Episode 1138 Scott Adams: Trump Taxes, Mail-In Ballot Fraud Scandal, How Trump Wins Without Trying, I Explain Taxes
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Topic ignorance is key to political attacks
The tax critics are ignorant or dishonest
Whiteboard1: 2017 Taxes
Whiteboard2: Expenses and Revenues
Project Veritas...Massive Mail-in ballot FRAUD, llhan Omar
Fareed Zakaria: Election chaos re-elects President Trump
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*statistician "Tsis Trel Sam" by Turn off my ringer Get ready for work.
Are you ready to learn something useful?
You know, probably there's nobody who's going to be on this periscope who doesn't already understand what I'm going to teach you.
Because you're smarter than average.
But there might be a few people wandering in here, and it'll be useful to you.
And at the very least, you might learn another way to explain it to other people.
So even if you already know about taxes and depreciation, you might pick up a little tip.
So hang around.
It's going to be worth it.
We'll have some laughs too.
But first, how do we get going?
You know how.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better except taxes.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go. I can feel my deductions increasing.
Well, before we get into a little whiteboard lesson on taxes that will not hurt one bit, I'm going to keep it so simple that you won't even mind listening to it.
There's some disturbing news about Brad Parscale.
You've all heard it by now.
I'm not really going to talk about it except to say that we wish him well.
This is the sort of story that should only be viewed as a medical issue.
So that's all that needs to be said.
There seems to be a medical issue, and I hope it works out well.
I am loving, just loving, from the trash-talking point of view, watching the president go after Biden and vice versa, I am loving...
President Trump challenging him to a blood test.
Now, I would say that the odds of that happening, where Trump and Biden both take blood tests before the debate, I think it's fair to say that the odds of that actually happening are zero.
There's no chance it'll happen.
But because it's such an outrageous thing to bring up, The president can bring it up.
There's no risk because there's no chance it's going to happen.
But because he's the president, you sort of have to cover it in the news because he just keeps bringing it up.
And you can't really ignore a thing like that.
So it makes everybody ask the question and think about it and focus on that question of how are they medicating Biden.
Now, part of the reason that it's sticky and it's a good attack is because even if you support Biden, don't you think there might be some pharmaceuticals involved a little bit?
Because even if you support him, you do notice that he has good days and bad days.
You can't miss that.
What causes a good day versus a bad day?
Is it maybe medication?
Is it maybe a natural cycle, which would be disturbing as well?
It's a perfect attack.
Now, of course, the counterattack on the president is his critics accuse him of using Adderall.
Now, do you know anything about Adderall?
I would say that it should be a rule that every president should be on Adderall, even if they don't need it.
Now, Adderall is a very controlled substance because if the wrong person is using it for the wrong reason, it basically acts like speed and it could be bad for them.
But if somebody, just hypothetically, hypothetically, if someone was under a doctor's care, such as a sitting president, would you want them to be on Adderall or to not be on Adderall?
Well, here's the thing.
If you know anything about it, you probably want them to be on it because they're going to be way more productive and actually smarter.
That's what it does.
I don't want to encourage anybody to take an illegal drug if it's not recommended by your doctor.
But it is a fact that Adderall is not like cocaine or heroin or oxy.
It's just nothing like any of those drugs.
It's not like alcohol or weed.
It's not a Quaalude.
It's not any of those.
It is purely a performance-enhancing drug, which has plenty of history and science.
So if it turned out, and I don't think that this is an evidence, but if it turned out that the president was on Adderall, that would be a plus.
You're just not allowed to say that in public.
Everybody here who's had a little experience with this and has had anything in that family of chemicals, you know what I'm talking about.
So it's interesting that ignorance is the most important part of these political attacks, is that you can make an attack as long as the public doesn't understand the topic.
So right now they can say, hey, he's on this drug called Adderall, and 80% of the public will say, I don't know what that is, but it doesn't sound good the way you described it.
And that's it. That's all you have to accomplish, is that it doesn't sound good.
Just like asking for Biden to take a blood test.
It doesn't have to happen.
