here at age 16 because your parents told you to.
You would have missed the brainwashing, but you also would have missed, it would not have been your decision necessarily.
So you can imagine that other people would get in their heads that you were not quite on the team necessarily, your loyalties might be split.
None of that applies to the actual people we're talking about.
But these are all the biases and things that float around in your head.
So the point here is this.
My guess, and it's only a guess because we can't read the President's mind, is that he thought at least two of them were born in other countries.
And I'll bet a whole lot of Republicans think the same thing.
I don't know how many Democrats think it.
But because of the way they act, Omar and Tlaib, you kind of think maybe they were born in another country.
Now, AOC, I think we just know more about her.
But I had to actually check to make sure that she wasn't born in Puerto Rico.
Now, Puerto Rico would still be considered born in the United States, but it was her parents, because she's talked about her Puerto Rican roots.
So I actually had to look it up.
I don't know. How many of you knew that AOC was born in New York?
But her parents were born in Puerto Rico.
How many of you thought that she, too, was born in Puerto Rico, which would be fine?
I'm not making a comment on that, but how many thought that fact was true?
Probably a few. Anyway, so the president often gets the details of the fact-checking wrong.
But, as I often say, he is directionally accurate.
This too is a wrong fact, which is directionally accurate.
What he's questioning here is not the actual birth certificate.
He's questioning people's loyalty and whether they're American enough.
So that's the question.
But he got a detail wrong, which makes it look far worse than it is.
So that detail getting wrong...
It accentuates the fact that it's taken in a context in the first place, because they don't show the second part of the quote.
And then because of the fact that's wrong, had it been two of them were born in another country, you'd say, okay, he's just talking about these two.
But given that he said multiple people, but only one of them was actually born in another country, that's what gives you permission to say, ah, it must be a racist thing, because that's the only way to explain this fact.
But there's two ways to explain it.
One is it's just the wrong fact.
All right, here's what is the clever part about this.
This is the part you're waiting for.
This is why you come on this Periscope to get the bottom line on the persuasion here.
All right, so now let's talk persuasion and strategy.
So we've talked about the facts.
We've talked about how people feel about it.
Is it going to work?
In other words, is there some objective that President Trump would have that is served by this?
Well, the Democrats are going to say, there he goes again with his racist whistles, or in this case, they're saying it's not even a whistle, it's a direct racist statement to make his base happy.
At the same time, the President is tweeting out that he's got the highest Republican approval level of any President ever.
So, do you think that the President's strategy was to act racist to get Republicans to support him?
No! He had every Republican that's going to support him.
He had them all.
If that was his strategy, then he would be a very stupid man.
Can we agree on that?
Let's see if we can agree on this.
If it were true...
That the president, and I'm not saying this is true, I'm saying hypothetically, if the president thought to himself, hey, I think I'm going to say something that's pretty blatantly racist, and if it's not blatant, it's certainly a whistle that they're going to hear.
So either way, they're going to get the message.
So I'm going to do this really racist thing because this will get me more Republican supporters.
If he thought that, could we all agree that would be the dumbest man who ever lived?
We'd agree with that, right?
Now, would that approach get him more Democrats to cross over and vote?
No. It would not.
So we can all agree that if he was thinking that, to intentionally be racist, and you'd have to say, anybody who wrote this tweet knew it was going to be provocative...
I think we can agree on that.
He didn't tweet this because he thought it would be ignored.
He tweeted this to get attention to this message, and we'll talk about why.
So one theory that the CNN people are going to have to wrestle with is if it's true, their interpretation, not mine, if their interpretation is true, he is also too stupid to eat and get dressed.
So it must also be true that if we were to see what's happening behind closed doors, there's somebody every day who comes up to him and says, Mr.
President, I know you can't tie a necktie after all these years, but we'll get rid of the dumb person here.
Okay, you're gone.
There must be somebody behind closed doors who's teaching him how to tie his necktie every day because he would be too dumb to tie a necktie.
