Joel Pollack and guests dissect Trump’s State of the Union, praising his showmanship—gold medal presentations, Democratic silence, and 63% CNN approval—while critiquing their rebuttal as divisive. They highlight his data-driven claims (e.g., murder rates at a 120-year low) and partisan framing, like honoring military figures over bipartisan gestures, contrasting with Democrats’ unpatriotic reactions. The speech’s victory-lap narrative, tied to America’s achievements, underscores a broader cultural divide between pro-American boldness and perceived anti-American resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
Hopefully, Mike Bird has gotten his ex account back.
Oh, yeah.
He might be in a mine today.
He was going back into the mine.
Good morning.
Look how cute.
Good morning, everybody.
Is everyone nice and refreshed?
Look who's joining us in the house today.
Joel, Joel Pollack.
We're so excited.
But you guys, you know, once we all file in, I see people coming in through the door.
Come on in, and then we're going to have a little simultaneity with Scott, which is the best part of the day, always.
Free Bird.
What's going on?
Chunks.
Love you.
Book it.
Oh, my gosh.
All the kids are here.
YouTube's going strong, Erica.
Who is?
YouTube.
YouTube's.
YouTube's YouTube.
Freebird.
Annie.
You're the bomb.com.
Yep.
We see YouTube.
Okay, Rumble.
All right.
You guys, grab a vessel of any kind.
It's time, Brie.
Let's take it away.
Special surprise.
Special surprise.
I've updated the introduction to the simultaneous sip to make it easier for you to sing along.
In fact, turn it into a generic drinking toast.
Are you ready?
So here's the rework introduction to the simultaneous sip.
It goes like this.
Watch the rhyming pattern.
You'll be impressed.
I'd like to perform this correctly.
For the simultaneous sip, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, chalice, or stein, canteen, jug, or flask, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee, but if this were a drinking game or you were doing it for a toast, everybody would get to say their own favorite liquid at the same time.
So I'd be yelling coffee.
You'd be yelling vodka, perhaps.
It all works.
Now join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything simultaneous.
Go.
Yep.
Yep.
That's good stuff.
It all works.
That was delicious, Santa.
Santa Scott.
Good morning.
Here we are, day after the State of the Union, the one, the only coffee with Scott Adams, Scott Adams School.
So my name is Erica.
I am your lovely host.
That was hysterical.
We have Sergio joining us.
And we have Owen Gregorian, still not perfectly feeling better.
So we have his voice again for today.
Hello, everyone.
We have beautiful Marcella in blue today.
And one of our favorite guest co-hosts, Joel Pollack, is in the house.
Halfway Through The Draft00:05:02
Joel, first things first, we have a lot of people who are wondering how the book is coming along.
And we have had questions.
Do you have like a timeframe of how long it'll take before we can read it?
It's going very well.
I'm more than halfway through the first draft.
I am going to write several drafts.
So it's not going to come out next week, but it will hopefully come out before the end of the year.
The goal is that it would be on sale in time for the holiday shopping season.
So I'm guessing maybe a target date for release of something like October.
Wow.
We will have to go through another draft that'll take a little bit longer to finish, probably by June or July.
And then revisions and editing over the summer.
And then hopefully publication by the fall.
So I know that's going to be frustrating to people who want something right away, but you'll just have to wait.
Yeah, but it just, it takes a long time to do this right.
And it's the second biography I've worked on.
The first one I worked on took about a year and a half to do.
And that also went through several drafts.
This won't be quite as long in terms of the process or in terms of the book length, because it's got to be readable above all.
And also because in the earlier biography that I wrote, I wrote about my mother-in-law, actually, who was a very prominent civil rights activist in South Africa.
I wrote a long book because a lot of her writing, even though she was also famous as a writer, a lot of it hadn't been published.
So I wanted to include excerpts of some of her writing.
Whereas with Scott, he's written so much and he's actually told his own story so many times that we have the luxury in a sense, or maybe the additional burden, if you want to look at it that way, of writing a shorter and more concise and direct biography.
So that's what I'm working on right now.
And it's going very well.
And, you know, as with exercise, as with just about anything you want to do, Scott's advice was you do a little bit every day.
And that's how this is going as well.
It's a little every day alongside all the other things I'm doing, California Post and raising my family or trying to be there for the family as I divide my time between two coasts, really.
So hopefully I'm barely hanging on to all that and making sure that the work gets done everywhere it needs to be done.
We've got little league season coming up.
You know, we're all extremely busy and you have to basically schedule time for the things that really are most important.
So I usually write the biography first thing in the morning.
If you have something you really want to do and you don't want it to hang over you the whole day, just get it done as soon as you possibly can.
So I'm usually up really early and I'm working on Scott's biography.
That's great advice.
The other thing we definitely want to know about is how is the California Post going?
It's newly launched and what do you think?
It's going very well.
I mean, the reception's been incredible.
Everywhere I go, people who are familiar with it tell me that it's really changing their media diet and also changing the political landscape because people feel that there's finally an alternative voice within California that can reflect a variety of perspectives that isn't the usual liberal left perspective.
That doesn't mean that everybody who reads or writes for the California Post is conservative or Republican.
We had an opinion article a few days ago by the lead plaintiff in the case against Trump's tariffs explaining why he had sued Trump and why he had won.
And that's what we want to be.
We're not trying to be straight down the middle.
Nobody really can be.
But the motto of the editorial page is we deserve better.
We deserve better than the quality of the government services we're getting.
