MTG resigns, Ukraine peace proposal, Zohran and Trump~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Politics, President Trump, TPS Somalians Terminated, Somalian Minnesota Fraud, Christopher Rufo, MTG Resigns, NC Construction Sites, Matt Van Swol, Trump Mamdani Meeting, Trump's Respectful Mode, Affordability Persuasion, President Trump's Follow-Up Call, Dr. Oz, Ukraine 28-Point Peace Plan, Derek Chauvin Training, Bill Maher, Bubble Politics Awareness, Thomas Crooks Encrypted Apps HOAX, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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All right.
Well, so today will be one of the best shows I've ever given you because, just by chance, there's a whole bunch of persuasion-related, Trump-related things happening.
And they're all delicious, and they'll all teach you something.
But we're going to start with, oh, by the way, after the show, immediately after this, Owen Gregorian will be hosting another spaces event on the X platform.
So look for Owen Gregorian.
If you search for him, it'll pop right up.
And then it's an audio only.
But you can ask questions and you can participate and you'll love it.
Anyway, President Trump has issued an order to temporarily terminate what's called temporary status for Somalians.
Some kind of temporary protective status.
So I guess they had some kind of special characterization because the Somalians were assumed to be in more danger than other people.
And that allowed a lot of Somalians to come over here.
And do you remember, was it just yesterday or the day before yesterday?
You can remind me.
Remember when I was saying that whenever you see a news story and it has any of these keywords, it means some Somalians have stolen your tax money?
Like, you don't want to see Minnesota, Any kind of government program, anything about tax dollars.
If you see any of those words in the news, and they're together, some Somalians are running some kind of scam on you.
So there were so many of them, I think, that I started losing the ability to tell them apart.
It seemed like there was one every day.
It was just crazy.
Well, Christopher Ruffo, you know him if you're on the political right and you follow social media.
Christopher Ruffo and I guess some people he works with, I don't know exactly the entity, they did the research and he says, quote, we broke this Somali fraud story and called on President Trump to revoke the temporary protected status for all Somalis, and now the president has delivered.
How many times have we seen this happen?
By far, this is the coolest thing about the Trump administration.
I've called this out just a number of times.
Trump actually reads the room.
You know, we talk about can people read the room, meaning know what people are thinking, but he actually reads, like literally reads the people in the room.
So Christopher Ruffo and his posts on X, and I'm sure he's had direct communications with people in the administration.
He does the work.
He puts in the work based on what he and some other people have decided would be the important thing to work on.
Like what would be good for the country?
What could we do that would make a difference?
And then they go do that thing.
I don't know that anybody asked them to do it.
They just sort of recognize this gap in the way we run the country.
And he must have said, I'm doing a little mind reading here because I can't know what they're thinking.
But it seems to me that these were some patriots who said, no, we're not going to put up with this.
I'm going to call it out.
I'm going to write it up.
I'm going to go to the president.
I'm going to ask him to stop it.
And then that's what happened.
I mean, come on.
Is that the coolest thing you've heard today?
Just the fact, doesn't it make you feel good that somebody could identify a problem, put the work in, and then it gets solved?
How often does that happen?
Pretty cool.
So good work, Christopher Ruffo.
Good work, President Trump.
We're at least one step forward on that stuff.
Well, you already know by now Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned effective early January.
So there's so much to say about that because everybody took sides, blah, blah, blah.
But I'll say a bunch of things about it in no particular order.
Some say that it was because she disagreed with Trump on a number of what she might call MAGA-related issues, and that she was more MAGA than Trump was in the end.
And then they could no longer work with each other.
So Trump has said he wanted to primar, and there's not much chance she probably could have got elected if she got primaried and the president was against her.
It'd be hard to get elected.
So a lot of smart people said, well, did she really quit?
Or was she not going to be in office after the next election cycle anyway?
So she's just getting ahead of it.
That's a fair statement.
Other people said, oh, is it just a coincidence that her benefits are vested?
Now she's got health care.
Well, that would be a perfectly good reason for retiring from any job.
No problem.
Let's see.
Some say it's about Israel.
Of course, that'll be, we always throw that in there.
Anyway, so, but let me give you a few other ways to look at this.
Mario Noffel on X had a take that was that she just pulled off the smartest political move of her career.
How many people think that?
How many people think that this wasn't running away?
She just saw an opportunity for the biggest move of any politician ever, and so she took it because she's smart.
And she said, whoa, this will never happen again.
I'm going to take this opportunity.
What are we talking about?
What opportunity?
Well, here's what Mario said.
He said that she quit because she's playing the long game.
And losing in a primary with Trump destroying her is not really a good long-term strategy.
But you know what would be?
You know what would be a long-term strategy?
To sort of go out at the top.
Now, you could argue what the top is, but you know what I mean.
To go out before she's badly bruised, when she still has full name recognition and all that.
And she has every opportunity in the world now.
I mean, I think she's got a book out, but I don't know if that's new or it's been out for a while.
Obviously, by now, she would be looking at offers, probably lots of them.
Could she start her own TV show?
Of course.
Yeah.
Do you think anybody's offered to say, well, how would you like to be our next Matt Gates?
Well, she'd probably be good at it.
So the world of opportunities for her just opened up.
