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Oct. 26, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:02
Episode 705 Scott Adams: Special Guest @NorteyTX About Trump, Then #Rotfrancisco
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Time Text
It is 7am or 10am where you are.
Hold on, let me fix this.
Oh, that's better.
Hey, I know why all of you are here.
For a very special episode of Coffee with Scott Adams.
Probably one of the best you're ever going to see.
But I can tell you one thing.
With no ambiguity whatsoever.
Today's simultaneous sip will be the best one you've had today.
By far. And all you need to participate.
It doesn't take much.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a snifter, stein, chelis, tankard, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure Of the simultaneous sip.
Are you ready? Are you ready?
Come on. Get ready for the dopamine hit of the day, the best part of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Go. Better than normal, and that makes total sense because today is going to be better than normal too.
Let me see if I have my guest ready yet.
No, not quite. Not quite.
So, in a moment, I'm expecting a guest to join me, and I will be introducing him then.
Let's talk about a couple of things while we're doing this.
All right. I don't know if you got to see...
Hold on.
Let's see if James is here yet.
James, are you here yet?
Well, he should be here around 7.05.
So before we do that, let me show you something I did today.
I took James Clapper and I fixed him.
Well, hold on.
Let me take down the temperature on this.
Okay. Take down the temperature.
So I took James Clapper.
Yeah, it's hard to see, but he used Photoshop to turn his frown upside down.
It's better, isn't it? Ah, it's hard to get a good picture of it.
Alright. But trust me, if you saw it on Twitter, you'd be laughing right now.
And larfing and larfing.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
Kind of like that. Alright, let's see if James has joined us yet.
Yes, he's about to come on.
I'm going to add you, James, and then I'm going to do an invitation.
I'm sorry, an introduction.
James, are you there?
Hey, good morning, Scott. Can you hear me?
I can. I'm going to play your video as your introduction.
Are you ready? Alright, let's do it.
Alright, hold on. Hello, my name is James Norte.
I'm an attorney, an advocate, and activist.
Hi. Hold on, look at it.
Let me do this better.
Hello, my name is James Norte.
I'm an attorney, an advocate, and an activist.
I have the privilege of being able to go to Harvard Law School to serve as an attorney, and now I volunteer in my community so I can pay about things I've enjoyed forward.
That's why I'm a progressive Democrat.
I believe in an economic and socially inclusive opportunity for everyone.
And I greatly admire Scott Adams.
I would love the chance to talk to him on this show.
And also to raise a conversation with some of the points he's made about our president.
I think there is a lot to be said about his marketing strategy and his political strategy, but I want to go toe-to-toe on the ethics of his policies and how we should push him to become better at ensuring that inclusive, fairer, just and free society for all of us.
Challenge accepted. James Norte, you are here, aren't you?
I'm here. So, look, my good friend Omar, you can follow him at OmarDimCative, is a marketing mastermind.
And he says, hey, James, I have a book for you.
Go read Win Bigly.
And so, I did.
This is by the author of the comic book.
James, can you do anything to make your sound louder?
We've got very low audio on you.
Is this any clearer? Yes.
Yeah, that's a little better. Thank you.
Awesome. If it comes up again, just let me know.
But essentially, I read your book, Win Bigly, and I loved it because you explained the art of persuasion and how the best persuaders influence others.
But I challenge the notion that you call Trump a master persuader.
He is not. He is a schoolyard bully.
He is a con man.
So I just want to bring up three quick points.
One, I think you overhyped what Trump did right.
Two, I think you glossed over what he did wrong.
And three, Scott, you're a liberal.
You call yourself an ultra-liberal.
We need you to help Democrats avoid loser-think and develop a message that wins for our future.
All right, give me some specifics.
I am not persuaded by just relabeling him a con man or a bully.
Give me a specific...
That affects real people.
So rather than saying he says bad things, tell me how the world is better or the nation is worse off because of what he's doing.
Connect it to the real world.
Absolutely. For example, the signature policy that Trump ran on was that he was going to build the wall and have Mexico pay for it.
But that wasn't going to do anything for real working families in America.
No one was convinced. Wait, hold on.
Hold on. Okay. 60 million people were convinced they had a good take on immigration.
Are you suggesting that there's no difference to the average American whether we have permissive immigration on our southern border?
Or more restrictive?
Are you saying it would have no effect on the people who are here?
So this is what's called a scarecrow.
I didn't say anything about having a permissive border, right?
No one is for just straight open borders.
What we want is a sensible policy.
And so building the wall, he still hasn't done it.
Asking Mexico to pay for it still hasn't done it.
Well, hold on. James, make a point.
You're sort of all over the landscape here.
Are you suggesting that Mexico is not paying for border security for the United States right now with their 27,000 troops that they put on their own southern border at the request of the President?
Would that not be, even though it's not technically a wall, wouldn't you say that the president has caused Mexico to spend a great deal of money on our border security?
So I like what you're doing here, but he promised a wall.
He hasn't delivered a wall. Well, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Would you hold it against him if he promised a wall?
But let's say he built a fence and it worked, or if he used another means, let's say electronic or drones or something else, let's say he did something that's not technically a wall, but it was border security and it worked.
Would you hold that against him?
And so, if your point is that he really was going to fight for border security, I have no problem with that.
But this is why I call him a con man.
He promises A, but delivers B. Hold on, hold on.
If he promises A, And he delivers something that is just as good, or maybe it's just the best that can be achieved in the time and resources you have.
Do you hold that against him?
No, not if it's truly just as good or better, but this is the classic bait-and-switch.
You get a shiny object wave at people's attention, and then you deliver something that's guilty.