There must be somebody who's like talking in his ear to say, walk up to the thing with the microphone and start talking.
Just read what's on the teleprompter.
He would have to be so dumb that he wouldn't even be able to function in public if what CNN says is true.
If it's true. Now...
We'll get rid of...
For those of you who are new, I block the people who complain about the sound, even when it's true.
So one theory from CNN is that he's the dumbest person in the world, and on top of that, he's also racist.
Now, I've often said that being racist in the way that he's being accused and being dumb would be pretty similar.
They would be pretty similar, but let's say that he's both according to CNN. Now, if that were true, and remember, I always tell you that you can check your worldview by whether it predicts.
Now, if their interpretation is correct, What would you predict about this president?
Well, you'd predict that he would do more things that are so stupid it would look like he's a five-year-old bumping into things.
But we don't really see that.
We see him doing things that even adults like Lindsey Graham would admit are good ideas.
We see things that other Republicans who nobody is calling a racist also think are good ideas.
Oh, the Central Park Five is actually, somebody's mentioned that.
That's a perfect comparison to this.
The Central Park Five is where the President did not mention race, he mentioned crime, and everybody said, why are you being a racist?
Which wasn't even in it at all.
There was no mention of race whatsoever.
There were some criminals or alleged criminals in the news and some actual criminals that I'm not sure if they caught or not.
But there were criminals in the news and the ones that were most in the news were black.
And he did reference that as an example of how bad things are.
But he never mentioned their race.
That was never part of the discussion.
And anybody who thinks that a discussion of crime is also a discussion of race is a racist.
So weirdly enough, the Central Park Five uncovered that all of Trump's critics were racist.
Because when he said, hey, crime is bad, they said, stop talking about black people.
Which of those two people is racist?
I'll say it again. One person says, crime is bad, we should do something about it.
The other person says, why are you talking about black people?
Which of those two people is the racist?
That one's an easy one, isn't it?
All right, so this is the same play where you take things out in context.
But here's the fun part.
As you know, the president has gotten in the middle between Pelosi and, let's say, her representing the Democrats, who are not so happy with the squad.
Here's the fun part.
This is the active part of the tweet.
This is the whole point.
Everything we've talked about up to now is sort of fun context and flavoring, but the meal is driving a wedge between Pelosi and the rest of the country.
And the Gang of Five, Gang of Four or whatever there.
And what this does, it quite brilliantly confuses the entire situation.
Because remember, this is coming on the heels of AOC implying that Pelosi was a racist.
Jumping the shark!
Right? When AOC says that maybe Pelosi is a racist, what did that do to all of the Democrats who believe that Trump is a racist but Democrats are not?
It was their first taste of what it's like to be on the receiving end.
When Kamala Harris suggested that Joe Biden's history of his comments on busing were, let's say, racially imperfect, Not racially imperfect, but in terms of policy, they were imperfect about something about race.
That was also a time when Democrats said, whoa, are you telling me this stuff can be turned against us too?
We're just normal Democrats.
We're just minding our own business.
And now AOC is saying maybe we're not quite right on race?
What's going on here? So then the president jumps in, as you remember, and he vigorously defended, and this is one of the funniest things he's ever done, Pelosi.
And he says, Pelosi is not a racist.
Do you see where this is going?
Wait for it.
Wait until somebody asks Pelosi if Trump is being racist about this.
She either has to back, here's the fun part, Pelosi either has to back AOC, which she doesn't want to do, or she has to back Trump, which she doesn't want to do.
Trump has put Pelosi, and Biden too, and maybe the rest of the Democratic candidates, in a position where there are two sides and neither of them are tenable.
Is that even a word? If something can be untenable, something can be tenable, right?
That's really a word, I think.
Now compare Trump's situation.
He's got an unprecedented number of Republicans who support him despite every other accusation that's been leveled against him.
Are they going to change their mind because of this?
No. President Trump's poll numbers probably don't change at all.
None of this is going to change his support because nobody takes it seriously.
It looks more like CNN taking stuff out of context.
But what's going to happen to the Democrats?