Did she become more powerful or less powerful because of resigning?
You tell me.
Well, it depends what happens next.
If she just goes off and works on her construction business or family construction business, then that would be perfectly respectable patriot, took a shot at improving things, decided it wasn't for her, wasn't making enough of a difference, went to do something else in the free market.
No problem.
So that's sort of the worst case scenario is that she just has a normal life now, a good normal life, a very good normal life.
But what's the other possibility?
Well, the other possibility is that she becomes a Tucker Carlson-like Matt Gates-like Ben Shapiro-like person whose influence just magnifies because she'd be good on TV.
You already know she's good on TV, right?
So now she suddenly has the opportunity to be way, way more influential.
And even President Trump might someday want to go on her show and answer some questions.
And she's going to have some tough questions, tough questions.
So we don't know if any of that's going to happen.
We're just purely speculating.
But if you think that she's operating from loss or operating from weakness, doesn't look like it to me.
It looks like she's operating from strength and she has lots of options, so you just don't know where she's going.
That's what I think.
Anyway, we'll see where that goes.
I think there's more, it's more likely that she'll come out of this more powerful.
What do you think?
I'm looking at your comments.
Whether you like her or not, you know, I know, I know it's always a mixed bag, but would you agree that she'll come out of this more powerful, not less?
All right, we'll see in your comments what you say.
All right.
Meanwhile, in a somewhat related, but not really, I saw user Matt Von Swall on X, who's a good account.
You should follow it.
Matt Van Swall.
His last name is Van Space S-W-O-L.
He noted that in Charlotte, North Carolina, that there were, he says hundreds of construction sites are completely empty.
And he believes the reason is that ICE came through and took all the employees.
How would he know, or how would anybody know, if there were hundreds of construction sites that were empty in Charlotte, North Carolina?
It sounds like maybe a little bit, a little bit of hyperbole or a little bit of not projection, but would he know that?
Now, I do believe that it's observable that you would observably see that a lot of sites were closed.
I don't know, it's hundreds.
That's the only thing I question.
So what do you make of that?
Do you make of it that it would be a mistake or was a mistake to send away all the people who know how to build stuff?
I already know what you're going to say in the comments.
Shall I summarize your comments without even reading them?
I believe I can.
Some of you are going to say, too bad.
Too bad.
Why did you start a construction company that depended on non-American workers?
Whose problem is that?
Not my problem, right?
Now, does that capture some of your comments?
Yeah, it's just not your problem.
But I would argue, we are all part of this big old economy.
And if it were this problem once, you might say, well, that construction owner guy made a mistake.
That's his problem.
But what if it really is hundreds?
And it's only in one city there are hundreds.
That's going to be magnified all over the country, right?
Are you okay with that?
And then the real question is: it kind of depends how long it lasts, right?
If you said to me, Scott, Scott, answer me this.
Yeah, there might be a few days where they have to hire American-born workers and replace all the foreign-born people who got deported.
It might take a few days.
What would I say to that?
I would say, a few days, you say.
Like, how many days?
What's a few days?
Well, I don't know, two weeks.
I would say two weeks to convert from foreign-born to American-born workers in these good jobs.
Totally.
Yeah, sign me up for that.
I would definitely take a two-week total national disruption if at the end of it we had American-born workers and that's what we wanted.
But what if it's not two weeks?
What if it's six months?
Well, now you get a whole different problem.
What if it is six months and then the half of the people who are in the construction business go out of business?
Because they can't hold on for six months.
So did we even create a path for the construction industry to survive?
I don't know the answer to that, but it's a pretty big question.
So I would feel very different if there was simply a disruption in the economy versus destroying the entire construction industry in a way that almost can't go back.
And do we know which one of those is going to happen?
Because I don't.
I'm watching pretty carefully.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I think the general feeling, and I'm going to say something that sounds a little biased here because it is.
The general feeling is that for people who are not close to the employment market, which is a lot of us, I don't think people understand how woefully undertrained American-born workers are.
I don't think you know how hard it's going to be to get them trained up to the point that they can match the work of the foreign-born people.
Now, should we do it anyway?
Because it's hard?
That's a good argument.
The fact that it's hard shouldn't stop you from doing it, if you want to get to that end point.
But we do not know what's going to happen.
We don't know.
How many of you feel confident that you do know and that you've got a good idea in your head, ah, this is going to be three weeks of pain and then everything will be back to normal and better than normal because it'll be American-born workers and maybe that's what you want.
What do you think?
Are you confident that you know where this ends up?
Well, I'm not, nor do I need to be.
I mean, it's an uncertain situation.
But we'll find out.
You know, sometimes, and this might be one of those times, sometimes you have to just jump to the next rock without knowing if there's going to be another rock there.
Sometimes you just have to go for it.
And I don't know that there will ever be another time when the construction companies will be forced to hire American.
Might be the only time.
So if we lose this opportunity, well, maybe it doesn't come around again.
So I wouldn't disagree with your plan if you thought that we should just do it and suffer the consequences.
Whatever it is, it is.
It'll be hard, but we have to do it.
That wouldn't be a bad opinion.
I just don't know if it'll work out.
Well, the other big story is that Trump met Zoran Mumdami.
This is my favorite story, actually.