May, just a clarification, are you saying that building a wall would be the best solution for immigration?
It wouldn't. I grew up in El Paso, Texas, where there was already a wall long before...
Then I don't understand your point.
You're saying that he promised a wall, but you're saying a wall wasn't really the best solution.
He did something else.
So why would you be disappointed if you didn't get a wall?
Because the problem is not that...
Look, I don't care if he has a wall or not.
The point is he makes promises that he can't deliver on.
And that does not make him a match persuader.
Hold on.
Have you not noticed that he's been fighting tooth and nail in every possible tool available to him, but he's thwarted by the Congress?
Wouldn't you say that the Congress is the only thing stopping the wall from happening?
No, no, no. Look, in his first two years, he had a Republican Congress.
He had a Republican Senate.
He should have been able to get that.
Hold on, hold on.
But he needed a supermajority to get funding, which he did not have.
So people say he had a Republican majority.
It's true, but that doesn't get you what you want because, as I understand it, for these funding-type things, a simple majority doesn't get you there.
So he did not have a Congress who could get him what he wanted at any time during his presidency.
But it doesn't matter because he said Mexico would pay for it.
Why does he need American dollars?
Once again, backtracking what he promised.
But this seems sort of pedantic because if you promise something and then you deliver something that gets you close to that but it looks different, would you say that that's a broken promise?
Because I think his supporters would look at 27,000 Mexican troops on Mexico's southern border only because we asked them to be there.
And they'd say, it looks like something good's happened.
So then let's get beyond pedantics and talk about what affects real working people.
This president, he said he would be a champion for working families, right?
That he would rave on the economy.
Can we close on the first point?
So the first point was that he did not deliver, which I agree, did not deliver precisely what he asked for.
But would you agree?
So I'm agreeing with that. It's not precisely.
Would you agree with the following statements?
Number one, he's tried very hard to make that promise happen.
Would you say that he's put in a lot of effort?
So he's put in effort, but at what cost?
I mean – No, let me just finish the point.
He put in the effort.
He did not get exactly what he asked for, which was a wall funded by Mexico.
He has achieved some amount of wall.
What he's achieved is not a wall.
It was a family separation policy.
There's no physical barrier that he actually implemented.
Wait, wait, hold on.
Are you unaware that he's built a great deal of walls so far?
We say a great deal of wall.
I don't know what you're referring to.
I can tell you.
The thing that's misleading about walls is that there are some places that are naturally more attractive places for people to cross the border.
Most of what's done, as I understand it, is upgrading places where we had some kind of a structure but it wasn't adequate because people were getting over it easily.
So even though the total amount of mileage that he's done is way less than he promised or people wanted on his side, the things that he is doing, the upgrades, probably are the most effective parts of the border because those are the places people have already demonstrated they wanted to cross.
So I think you'd agree that he is upgrading wall, building wall, at places that it matters the most.
We can argue over semantics, right?
But I think No, wait.
That's not semantics. Sure.
That's building an actual physical structure in the places where the engineers agree it's most needed.
Because that's why they already had something there.
It just wasn't good enough.
And give me specifics. Where was this?
And what were the nature of the upgrades?
Because I certainly haven't heard anything about this.
Are you serious? Your news sources are not telling you that the president has replaced a lot of bad wall with good wall?
Scott, you're deflecting.
Where was this? Well...
You're making the claim that he's upgraded walls.
I am challenging you to tell me specifically where is it?
Where are the upgrades? Give me a city.
Give me an area. Give me a state.
Give me something. That is a very lawyerly question.
Let me answer.
May I answer your question?
Please, please. So do you think that that's a fair question, that I would know the names of the cities just because I watched continuous coverage of the many places he was building all?
Is it important that I've remembered the cities when you could just Google them and they would pop right up?
Scott, I respect you immensely.
You could Google them right now and tell me where they are, but you won't, which leads me to believe that maybe he hasn't.
Well, I just didn't want to bore the audience, but I'll do that for you.
Oh, we're going to have a real exciting show today, Scott.
Trust me. I have a feeling no one's going to be bored.
Where Wall Mexico built?
Probably in the comments you'll see something people say.
I hope so. CBP says it has built 75 miles of Donald Trump's border wall with 150 more miles on the way.
So that's Newsweek. Would you accept Newsweek?
So 75 miles where, I'm sorry?
Well, this is a Newsweek report who are anti-Trump.
But the specifics of where they are doesn't seem to have any relevance to our conversation.
Which is a common theme, right?
That President Trump makes these promises without specifics, and it does nothing for the American people.
Once again, we're seeing how the con man works, how the bully works.
Well, hold on. You haven't demonstrated con man.
I'd love to. Give me a chance.
All right, so here's the wall.
San Diego sector.
So you asked for specifics.
So here's San Diego.
Here's the new wall that replaces some kind of old border barrier.
Now, I could do more of these cities, but I'm kind of shocked that your news sources are not telling you the wall is being built, because there are Now, what, 158 miles that are being worked on and 75 already completed?
San Diego. So San Diego.
And apparently, somebody's saying El Paso.
I don't know about that one. No, so I grew up in El Paso.
That wall was there long before Trump.
I guess this is what I'm trying to say.
He's taking credit for things he didn't do.
And this is what's so dangerous about him.
Because we can play fast and loose with the facts, we fall into a false insecurity.
And we've got to challenge him on facts matter.
Because when we ignore the facts, you put our entire judgment at risk.
No, you don't. Let's take this very example.
The President has told us many times that he uses hyperbole to boost his accomplishments and maybe minimize his opponents.
And I think every adult who's watching understands that.
So when you listen to the President, you know he's puffing up his accomplishments and minimizing the other side.