The Democrats are watching before their eyes as this whole, you're a racist, you're a racist, everybody's a racist thing, is tearing their own party apart.
And it's confusing the whole picture.
What Trump has done is taken the least popular group within the Democrat Party, meaning the least popular not only among the Democrats themselves, but of course Republicans too.
He's taken the least popular among them and put, here's the key, All of the attention on them.
If there's one thing that I've taught you, it's that facts don't matter to our decision-making process in politics.
Facts do matter to outcomes.
I always have to say that in case you forget.
They do matter to outcomes.
But the way we think about things, the way we decide to vote, the things we decide to support, facts are not so important.
What does matter is what we put our energy on.
President Trump...
Always operates on the energy level.
It's how he took out Jeb Bush.
It's why he does these giant rallies.
It's energy. It's why he has the tech summit at the White House of all these folks who are controversial.
It's energy.
Everything he does is energy.
This tweet was to create a tremendous amount of energy and focus it on the one place that Democrats do not want to focus.
There is nothing they would less like to talk about than the schism between Pelosi and the squad.
What has Trump caused them to talk about?
That. Now, they're going to have a day or so of just talking about Trump's quote and a context.
And when they do...
When they're done with that, they're sort of going to have to ask Pelosi what she thinks.
They're sort of going to have to ask every person who's running, do you back the squad or do you back Pelosi?
Trump is making people take sides in a fight that they can't win.
But his support probably won't change at all.
It probably won't change at all.
So, the other thing, so those are the two things that happen.
One is that the focus is being put exactly where the Democrats don't want it, and it's going to stay there a while, because he threw so much red meat into the shark pond that there's just no way they can avoid this.
They can't avoid it, and it's everything that they shouldn't be talking about.
They won't be talking about overcrowded...
You know, border security, they won't be talking about anything he doesn't want to talk about.
He'll just be talking about that.
All right, but here's the other thing.
It feels like almost a swing from the fence, using a baseball analogy.
It feels like what the president saw was a pretty big crack in the Democrats.
And that crack had to do with the fact that That their primary weapon, hey, you're a racist, had been turned against them by their own party.
That's a big problem, because it delegitimizes the entire approach, and in effect, it delegitimizes their primary weapon.
Their primary weapon is, hey, you people on the other side are racists.
As soon as they start accusing each other of being racists, they don't have a weapon.
So this looks like the president seeing a crack and just running up to it and punching it as hard as he can to see if he can finish him off.
This looks like a decapitation strike.
A decapitation strike.
It looks like he said, well, if I take a run at it and it doesn't work out, I've got lots of news cycles between now and the election day for this to get erased.
But if I do take a run at it and it makes the whole thing fall apart...
You know, if he finally makes a decapitation strike and just destroys the Democrats by making them fight with each other over who wins, AOC or Pelosi, if he can make that the primary fight instead of the fight between any of them and him, he wins.
Now, do you think that...
Let's put it this way.
Is it obvious to you that the president, in not just these tweets, but in general, is it obvious to you that the president is trying to stoke the fight between Pelosi and Biden, let's say the more rational conservative middle people on the Democrats and their radical side?
Is it not obvious he's trying to make them fight?
It is obvious. It's obvious not just in this tweet, but it's obvious in his other comments.
Does this tweet get him more of what he obviously wants, which is more conversation about these fringe characters?
Which, by the way, I saw a poll that said even Democrats, by a huge majority, don't like the squad.
They do not like Democrats.
They have very small support, even among Democrats.
They're very unpopular.
Because I think the Democrats know that the squad is going to cost them the election.
If there were no squad, would the reasonable people in the Democrat candidates have a good chance of beating Trump?
They'd have a pretty good chance.
I'm not sure that it would be enough, but they'd have a pretty good chance.
I mean, at least they would be in the striking distance.
But if he can keep hammering at this difference, and he's trying to brand the Democrats by the four worst Democrats, right?
The four worst Democrats are so bad that he can imply that they were born in another country, and people say, sounds right, they don't sound very loyal to this country.