It just has to sound sort of sketchy and damaging.
And that's it.
So, Matt Walsh tweeted today or yesterday, Trump has had financial records leaked to the press, secretly recorded conversations leaked to the press, and many officials who worked inside the White House have written tell-all books.
And yet, through all of that, no crime or actual serious scandal has been uncovered.
Did you expect that we would get all the way to here and this president would be...
I mean, he's investigated inside and out.
The last thing that people were waiting for was these taxes.
And I can tell you that I personally had a conversation with a, let's say, a notable person who I will not describe further, a notable, very smart person who said, You just wait.
When the taxes come out, someday those taxes are going to come out, and it's going to show all those terrible crimes.
Well, taxes are out.
Where's all the terrible crimes?
If there were any terrible crimes, or even crimes, you know, even little crimes, that were in evidence of those taxes, do you think we wouldn't have heard about it by now?
Because you don't lead with the boring stuff.
If the New York Times had the goods, they had something that was like a, you know, even something suspicious, they would have told you by now, don't you think?
So it turns out that the president is way cleaner than anybody imagined.
I have to admit, you know, I'm a...
I'm a complete supporter of the president, but even I was surprised that there's nothing there.
I thought, you know, any billionaire, it wouldn't matter who it is, if you take anybody with a real complicated billionaire kind of a tax return and you say, all right, here are you public, go take a look at it, I feel as if you would find something suspicious looking in just about anybody's billionaire tax returns.
It might not be crimes, and if you looked into it, it might not actually be as bad as it looks on the surface, but there would be all kinds of stuff.
There would be flags where you'd say, I better look at this a little bit more.
But apparently Trump doesn't have those.
He apparently has a pretty clean return.
Now, the one thing that is being audited, and the President has been telling us this for years, is that there is a big $72 million deduction that's being debated.
Now, is that a crime?
Is it a crime if the IRS ultimately says this will be disallowed?
Not really. I mean, there might be a penalty with it because there may be some requirement for that.
But it is completely routine, completely routine, for companies to see some gray area thing and say, well, might as well take a shot.
It's sort of a gray area.
We have an argument.
The IRS would have an argument the other way.
We get that. But give it a shot.
It is not illegal to give something a shot.
You have to understand that.
That deduction could be disallowed, but it was done publicly in the sense that the IRS is aware of it.
The IRS got to look at it, and they started to question it, and apparently there's enough of an argument on the Trump side that it hasn't been resolved for years.
If it were easy to resolve, as if Let's say that there was no argument on the Trump side.
There's just no argument for this deduction.
I feel like it would have been resolved in less than four years, right?
It wouldn't take four years to resolve something that didn't have an argument on the other side.
So even if Trump ends up not winning that deduction conversation, that's not illegal.
It's completely legal to take your best shot.
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
But you knew what your risk was.
Here's some of the best tax advice I ever heard.
This came from my smart democratic friend, coincidentally, and it was from a friend of his.
And he recounts this story.
He said he was doing his own taxes, because he's really smart, so he knew how to do his own taxes, even the complicated stuff.
But he reached a point where there are two ways to calculate something, and it appeared that the IRS would allow either one.
One of those ways he could do it was good for him, and the other way was not as good for him.
But they both looked...
Like they were allowed.
It was just two different ways to account for the same thing.
So he asked his friend, who was more of an expert on finance, he goes, what do I do?
I've got two valid ways to do this.
One is good for me and the other one's not good for me.
What should I do? And his friend gave him this advice.
Do the one that's good for you.
That's it. Do the one that's good for you.
Now, what if it turned out that the IRS said, hmm, no, you know, really, it should have been that other calculation?
It's fine. You might have to pay a little extra, you know, for the interest or something, for something that shouldn't have been a deduction.
But the IRS doesn't put you in jail for having a good argument.
That's an important point that people don't understand.
It's not cut and dried.
These are legal things.
These are illegal things.
As long as your lawyers can go in there and say, look, this is the reasoning we used.
Here's your own rules.
Your rules say this.
We read those rules and we did this.
How is that wrong?