We all know that, right?
Right. Okay, so we're all adults and we know that.
So the president is no doubt, I would agree with you, selling his wall accomplishments as maybe more than you would, if you were to look at it objectively.
But everybody understands that.
All of his supporters understand that.
We understand it.
Is that really dishonest when he tells us he's going to use hyperbole?
And then he uses it, and 100% of the people watching say, oh, there's his hyperbole again.
We do believe he's building some wall, probably not nearly as much as he promised, but he's moving us in the right direction.
And we think that if somebody else had been president, they would have built fewer miles of wall.
So I have no problem with that hyperbole, right?
It's just bluffing. It's just branding, right?
What we are real concerned about are those...
Okay, give me an example of a dangerous example of that.
So I will accept the critics who say there are 11,000-ish times that the president has departed from facts.
That's roughly correct, right?
And here's where you and I can agree, that most people don't make decisions based off of facts under the time.
Most people are guided by emotion.
And in effect, a lot of our voting decisions are really emotional decisions who we'll be comfortable with, and then we later rationalize them.
So help us with an example of where the president is harming or potentially harming the country because of his hyperbole versus sticking strictly to the accuracy of the facts.
Let's start at the beginning.
June 2015, he descends down his...
His escalator. And he says when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.
They're sending people who are bringing drugs, bringing crime, rapists, and some of them are good people.
That was the beginning of fomenting racism in this country, specifically in regards to augmenting what was already existing with Hispanics in the community.
So we know what he said, but now connect that to...
But go ahead.
Connect it to something bad and then I'll talk.
Sure, because it's implying that Mexicans by their very nature are rapists, which plays into Stokes, plays into stereotypes of people with darker skin being dangerous.
That's why it's dangerous. Let me ask you this.
Sure. If the media had not reported it the way they did...
Would everybody have the same opinion and interpretation of what he said?
We don't need to interpret.
We have his video.
Those are his words.
No, we know what he said.
Now, do you believe that when he said that there are rapists and murderers coming across the border, do you believe that he was trying to imply...
That Mexicans are more rapey than other people.
So I don't know what he was trying to apply because this president is very inarticulate.
No, wait a minute. That's your whole point.
Your entire point is that you do know what he was trying to imply.
Isn't that your whole point?
No, the point is the effect of his words do harm.
Half the time he just says things just to say them, but his words are incredibly dangerous when he uses them to divide people, such as suggesting that Mexicans were racial.
Hold on, hold on. You made an unsupported assumption based on mind reading.
You said that he did this to divide people.
Mm-hmm. Now, you believe that his intention, which you can determine from a distance by reading his mind, which I have a chapter in in my book, is you believe that you can read his mind and that his actual intention when he stood up there was he was thinking, I think I've found a way to divide the country.
And you believe that his strategy was to divide the country because that would be a good way to become president.
Was that what you thought? Politics is the art of us versus them and building the majority.
He knew exactly what the effect of his words would be.
It would galvanize his base and give him some support.
That's exactly what happened.
And it worked. So wait a minute.
So your assumption is based entirely, I mean, not entirely, but a fundamental assumption is that you can determine his inner thoughts.
And people like me...
That we're doing it incorrectly.
Would that be accurate? Because my interpretation is that he was trying to bring the United States together with a common enemy, if you will, which is immigration of the type that he thinks is harming us.
He's always been clear that he's not saying all people are bad, all immigrants are bad.
bad.
He's not saying that.
He's always been clear that if you don't control it, you get too many of the ones who might be criminally inclined if you don't vet for that.
Now, his supporters interpreted that, I would say 100% of them probably, close to it, interpreted that as saying, let's bring the United States together against an outside threat, which is crime and drugs and stuff coming across the border.
Now, I think it would be fair to say, hey, stop demonizing immigrants.
100%. Right.
So that's a separate question.
But the question of what he was thinking, I think, is far more supported by everything he said, consistent with the United States I want to bring together, But we want to be more wary of our external threats from other countries.
Scott, he could have done that without saying Mexicans.
He could have said, let's unite to have a safer country that doesn't have drugs or rapists.
But he knew what he was doing because he talked about Mexico three times.
Hold on, you're mind reading again.
You're mind reading. Now, would you agree?
Let's just check some facts.
Sure. Would you agree that his supporters, and I'm going to put myself in that category for this conversation, would you agree that we do not interpret it that way?
Because I've literally never heard, not one time, and imagine all the Republicans I've talked to, Trump supporters, in the last three years.
You can imagine. It's a big number, right?
Yeah. I've never heard one Republican...
Or just a supporter of the president ever suggest that they believed that he was saying that Mexicans are somehow bad or inferior.
I've literally never heard it in several years of doing nothing but talking about this topic with the people that you think have that belief.
Why is it that you think I've never heard that?
I can't say why you've never heard that, but I can say that as someone who grew up in El Paso, I know so many people of Mexican descent who are horrified and personally offended because it was an attack against them and their culture.
And as someone who grew up in that community, I was offended for them as well.
He could have made those same points without naming Mexico or Mexicans.
He did it for an intentional point and it was very effective and it worked.
No, wait a minute. Wait a minute.
Wait a minute. I call that being a schoolyard bully.
Now, let's try to agree on the things we agree on, because that just makes it easier.
The things we would agree on is that the way he worded it was unproductive.
In other words, it didn't work for him.
It didn't work for his supporters.
It didn't work for me.
It doesn't make me happier.
It didn't work for you. It didn't work for Mexicans.
And I believe that if the president had a choice of doing it over...
He might say, well, I could have worded that better.
Would you agree that it didn't work for any of his supporters, didn't work for you, didn't work for Mexico, literally didn't work for anybody?