And you probably know that instead of fighting it out like some of you thought that they would, they ended up, at least Trump did, acting very friendly like everything went great.
A lot of smiles, etc.
Now, I would note that Zoron, at least in the Oval Office meeting that was on video, he was his usual smiley self, but boy, he wasn't giving up much, was he?
He looked like, I don't know where this is going.
Wait a minute.
Are you saying good things about me?
Are you going to hijack me?
Am I going to be like some of those other leaders who didn't know that you were going to hijack me when I went into the Oval Office?
Or is this going to work out for me?
I don't know.
So Trump had this gigantic advantage over him, that Trump knew where Trump was going.
And he knew that he was going to keep it friendly.
Zoron didn't know that.
I mean, he could have hoped it, he could have heard it, but he didn't know it.
So I think he was a little bit, not a little bit.
I mean, how many times has he been in the Oval Office?
Never.
Basically, I've been in the Oval Office more than he had until that day.
So it did look like Zoran was the Ashook the intern, didn't it?
You can see the power difference.
Trump is sitting in a chair and Mondani is standing.
There's this giant age difference.
There's an experience difference.
There's an office difference.
There's probably a height difference.
So Trump goes in with all these power symbols and he makes Zoran just sort of stand there and not know what to do.
So I love that.
But here's the persuasion lesson for you.
Have you noticed that Trump is consistently able to be the most interesting person in every story?
Especially if it's a story he has some control over.
How in the world could Trump become the most interesting person in this story?
Because Zoran, he's the it guy, right?
He literally is more interesting than Trump, just in this narrow domain.
Do you think Trump wants to bring in a guy who's got as much game as Trump does, ish, not as much, but that he's operating at that highest level of persuasion.
Do you think Trump wanted to bring him in and sort of make him the star?
Maybe not.
So if you were Trump, how could you guarantee that without looking like a giant dick, you could also claim all the attention?
Well, how about acting like he's Zoran's best friend and playing opposite of type to the point where it's all you want to talk about?
Wait a minute.
I didn't think Trump would do this.
Wait a minute.
With that other leader, he did this.
Wait a minute.
He could have done this.
Wait a minute.
Is it just because he likes New York?
Wait a minute.
You see where I'm going on this?
Trump made Trump the interesting person in the story.
Who else could do that?
I mean, really?
Nobody else could do that.
There's no normal politician who could have out-Zoran Zoran at the peak of his being interesting.
This is the peak.
This is Zoran's best day.
He's never had a better day.
And Trump just went, rump.
He just high grounded him like he wasn't even there.
So Trump made himself the star of the event and makes you insanely curious about what did they actually say behind closed doors?
What's going to happen next?
Did he plan this?
I don't know.
Or was it just like a spontaneous thing where he sort of liked Zoran and thought, you know what?
I'm going to play opposite type.
We're going to have some fun.
Don't know.
But it's the not knowing that makes it interesting.
So if you don't understand the level of talent that Trump brought to that one, just that one event, you're really missing a great show.
That is not normal.
It's not normal to be that skillful in this unique situation, which he's never been in before.
And he just owned it, just totally owned it.
All right, so here's one reason that you might have predicted that they would get along.
What would be the most predictive thing?
And I've told you this before, so it won't be the first time you've heard it, but it would be the first time maybe you used it to predict.
Trump likes talented people.
And now we're done.
Trump likes, really likes talented people.
Doesn't matter if it's sports, doesn't matter if it's politics, doesn't matter if it's some subset of talent within one of those things.
He really, really likes talented people.
He likes merit.
And even if the person's on the other team, he will call them out for their talent.
So, knowing as you do, and I've told you this before, that he's drawn to talent.
He calls it out, he follows it, he tries to incorporate it, he tries to be around it.
What would you have predicted that would be his response to Zoron in person?
Exactly this.
If the only thing he knew is that he loves talent and it completely changes how he operates, you put him in the room with a super talented person.
I'm talking about the kind of talent that only a few people in the world have.
I'm talking about a Tom Brady kind of talent, right?
That kind of talent.
You put him in the room with that, and he's always smiling, right?
You've seen it a million times, always smiling.
And he's always going to be respectful.
I'm seeing that word in the comments, respectful.
So he goes immediately into respectful mode, and then everything works out.
Two high-level people showing respect to each other.
And Zoran, Mom Doni, quite wisely, showed full respect to the office, which is all Trump requires.
It doesn't have to be that personal.
But if he shows full respect to the office, well, now you got two people who can talk.
And that's what happened.
All right.
Trump joked when it might have been CNN asked Mom Dami, did he think that Trump was a fascist?
Because it's a word that he's used a lot.
And rather than let Zoran try to answer that, which might be a problem, Trump jumps in and interrupts.
He goes, just say yes, which I thought was hilarious.
He goes, just say yes.
It'll be easier.
You just say yes.
He's a fascist.
Now, what was that?
That was a rescue, wasn't it?
It was a rescue.
Trump rescued him in real time.
He took that little problem, just took it off his plate and made it forever, never a problem again.
There will never be another time when Zoran has to answer that same stupid question.
Well, you called him a fascist before, but now you want federal money.
How do you explain that?
Why would you take money if I'm a fascist?
Trump just made that go away.