And if the IRS says, well, it is wrong, and here's why, nobody goes to jail for that.
It's very routine.
Let's talk more about Trump's taxes.
You should not trust anybody who makes this comparison.
If you see this on Twitter, and you're seeing it this morning all over the place, people are going to say this.
A typical A middle-class taxpayer might pay several thousand dollars whatever per year.
Trump only paid $750 in 2017.
So, therefore, it's totally unfair, right?
No. Anybody who gives you that comparison and tries to convince you that you've learned something Because you compared Trump's total taxes to an average citizen, they are lying to you.
Or they don't know a frickin' thing about taxes.
Those are the only two possibilities.
Anybody who makes that comparison is a flat-out liar, or they don't understand the field whatsoever.
There's no way that that comparison makes sense.
It's comparing a peanut to an elephant.
They just are different things, and I'll explain why.
Let me explain for anybody who doesn't follow finance, doesn't do their own taxes, a little simple situation.
I'm not claiming that this equals Trump's taxes.
It's a generic situation, right?
So suppose you've got a company in one year, any year, that makes $2 billion in money coming in.
So that's what they've earned from people paying them for their services or products.
And they've got an expense of $1 billion a year that is actual checks and money that they've given out.
That would leave them, since they brought in two billion and only put out a billion in expenses, that's a billion dollars left over to spend on stuff.
But if they also bought a lot of assets, let's say they bought buildings or computers or vehicles, you can do a thing called depreciation.
Depreciation is, instead of taking the cost of that thing and acting like you spent all your money the year that you bought it, So let's say you bought a building and it was a million dollars.
You don't write off the whole million as an expense the year that you bought it.
The tax law says that you write off a little bit every year based on what the tax law says.
If it's a building, maybe it's 15 years, for example, and you just spread it out as if it's an expense.
So if you had a billion of these paper artificial expenses, And a billion of real ones, the two of them would equal two billion, and that's all the money that you had coming in.
So even though you made half a billion dollars in cash, that's yours to keep.
You made a half a billion dollars, it's yours to keep.
You got a half a billion dollars in cash.
On paper, you made nothing.
And you don't have to pay taxes, federal income taxes, if you made nothing.
Now, is that a bad situation?
Is that unfair?
Is that the rich people taking advantage of a tax loophole?
Nope. Nope.
This law about how to deal with depreciation...
And indeed, depreciation won't be the whole story with Trump's taxes.
There will be other loopholes and things built into the law that he took advantage of.
But everything that's in the tax law...
is there because both Democrats and Republicans, in all likelihood, thought it was a good idea.
All the smart people thought it was a good idea.
Now, there are people who argue you should change the tax to a flat tax, etc.
So there is always room for debate.
But the point is, this idea of how to treat taxes Even for rich people, is not really controversial in the mainstream of people who understand finance.
Find me a CPA, somebody who is an expert on taxes, who thinks that this is bad for society.
You won't find any.
There's nobody who understands this field who thinks that this is bad or should be changed.
Now, when I say nobody, you can always find somebody who will say anything.
But the mainstream Democrat, mainstream Republican, they're all in favor of this.
There's nobody on the other side of this.
Now, the other thing you need to know is that when they say he didn't pay taxes, they're usually talking about federal income taxes.
It doesn't mean that no taxes were paid.
Indeed, he paid a bunch of salaries.
And everybody who earned a salary paid taxes.
So instead of the taxes coming out of here, it went to the people.
The people had an income.
They paid taxes.
And that goes to the federal government.
They also probably paid payroll taxes and Social Security and other related things.
That all goes to some government, either local or federal.
What about property taxes?
Every big company, especially if you're a real estate company, have enormous property taxes.
What about suppliers?
He's buying stuff from suppliers.
They make a profit.
Once they get that profit, they pay taxes.
None of this happens.
None of this. Unless this happens.
So why is it that the government and the IRS thinks it's a good idea to have a situation where sometimes big companies pay nothing?
It's a good idea because you really, really want this other stuff.
You want jobs, because if somebody has this job, the government doesn't have to support them.
That's a big win. You want all these taxes.