Would you agree? I would disagree with one point.
I think in a crowded Republican field, he was able to differentiate himself as the toughest on immigration with that comment.
And so maybe I didn't agree for you or I, but if you're looking for someone who said, you know what, I am tired of these hypocrites who keep saying they're going to be strong on the board but not going to, this made him stand out.
It's branding. I mean, it comes right out of your book.
Well, do you think he couldn't have also found a way to stand out, being the toughest?
Without saying it in an inelegant way that is easy to misinterpret.
Don't you think he could have hit that mark?
He didn't. He didn't hit it.
There were 15 people who ran for president to challenge Trump.
They all used elegant ways.
None of them won. Trump won.
And? And my point being is he knew that as someone who has never had political office, someone who was an outsider, that if he was going to win, and this is the genius of his marketing strategy, he needed to brand himself as something different.
But all of your opinions require you to read his mind and to see something that none of his supporters are seeing.
Would you agree that that's true?
I don't agree that after Rita's mind, and I don't agree that many of the supporters are seen.
I think lots of people saw it.
Wait, no. I'm telling you, and you can look in the comments.
So there are a lot of Trump supporters in the comments.
So back me up or disagree with me.
Fact check me in the comments.
Would you agree that you don't know any Trump supporters?
Who thought he was talking about all Mexicans being bad?
Is there anybody who thought, if you're a Trump supporter in the comments, tell me, did you interpret it that way or do you know anybody who interpreted it that way?
Because I've literally never met anybody who interpreted it that way.
But your entire point is based on the fact that we did, is it not?
My entire point is that he used a comment like that To stoke offense and it works.
That's my point. That's all it is. And so whether or not people agree or disagree, that's neither here nor there, but it was an effective branding strategy.
I mean, you've got to agree that it branded him well, right?
No one else in that stage is willing to delete it.
No, I would not agree that that branded him well or that it helped him.
Because to your point, there absolutely, it seems to me, was a way to make his point just as strongly.
And as we've observed, he can make news no matter what he does.
I mean, there's no situation in which he gets ignored.
So there are lots of ways he can get attention.
I would say that that was a failed speech.
That had the ironic effect of getting him so much attention that he sucked the attention away from everybody else.
But the notion that he planned to do something that was offensive to immigrants and to the whole population basically The idea that he intentionally meant it to sound that wrong for political gain is unsupported.
It requires you to assume something about his mind that doesn't seem sensible to me.
He is a mastermind.
He knew exactly what he was doing, or he just made a comment that wasn't well articulated.
But no matter what, he's not a master persuader, though.
He's either lucky or a bully.
Which one? He's either lucky or a bully?
My take on him has always been that he's amazingly good at persuasion.
But he does say things which, clearly, if you were to go back and say, okay, was that perfect or not, you'd say, okay, I would change that.
So I do not make the claim that he never makes a mistake, and I often, I don't know if I've done it often, but I have pointed out that that comment we're talking about would clearly be in the category of not effective.
It worked against him big time.
I would agree with a lot of what you just said, Scott, but now I'm wondering, in hindsight, because he was able to say things that garnered massive media coverage, was it really the fact that he was a master persuader, or did he use his celebrity, his bombast and vulgarity to dominate the news and use repetition to So that people are hearing his brand over and over and over.
And don't get me wrong, right?
The net effect is, look, like him or hate him, good news or bad news, he dominated the news.
People saw his name everywhere.
The community is not a master persuader.
That's just someone who's dominating the news with repetition.
Well, that's an example of word thinking, because you're just trying to define it as not important.
But we both observe that he went with no prior political experience to President of the United States.
Did he do that without being persuasive?
Well, I guess the question to ask is, what is it that makes that persuasive?
And when I think of persuasive, it's either having influence through argument or emotion to convince people to do something.
And it's not like, as you said before, he's gone through and thought through specifically, how am I going to win this election?
He stumbled in, down the escalator, said some words, and he thought he was going to lose.
He had no idea that he was going to win.
But he won because he understood how to connect and he used the same vulgar language.
He used the power of celebrity to dominate the news media and And then convince enough people to try something different.
I mean, let's be clear.
He didn't convince more people to vote for him, right?
But you know what? It doesn't matter because a popular vote is not how you win a presidency.
All that matters is the Electoral College.
What did he do that Romney didn't do?
He got 100,000 people in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to give him a shot because they wanted to try something new.
But he largely won the same state that any Republican would have won.
And so I'm just not convinced that he's the master persuader you speak of.
Well, you did see him tear through a field of 16 Republican primary contestants who pretty much all of the experts on both the left and the right said it's the strongest field of Republicans ever fielded.
And he just eviscerated them while we watched.
You watched the same thing I did.
And I agree. And I think how he did that was by being a bully, was by being vulgar.
Wait, hold on, hold on.
You just keep substituting the words bully for persuasive and claiming victory.
I learned that from you. That's a classic Trump move.
I learned that exactly from your book.
Your supporters should read.
But the point is, whether you label him a bully or not is less relevant than the fact that he is persuasive.
So you would agree, you may be disagreeing with his methods, but objectively speaking, he went from guy with no chance and just a joke to President of the United States.
I mean, we all watched it, and there's nothing except persuasion that could have made that happen.
Would you agree? And that's like saying when I was a kid and I would worry about running into bullies who would take my lunch money because they would beat me up.
That's also persuasive, right?
Because they can use force to beat me up.
Those tactics, if you want to call it persuasive, sure.
But calling him a master persuader when it's really just...
So if we were to look at, say, his policy about getting tough with trade negotiations with China, would you call that a case of bullying China?