We deserve better than the cultural snobbery of Hollywood, which persists even as the movie industry is in real trouble.
And we want to work together and bring voices out of the shadows to make this a bit of a better place to live.
And that's what I want for my family.
And I know that that's what millions of Californians want.
And that's why the California Post is doing so well.
Yes, that's incredible and very much needed in California.
So I'm working, by the way, on my Gavin Newsom impersonation.
I launched it yesterday and I'm like, you know, and then I realized it's sort of like driving the car dance.
I'm like, I don't really know what you're doing, but I'm going to perfect it.
So last night, President Trump said the state of the union is strong.
So I am going to start with you, Joel, about this speech.
So what do you feel this, the state of the union speech is?
Right.
State of the Union Dance00:15:20
Well, I tried to look at it in a number of different ways.
And I wrote about it at the California Post from my perspective using my tools, the way that I would write it as a political observer.
And next I'll get to how Scott would have seen it.
But I thought it was one of his best speeches ever, yet it was also a very partisan speech.
And so I wrestled for some time with the question of whether a partisan speech in the State of the Union could also be a great speech.
And I think he pulled it off.
And the way he pulled it off was he did not try to establish national unity by talking about the Republicans and the Democrats coming together.
That's the old model.
And I think he actually tried that a couple of times in his early State of the Union addresses.
But what he did instead was he went outside of politics and he brought heroes into the room that everybody could identify with.
The hockey team, the soldiers, the National Guardsman who was wounded, the mother of the refugee who was murdered.
He brought people in who could transcend the parties.
So he beat up on the Democrats quite a bit, but also said our national unity is really outside of this chamber.
And he almost emphasized the point physically by bringing people into the room from outside.
They weren't seated in the gallery.
Almost all of his guests were people who were waiting outside in the hallway, and he would bring them in.
The Olympic team, the Medal of Honor winner.
There were people coming in all the time.
He brought the nation into the room.
And I think that was a deliberate physical gesture.
And I've written about that before, how there's never been a president who has used the room itself almost as a musical instrument.
You know, if you go into a church with a pipe organ, the building is the instrument because you can actually see the pipes usually on the exterior of the building, sometimes inside as well.
But the resonance that gives the organ its sound is the building.
And Trump is the organist in the chamber.
He really uses the physical space, not just by projecting his voice, but by bringing people in and out.
And then last night, a new technique he really drew attention to, which was standing versus sitting.
We're used to that, right?
We're used to the party in power standing and applauding the party that's in the opposition sitting and frowning.
But Democrats came in and said, we're going to be silent.
We're just not going to say anything or do anything.
And they've done that in a few years past.
But I think Trump took that as an opportunity this time and said, okay, you're going to sit there.
Whatever you agree with, stand.
If you disagree, sit.
And so then he set up this series of questions that they had to sit for.
So visually and physically, that created something that was very useful.
And I'm kind of already getting into my Scott analysis.
But that's as far as mine went.
I mean, that was basically what I said.
So now, how would Scott have looked at this?
Well, I gave you a little hint just now.
Scott always said that visual persuasion is always better.
And what Trump did was he basically showed the nation visually, even gestured, you know, look, look, you know, look at these people.
They're sitting down.
They're sitting down for American citizens come first.
They're sitting down for this poor woman who was murdered.
Why don't you stand up for that?
You know, he made this visual case of the difference between the two parties.
Now, that's very powerful in a midterm election year.
And I think that is what many Republicans took from the speech.
They took a sense of confidence, not necessarily because he talked about how successful his policies had been or the good economic news.
Democrats can talk about some of the bad economic news because the economic news is never all good or all bad.
But what he really did was draw a clear distinction between the two parties.
And that gives the Republicans something to run on.
And what the parties need on both sides is they need something to believe in, something to run on.
Abigail Spanberger, who gave the response, I thought she was a terrible choice for the response if you're trying to reach the nation.
On the other hand, probably a pretty good choice if you're a Democrat.
Let me explain that.
Abigail Spanberger ran as a moderate.
She even said she would not redraw the congressional districts in Virginia.
She has governed as a radical and she's redistricting Virginia from a six Democrat, five Republican state to a 10 Democrat, one Republican state.
It's the most egregious partisan gerrymander in the whole country.
So you wouldn't have her after the president because in a way she makes his case for him, at least to independent voters.
Trump can point to her and say, listen, the Democrats are selling you some moderate candidates this year, but you're going to get radical.
Look what she's doing in Virginia, raising all these taxes, taxes on dog walking.
I mean, it's nuts.
As he said last night, these people are crazy.
But what a Democratic leader wants to tell the Democratic Party is quietly, quietly, we're going to do all this radical stuff you really want.
Just let us run the moderate candidates.
Let us do this.
And this is, in fact, happening in California.
The California Democratic Convention just met and they nominated some candidates for Congress and they nominated the more moderate ones, not the far-left ones, because Nancy Pelosi knows that's how you win.
So the message to Democrats is, you know, don't worry.
Don't worry.
Don't make a lot of noise about it.
Don't get upset about it, but we're going to run some moderate candidates.
Once they're in, they can do whatever you want.
And the other thing that she did was she reinforced this idea that ICE is basically the Gestapo, that they're arresting citizens, that they're poorly trained.
They're a bunch of thugs.
They come in.
I mean, it's a terrible way to talk about American law enforcement.
And just, I don't know, some part of me is just repulsed by the whole thing.
But that is the Democratic Party narrative.