I mean, the very fact...
That so many of you believed that Tulebi...
I wish I could pronounce her name right.
I'm not intentionally saying it wrong.
But the fact that so many of you thought she was born in another country, it's because you thought her loyalties weren't in place.
It's not because of her ethnicity.
I don't think anybody thinks that they see a member of Congress who looks like a slightly different ethnicity.
The first thing you think is not, I think they were born in another country.
Am I right? Is there anybody who would see, I don't know, Julian Castro or something?
You know, if you saw him in Congress, would you ever say, well, Julian Castro must have been born in another country?
You wouldn't. You wouldn't even think about it.
You would just think they were born in this country, of course.
But with Tlaibi, Talib?
Talib. Oh, somebody's helping me pronounce it here.
Talib. Thank you.
Somebody else is saying Talib.
Tlaib. Tlaib? Alright, whatever it is.
And I apologize for saying it wrong.
I'm not trying to do that.
So, yeah.
So the things that the news will not report, and that's why you come to me, is that so many people thought they were born in other countries that President's incorrect fact or incorrect assumption, whatever it was, still feels true.
It feels like they were born in other countries because of their perceived lack of loyalty to patriotism and to this country.
Now, have you noticed that already the Fab Four have been forced...
This might be the best part.
Have you noticed that the news is going to continually ask the Fab Four about their loyalty to this country?
And the Fab Four will have to declare their loyalty to the country or say they're not.
If they declare their loyalty to the country, they lose their base.
If they say they are loyal to the country, they lose their base.
If they say they're not loyal, they lose everything.
So the two choices that they have is to lose their base We're going to lose everything.
So only two choices.
I think that they're going to say, oh, yeah, we're more American than you are.
We're the most American people.
We love flags more than you do.
Look, let me salute this flag right in front of you.
I'm so going to salute this flag.
I'm going to salute this flag harder than you are, Mr.
Trump. Watch me saluting this flag.
So... Everybody is in an awkward situation now.
It doesn't seem like it yet, because at the moment, the news is simply talking about the tweet.
Do you know what phase two is?
Phase two is asking all the Republicans about the tweet, like they did with the head of whatever, immigration or something.
So asking Republicans to comment is phase one.
Do you know what phase two is?
Asking Democrats what they think of it.
That's where the fun is.
Trump is literally two moves ahead.
Move one, he loses because the tweet looks bad.
So in his first move, he sacrifices a piece.
In move two, they talk to all the Republicans and the Republicans are embarrassed by the tweet and even they disown it.
President Trump loses another piece.
So he's playing chess and he's giving up two pieces.
Right off the bat, two pieces.
And I would say those are clearly lost pieces, right?
Nobody's going to disagree. The tweet loses him a piece on the board, and then when the Republicans talk, they further distance themselves from it, and then he loses another piece.
And then is the part where they realize that the Democrats can't hold together Through this controversy, or at least there's gonna be a bigger rip than there was before.
And not only has he branded the Democrats with this very unpopular wing of the squad, but they're gonna have to work it out.
And that is the endgame.
The endgame, after sacrificing two pieces, is he's gonna leave the Democrats critically wounded.
And that, I would say, Is probably the play.
So, let me complete the picture.
If CNN's interpretation of these events is correct, the president is the dumbest person in the world, and so dumb, I think you'd agree that he'd have trouble getting dressed, and certainly there's no way he could lead the country to successful outcomes before going on to a landslide victory to a second term.
Would you agree? If CNN is right that he's so dumb that he thought that tweet would be a good idea to just stir up some racism, well, if he's really that dumb and that racist, nothing good could happen from here on in, right?
I mean, that makes sense.
Nobody that dumb could get good results.
If I'm right, In this analysis, and let's just call it a filter.
Let's not even call it right or wrong.
Let's not personalize it.
Let's just say that the evidence supports at least two hypotheses.
One hypothesis is that he's so dumb and racist, he thought saying dumb racist things in public was going to help him.