So, I'm so glad you brought that up, because this is part of his bombast.
And to an extent, it works for him.
I don't think any other presidential candidate can do what he can do, because that's his brand.
Whether or not it's working, what we've seen is consumer prices are going up.
We have not seen the net effects yet, the trade war.
But you know what? I am willing to say, let's give him a chance.
Let's see if he can make this work for the American people.
But you have to review that. So far, it has not.
Well, I don't want to get into China too far.
I don't think we should have a trade deal, and I think that he has educated the public to turn against China in a way that probably no other president could have.
The national mood about China right now is that we should probably decouple, whether gently or not, because they're sending fentanyl over here and killing us.
Would you agree that the feeling about China and the United States has changed radically under President Trump from being, hey, why do we want to start a trade war?
Would you not agree that it's closer now to why are we in business with these horrible people anyway who are killing 50,000 Americans a year, turning on Hong Kong, locking the Uyghurs up in concentration camps, stealing our IP, giving us bad trade deals?
Why are we even dealing with them at all?
Would you agree that the national mood has changed radically against China under President Trump?
You and I can agree that China should be held accountable for stealing our IP, for producing fentanyl that comes and harms our communities, and for being irregular with its currency.
right? But I will say this.
Countries that trade together don't go to war with one another.
The reality is that China is a large country that's going to be an economic player.
One way or the other, we're going to have to engage them.
We'd probably be more successful using a trade deal and the rule of law to bind them to mutually acceptable policies as opposed to being isolationist pretending they don't exist.
Well, yeah, we could go down that road, but rather than do that for the benefit of the audience, my original question is – or let me state it a different way.
Sure. When you characterize the president as a bully – I think that the bullying as a component of persuasion, would you say that bullying, whether you think it's a good tool or a bad tool, would be within the larger persuasion category?
We're on the same page there, right?
I would agree, and I would just say that bullying is the lowest form of persuasion.
Take, for example, the former president, Barack Obama.
Here's a man who was black.
How many black presidents have we had?
His middle name was Hussein.
He had been on the Senate for less than a term, yet he somehow used hope and inspiration to convince people to vote for his vision.
That, to me, is more of a master persuader compared to Donald Trump.
So let me acknowledge that I've also said that Obama was a tremendously skilled persuader and politician.
And I'm also, unlike nearly everybody watching this at this moment, most of them are Trump supporters, I also give Obama a fairly good score as a president on a lot of levels.
So we would not disagree on that.
But you didn't write a book about President Obama.
You wrote a book about Donald Trump.
Right, because I didn't get really involved in politics until then.
So I didn't really write about politics in any serious way before that.
So here's the thing. I would agree that bullying is part of persuasion and you would agree that it's the lowest level.
Would you agree with me that there might be some situations in which a little arm twisting, you could call it bullying, let me call it arm twisting, but we'll agree we're talking about the same thing.
Would you agree that there are some situations where you just have to push?
And that regular persuasion is not the right tool.
Would you agree with that statement?
I would, but there's degrees, right?
How much are we pushing, and at what cost?
At what point do you justify walking women in cages with their children, or saying that women who have abortions should have some form of punishment, or saying that a judge is biased because he's Mexican?
Hold on.
Hold on. Don't give me the laundry list.
Let me – give me chances to respond to any of these wild claims because one of them was just ridiculous, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Actually, let me get to that first.
Sure, please do.
Because I think you've now agreed with me that some form of bullying, if the situation is right, would be the right tool.
So we could agree that bullying is not good or bad.
It simply is something that could be used wrong, right?
I think more in terms of degrees, and I would put bullying at the lowest level, but yeah, sure.
Well, I would not put it in terms of degree.
Let's say we needed to bully Afghanistan to do more to stop terrorism, and it was clear that we had tried everything else, and nothing but bullying would work.
In that case, is there anything wrong with bullying as hard as you possibly can to reduce the risk of terrorism as much as you can?
Sure. So if you're going to use economic sanctions, if you're going to use a threat of war, that's fine.
But in my mind, that's not bullying.
I guess to your point, you're trying to say they're one and the same.
I see something very different when Trump says mothers who have abortions should have some form of punishment and that judges who, by virtue of their last name, are somehow biased because they're Mexican.
Those are very different forms of abortion.
Let's not conflate the two. Let's talk about this Mexican judge situation.
I love the fact that you're a lawyer because I haven't talked to an actual lawyer about this.
Let me ask you this. In the context of legal cases, is it cut...
Is it common and routine and in fact expected and good for the system that anybody who perceives a source of bias calls it out so that the system is transparent in terms of people being concerned about bias?
Would you say in general, we're not going to talk about the judge specifically yet, but in general it's good and always productive to call out bias.
Would you agree? I would.
And Trump could have filed a motion saying, hey, this guy is best friends with my opponent.
He should not be serving us.
Hold on. Hold on.
Now, given that it's good to call out bias, when it's true, let's see, I think we'd both agree that if there's real bias or even real reason to suspect bias, that calling it out helps the system.
It doesn't hurt the system.
If there's real reason to do it, yes.
Right. But if...
But if you're just making stuff up...
As Trump often does.
If you're just pretending there's bias, then you're allowed to do that because it's the legal system.
But I think we'd both agree that if you're just making stuff up, that's not good.
Like, just pretending somebody has a bias when they don't.
We'd both agree that's a bad idea, right?
Exactly. Alright, so let me finish the point.
Do you believe that someone who has...
Let's say a lot of relatives who are immigrants from Mexico and very close relatives, let's say it's your parents.
Do you believe that that person would have seen President Trump in an objective way after what the news reported about what he said when he came down the escalator, which we just talked about?