Now, does that obligate Zoran to sort of owe Trump?
Yeah, a little bit.
And not in a big way, but a little bit.
It's like he did him a favor.
Men especially feel that.
We feel it.
I'm like, all right, I owe you one.
What else?
Next, Trump has an instinct for the show.
I call it the show, because he's always involved in the show.
There are different episodes of the show, but it's always the show.
And Trump knows the show better than anybody.
And what could have been a better show than the one he put on yesterday by surprising us that they're acting like best friends?
You can't beat that.
I mean, a fist fight might have been more fun, but that wouldn't have been appropriate.
So he knows how to put it on the show, and he did.
And then Trump also said that they had good chemistry.
And he said, quote, it's always nice to have good chemistry with people.
That's a bigger deal than people understand.
If he has good personal chemistry, he can get along with anybody.
And by the way, do you remember when I used to say that Trump had a pirate ship?
And one of the things I liked about him, especially in the first election, is that he would assemble people who were his supporters that you wouldn't think would be in the same ship.
That's why I call it a pirate ship because it's all these weirdos.
And weirdos, I say, with love, not with insult.
And he never left that model.
And I always thought that is the strongest frame you're ever going to see.
Because once you've established that you're the only one who can have any kind of pirate, you get all the good pirates.
Right?
If you're trying to pick teams and you've established that you'll not only work with the pirate, you'll make them head of a cabinet position.
That's a real strong power.
So yeah, the pirate ship mentality, if you're treating the pirates as a positive, like I don't care what you did before, RFK Jr. I don't care if you ate a whale's head or I don't know what he's accused of doing.
But as long as you can do this thing for me and for the country, we're going to do this thing.
Pirate ship.
Very powerful.
What else?
I saw a body language expert looking at Zoran in the Oval Office and thought that he was being very reserved, but also seemed to be relaxed.
I don't know about the relaxed part.
I might disagree with that.
But he seemed to have been put at ease.
I think both of them knew how to put each other at ease and did a good job of it.
Yeah, let's say.
And Trump said about Zoran that he couldn't have been nicer.
And I thought to myself, that is just a superpower, isn't it?
Being nice to people is really powerful.
Even if it's the president of the United States, if you're nice to him, who knows what could happen?
All right, but here's the best part.
I'm getting to the real payoff here on persuasion.
Now you're really going to learn something next.
You ready?
Do you remember when Zoran and maybe some other people trotted out the word affordability?
Do you remember what I said on my show here?
And I was just swooning at how smart that was.
I'd never heard affordability being used as the main word.
Of course, it's a normal word that people use, but I'd never heard it used as sort of the campaign's main theme.
And I thought to myself, oh my God, you can't really beat that.
So what are Republicans going to do to counter that?
You can't really beat affordability.
It's so well chosen.
It's not overused.
So it's not like you remember Kerry did it when he read nothing like that.
So it's fresh.
It's perfect.
It's on point.
Everybody feels it.
It works for all kinds of categories.
It's just a great word, and I don't think you can beat it.
So then Trump runs into this word.
He would have, I believe, exactly the same reaction to it that I did, which is, oh, crap.
That's a really good word.
What am I going to do about that?
But as you know, Trump is the unmatched persuasion expert. of our time.
Is there anything he could have done to counter the effectiveness of affordability?
Anything?
Is there any way to play that?
I couldn't think of one.
I was coming up blank, and I think about this stuff all the time.
I didn't really have a good answer.
So what did Trump do?
Do you know what he did?
If you've been paying attention for the last week, he did the smartest thing you'll ever say.
He just took the word.
He credited them.
So he didn't say, you know, this is my own word.
He gave them credit.
And then he embraced it.
And he fully embraced it.
He borrowed it.
He stole it.
He co-opted it.
He embraced it.
Now what?
Now what do you do?
And my guess is that behind closed doors, it was probably that word that allowed them to say, you know what?
I think we can say good things about each other when we're out in that other room.
Because if you're down with affordability and I'm down with affordability, we can work together.
If I told you that one of these candidates was the common sense candidate, common sense.
Now that would be Trump, not Zoran.
But affordability sounds like common sense, doesn't it?
Because if it's not affordable, it's a nothing.
So it perfectly fits Trump's whole MAGA everything.
It's common sense.
Affordability is.
And at the same time, if it's Zoran's whole, it's got to be affordable because nobody can afford to live in New York City.
So it's sort of perfect for both of them.
And Trump noticed that, apparently, and decided that he would get on that channel and that nothing could kick him off.
And that once he's on there, the only thing that could happen is Zoran can leave.
And he's not going to.
So since they're both committed to this affordability thing, but the president of the United States has more tools simply by being president, Zoran probably can't get to affordability without a little bit of help from a variety of places, including the president.
So the fact that Trump not only noticed that the word was a high ground killer word, so the first part is hard.
The first part is simply recognizing the power of that word.
But the second part, oh my goodness.
The second part was knowing what to do about it.
So rare.
And the third part is he executed.
Because right now, I just think of affordability as something that two of our leaders have embraced, and I hope the rest of them get on board.
That's three for three of three of the hardest things you could do in persuasion.
Recognize the word, know that you have to deal with it, and then totally embrace it and co-opt it and turn it into your own thing.