This is exactly what you want.
Now, if this lasted forever, Would that be good?
What if a big company just never paid taxes?
They just always found loopholes and just never paid taxes.
Would that be good? Well, it actually would be pretty good for the reasons I just told you.
Tons of taxes get paid, but it's a second-order effect.
Now remember, these suppliers who made money because they sold stuff to the company, Once they make their money, they go spend it again.
That's called the multiplier effect in economics.
So these dollars that are generated by this business, it's not one dollar.
This dollar goes to the supplier, the supplier buys his own supplies, that dollar goes to the next person, that dollar goes to the next person, and the next person.
Every time that dollar changed hands, somebody paid taxes.
Maybe sales tax, probably income tax if there was a profit there.
So there's an enormous economic benefit from a company that pays no taxes.
That's why it's allowed.
Because it's really, really good for the world.
It's not a coincidence that Amazon has this situation.
It's not a coincidence that there are lots of companies that have this situation.
Here's what you need to know.
For your further lesson in economics with my awkward whiteboard, here's the situation which might be somewhat typical for a company that's not paying federal income taxes.
If you're a growing business, meaning that you're plowing money into your business continually, it could be that your expenses are going up, because let's say you're buying a new building, you're investing in some infrastructure, You're just putting all kinds of money into that.
Now this could be real money expenses or depreciation, but it could be going up like crazy.
At the same time though, it's fine.
Your bank will give you loans because your revenue is going up like crazy too.
And the hope is that someday you'll get to the point where you don't have to put in as much every year and you can just start harvesting the benefits.
A good example of this is your cable company.
The company that is digging ditches and putting cable in the ground and connecting one neighborhood after another.
Every time they connect a neighborhood, they make money from that neighborhood.
So that neighborhood that the cable company connected is now profitable.
But the company itself is not profitable, only that neighborhood, because they have already put in two new neighborhoods that are not yet profitable.
As those new ones become profitable, now you've got three profitable ones.
Yay! If you stopped there, you could immediately get your expenses going down while your income goes up.
Hey, you're making money and you're paying taxes.
But why would you?
You didn't start a company.
You didn't start a company to get to some point and then just level off.
You started a company to grow forever.
And the best way to grow forever is to keep getting bank loans, to keep getting financing, private financing, etc.
As long as your revenue is going up and it looks like it could cross over in the future, The banks will give you all the money you want.
People will buy all the stock that you want.
You can give financing easily and cheaply.
Now, I don't know if President Trump's situation is like the one I described.
But what's important is, neither do you.
We don't know.
Now maybe if I looked at the details of his tax returns I could deduce this.
I'm not sure I could.
But if the news has not described to you if this is a normal situation of a growing company, is he plowing his money back into assets that are creating jobs and creating other kinds of taxes?
That's the best situation you could possibly have.
Now, it turns out that as an attack on the president, it's really, really effective.
Because how many people understand this little lesson that I just gave you?
If you were to guess what percentage of the general public Understands that you can't compare an average wage earner's taxes to a big company and that there are good reasons you can't compare them.
What percentage of the company do you think, or of the country, do you think knows that?
I would say 20% tops.
Yeah, somebody's guessing 20%.
Somebody says 5%, 10%.
It's somewhere in that range.
It's definitely not more than 20%.
But it's probably in the 5 to 20% range.
Now, having explained it to you, we're good now, right?
Everybody who sees an explanation like this, they didn't used to know, but now they've seen the explanation.
Oh, good. I guess that problem is solved.
We used to be ignorant, but now we've been informed, so I guess we're all good.
No, it doesn't work like that.
It's not just that 20% of the country are the only ones who understand this.
It is that 20% of the country might be the only ones capable of understanding it, which is a horrible thing to think.
But it's true.
Something like, I would guess this is true, something like maybe 20% of the public has the raw intellect and enough context and background and enough of a talent stack To even understand what I just said.
It's kind of complicated.
I would guess that there are a whole bunch of people who watched this, saw this maybe for the first time, some of you, and are saying to yourself, I think I kind of follow that, but I'm a little hazy on the depreciation part.