Do you believe that it would be...
Do you believe that the judge could be expected by a reasonable observer to be unbiased if his family was probably biased by association?
What I say by that is there's no reason to believe that anybody in his family was biased either just because they were immigrants.
Especially because he was born in Indiana and is an American, not a Mexican.
Well, let me back up to that.
Please back up. This one bothers me more than anything else.
If you said to your neighbor, hey neighbor, or actually I've got a friend.
I just talked to him the other day.
His name is Sal. And if I said, Sal, tell me about your family.
Just describe your family.
He's an American. Sal would say, well, the first thing you need to know about me is that I'm Italian.
Now, I would know that Sal means he's an American whose relatives are from Italy.
If I go to my friend Ed and say, Ed, tell me about your family.
What do I need to know about you?
There's a good chance that Ed would say, well, the first thing you need to know about me is that I'm Mexican.
I would know, without any further explanation, that he doesn't mean he was born in Mexico, because he wasn't.
He's American, but he has deep Mexican roots, etc.
When the President said that the judge was Mexican, I interpreted it the way Ed and Sal would talk about themselves in the normal language that people talk casually, which is the way the president talks.
He did not indicate by that statement that he thought that that judge was born in Mexico.
There was nothing indicative of that.
Rather, people who wanted to interpret him incorrectly said, my God, he doesn't even know where the judge is born, when in fact every person who talks I'm not.
I'm American. So here's what I would say.
You and I just had a conversation about mind reading, and I can't tell what was in his head just the same way that I saw from Trump's head, right?
Exactly. So we agree on that. We can agree that we don't know what he was thinking when he said Mexican, but you also agree that there's a perfectly innocent interpretation, which would be normal.
And then there's a weird and crazy one in which he's calling him out for his race in public while running for president, the craziest thing I've ever heard.
Would you agree that those are the two interpretations, totally normal language or crazy interpretation where he's insulting his ethnicity in public while running for president?
And I'm going to reject the premise of that false equalization.
That's false equivalence.
Because, of course, anything is possible.
Now, what's more probable?
What's more likely? Believe Trump at his worst.
Look at the words himself. That the man would be biased because he was Mexican.
That's what he said. Oh, hold on.
That's exactly what he said.
Here's my interpretation of that.
He has a heritage from Mexico surrounded by people who probably have a very strong opinion about President Trump.
Would you agree that the people around him, his family, in all likelihood, we don't know this, but again, that's not important for the purposes of biased questions in the court.
Let me give you this example, and I think you'll agree with this.
If somebody, let's say, had an association with some organization and they were a judge, it would be fair to call out that association without necessarily knowing that that would bias them.
Would you agree?
No, because you don't know anything about Judge Curry.
I mean, you don't know if he's...
No, you're on a different topic.
I said, just in general, if somebody has an association, they're a member of an organization, and there's reason to believe that could cause conflict of interest or bias, isn't it fair for an attorney to point that out, even if there's no way you can tell if that person is biased simply by being a member of the organization?
If there's a reasonable basis with objective demonstration, then yes, I would say...
Yes, okay.
Now, I love your choice of words, good lawyer word.
If you said there's a reasonable basis for it.
So you don't have to be right, and in fact, in the advocacy lawyer world, being able to make a case is fair, even if maybe you're not right.
I agree, yep. Okay, so the president...
As a legal strategy, one of the best ones I've ever seen, called out the bias of the judge, and yet there were two possibilities.
One, the judge might be recused.
Two, the judge would have to go above and beyond to show that he was not biased.
Which of those two things happened?
Yes, I'll give you the answer.
When it came down to Judge Curiel deciding whether the judgment or the case would be held Before the election or after, and by all normal standards, it should have been before.
Had it been before, it would have been very bad for President Trump.
Judge Cariel went above and beyond, in my opinion, of what he needed to do to create the impression of lack of bias by deciding to hold it after the election, which probably was a big deal in terms of how people saw the election.
From a legal strategy, I would say that he put the judge in a position where the judge had to defend his lack of his unbiased position, which is really strong persuasion and really good legal technique.
And when it came to a gray area where that judge could have gone against Trump by having it before the election or for Trump, he went for Trump.
And in so doing, that judge We're good to go.
We have a strong feeling about the president because the fake news has branded him as such an enemy to the Mexican people and anybody with Mexican heritage that one could not expect him to get a fair trial from somebody steeped in the culture of Where other people feel bad about the president, even if that judge doesn't.
There was zero evidence that Judge Curiel was steeped in the culture of people who thought otherwise.
Judges are trained.
They're expected to be independent.
There has to be some evidence, right?
And there was no, he had never made a remark.
No, hold on, hold on. Hold on.
Hold on, hold on.
Judge Curiel's parents came from Mexico.
Isn't that right? So you don't think somebody's parents could have an effect on their bias?
So there has to be evidence of that.
There was no evidence of that. No, there doesn't.
No, there doesn't. I hate to outlawyer you, but in the context of a legal trial...
Where somebody suspects bias because of, let's say, an association, the appearance or the possibility of bias is all you need.
Right. And in this case, there was not even the appearance of bias.
Just because someone from Mexico does not need the appearance of bias.
I hate to outlawyer you again, but it has nothing to do with what the individual did or did not do.
It has only to do with the description of the situation, and you could put in any person in that situation and say, would a person be likely to be biased if they were in this situation?
So it had nothing to do with what Judge Curiel did or did not do, and I would agree every indication is that he's just a good judge who played by the rules.
So every indication is that he was not biased, but it was certainly good legal strategy to put him in a corner.
Would you agree with that?