And the other is that this is an intentional ploy to get close to What feels like it could be sort of almost racist, except for the part where he said, once you figure it out in your other country, come on back and show us how to do it.
So technically, it wasn't what people are reporting.
They're reporting it out of context.
So he goes up to the line.
He knows that he's stirring people up, and he's completely going to create a situation where the Democrats have to fight this out.
They can't ignore it.
The news will make such a big deal about this that Pelosi and Biden and all of the Democrats are gonna have to answer the question, which team are you on?
And if they throw the socialists under the bus, then the people running for president have to explain why the people they're throwing under the bus are influencing all their policy decisions.
And if they don't throw them, well, basically it's a lose-lose situation.
All right. And how about those ICE raids, which we're not hearing about at all?
And by the way, CNN is doing the same thing with the ICE raids that they're doing with this story, which is they leave out the second part.
So here's the part that CNN reports.
ICE is going to be knocking on doors and taking families out and maybe separating them and deporting people.
Okay, that's all true and terrible.
So let me say as clearly as I can, I'm very pro-immigrant.
But I also think you need some kind of rules.
I think those rules should be generous.
But you should have rules so that the United States is in charge of our immigration and we're not delegating it to the randomness of who decides to come.
So I like the United States to have control over the decision.
But once we have full control over our borders, I'd like to crank it up.
You know, we should do as much as we can within the parameters of what makes sense.
So certainly I'd like to see lots of immigration but within controlled parameters.
I think that's reasonable.
What was I even talking about?
I'm sure I had this great point I was going to.
Oh, so we're talking about the ICE raids.
So when CNN talks about them, they'll just say the first part, that the ICE people are dragging immigrants out and shipping them back.
And it leads you to believe that it's the beginning of all, I don't know, 12 million or 20 million people being deported, which, of course, is ridiculous.
It looks like CNN would like you to believe this is the beginning of lots of this.
The part they leave out is that these are people who specifically have recent deportation orders.
They're not the people who have been here 20 years.
They're not the people who came in and are successfully working and they have a family.
It's not those people. And then leave that part out to turn it into...
If Scott believes there is a Trump plan, he's disappointed.
I'm not sure. I try to use...
I try to stay away from strategy and plan.
Because a lot of life is responding to the situation as best you can.
So you don't often have a long-term plan, because as soon as the bullets start flying, you know, the plan goes out the window.
Trump tweeted that AOC is a communist.
Did that just happen?
Well, hold on.
Hold on! Hold on, people!
Let's see if Trump tweeted that AOC is a communist.
Let's see. Trump.
All right. I guess it's a quote from somebody else.
So Trump tweeted, quote, We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists.
They hate Israel. They hate our own country.
They're calling the guards along our border, the border patrol agents, concentration camps guards.
They accuse people who support Israel as doing it for the Benjamins, which is a good thing to bring up.
What does it mean for America to have free health care for illegal immigrants?
No criminalization of coming into our country?
See how that works for controlling immigration.
They talk about Israel like they're a bunch of thugs, not victims of the entire region.
They wanted to impeach the president.
The politics will destroy the country.
Okay, so it's Lindsey Graham who is the source of the quote.
So you have to read pretty far to find out that it's Lindsey Graham.
And then in his earlier quote today, he said, if Democrats want to unite around the foul language and racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular representatives.
So what the president's done is he's dragged...
The fab four into the mud with him.
And I think the calculation here is that the president can be accused of being a racist all day long, and he just gets reelected.
But these four, they're not going to be able to survive being accused of being racist.
They won't be able to survive in their own party.
So I think the president is joining forces with Pelosi, even though she hates it, To accuse the Fab Four of being racist.
So let me summarize.
The President, through his tweets, and especially his recent support of Pelosi not being racist, has joined with Pelosi, against her will, to call Pelosi's enemies racists.
And he can back it up.
The Squad, as they're called, They do have a body of comments that a reasonable person could interpret as racist.