That's how they see their identity as opposed to the Republican Party.
And so it was a good speech for Democrats because she reinforced the feeling that they're standing up against tyranny in some way.
Now, Scott addresses this in his book, Win Bigley, where he talks about the absolute conviction of Trump's critics that he was the new Hitler and that this horrible authoritarian regime was descending.
And he said, none of that was true.
And when you showed people evidence that it wasn't true, they didn't react.
They didn't change their minds.
They were at best placed into a kind of cognitive dissonance where they would try to justify the opposite of what they were feeling or experiencing.
But that's how we function, two movies and one screen.
And it's just interesting to see the reactions afterward.
There wasn't two movies, one screen effect in the sense that you had Democrats with their talking points coming on and saying this was a terrible speech.
It was awful.
He said Gavin Newsom said, it was boring.
Now, that was probably the dumbest comment because I think even Democrats understood it wasn't boring.
I mean, it was long.
He could have said that was long, right?
The joke there is, it's long.
I fell as I'll tell you what I think about the speech, but I fell asleep, you know, whatever.
I mean, there are other, you could have done something funny with that.
The longest state of the union ever, but that's not where he went.
He went to boring.
It definitely wasn't boring.
And that's bad persuasion.
It's not credible.
It's not funny.
I don't think any of their persuasion was funny or credible.
And this is the thing.
There's always this moment when Trump really does well, when the other side doesn't really know what to do.
And so they go with their talking points.
There is a kind of cognitive dissonance.
I mean, Pete Budichej on CNN was talking about how it was a terrible speech and the president lied, That's sort of the default.
Like, I didn't like the speech, so he must have lied.
Well, CBS News, which is normally pretty harsh to the president, maybe not since Barry Weiss took over.
I don't know, but CBS News did a fact check.
I just saw this on X.
They fact-checked his claim that murders were down to their lowest rate since 1900.
Sounds crazy, right?
I mean, that's like a long time ago.
Fact check, true.
I mean, it's true.
It's extraordinary.
Now, where Democrats will disagree with the Republicans is why.
And President Trump said why.
He said it's because we had ICE on the street deporting criminal gangsters.
But Democrats won't admit that.
Okay, fine.
But I think the two movies, one screen effect was there, but it took a little bit of a shock, a little bit, a little bit of a beating last night.
For a moment, at least, the Democrats didn't really know what to say.
I watched Harold Ford, who's probably the most fair-minded Democrat.
He's on Fox.
And before the speech, he was saying, well, we have to remember a lot of Americans are still hurting economically.
And that's what the president needs to talk about.
All the people who are hurting, sort of re-emphasizing the idea the economy is bad.
And when the speech was over, his reaction was, Democrats need to talk about economic issues in response to this president, which told me that Trump was successful because Harold Ford Jr. wasn't saying Trump failed to talk about the economy.
He failed to talk about people who are working for a living.
It told me that he knew Trump had really hit a home run and the Democrats were going to have to find a way to respond.
So I think that's where it was.
And again, visual persuasion, as Scott said.
Also, finally, about the persuasion element of it, I said to my wife, you know, Trump has done this before.
I mean, how many speeches has he done where he's gone to the gallery, there's been a medal of honor awarded or a medal of freedom.
And we've seen this before.
We have actually seen it before.
I thought Trump's speech in 2020, the one Nancy Pelosi tore up, was probably the best speech he'd ever given.
And nobody remembers it because she tore up the speech.
That's visual persuasion for you, right?
That's what we remember about the speech.
But what was different this time?
And I think it was the hockey team.
It was the hockey team because it allowed him to frame the entire speech as a victory speech.
It really was a victory speech.
And it associated him, or he associated himself with the color gold or with the metallic gold of the medals.
They came in wearing medals.
Another form of visual persuasion.
And also, it resonates because everybody knows Trump likes gold, right?
There's gold in the Trump Tower.
There's gold in Mar-a-Lago.
There's gold in the Oval Office.
He's big on gold.
The Nobel Prize is gold behind his desk.
Everything's gold.
He likes gold.
It's almost a joke, you know, like, what's he going to build in Greenland?
Like a giant gold tower, you know, on the ice floor or whatever.
But that was very powerful.
The gold medals, the hockey team coming in, it also showed that he could break the opposition because half the Democrats stood up and he pointed that out.
He said, Look, half of them are standing.
The other ones aren't.
But anyway, so I think that was a way of making this speech different and better and more effective than the other ones was basically framing it as a victory speech.
I'm not trying to make the case for you that I'm better or that I'm succeeding and that you should vote for my party in November.
The case I'm making is we've all already won.
And that was, I think, what made it very effective.
And that's why people are upbeat about it today if they like the president and why Democrats are trying to find a better answer for it.
And they may just try to forget about it and move on because they think they have the upper hand as the opposition party in the midterm year.
But it was a very effective speech.
I felt like he painted it, if I just summarized it quickly, as American, anti-American.
And that's really how I saw the whole thing, you know, like not stand, like you can't stand when he says that your number one job is to protect Americans and the country.
And they were like, oh, no, we're going to sit for that.
So, oh, oh, okay.
You know, so I felt like, you know, even like some, and some of the medals he gave out, like, I was like, he's just giving out medals and awards.
He's using.
And then he said he wanted the presidential medal of honor.
And he's like, I can't give it to myself, but if they could change that law.
And I'm just like, oh my God, he was so funny last night and animated.
And like you said, the room was part of his speech.
And he used the sitting and the silence as part of his speech.