And I would also say if you swapped out legal strategy with Conman, the same sentence is true.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute. Did you just try to win the argument by once you agreed that it was a good legal strategy, you just changed the words into it's a con man and declared victory?
Exactly. Because this is what Trump does, right?
You call him persuader, I call him a conman.
It's the same thing. And you're right.
It put Judge Carell on his heels where he delayed his decision on Trump University, which, by the way, is another example.
Which worked. And it got the outcome Trump won.
Did I lose your connection?
I think we lost the connection.
Yeah. All right.
I think, well, that wasn't me, in case anybody's wondering.
I did not disconnect you.
But let's, I don't know if you'll be back, but we may have exhausted that conversation a little bit.
So thank you so much, James Norte.
If you'd like to follow him on Twitter, he's at NorteTX.
It's spelled N as in neighbor, O-R-T-E-Y-T-X. And thanks so much for coming on.
It's a great treat, actually, to have somebody smart and well-informed come on and just mix it up.
So very much appreciated.
And thank you.
So let's talk about a couple other things.
President Trump had one of the greatest tweets ever today.
Now, I'm sure that's hyperbole on my part, but here it is.
He's gone on the offense against Pelosi, and he's trying to create a contrast.
So contrast is good persuasion, right?
In this case, the contrast is what is Nancy Pelosi spending her days doing, impeachment, versus what should she be working on?
This is really strong.
So here's his tweet.
It's a two-parter.
He says, I can't believe that Nancy Pelosi's district in San Francisco is in such horrible shape that the city itself is in violation of many sanitary and environmental orders, causing it to owe the federal government billions of dollars, and all she works on is impeachment.
We should all work together to clean up these hazardous waste and homeless sites before the whole city rots away.
Before the whole city rots away.
That is so good.
Very bad and dangerous conditions.
Also severely impacting the Pacific Ocean and water supply.
Pelosi must work on this mess and turn her district around.
This is just gold.
This is just absolute gold.
Because this whole phrase, before the whole city rots away, do you notice how that's making you think past the sale?
He does this all the time, and you don't always catch it, so I like to point it out.
The sale is whether or not the city is rotting.
So instead of saying, hey, your city is rotting, Where people would just say, no, it isn't.
You know, we just have some problems.
He words it this way.
We should work on cleaning it up before the whole city rots away.
So adding the before makes you uncritically accept that you're on the path to rotting away and that you've got to do something.
It's really clever wording, persuasion-wise.
And also, it's visual because if you think the city has problems Conceptual problems.
It's hard to wrap your hand around it, but when you say the whole city rots away, rot, it's really good.
That's a really good word for this, just persuasion-wise.
All right. Here are some provocative concepts.
I asked this on Twitter just to mess with people.
And I'll ask you here, what is the opposite of this sentence?
Can you do me a favor?
Can you do me a favor?
Or can you do us a favor?
What would be the opposite of can you do me a favor?
Well, let's break it down.
What's a favor? A favor is something that you do without an expectation of payback.
President Trump said on his Ukraine phone call to the president of Ukraine, can you do us a favor?
He asked for a favor.
Definition of a favor is something that you do without expectation of compensation.
That's what the word means.
What is quid pro quo?
It's the opposite.
Quid pro quo is where you do something with the express expectation you're going to get something else in return.
Favor It's exactly the opposite.
It's where you do something with no expectation of getting something in return.
So here's the funny part.
Let's say the president gets impeached.
Here's how the trial is going to go.
So we're accusing you of asking for a quid pro quo.
Let's look at your language.
Can you do us a favor?
What is the definition of favor?
Something you do without a quid pro quo.
What is it he asked for?
A favor. What is the opposite of a favor?
A quid pro quo.
So, your case against the President is that when he said, do me a favor, what he really meant is exactly the opposite.
What is your evidence that what he meant was the opposite?
Well, we read his mind No, hold on.
Mind reading is not part of the legal process.
So, remind me again how favor, which is the thing you do without any compensation, is interpreted by you as a quid pro quo, which is literally the opposite.
Something you do for something in return.
Tell me how you got there.
Well, obviously the President was thinking, hold on, stop.
You don't impeach people.
For what strangers imagine they're thinking.
And that's what we have here.
Now, would it be good for the President and his re-election if something bad came up in Ukraine about Biden?
Of course it would. Is the President allowed to do things which could help his re-election?
Well, let's talk about one.
What would happen...
What would happen...
If China decides to sign a favorable trade deal and gives us everything we want between now and election, what would happen?
That would pretty much guarantee that President Trump got re-elected, wouldn't you say?
If China agreed to a deal that even the critics said, that's better than what we had, wouldn't you agree that that would pretty much get him elected?
Now, let's say China doesn't.
That would not necessarily cause him not to get elected because I think we won't have a deal and I think you'll get re-elected easily.
But wouldn't it make a difference?
Would it affect our elections if China gave a deal or didn't give a deal or what kind of deal?
Of course it would. Is the president allowed to accept a deal from China on an election year?
I don't know why he should be allowed to do that.
It's going to influence the election.
So here's the thing. The reason that that doesn't bother you, doesn't bother the public, is because we all understand that dealing with China and the trade deals is just the normal part of being a president.
It's just what you do.
So the fact that doing a good job at your job helps you get re-elected shouldn't be a negative.
We all agree with that.
Was it the president's job that To find out if any foreign entity had, let's say, blackmail on who might be the next president of the United States.
Kind of exactly his job.
It's literally exactly the president's job to make sure there's no foreign interference in our elections.
And certainly, if Hunter Biden was raking in the money or had raked in the money, it doesn't matter if he's doing it now.
It only matters if Ukraine knew he did something bad before.