Nobody else can do that.
That's a Trumpy thing right there.
It's one for the ages.
Anyway, you'll remember that one forever.
Meanwhile, CNN's Harry Enton tells us that the polls are not looking so good for Trump.
And I guess the independents in January of earlier this year in January, he was only down four with independents, and now he's down 43.
He's down 43.
Now, how do you explain that the independents liked him, if not, or at least liked him a lot more, in January, but it's completely collapsed?
Well, there's two ways to look at this.
I'm going to give you a little mental test.
I guess that's what it is.
What do you call it?
What's the word for that?
Not a mental test.
You know what I mean?
Like a mental exercise.
Imagine, if you will, that Trump became president, as he did, and he did everything wrong, and he only made mistakes.
What would happen to his poll numbers if he got in the job and didn't solve any problems?
His poll numbers would fall through the roof or not fall through the basement, right?
So if he does a really terrible, terrible job, his poll numbers would look a lot like they do now.
What would happen, on the other hand, if he came into office and let's say there were five really big problems that the country cared about a lot, and he immediately solved all five?
Let's say he ended some wars, closed the border, put an end to inflation.
You'd like it to be lower, but he ended it.
Let's say tariffs worked.
Let me just throw in a few more things, right?
What would happen if Trump solved all the problems that could be solved and what was left didn't look like that big a problem or didn't look like something that only Trump could solve?
What would happen to his poll numbers then?
Well, once you solve all your big problems, you start thinking about things like empathy because it's a luxury.
Empathy is a luxury.
If everything's falling apart and you're in mortal danger, well, then you need a Trump to do the things that no one else can do because no one else can do it and it's a mortal danger.
People are pouring across the border or the dollar is becoming worth a penny.
I mean, these are mortal end-of-the-world existential problems.
But what if he solved them all?
So you have this weird situation where it's going to be hard for us to distinguish, is Trump less popular because he solved all the Trump-only problems?
I would say the border was kind of a Trump-only could solve it situation.
But once it's solved, then the next Republican can certainly maintain.
So I've always predicted that Trump's poll numbers would fall through the floor.
Have you seen me predict that?
Before it actually happened, I predicted it.
And there would probably be a point sort of early in the election cycle.
Well, after he'd been elected, there would be a point early on where maybe he hit the best numbers he'd ever had because he hadn't done anything yet and they're hoping he could solve the big problems.
But I did predict in public that once he solved the biggest problems, his polls would drop because you didn't need Trump for business as usual.
Business as usual is Marco Rubio.
He could do that.
He'd be great at it.
JD Vance, absolutely.
Business as usual.
But you really need to do something that's going to make everybody hate you and maybe try to shoot you.
That's kind of only Trump.
So once we finish all these only Trump Can Do It problems, if you combine the fact that Trump won't be running for office again, it kind of makes total sense that whether he succeeded or failed, his popularity as president should naturally come to an end.
So there might be a point, and I don't know if I would be bold enough to predict this yet, where the type of success that he gets is so undeniably, crazily good that before he leaves office and maybe after, his numbers will creep back up.
If, for example, he does put an end to the Ukraine war, and we'll talk about that in a minute, if he pulled that off, and if he got our budget a little bit closer to balance, and if Gaza was heading in the right direction, and if the border stayed closed, and if the employment numbers were just crazy good because it took two years, let's say,
but we finally trained enough American construction workers.
I mean, just take a look at construction, just pick one.
If the only thing that happened is you waited two years.
Well, on day one, it looks like, oh, that Trump, he made a mistake.
He sent back the only qualified workers, and now we can't build this hotel.
That's a real problem.
It's a real problem.
But in two years, what will it look like?
Well, the companies that are still in business will have figured out how to hire locals one way or the other, and they'll just be running their business.
So there's going to be a point where if Trump succeeds on this whole range of things that it looks like he isn't going to, it does look like he will succeed.
If he does, and then you wait two years, and then let's say he turns down the temperature a little bit because he's not running for office.
You know, when he runs for office, all the temperature goes up.
He doesn't need to do that again.
So he can simply play for his legacy.
If the last two years of his office, he's playing for his legacy, playing nice, basically, he'd be more like his meeting with Zoron, which even the left is going to say, ah, we don't mind that.
You can do more of that.
We have no problem whatsoever with you being friendly with Zoron in the Oval Office.
Even we Democrats like that.
So the most natural arc for where this ends up is that Trump's poll numbers will continue to drop until, to borrow his language, no one's ever seen anything like it.
He might break records for the lowest popularity of a sitting president.
And whether that happens or not, the second part of the prediction is that by the time he leaves office, but it could be maybe shortly after, he will have the best poll numbers of any president of all time, of all time.
Yeah, but you're gonna have to wait to find out if I'm right about that.
So here's a little personal interest story.
So I'm sitting at home and I'm in my nice comfy lazy boy chair and I've got my phone and I'm watching the news and I'm watching a video that just happened, really.
It was right after the Zoron meeting in the Oval Office.
And so I'm listening to Trump.
He's talking on my phone.
Trump, Then my phone rings.
I'm like, oh, damn it.
And it's West Palm Beach.
Yes, the president called me while I was watching the president on TV.