And those non-words and those moments of just gesturing were huge.
And I'm glad that he also allowed so much space and time to happen for those moments.
Like he didn't just make a point and move on.
Like he let the Republican or the American side, I'm going to say, to applaud for, I think it was like two minutes and 18 seconds when he said, your first job is to protect Americans.
And he let that go for well over two minutes of them just sitting there.
And that was serious, in my opinion.
You know, the remark about changing the law to give himself the Medal of Honor, it may have had to do with the fact that the gentleman who won the Medal of Honor right before he said that, whose name escapes me right now, I can look it up quickly.
The centenarian who had flown in the Korean War, his name is, I have it on the other computer, sorry.
He is from San Diego or the San Diego suburbs.
His name is Royce Williams.
And Royce Williams had flown that mission, but it was a secret mission.
And the reason that it was secret, Trump kind of alluded to the fact that it was secret, was that we did not want to acknowledge that the Soviet Union had actually been in combat with our troops because it would have had massive implications for the Cold War when both countries at that point had nuclear weapons.
And so the rule for the Congressional Medal of Honor is you have to be nominated for it within three years of the event that causes you to win the medal.
And the only exceptions that are allowed is if there's an act of Congress that actually says, okay, this individual should get it.
That's why it's the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Congress actually has the final say.
And so they did actually pass an amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act that allowed Royce Williams to receive the Medal of Honor.
So that might have been what Trump was doing.
But how did they even get to that point?
It was because a bunch of his neighbors in Encinitas, in San Diego, decided, you know what?
This is our neighbor.
He's never talked about this, but he's kind of a legend.
We think he deserves a medal of honor and we want to give it to him before he passes away.
He's 100 years old.
How much longer is he going to be here?
So it's also a reminder that in the United States, small groups of people, neighbors can really get things done.
Might take a few years, might take a push, but you'll get things done.
And I think that was a nice touch.
Heroes in the Room00:10:02
I didn't even realize that till this morning when I was reading the paper, reading the San Diego Union Tribune.
And wow, okay, wow, that's interesting.
The neighbors basically elevated this somehow to the White House and Trump reacted and Congress reacted.
That's beautiful.
Owen, did you want to grab Joel or Marcella?
He has to go in a couple minutes.
Well, I think I agree with a lot of your assessment.
I think it was interesting to me that the Democrats did stand up several times.
And I just thought that was interesting because I kind of expected them just to sit through the whole thing and not do anything, maybe heckle them along the way.
But, you know, on the insider trading thing and the hockey team, and there were probably three or four other times where at least a fair number of them stood up and clapped.
Well, they stood up at one point, ironically, when he said they voted against all the tax cuts in the one big, beautiful bill.
And then some of them stood up to applaud themselves.
Like, yeah, we did.
We voted against that because, you know, they're trying to make a point, which is that they don't like the one big, beautiful bill because it cuts funding to some of their favorite state programs.
But that's just a sign of how much he broke their unity.
I mean, it was also, you can't really control hundreds of people.
Did they ever really think they were going to get everybody to sit still?
I mean, Elon Omar and her heckling and, you know, I mean, did they ever think they were going to get everyone to behave?
It's hard enough to get, you know, a few of them to do the same thing.
I mean, it's just anyway, he did very, very well.
And he has this technique that Trump, that Scott talks about, which is using an anchor.
So he'll mention a number or a figure or an individual person.
And I tried looking for a number that was an anchor in the speech.
There wasn't really one because the anchors Trump usually uses are exaggerations.
But in this case, the numbers were all factually accurate.
You know, core inflation is the lowest.
It's been in five years.
You know, all the different other numbers he uses, gas prices are the low.
He gave the average national gas price.
So he used these anchors that were actually real anchors.
I think the anchors, in a sense, were the heroes in the room.
So Trump kind of made you think of him in a heroic way because he was connecting to all these to all these heroes.
And I think there were some opportunities Democrats missed to show some unity.
They did stand up a little bit, but really I just think the country is watching.
And, you know, my 10-year-old was watching it this morning.
He was in bed already by the time the speech happened last night, but he was watching it in the car on the way to school.
And he just couldn't believe anybody would sit down for the hockey team or for the Medal of Honor winners.
He was just looking at me like, why do they sit down, Dad?
Or lowering taxes.
But some of them stood about the insider trading.
And that call out to Pelosi was so amazing.
I loved it.
Yeah.
Well, I think, you know, we all see these events differently through Scott's eyes.
I think once Scott sort of showed you what's behind the curtain, it's very, it's very difficult not to see it.
I also think Trump did a good job of just staying on like the 80-20 or 90-10 type issues where almost all Americans agree that we want these things.
And so he was really painting Democrats into a corner by just focusing on all these things where they're really popular in terms of what he's doing or really unpopular in terms of what the Democrats are doing.
And so I think he's doing a good job of focusing on the right issues going into the midterms rather than some of the more controversial things that might be more split down the middle.
Can I make an observation about that very quickly?
I got an advanced copy of some of the excerpts of the speech.
They circulated to journalists, you know, five or six paragraphs.
And I looked through it briefly and he went after the fraud in Minnesota.
And in the excerpt that was released, it was something like fraud in the Somali community or something like that.
And I kind of said, that's not going to land very well.
I mean, even though it's really what happened, people don't like to hear a community singled out.
He must have changed the text or he ad-libbed something in the actual delivery of the speech because instead of Somalis or Somali community, he said Somali pirates.