Because that would create some blackmail potential.
So a president doing his job, looking into foreign interference or potential foreign interference, even if it helps his election, can never be wrong.
It can never be wrong.
So when people talk about Whether the president should be impeached or not impeached, I have to say I have mixed feelings about it.
I support the president.
I would not want him to be kicked out of office, but I'd kind of like to see the impeachment process just to watch it play out because I think it would be the easiest win anybody ever had.
I would love to be the lawyer who had to defend the president against these charges.
I mean, if something else comes up, that's a different situation.
But on these charges, this is the easiest case ever.
I was doing my job, it was my highest priority, and I asked for a favor, which is the opposite of a quid pro quo.
Well, but Mr.
President, what about the fact that they knew that the funding was being held up?
Did they know why?
I'm not sure they knew why, but that'll all be That'll all be coming out.
However, I don't think it matters why.
The president is allowed to negotiate bully quid pro quo as much as he wants, as long as it's also his job, as it was in this case.
Alright, something else.
What do you think is more predictive of who's going to be president?
The polling a year out Or the fundraising?
I would argue that the fundraising is far more predictive, and Biden is starting to have some money problems, whereas several of his competitors are not.
So I would say that Biden is pretty much done, because the fundraising is really – that's the end of it.
Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey said in a tweet – That the White House Trump statement telling the entire federal government to terminate subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post is a watershed moment in national history, McCaffrey said. No room for humorous media coverage.
This is deadly serious.
This is Mussolini. So a retired general who happens to be now an NBC contributor...
Which is important to this story.
Believes that the White House canceling subscriptions to two publications that tend to write bad things about them is like Mussolini.
Does that feel like Mussolini to you?
Because I'm pretty sure everyone who works in the White House can go online and read the New York Times if they want to.
Feels like the easiest thing in the world to It would be for any individual who wanted to read the New York Times or the Washington Post to pick up their phone and then read it.
So they have to pay for it because there's paywalls.
But I think they can afford it, a few bucks a month.
So when you see stuff like this, he's a retired general.
And this is so clearly just bought and paid for crazy-tweeting.
It actually lowers my respect for the military.
I hate to say it.
I mean, I have tremendous respect for the military.
But when you see a four-star general, retired, joining NBC, and then tweeting that canceling some newspaper subscriptions is similar to Mussolini, how do I respect the military as much as I did yesterday?
I mean, it's not a big difference.
I still respect the military completely, but he's not helping.
He's not helping the cause here.
Rudy Giuliani, apparently he butt-dialed a couple times.
This is the funniest story.
He butt-dialed at least twice, and his conversations, private conversations that were not meant to be on a phone call, We're recorded on voicemail to some journalist.
And of course, he mentioned something about money and something about a foreign country.
And so that was enough for the president's critics to say, hey, talked about a foreign country, talked about a lot of money.
This can't be good.
But we don't know what the context was.
We have no idea what the context was.
So to imagine that because you don't know the context, you therefore might be guilty of a horrible crime, well, that's kind of a stretch.
Kind of a stretch. All right.
What else is going on here?
So the Flynn case is getting really interesting.
And I feel as though I don't quite understand the timeline and the who did what, because it's a really complicated story.
But I would just tell you this.
Did you ever wonder about why somebody who was smart enough to be a general got taken down so easily?
Have you ever wondered about that?
You know, he's a general.
So clearly he's, you know, highly educated on strategy, military strategy.
You know, you would expect he could play a pretty good chess game.
So weren't you surprised he was taken down so easily?
Just like, just wiped off the board.
So here's what's interesting.
So his lawyer is getting busy, making some claims about what has happened to General Flynn and the way that was run.
And I won't go through the claims, But I've suddenly redefined my understanding of Flynn.
It appears that he might have more strategy and more guts than we think.
Yeah, I think his son was threatened, so that has something to do with the way he handled things.
But it looks like he just sort of did a strategic retreat.
And now that the strategic retreat...
Has served its purpose.
It looks like he's going full thermonuclear on the government now.
And I think we're going to find out that General Flynn's game is pretty strong.
Because if you're a general, you don't send your weak unit against the enemy's strong unit.
And on day one...
Flynn had a weak, you know, let's say a weak force against the entire government who'd lined up against him and threatened his son.
That was a superior force.
What was someone who was trained as a general supposed to do?
Strategic withdrawal.
Build up your defense.
Build up your weapons.
Wait. Hold.
Hold. Hold.
Hold. Kill.
We have entered the kill phase.
General Flynn, through his lawyers, look like they're just going to burn the fucking ground.
I mean, it's too early.
So we're still in, you know, we're still in, you know, fog of war.
Don't know exactly what these new accusations from Flynn's side are.
We're going to come up, you know, stuff about documents being edited.
We don't know how, but, you know, maliciously, etc.
I mean, there's a really, really serious complaints.
He's going to scorch the fucking earth.
It looks like, I mean, too early to say, I could be wrong, but it looks like he's coming hard.
I don't think General Flynn is going to take prisoners.
I think he's going to scorch the earth.
This is so much fun.
Anyway, too early to know.
We'll find out. But here's my advice to any of you.
If you're going to mess with a general, you better finish the job.
If you're going to mess with a general who's been trained by the U.S. military, a very experienced man, if you're going to try to take him down, and you're going to try to take down his family, In this case, threatening his son. And of course, everything that happens to him affects his wife, etc.
If you're going to take him down, you better finish it.
Looks like they didn't finish the job.
So, General Flynn, it's your turn.
And this is going to be so fun to watch.
All right, we'll see. That's all I got for today.
I will talk to you tomorrow. Thanks again for James Norte for joining me for a great conversation.
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