Unfortunately, the president has lots of comments which are also interpreted as racist by also people who are reasonable.
Probably wrong, but reasonable people.
So I think that he's dragged this conversation into the mud, and he's the only one who's good at wrestling in mud.
So congratulations, everybody.
You created this big pile of mud.
You threw the president into it.
And then he dragged you in to see who can win in a mud fight.
and I would not bet against President Trump in a mud fight.
Somebody says, excuses, excuses, Scott.
Give it up. So I'm going to add...
So one of my...
I'm just blocking all the people who are just unpleasant people.
So if you have a reason for your opinion, please offer it.
I always like reasons.
If you come here just to say, I'm dumb, give it up, I'm a whatever...
Then we just don't want you here.
And it's not that I say you shouldn't have an opinion.
I just don't want to hear. It's just an entertainment decision.
It's no fun. All right.
So some of the tells that I surfaced the other day for somebody who is not using thinking.
When everybody says, so look for this one on this, somebody's going to say, Scott, what the president said is racist, period.
If they add the period, it means they don't want to talk about reasons, they don't want to talk about context, they don't want to talk about anything.
If they say, end of story, it means they don't want to talk about reasons.
And when people say, Scott, you're an apologist, Because they don't want to talk about reasons.
They don't want to talk about what I said.
They don't want to talk about facts.
They don't want to talk about anything that would reveal they don't have a counter-opinion.
So when they come after me for being an apologist, or they say, Scott, just stop.
Just stop. Yeah, or full stop.
That's the other one. Full stop.
Full stop. So here's somebody saying, Scotty the shill.
So that person is triggered into cognitive dissonance, but they're blocked.
Period. Yeah.
End of line.
It's the end of the conversation.
You're an apologist. Stop making excuses.
It all means the same thing.
All of it means the same thing.
It means that I can't talk about this on the level of reasons and details and context, and I just give up, but I'm still mad, so I'm going to be mad at you instead of the situation.
All right, let's talk about something else potentially gigantic that's going to be totally buried in the news.
So speaking of Lindsey Graham, Lindsey Graham and Jack Keene, who I believe is General Jack Keene, if I'm correct, retired general, So both of them authored an article that was in the Wall Street Journal.
And listen to how interesting this is.
It's about the Iran nuclear situation.
So Lindsey Graham and Jack Keene.
Now, one assumes that they're working on the same side as the president.
So if you see that Lindsey Graham and Jack Keene wrote an article about foreign policy...
And it's in the Wall Street Journal.
What do you assume about it?
Well, what you assume about it is that it's an A-B test.
An A-B test.
So if the president suggested this idea, it would be a little too dangerous.
Because if the public hated this idea, the president would be forever tagged with this idea, and then he'd have to defend it without even knowing if it was a good idea.
But if Lindsey Graham and Jack Keene write an article, and it's published in the Wall Street Journal, then people say, oh, well, it's not the president.
It's to people who would like to maybe influence the president, and if people take to this article and it gets a lot of clicks and people say, huh, that's a pretty good idea, then the president can adopt it.
But the president is insulated at the moment, cleverly, because if the idea dies in public, he doesn't ever have to take responsibility for it.
But I assure you that the president has heard this idea.
It's fair to speculate that that's true.
Not guaranteed, but I would say it's in the high 90% chance that Lindsey Graham has spoken to the president on this exact topic, and the president is letting him test it down in public.
And here's the idea.
And by the way, Mark Schneider, who talks about the green nuclear deal and is my source for all things nuclear, along with Michael Schellenberger, who's great on this too, This is an idea that may sound familiar.
The idea is to be okay with Iran having nuclear energy, but have the fuel rods supplied by an outside country that is not the United States, because obviously Iran would not want to depend on the United States for any part of their nuclear energy program.
Now, since Iran is saying that the reason that they want to develop nuclear is for internal energy purposes, Lindsey Graham and Jack Keene have suggested in this Wall Street Journal article that the United States might be okay with them developing a robust nuclear energy program so long as the parts that could be weaponized, the fuel, comes from a third party Which they suggest could be Russia and or China.