I kind of need to see that explained a few more times, which would be perfectly normal.
Trust me, If you go to school for economics or accounting or something like that, the first time you're introduced to the idea of cash flow being different from income and depreciation being this invisible expense, the first time you see this stuff, it doesn't really stick.
You kind of need to be introduced to it over and over again before it sticks.
So as a political attack, it's just brilliant.
But it is completely disreputable.
It is not good behavior.
Let's just say this.
The attack on Trump's taxes, if they were honest players, this is what it would look like if the critics were honest.
We thought we would find a whole bunch of criminal activity here.
We didn't find any.
That would be the first honest thing they would say.
Because unless they're hiding something, waiting for later, and it seems unlikely, they found nothing.
So the first thing they should say is, all those things that we thought were going to be big problems, we didn't find any.
That would be an honest statement.
But instead, they've suggested that there are problems when it is not demonstrated that there is.
Here is another example.
If you look at CNN, the way they're covering it, they say stuff like this.
President Trump has a $300 million loan personally guaranteed that's coming due.
So you say to yourself, whoa, that's bad, right?
$300 million loan coming due?
Sounds bad. And then you say to yourself, CNN would say, And what would you do if you needed $300 million and you're the president?
Let's say Russia might be a future place that you think you might get some money.
What would you do?
Would you be a little nice to Russia because it might help your financing later in your own personal life?
That's the CNN take.
Let me explain to you what they don't know or are lying about.
I don't know. They either don't know or they're lying.
A large company with a large loan coming due, how should you value that?
What should your brain do when you hear that there's a big company with a $300 million loan coming due?
Here is the correct way to analyze that.
So? That's it.
That's the entire analysis.
There's a big loan coming due in a big company.
So, that is the most routine thing in the world.
Do companies pay off their gigantic loans before they're due?
Sometimes. Sometimes they just refinance.
The only thing that matters is if the company is producing enough cash to pay the loan.
If you're a bank and the loan is coming due, But the borrower is making plenty of cash.
That's all you care about.
You don't care about his income statement.
You don't care that on paper it looks like he's not making money.
You care that his bank account is producing cash.
Because you don't get paid with conceptual money.
You're the bank. You want actual money.
If the company is producing actual money, And it's enough to service the loan.
The bank loves you.
The bank will fight over you.
The bank will compete for your business.
They love to give you money.
So, which is this situation?
Is this a situation where there's not enough cash flow and the president's really in trouble?
Well, they've kind of suggested that, haven't they?
They've kind of suggested that's the case.
But they haven't demonstrated it.
They've produced no evidence To suggest that it's even a little bit of a problem.
Might it be a problem?
Sure. Sure.
It might be a problem.
But in most cases, it would not be.
If they don't tell you, does he have enough cash flow to service the loan, they have told you nothing.
The amount of the loan, irrelevant.
The fact that it's coming due, irrelevant if you have cash flow.
That's all that matters. You tell me how much reporting there will be on cash flow.
There won't be any, right?
There won't be any reporting on cash flow, because cash flow is the story that probably makes Trump look good.
When Trump talked about his balance sheet before these taxes came out, when he was talking about them, did you ever notice the way he talked?
He talked about having a strong balance sheet and good cash flow.
He did not say, On paper, I have a big income.
Because that would be dumb.
What you want is the biggest cash flow and the smallest paper profit.
Did he do that?
Don't know. Because the reporting is silent on his cash flow so far.
So in other words, the people who understand to have a look at this would say, wait a minute, I don't care about any of that stuff.
There's nothing on the taxes that's really that important.
What matters is It's the cash.
And where's that reporting?
Where's all the reporting on the cash, also known as the only thing that matters?
When you see...
Somebody says, next, explain the EBITDA. We won't be explaining that today.
Keep it easy.
All right. The Trump lawyers have said that the, quote, the New York Times story is little riddled with gross inaccuracies.
Now, what does that mean?
When Trump's lawyers say that the story is riddled with gross inaccuracies, does that mean that they don't actually have the actual taxes?