So Trump called just to make sure I was doing okay and I was getting the help I needed for my medical situation.
He followed up.
My God.
He called twice.
Yeah, I missed it and called back.
But I will never get used to that.
You cannot get used.
There's no way your brain can actually process it.
That you're sitting at home.
You're literally watching the most powerful, in my opinion, and successful president in the history of all humankind.
The most important person, you could argue, out of about 7 billion of us.
And his little face and his words are on this phone.
It's like in my hand.
And then the real one calls me.
The real one calls me while I'm sitting there.
I'm trying to make this into a more interesting story, but it doesn't really need any extra details, does it?
Just the fact that it happened at all is just mind-blowing.
It's just mind-blowing.
Then I hang up the phone and Dr. Roz calls me also because I'm sure also because Trump originally got him involved.
Also to check to see how I was doing.
And thanks to Dr. Roz, my healthcare company, Kaiser, is definitely stepping up.
And they're definitely giving me a high-quality product.
Now, I don't know that it's any higher than anybody else's.
I know some of you are going to say, Scott, you're using your fame and connections to get extra health care that the rest of us don't get.
I don't think that's happening.
I'm not aware of any special things outside of the boundaries of my healthcare that I'm getting, but I'm definitely getting a good version of it.
Anyway, so there's a Ukraine peace plan that the Trump administration has floated.
What do you think about that?
Do you think Trump's going to pull that off?
A peace plan?
I guess today might be the fourth year of the war.
You know, there's something about random numbers that motivate humans because we act like random numbers matter.
So it's the fourth year.
And if I told you a war was in, let's say, its second year, you might say, well, that's a long time, but wars are longer than that.
If I told you it was in its 10th year, you would definitely say, let's wrap this up.
It doesn't look like it's going anywhere.
Fourth year starts to look like, you know what?
We all want to just get out of this.
This didn't work out.
So I think maybe just psychologically, everybody's a little bit closer to doing whatever it will take to make the hard decisions.
So I went to Grok and I said, because the news is terrible at summarizing, I said, can you summarize this 28-point plan?
And Grok could not.
It can only explain each of the 28 points in way too detailed for what I wanted.
So I said, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Somebody just have to scream at it, stop!
And then it stopped.
I said, all right, try again, except I only want one sentence for each of the bullet points for the 28 things.
Just give me one sentence.
Do you think it could do that?
Well, sort of, but it decided that that one sentence would be about a paragraph long.
So I'm like, stop, stop, stop.
All right, we're going to try it again.
And it's going to be one short sentence, one short sentence for each of the 28 points.
Can you do that?
Oh, yes.
And then I made it number them.
But man, did I have to work at it?
So now I have maybe the only list because my guess is that the people who work in the media were way too lazy to do what Grok did and probably way too, or let's say not trained well enough to make AI do what I did, which wasn't any genius move.
I just yelled at it more.
So here are the things.
It might be the only time you hear these actually summarized in a good way.
The 28 points would be that Ukraine's sovereignty would be confirmed internationally.
So everybody would agree that it's a country.
Crimea would stay under Russian control permanently, no surprise.
And by the way, I'm not saying I like these or don't like them.
I'm just listing them.
These are not agreed to, not agreed to.
These are just what the Trump administration is proposing.
That Donesk and Luhansk would just be completely Russian.
Parts of Kherson and Zaporizhia would go to Russia.
And some additional Eastern territories, including some in Kharkiv, would transfer to Russia.
All right, so you and I don't know too much about any of those regions, but we knew that Russia would demand some keeping forever some part of it.
And maybe these make sense.
And then there's the Odessa region's coastal areas which would become Russian enclaves.
Well, I don't know what an enclave is, but it's probably something that they plan to someday become Russian territory.
I think enclave might be the word they use for, oh, that's right before we say we're going to take it and it will be ours forever.
It's an enclave.
Then there would be a demilitarized zone along the new Russia-Ukraine border.
Of course, you would have to have a demilitarized zone.
And UN peacekeepers would monitor that.
We're up to number nine.
Ukraine would commit to permanent neutrality forever.
I don't know what that means, but probably that's workable.
No NATO membership for Ukraine ever.
Ukraine's, this one will be negotiable.
Ukraine's army gets capped at 100,000 active troops.
Well, that's kind of clever because we're already at the point where I tell you too often that all the wars will be robot wars.
The number of soldiers Will no longer be predictive of who could win a war, but the number of drones might, and the number of drone operators might.
So this might be workable in a way that it would not have been maybe even three years ago, because it could be that Russia will say, well, if you only have that many soldiers, you're not a threat.
Whereas Ukraine might say, well, I don't know.
If we send you 50,000 trained drone operators who have a million drones at their disposal, because one operator would have a swarm, do you think you'd feel safe from that?
So there might be a way that both sides think they got the advantage, which would be a good deal.
There'd be limits on Ukraine's heavy weapons and tanks, but again, those are not robots, so that might work.
No offensive missiles over 300 kilometers.
I wonder if that includes drones, but no offensive missiles.
The U.S., EU, and China would guarantee Ukraine's security jointly.
Well, that would be good if all three of them were on the same page.
The ceasefire would be immediate upon signing.
International observers would enforce the ceasefire daily.