Okay.
That's like, oh yeah, nobody likes the Somali pirates.
I mean, Somalis are okay, hardworking people.
Somali pirates, they're bad.
You know, they're like the villains in the movie.
So yeah, we don't want Somali pirates.
I thought that was very clever.
And I'm not sure if that was an editing change or if he decided to do that.
But he does make things up as he goes along that are often improvements on whatever's been written.
Marcella, did you want to grab in a question?
I think we forget he's 79 years old.
It's amazing that he gave the longest State of the Union speech.
And he never skipped a beat.
He was just on fire, you know?
And I like the flow.
Like he was hypnotizing us because like Joel said, he kept on bringing people into the hockey team, the different people.
But it was like he was an orchestra director, like directing everything.
The Dems not standing at the same time, Go pointing as if he's doing a musical, like a musical piece of America.
So it felt short because I tend to like, oh, I mean, I tend to get bored if it's like almost a two-hour speech.
But for me, it felt like bam, And then it was over.
So there's been speeches, I do have to say, that Trump has gotten to me.
And I'm like, oh, it's still going, you know, but with this, it had momentum.
It had cadence.
It had like, and I don't know if Joel wants to talk about that.
Well, I think your impression was widely shared because my wife, who watched the whole thing, said she couldn't believe it was two hours long.
It didn't feel that long.
That's what she said.
So I think a lot of people felt that way.
And yes, I think the variety helps.
If you're listening to somebody talk, it doesn't matter how interesting they are.
If they're just talking, it does eventually get to you.
But changing the camera angles, the characters he brought in.
And I like your metaphor.
He was like a conductor conducting an orchestra, but I don't know how he is going to top that performance next year.
I mean, are people going to descend through trapdoors in the ceiling and swing in on ropes?
I mean, I don't know.
But one other thing they did at the White House YouTube channel, I'm not sure they were doing this live, but when I watched the replay this morning, they had already added this in.
So maybe it was done live.
As the president was speaking, if you watched on the White House YouTube, they would do a split screen every time he mentioned a fact and they would highlight the fact with a chart or a like large type so that they drove home the point.
Like they were basically giving you the talking points while you're watching the president talk about them.
I thought that was yeah, Trump loves charts, right?
Yeah, sure.
I'm always there to save his life.
I have a question for you, Joe.
You mentioned the room, how he used it.
He used it as a theater, right?
Yeah.
It's like one of those live action theaters.
You're in there in your city and you don't know where people are going to come out from, right?
Even he uses on enemies as props, right?
Like Evan Green, like getting him all angry.
It's like the WWE almost getting all the energy onto him and getting him out of there, right?
And with the sign.
Yeah.
Well, that got into the spirit of the people waiting for something to happen.
So my question is, if you were the president and somebody came to you and said, like, okay, Mr. President, we don't have a space.
We don't have sitting space for the hockey players.
Where can we put him to maximize the power of them?
And do you think that Trump came out with that idea of that, doing that?
Is that something that gets yeah, I do.
I mean, that contrast was amazing.
I think he, I think that's him.
And I just say that because he's done certain things like that in the past.
In 2020, again, the speech nobody remembers because Nancy Pelosi tore it up.
There was a soldier who came home from Afghanistan who was waiting outside and his wife was in the gallery and she thought she was being honored as a representative of military spouses, which she was.
But then the door opens and in comes the soldier and people cried.
You know, it's, I just think he's done it before.
He understands how it works.
I'll say one other thing about how he gets his enemies or his opponents to participate, even if they don't want to.
It's not always by getting them angry.
I don't know if you remember the first State of the Union after Democrats took the House in 2018 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was there for the first time and they were all wearing white to honor the suffragettes.
It was a tense atmosphere.
People were expecting a confrontation between the Republican president, the new Democratic House.
And Trump said, I want to congratulate the American people and Congress for having the most female members ever elected to the House.
And Ocasio-Cortez stands up and gives him a standing ovation.
JD's Strategic Speech Tactics00:10:01
You know, I mean, so it's also, he knows how to get them to do positive things as well if he wants to.
Now, that was no longer an election year.
In an election year, you want to draw a contrast.
So he gets them angry, but he can do both.
Can we shout out to, I mean, also, the other thing he did last night was, I'm sorry, I forget the whole story, but Enrique, who came in, he's like, you know, and here's Enrique behind like door number two.
And I am obsessed watching JD behind Trump all the time because JD is like, no way.
Like you can see his face.
Oh my God.
He's, he is the advocate of Johnny Carson.
Yeah.
Yeah.
JD was just as surprised about everything.
It was so sweet.
I love watching JD so much.
And I didn't, I didn't miss that he said he's appointing Vance to do the all fraud stuff.
Like that's his thing now.
So yeah, yeah.
Into the spotlight.
Yeah, that was announced a few weeks ago.
I tried, I got in touch with Vance's office and said, she need to do an interview about that.
And they said, let him get a handle on the job first.
You know, like it was too new.
So, but we'll be talking to him about it soon.
Oh, that'll be great.
Do you have to jet, Joel?
I don't want to keep you.
Yeah, we're in the middle of an editorial meeting.
That's why I can only do these half hours, but I spent a few extra minutes with you because I love that.
We see that.
We appreciate it so much, Joel.
We'll be looking for your interview with Vance's office with Vance soon.
And thank you.
By the way, thank you so much for always offering to come on.
And that is like the kindest, sweetest thing.
And I just want you to know that we all collectively appreciate that so much.