It could. You could interpret it that way.
But it could mean that they have exactly the right taxes, But the way they're interpreting them is so selective that it's grossly misleading.
So the lawyers have very cleverly worded it so it allows two interpretations.
One, they don't have actual taxes.
It's more of a fake news thing.
Or two, they do, but they're explaining it all wrong to confuse you.
I would say the second part is unambiguously true.
As I just explained, but we don't know if they have the real taxes.
Given that the Southern District of New York presumably has those taxes and they hate the president, it probably got leaked from the Southern District of New York, which would be a very big crime.
It's a felony. So there's somebody who committed a felony, and that might actually include the New York Times.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to this.
But there are some people who seem to suggest that the New York Times broke the law by printing it.
I doubt that they would be in legal trouble.
I feel as though they would claim that there's enough of a need to know in the public that it was okay.
We'll see. Alright.
The thing that makes this argument so devastating...
Is that the entire protests and the way that the Democrats feel is they have this sense of unfairness.
A sense of unfairness.
And the sense of unfairness is not based on anything objective or smart.
It's just how you feel.
So if you have a million dollars and there's somebody who has a hundred billion dollars, you kind of hate them.
Because unfortunately, We're sort of built that way.
We're built to envy and maybe think poorly of somebody who is doing better.
So because this fits so perfectly into the Democrat worldview, that there's something with unfairness in the world, it's really good.
It really fits their message pretty well.
And indeed, Rasmussen is teasing that the president's approval rating took a steep dive last night.
I think, or recently.
So the president's approval did recently take a steep dive.
These are just the overnights, so they might not be a long-term effect.
Joshua Gans, who's an economist, I mention him often, he had this tweet, which I thought was funny.
This will be the sort of thing that when you hear it, you're going to say, why didn't anybody else think of that?
You know, one of those where you go, that's true.
Here it is. He says, the thing about the New York Times tax story is that Trump doesn't have to release all of his tax returns to show it's fake news.
Just one page of one submitted return would get it done.
So in other words, he could just say, hey, New York Times...
If you think you have my actual tax returns, release one page.
I will allow you to release one page.
Maybe pick one of the pages that doesn't have much on it that's controversial and say, just show us page 23 about this.
Let's see if it matches mine.
Somebody says, read Trump tweets.
Does he have some fresh ones that are fun?
Maybe if I have time, I'll do that.
All right. So Joshua is correct.
It would be easy for Trump to prove that they don't have the real tax returns, but I'm not expecting that to happen.
Because my expectation is that they do have the real tax returns, but that they're telling a misleading story about them.
All right. I wonder, this is another one of those cases where all the people who believe that there would be all kinds of crimes in his taxes, those people now have to go back and say, all right, I was wrong about something, I was totally positive would be true.
So I believe that there would not be indications of crimes in his taxes, but there would be, you know, people would imagine they saw them.
So I think my estimate of where this was going to end up was pretty close.
If yours was not, reassess how good your predictions are.
All right. So financial illiteracy is sweeping the country, of course.
So everybody's going to be talking about depreciation and explaining it to other people, but none of it's really going to matter.
Because we're in a world where it goes without saying at this point, do you remember in 2016 when I said that facts don't matter and that people don't make up their mind based on facts?
Do you remember that? Alright, people are begging me to read Trump's tweet, so there's got to be something going on here that's good.
Let's see what Trump's up to.
Joe Biden announced that he won't agree to a drug test.
Bringing up my taxes all the time.
Bad intentions.
Is there something here that's especially good?
It shows that I'm only president.
I have very little debt compared to the value of assets.
There we go.
He has very little debt compared to his assets.
Now, that's the finance way of saying that he's not going to have trouble getting bank loans.
I have no idea why you needed me to look at that, because I don't think that told me anything.
Alright, the other big story we'll get to.
Let's see if I said anything I want to say about this.
Oh, so CNN's take is that he will be desperate for money And the only reason he's president is to make money, because he needs money to save his struggling businesses.
Now, I don't think that's the case.
I don't think that's the case.
But let me ask you this.