If they're smart, they'll use both of them because then you have two sources.
So you never want a single source for anything.
Beyond that, even the United States would probably sell them fuel rods.
So even if, let's say, for some reason Russia and China decided not to, Well, as long as they're really just using it for domestic energy, and we can confirm that, even the United States would sell them fuel rods because it's just stuff you sell.
But we'd have to be sure that they needed them.
Now, they don't need to buy from us because they don't trust us, and they would never be okay with that.
But as long as they can buy from the countries that already have nuclear, China and Russia, and surely those countries have the capability and the reason to provide fuel rods, then Iran will never have the type of materials in their own control that could make a nuclear bomb.
They would have a robust energy program, and they wouldn't have to depend on the United States for anything.
Pretty good, right?
Now, what the article from Graham and Keane points out quite cleverly is that even if Iran says no to this deal, or even the outlines of this as a deal, if they say no to it, it will have revealed quite clearly,
and I think this is accurate, it will reveal that they didn't want nuclear technology to Maybe?
It's entirely possible that Iran only wants a bomb, and that's the whole purpose.
Right? That's possible.
But what's fun about this, and clever about it, is that they don't say that.
They say they want it for domestic energy purposes.
So this offer would test that.
It would allow them, first of all, it would allow them an escape hatch that's compatible with everything they've said.
As far as I can tell, if Iran had the option of developing nuclear energy, which is what they say they want, and they had a real path to it, no jokes, no tricks, it's a real path to all that happening, if they say no to it, the only conclusion you can make is that their real game is nuclear weapons.
And if we come to that point where they can't hide it anymore, they can't be clever anymore, they can't They can't redirect our attention to domestic energy.
If we know what the game is, then we can be a lot more serious about how we treat it.
And the world will say, okay, you tried to make a deal.
Right now the world looks at the situation and says, President Trump, you're just making things worse.
Nobody's talking. You don't see any negotiations.
This is just getting worse, etc.
But if we put this offer on the table and Iran turns it down, just turns it down flat, as in we don't even want to talk about it, if that happens, then there's no limit to what we can do in terms of responding to Iran.
It would take all the limits off.
Because that would be a statement in clear terms that their plan is to build a nuclear weapon.
And we're not going to stand for that.
Somebody's talking about Bitcoin.
Let's see what Bitcoin's doing today.
Let's check on Bitcoin.
That's a good one to check on every once in a while.
Down 6%.
So that's not too cool.
Twitter's up. Twitter's up.
Full disclosure, I bought a bunch of Twitter stock about 30% ago.
So I'm making a killing on Twitter stock because it looked undervalued to me.
By the way, I don't see anything that's ever going to happen to Twitter.
I don't see any of the competitors ever really getting much of a hold.
And I do think that Twitter is different From the other social platforms.
I think Twitter...
I believe Twitter could actually get a handle on the real or perceived bias, and I think there's probably a path where Twitter gets to a good place long before Google and long before Facebook.
I think Google and Facebook have some real issues with the government and with the public that they're going to have to work out.
Twitter also has a lot of questions to answer, some that I'd like answered, but I think they have a real shot Of figuring it out internally with maybe a little government help.
We'll see.
All right.
Let's see what else you got to say.
So those were the main things I wanted to talk about today.
I hope you all saw Bill Pulte's live money award to a veteran.
It was just the greatest live streaming ever.
So Bill Pulte, as you know, has decided he's going to give away $100,000 of his own money, maybe more.
We'll see. We're good to go.
As he brought somebody on the line and had them describe their problem and then gave him, I think, $5,000.
And watching the gentleman just break down in tears was amazing.
So that's happening.
And we see a lot of people picking up on it and finding their own ways to give, etc.
And I think Bill Pulte, who you should follow at Pulte, P-U-L-T-E, at Pulte.
Follow him and you'll see some of these giveaways coming up in the following months.
And it will be amazing.
It will be amazing. Alright, that's all I got for today.
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