Oh, it's a lot of fun to come on.
My favorite community.
Oh, thank you.
All right, Joel, then we'll see you soon.
I hope you see you guys.
Have a good meeting.
Take care.
Bye.
Yes.
Cheers to Joel.
All right, you guys, I think we're alone now.
So I just want to give you an update.
I said, you know, Marcella asked me yesterday what my predictions are for me watching the state of the union.
And I said it might be a shot every minute of vodka, but you'll be happy to know I did not need to drink.
I did not have a shot of anything because it was epic.
I loved it.
I listen, I grew up in the theater.
I come from a show business family and a business family.
So, and New Yorkers and blah, blah, blah.
So Trump is the ultimate New York mogul showman.
He understands how to put on a show, how to involve everybody.
And he sucked me right in.
And I loved his timing and pacing.
I loved the visuals.
I loved the silence.
I loved them sitting.
I loved everything about it.
I love the medals flying, all of it.
I love JD.
Even Johnson, he could never get Botox.
He's got that good face like when he furrows his brow.
He looks so young.
They're like all characters in this multi-dimensional play that we watched last night.
And I loved every freaking minute of it.
And I loved watching Ilhan ill, ill Han Omar, you know, you, da, I mean, I'm like, yeah, she did the point.
And I'm like, oh, you only get upset when we're talking about the land you love, Somalia, because it's not America.
And a lot of them really showed their disdain for our country and for their constituents.
And I was like, there's all the advertising you need.
And so for me, I went to bed like, I'm proud of people that are pro-America and put Americans first.
And I can clearly see by their own demeanor and their own inactions who hates this country and does not care about us.
So that being said, like, I'm going to toss to you first, Owen.
What was your grand takeaway from last night?
Well, I thought it was a great speech.
It sounded kind of like a rally speech to me, which I say that is a good thing because I think that's what gets people really going.
I think he definitely was appealing to his base.
I think he did appeal to independence, I think, and call for unity in many ways.
I think it probably would be appealing to anyone who actually is open-minded that, you know, I don't know if it's 2% or 5% that'll actually swing one way or the other.
But, you know, he was just taking victory lap after victory lap.
And I don't think the Democrats were prepared for that.
I think they were expecting him to come in like wounded from Epstein files and all these other, you know, the Supreme Court ruling against him and all these other things.
And instead, it was just all positive.
It was just we fixed everything.
We turned everything around.
We've, you know, everything's going in the right direction now.
And so I think it was great.
You know, I did post a story about some of the political strategists that gave grades and some of them were like A ⁇ and some of them were F. I'm sure those are the Democrats.
So I do think it's going to be very much two movies on one screen that I'm sure anyone who's Democrat aligned would have just hated everything coming out of his mouth.
But I think anybody who is an independent probably would have liked it.
I think they would have said this is the right type of messaging and the right type of things.
Also, that he didn't make it all about himself.
You know, when Trump does his rallies, it's usually all about what he's going to do and all his plans and how he's so important to fixing everything.
And in this case, he brought in all these other heroes and all these other victims and all these other people, but he also gave credit to Rubio and he gave credit to all these other people in his administration.
And so I think it was very much like we've got a great team and we're all doing things in the right direction.
And we're trying to push these things that are really important to move things forward in the right way.
So I loved it.
Awesome.
Marcella, what's your takeaway?
That's interesting that you say that, Owen, because he didn't make it about himself.
He made it about America, the speech.
And, you know, you just hit on it very well because his speech was about showcasing the wonderful wins that America has, but also giving us a vision of the future because he talked about at the very end of the speech, it was very inspiring.
He said, there's no challenge an American cannot, Americans cannot overcome.
There's no horizon too distant for us to claim.
And he talked about the golden age of America is upon us.
And that's how he closed.
And he also indicated the revolution that began in 1776 has not ended at all.
And it's still going.
And I think that's what could grab independence because it wasn't something where it's like, oh, me or Republicans.
It was, no, it's America.
And I think Erica touched on it.
It's America and anti-America.
And I think the way that he made that happen, where we were thinking he was going to go very, very party oriented, like us Republicans, we do everything and you Democrats suck, you know?
So he didn't do it in that manner.
He did it in this beautiful way of doing it.
Sort of, you know, but it was more about, hey, this unites us.
And then he went on with litany of the 80-20 issues.
Yeah.
Issues like the Save Act, like, hey, have an ID to vote.
No driver's license for illegals because it could cause people to die.
$1,000 for every child insider trade and insider trading, which I love because I thought of Erica because he called out.
I don't know if this is when he called out Nancy.
Did she stand up for this thing?
Yeah, that was it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I found it great, but so did people because the CNN poll that came out said that there was 63% of whoever was polled.
I'm not sure exactly the polling range, but 63 found it really positive speech.
And 36, not 25, found it negative.
Oh, and I think I don't think Trump did that to the Democrats.
I think the Democrats did that to themselves by their behavior.
So I think he was just spitting facts and truths and their reaction and him just saying, like, really?
Like, that was on them.
He showed his evidence.
Yeah.
Like, he brought their receipts and they were just sitting in their chairs.
Sergio, what is your takeaway?
Well, that was an amazing analysis by Joe.
First of all, I love how he broke it down that way.
And he understands the show is the show.
That's what Scott always told us that people, somebody was asking me yesterday, well, let me see when he's going to get to the policy part.
It's like there's no, there's no policy.
Like the, everything is the policy, all of it.