What president would not want a billion dollars?
Or what president would not want to get rich?
Do we produce presidents who don't have any Any personal ambition or cannot be bribed.
It seems to me that any president who wasn't already rich is a risk for bribery, right?
Wouldn't that be true of every president?
If you had a president who, you know, let's say he needed some money to pay off a loan, is that really a big difference with somebody who just might appreciate $100 million after leaving office?
I feel like they all have a bribery risk.
I don't know that you could really say that one is worse than the other because the dollar amounts would be so big.
Alright, Project Veritas.
As you know, Project Veritas just came up with an expose of mail-in vote fraud.
And it looks like a good one, meaning that they have on video somebody who says that he personally was part of a larger Operation in Ilhan Omar's territory in Minneapolis to collect the ballots, whether they're filled out or empty, from, let's say, senior citizens and other people, and to fill them out themselves, I guess.
So massive vote fraud appears to be demonstrated, and it appears to be demonstrated in a massive way, and it appears to be maybe even decisive, right?
Meaning that it may be the only reason that Ilhan Omar can stay in office is by rigging the vote every time.
So that should change the story, right?
Now, in a rational world where one side is claimed, there's no such thing as widespread voter fraud with mail-in ballots.
That's the claim. They've continued to push that claim.
Nope, there's no evidence.
Can't find any widespread voter problems.
And then you shout to them.
What should happen in a rational world?
It should look like this.
Oh my goodness!
I sure am surprised.
My old opinion has to be revised.
Now that we can clearly see that in this one location it was so easy to do, we should assume that That even though this is the place that it was spotted, we should probably assume it's happened in other places.
Because look how easy it was, moronically easy, to cheat in this one place, Minneapolis.
Wouldn't you expect that somebody else in the country has figured this out?
And if such activity were to happen in tight races, well, it could be the difference.
So we should expect that by this afternoon, Everyone who's been making the claim that widespread mail-in voting doesn't have issues, every one of them, including the FBI and everybody who's looked into it, every one of them will be apologizing to the public, right?
Don't you think? I mean, obviously.
They found out they were wrong on something that's terribly, terribly important.
And we really, really need to know what is true and what isn't.
And they misled us.
So now they'll all be apologizing today, right?
That's how it works, right?
No. No.
We've reached a point where you can just say it didn't happen.
The Democrats will simply just act like it didn't happen.
That's it. Do you know how they're doing that?
They're saying, Project Veritas, well, they're not credible.
That's it. That's all they have to do.
They have primed their viewers and supporters to the point where they can just tell them anything.
It doesn't matter what they say.
They can just say, let's pick a dumbass excuse from the list randomly.
Oh, we'll just say the source is bad.
That's it. It goes away.
Now, Because they control so much of the news business, all they have to do is just ignore it.
That's it. And it just goes away.
It should be one of the biggest stories of the year, and they're just going to make it go away.
And they're going to do it right in front of you, and it'll be incredible.
And of course, every story is something about Trump being beholden to Putin, I guess.
I guess every story has to have that connection to it.
Fareed Zakaria did a really good job of explaining what could happen that would get Trump elected without him doing anything devious.
Even if he didn't win.
So I'd never seen it framed this way.
And I recommend Fareed Zakaria's show because I find he's just unusually good at explaining things and he's unusually good with his guests.
So even if you don't agree with him on politics, it's worth watching.
If you want to make sure you've seen the whole field, he's a real good watch.
But he explained it this way, and I'll see if I can do as good a job.
There is a scenario in which, because the mail-in votes are coming in late and there's disagreement among the people who are in the electoral college, if you get to the point where the states just can't agree, It goes to a vote of the states, and every state gets one vote.
And there are more Republican states.
So even though by population the Democrats have more people, because of this old constitutional rule that just says, well, if we can't figure it out the normal way, if our attempt to have a fair vote and an electoral college and a credible result, if it just doesn't work...
Our fallback position is every state gets one vote and there we go.
So Trump simply needs to create enough doubt about the outcome because of mail-in votes or anything else.