Russian troops would withdraw from the non-ceded areas in six months.
Good luck with that.
Western sanctions on Russia would be lifted in phases.
The frozen Russian assets would be used, they would be unfrozen.
So the frozen Russian assets would be unfrozen to rebuild Ukraine with a U.S. lead.
So it looks like Trump found a way to make some money for us.
So he's going to unfreeze Russia's money, if I get this right.
But U.S.-led entities would get to do the work.
Doesn't mean U.S. entities, but U.S.-led.
So that would be plenty of opportunity for the U.S. to get its beak wet in some of this economic activity.
Russia would get access to Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Ukraine protects ethnic Russian rights.
No foreign military bases in Ukraine except for the UN.
Disputed borders, well, that's a big one.
No foreign military bases in Ukraine.
Do you think, well, this is our proposal.
So apparently the U.S. would be okay with this, given that it's our proposal.
And then disputed borders go to international arbitration.
Ukraine gets 50 billion in debt relief from Russia.
I guess they have some debt out there.
Joint energy projects.
Oh, joint energy projects until 2040.
So that's yet another way that Trump could make some money for the U.S. EU accession talks pause for 10 years.
So Ukraine wouldn't get into the European Union for at least 10 years.
And all parties ratify the deal within 30 days.
All right.
So obviously that's way too big and complicated for people like you and me to know if that's a good idea or a bad proposal.
But what's your general feeling about it?
Do you feel like there's something we could work with on this?
Is that close enough to a deal?
Well, it really depends if Russia wants a deal.
I would say it comes down to this.
It really isn't about the specifics of the proposal.
If Russia is tired of fighting and they don't think they can win outright and they're just ready for some kind of Some kind of result, then yes, they could make this work.
If Russia is doing nothing but stalling, Stalin, Stalin, if they're nothing, if they're doing nothing but kicking the cam down the road and making it look like they care about peace, but they don't, well, then nothing will work.
So I'm going to say that the details of this plan will not be the defining or predictive element.
So you would not be able to, so this is my prediction, you would not be able to look at the plan to know if this could work or not.
You would only be able to look into the hearts and souls of the people involved.
Zelensky, does he have a way to survive this?
Does he have an after-war plan?
Putin, does Putin really want to wrap this up?
Would he get enough out of this?
And then Trump, how much does Trump want the Nobel Peace Prize?
So I think my take on this is that this plan pushes you in the game.
Meaning that if the players were finally ready to make peace, this would get you there.
So I'm going to say this would be good enough.
You still have to tweak it like crazy, and it might take weeks or months to get there, but this is close enough if, and this is the biggest if, if they've already mentally decided they want to get this done.
If they've decided they, if they haven't decided, then it's no good at all.
All right.
Would you believe that there's another story about a court blocking something that Trump wanted, and then the Supreme Court overturned the activist judge?
Well, that happened again.
This is about Texas's new Republican-friendly congressional map.
So Texas draws a new map that would give them a new representative.
A activist judge says, you can't do that, but then it goes immediately to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court says, well, we don't have time to decide on that yet.
But in the short run, we're going to block you from blocking it.
So the Supreme Court has blocked the lower court from blocking it.
It just sounds like the same story every few days, doesn't it?
Because it is.
In other news, remember, you probably remember George Floyd and Derek Chauvin.
I'll bet you do.
But Derek Chauvin's attorney has filed a new petition to try to get Derek Chauvin released.
And this is the approach they're taking, according to Alpha News.
I saw this on X. Apparently, they found more than 50 former and current officers, police officers, who have provided sworn declarations stating that the technique used by Derek Chauvin and other Minneapolis officers involved that day was part of the Minneapolis Police Department training.
Now, you already knew that, right?
Just as an observer, you already knew that Derek Chauvin literally used the technique that he was trained to use and that it was in writing and it was an actual official policy.
You all knew that, right?
But I believe that was, I believe it was prohibited from being presented at the trial.
Do I have that right?
Give me a fact check on that.
Were they prohibited or did they just treat it in a way that wasn't quite the way you'd want it to be treated?
Yeah.
So, I don't know the total details there, but to me, that does seem like that should be really, really important.
Because if he was trained to do it that way, and everybody else was trained to do it that way, and you got 50, 50?
50 is a lot.
Just ask those former and current intelligence people who signed off on the Hunter laptop.
50 is a lot.
The 50 is all you need.
If it were up to you and the only thing you knew is that they had this and nothing else changed, but let's say you believed completely these 50 officers and you said to yourself, Holy cow, I was part of the decision to put Chauvin in jail, but I didn't know this.
I didn't know.
What if you're finding out about it for the first time?
How would you feel?
How would you feel if you were on the jury and you had convicted him to effectively something like life, and then you learned that he had been trained to do it exactly that way?
How would you feel about yourself?
I'll tell you, if that were me, I wouldn't feel too good about that at all.
So, anyway, we'll see if that goes anywhere, but good luck.
So, Bill Maher's show was last night.
Do you know that whenever Bill Maher has a show that we like to talk about his slow transition into a Republican?
No, I'm just joking.
He's not going to become a Republican.
Might be better than that.
Might be something better.
So, he had Donna Brazil on the show.