And like you Erica, you were so right about that you know the showmanship and nobody can do it better than he does, because at the end, Marcela says it all the time.
Facts don't matter.
What matters is how people feels today, this morning and um, the people that watched it, which is uh, only the ones that you know are not independent.
Showmanship Matters00:02:23
Even I don't think it's going to be a lot of independence.
You know, i'm going to spend tonight watching this.
It's going to be.
It's his base is a pep rally, right?
Uh, Owen is right, it's like a rally for the base first, to show.
You know, this is how we're going to start the year and we're going strong here.
We're not gonna.
We're not.
I was gonna say a word, but you know we're not very cat pudding, you know very careful walking through this.
So we're going to.
He's bold, he said at the beginning of the speech.
He said uh America, our nation, is bigger better, richer and stronger than ever before.
He said that right, so those are the first words.
He didn't say like okay, let me tell you some things.
You know, he just went for it, that feeling that everybody has right now, that so the rally can can be transmitted to other people and that's the the effect it's not going to be about.
Um, there's no effect for the Democrats today on this uh speech.
You know, just uh, they're gonna use it for their own purposes.
With good editing they, they can make Al Green look like a hero right they, they can do it, they can totally do it.
They're gonna make him do that.
They're gonna he look, he's gonna look like a hero in their eyes, right.
But that base that they have, I think, is going down and down.
Like Owen was saying, some Independents are going to be like you know what, why do these guys look so happy all the time?
Everybody's so excited, and on the right, you know, they're like so positive and over here, so everybody's miserable.
Again, when he put the hockey players next to the press right, the most uh, the the most miserable people sometimes, you know, and one of them had a mask on right that took a screenshot, he had a mask on and he didn't want to look at them right, he was just these guys with gold medals, wonderful men, beautiful looking men, and this guy was like this, looking at his monitor.
Right this, that was it right, that was the.
That was teaching you what was the last four years and what we have ahead of us.
So that's uh, that was the best speech i've ever seen in.
Not the text itself, the whole show of it like uh, I think, in all fairness, the press is not supposed to react during the state of the union, so there's that.
State of the Union Drama00:05:11
But I mean, how do you not react to them?
I mean that's, I mean, if you have a mask on, is the perfect excuse not to do anything, right?
Oh yeah, here's the guy right.
Here's the picture.
See him on the bottom with the mask.
Oh yeah yeah, she looks like she's barfing.
And And for anyone who is an independent, who might have been flipping back and forth between the state of the union and the counterprogramming that the Democrats put on, I assume all of you have seen all the people in the frog suits.
It was a joke.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, it just looked like a clown show.
I couldn't even watch it.
I was just like, what the hell is that?
Like, I can't imagine anybody who's taking politics seriously would ask him people at a campus.
They're going to go to that and say, yeah, let's listen to this.
This must be good.
You know, yesterday they were asking people at a campus, students, what they thought about the state of the union the day before, which hadn't happened yet.
And they were already saying that it was horrible, that he was divisive.
The point is that the left is not watching this at all.
They're all going to be watching because I used to date somebody in the left and I didn't have even permission.
You dated the enemy.
You dated the enemy.
I dated the enemy and I was the enemy, you know, the enemy, right?
And I never got permission.
We never sat down like, oh, baby, let's watch Trump.
Never happened, right?
So the only information I got about Trump was through other sources and it was all lies, right?
So only until I started watching it myself, I was able to see.
So anybody's out there that cannot watch him live, I feel sorry for you, you know.
You know, Robbie, Robbie Starbuck talked about the frogs.
Someone else said this, Sergia.
Oh, nice.
From our locals.
Robbie Starbuck talked about the frogs and he was like, this reminds you of Batman, where like the evil Joker press or whatever had like different like crazy outfits, the Joker style.
And then there's the good guys and then there's the bad guys.
And it was funny because it does remind me of that.
And like, who would think like this?
These frogs are cool.
This is his rebuttal.
He's like, oh, look at me.
I'm tearing up one piece of big strong man.
Did not like it.
It's so stupid, Gavin.
That's not a Gavin.
No, it's Nate Bloon or Bluen for Utah.
My state of the union response, he tore up a piece of paper like nanshi.
Well, I found the Democrats response boring.
I mean, I have to say that.
I, you know, I don't know.
I know, Erica, I watched it for you.
Thank you.
It was not exciting at all.
I don't know, Owen, if you have comments.
Like, I know they talked about affordability.
I didn't watch the whole thing, but Marcela, did they like talk about how they would make things more affordable?
No, they just talked about what they hate about Trump.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like they ever have any ideas about here's what we're going to do that's better.
They never was Sergio showing us.
You're on mute.
I love that you're on mute so much.
You're on mute.
Did it.
I did it.
All right.
I did it.
So this man right here, right?
Look at this man.
So he can be like the Jim Caviso, you know, Superman.
He's the face of America now, right?
This is the guy that we want to, he can be president someday.
He stood up.
He was in crutches.
Didn't you make Joel president today, too?
Did I?
So, yeah, this guy, he stood up, you know, he was standing or sitting, right?
He was stood up looking at the eyes of the president.
Yeah.
And that was beautiful.
So how did it make you feel, right?
Oh, my God.
What a guy.
What a guy.
What a story.
I mean, all those people, I mean, all of those people like pulled at your heart or made you proud or you just felt like the red, white, and blue running through your veins, you know, and you're like, these are our people.
These are Americans.
This is, this is a little snapshot of America all here in this room.