As long as there's doubt about the income, he personally doesn't have to do anything because it's the states that would just do their thing without any involvement from the federal government.
He would just sit back and say, you know...
It's not up to me.
I'll just follow the rules wherever they lead.
I'm just saying that this vote did not look credible to me.
Do what you need to do with that.
Now, if enough of the states agree and say, you know, you got a point.
We found this irregularity here, and there was an irregularity here, and there's still votes coming in, and we tried the best we could.
We really thought this would work.
But in the end, We have to admit, if you're just being objective, it didn't work.
It's very, very likely.
I'm going to say somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70% chance that that's how we'll feel after the vote.
Even after a few weeks after the vote, we're going to feel like we're not quite sure we believe the outcome.
Don't you think? Probably a 70% chance you're not going to believe the outcome.
Whichever way it goes. Even if your team wins, you're still privately going to be thinking, I'm glad I won, but I'm not sure I believe it.
That's what the count was, but I'm not sure I believe it.
If that happens, Trump gets re-elected.
And there's nothing he needs to do.
He doesn't need to be a dictator.
He doesn't need to invoke the military.
He doesn't need to refuse to leave the White House.
He just needs to follow the rules that the states will perform for him.
It was good to know.
A good addition by Fareed to our understanding.
I understand that in the debate tomorrow...
That Chris Wallace will not be doing any fact-checking.
Would you want the debate moderator to do fact-checking?
I have to think that while you think to yourself, yeah, you know, that would be useful if he did some fact-checking in real time while it's happening.
That could be useful.
But I don't think it is.
Because, first of all, nobody would feel it was fair if he did a little more fact-checking for one than the other.
Everybody would complain. So as soon as he starts fact-checking, it becomes this whole new thing to complain about.
And everybody would say, well, you fact-checked it, but you fact-checked it wrong.
So you really can't win with the fact-checking.
So if you don't have fact-checking, and especially because there's a time limit, you would use up all your time with the fact-checking if you did it.
What good are the debates?
Are they any good at all?
Now, these debates are unique because the biggest question is whether Biden can get through it without having some kind of a mental collapse.
So really, the only thing we're looking for is Joe Biden's mental collapse.
We're not looking for facts.
We're not really going to learn too much about policies that we didn't already know.
We're just looking to see if he can stand up there for 90 minutes and not become a blithering idiot.
Now, if I had to put odds on it, I would say that the odds are probably better than 50%, and probably a lot better than 50%, that Biden will have a good night.
Meaning that he'll just blather his Biden stuff, and he'll just do, you know, from memory, he'll just say what he needs to say.
And He'll probably have angry Biden moments where he gets that furrowed brow and acts like he's indignant and angry about everything, but probably won't go so far that he just has a complete meltdown.
I think there's a solid...
I'll put some odds on it.
I think there's a 30% chance that Biden will Have a meltdown that everybody sees, and everybody agrees, oh, that doesn't look good.
Probably a 30% chance of that.
70% chance he actually has a good night.
And he rests up, and he's sharp, and who knows if they shoot him up with chemicals.
I think maybe they do.
Maybe they do. Possibly.
I don't know what the odds of that are, but at least...
At least 50% chance, I'd say, that he gets a little shot in the ass or something.
So I think he'll probably be fine.
I will be watching the debates with Christina.
I don't think we're going to live stream, but I might be texting while it's on.
He's done debate prep half the month.
Yeah, he disappears a lot.
Have we heard yet if Biden has put the lid on?
Is the lid on yet?
Oh, there's a really good bingo board from, oh my God, what's the name of John's show there?
Adam Curry, John Dvorak's show.
Somebody tell me in the comments the name of their It's a No Agenda.
So if you look for the No Agenda podcast, or it must be a website or something, they have a bingo card of things that Biden says, and it's pretty hilarious.
And actually it would be fun to literally play at a home.
So look for that, the No Agenda bingo card for Biden.
Just Google it, it'll probably pop up.
Reporters say he should get mad, but they describe him as the nice one.
Yeah, we don't know if there's a lid yet.
Alright, so I think we've done what we need to do today.