And I'm going to tell you about their back and forth, but I'm going to take a direction on this after I tell you that you don't see coming, I think.
So, the Overton News is reporting that, so they were debating education and an issue Democrats used to sort of own.
And Bill Maher is making the point that Democrats are sort of seeding control of that topic.
So, here's what happened.
So, Bill Maher said, I really do feel like the Democratic Party, this has been their portfolio, meaning education, for a long time, education.
So, I feel like they, if they're going to get back into office, they have to own the issue a little.
And then he goes on, he says, because a lot of the states that are doing better now are like the southern states, meaning Republican.
And Don and Brazil said, Really?
Which ones?
And Maher said, Mississippi, as an example.
And Brazil said, Mississippi's getting better than Louisiana.
So I guess Louisiana would be a blue state.
And Bill Maher said, and here's the payoff.
See, you're in a bubble.
You didn't get that story.
Now that's the story is not about the story.
So here I have no interest, not really, at least at the moment, about which of these states did a better job.
That's not the point.
I'm going to make a point that's not about education.
That's also interesting, but that's not where I'm going here.
So it's not about the states.
It's not about education.
It's about this: that the way Bill Maher framed it was two people in different information bubbles.
When was the last time you saw that?
That it got framed as reasonable people who just happened to be getting different information.
What's that sound like?
It sounds like something that comes from Republicans.
What's important here is that Bill can now speak the language of Republicans the way we would speak it.
Because I would have said maybe the same thing.
I would say, well, if you don't know about that story, you might be in a bubble.
And it doesn't mean you're smart and I'm dumb or vice versa.
It just means you and I get different information.
And if we got the same information, especially about something like education, don't you think we'd probably be on the same page if we had the same information?
Probably.
So again, I'm not arguing the merit of the point about education.
I'm just really impressed when I watch, in this case, Bill Maher, he's trying to see the whole field, but he's not trying to see the whole field just factually.
He's trying to see how it works.
And how it works is that we get pushed into these little bubbles, and then we believe that our bubble has the right facts, and then we're completely lost after that.
It's a big deal.
It's a big deal that somebody has learned how to speak the Republican language and they're not a Republican.
By the way, do all of you see that?
How big a deal that is?
Am I getting too excited over nothing?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Because, you know, I've been making this point that Republicans learn and also teach their base.
This is more important.
Republicans teach their base and their followers how to think about things, not just what to think.
And did you see that Bill Maher just did that?
He just told Donna Brazil how to think, which is make sure you're not in a bubble.
He didn't tell her what to think that came along with it.
Oh, by the way, if you had done that, you would see this differently.
So every time you see somebody in the left start to adopt the idea that common sense and affordability, and these are also how to think kinds of issues, if they start focusing on how to think about things, we're going to end up in the same place.
That's the magic of it.
You'll end up in the same place if you learn how to think.
But if they try to teach you what to think, you'll all end up in different places.
And then you fight.
All right.
Apparently the FBI has now concluded, and that would include Dan Bongino, who I think most of us completely trust.
So to me, I would be amazed if Dan Bongino started lying to the country.
It just doesn't even seem possible.
He seems so credible that he, you know, like anybody, he can be wrong about something, but would he lie?
It just doesn't even seem possible.
But they say that they've now looked into it totally and Thomas Crooks acted alone.
But what I found even more important, this is in a Fox News report, is that there were some things I thought I knew about that story.
So Crooks is the one that was on the roof and got shot as soon as he took a shot.
One of the things I thought I knew about that is that Crooks had some encrypted apps or some devices that we couldn't get into.
How many of you thought that was real?
That the shooter was known to have some encrypted apps, and even the FBI couldn't get into them.
That was never real.
Did you know that?
That was never real.
There are no apps and no devices, according to Bangino.
There were no apps and no devices that were impossible to get into.
The FBI just opened them up like they were all just cans of soda.
No, no, there was.
And remember, you thought to yourself, how can this even be possible?
How is it possible that in this day and age, you know, the FBI can't get into all these apps?
Of course they can.
They got into them right away.
There was no problem at all.
So what was the other thing?
There was at least at least one other thing in that story that I thought everybody knew was true that just turned down it was never true.
So anyway, once you adjust for the fact that you had the wrong facts, you know, I guess you were in the wrong bubble.
Once you adjust to the fact that you had the wrong facts, it does look pretty believable that it was a single shooter.
But if you had believed that there were these secret encrypted apps that nobody could get into, well, that's a little bit more suggestive that there's more of the story.
All right.
I guess JD Vance has been mocking Canada.
I don't know if mocking is the right word.
But Canada's living standards have stagnated.
And JD points out that it's probably not unrelated to the fact that Canada has the highest number of the G7, the highest percentage of people not born in the country that they're living.
So that would say that immigration is the reason that Canadian living standards have stagnated.
Do you think that's true?
Do you think that the reason that Canadian living standards have stagnated is because of immigration?
Well, might be part of it.
I imagine there's more than one reason.
All right, that's all I had for today.
I will remind you that the after party will be starting pretty soon.
I'm going to say a few words to my beloved subscribers on locals.
And the rest of you, I'll see you tomorrow if I don't see you today.
I might join the spaces today, but I will be anonymous so you wouldn't know if I'm there or not.