And it was so, I mean, look, I put on my red, white, and blue.
You guys, I'm wearing red, white, and blue socks under my slippers.
I was like, yes.
I pulled out all these baseball hats that I have.
And I'm like, no, I have headphones on.
I can't do it.
But I mean, I just felt so much pride after that.
And I was like, oh my God, he's going to end this speech and it's going to start.
Young man.
I was like, if he plays a YMCA at the end, it's on.
So, you know, I guess the next one will maybe we'll have some music and pyrotechnics.
But I mean, all of it just felt so American.
And like, I don't even want to, you know, focus so much on the Democrats because they're just, like I said, like big sour pusses and it's just not fun.
And it's like, why can't we rally together and be like, yeah, F yeah, like this is America.
We are, we are exceptional.
And like, let's just throw it forward and keep going.
Special Guest Announcement00:06:36
But the drama kids, right, Dereka?
The drama kids.
Drama.
Al Green is a legend now, right?
He's going to try to go.
What is he going to do next year?
That's what I'm doing.
Pathetic.
I mean, he's just him and his cane and he's like, oh, you know, and it's like, okay, you're holding up.
You're, you're still mad about the fake hoax from like two weeks ago that everyone forgot.
And, you know, and I'm like, just don't even bother coming.
But I'm glad he left early because, you know, he's unsightly.
Oh, shout out to Fetterman in a suit.
Shaking hands with the president.
Right?
We love that.
That's good.
That's a that's a very important sign to see people dressing up for Trump, like Zelensky.
And they caught a few people sleeping.
A few of the Dems were asleep.
And is it true only a few of these Supreme Courts?
Yeah, only four.
Is that normal?
There is a few of them that don't go.
Like Alito is known never to go and he's Republican.
But Soda Mayor has always gone, Sonia Sora Mayor, and she wasn't there.
It was just Kagan, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett that were there.
And, you know, Kagan is a liberal judge, liberal justice.
So, I mean, she was still there.
The rest were not.
Five others were not.
The other one was probably in a theater play that night because she just wants to be a celebrity.
You know, they don't like being too public.
That's just their general demeanor.
And I think the cameras caught Chief Justice Roberts, like, I don't know if he was like paying attention or what, but they caught him like looking down or something.
You know, it is what it is.
But Trump still greeted them.
And then in his speech, he still went after them.
So he, you know, he is Trump after all.
He is Trump.
Yeah.
Owen.
Well, the story I read said he snubbed Barrett, that he didn't shake her hand or something.
So I didn't, I didn't watch that part of it before the speech started, but I did hear that he turned away from her or something and didn't greet her.
I noticed she worked on her expression this year because remember the last time everyone's like, did you see her face looking at him?
And she needs a little bit more work.
She looks a little bit like she hates his guts, but it was a little bit softer than the time before, in my opinion, allegedly.
I'm guessing he'd love to take that pick back and go with someone else.
Oh, yeah.
Go ahead, Marcella.
I don't know about that because she's favored him in the past.
You know, it's hit or miss.
You know, she's not a Thomas.
So Thomas wasn't there either.
They just, you know, they, they have their ways of looking at the law.
And, you know, Trump was asked if he would take her back.
And he didn't say he would.
He just said no comment or whatever.
But I really think he, she's favored him in the past on certain rulings.
So it's, it's a mixed bag because who would have appointed somebody just the same?
Right.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Cannon seems like a potential pick for the future.
Yeah.
We'll see.
That's the, that's the other thing is that that's coming up.
Some of them are getting older.
Um, Thomas himself is getting older.
So there'll probably be somebody.
I know.
I want to love him.
Nine Thomases.
But who else was there?
Mark, Marco Rubio was there sitting there.
And I think, I don't know if Sergio was saying this.
He was working.
Yeah, he was texting at one point and I took a screenshot of it.
And I sent it to you guys.
Like, look at him.
He's always working.
And like the camera panned out and Tron was speaking and he was on the phone.
So we had a group chat going last night and Owen was missing from it.
So we made him our designated survivor last night.
So the three of us were taking one for the team and then Owen would have come in and saved the day if something happened to us.
So he was ours.
But all right, you guys, well, I think this was a great show.
We have a few minutes, but we'll just end a little bit early so everyone can get on their way.
Tomorrow, we have a special guest.
We have Corey DeAngelis coming in.
And I'll post a bit about him after the show because I really want you guys to get familiar with who he is a little bit if you don't know already, because he is very pro-school choice, pro-student, pro-parent.
He's someone that is fighting the good fight to protect the future of our children.
And I think that we're really lucky that he agreed to come on and you're going to love him.
So look for a post.
I'll repost this show after and I'll put information about Corey in there so you could take a peek before you meet him tomorrow morning if you haven't met him yet.
And Owen Sergio and Marcella, I love you guys.
And we love all of the simultaneous sippers.
And I know a couple of people were coming back today for the first time.
And I want to say thank you for coming back.
And we miss Scott too.
And there would have been nothing better than to have Scott's take on the state of the union.
So I know it's not the same, but we're all here together.
And that's what's important right now.
And I wouldn't want to be anywhere else talking about this today than with every single person on here on all the platforms.
So thank you for being here with us.
And we'll be back tomorrow morning, bright and early with another cup of coffee.
And Brie, thanks for hosting us today.
And let's give a final sip to our beloved and super, super missed, Scott Adams.
Scott, I hope we're doing you proud.
And the chat, the sippers, the beloved, they're so smart.