Episode 333 Scott Adams: The Trump/Schumer/Pelosi Meeting, Cohen, and “Manhood

Hey, everybody. It's a very special evening edition of Coffee with Scott Adams featuring water. What's wrong with my label? Unlabeled water. It's the best. So there's so much news that I had to jump on right now. And if you're on here with me, I hope you have a beverage. Doesn't need to be coffee, could be water, could be beer, it could be wine. But join me for the simultaneous evening sip. Oh yeah, that's good. Good water. So you probably have all seen the clips now of the exciting meeting between President Trump and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer bickering about the wall. Now the funniest thing that came out of that meeting are the Roger Pence memes. If you're only following conservative social media, you may have missed it. But there's some pretty funny memes about Mike Pence because apparently he looked a little sleepy there. He wasn't quite engaged. So they're comparing him to the elf on the shelf and some other stuff. So check that out. So have you noticed that CNN, if you check out CNN, they've started to do this graphic image of 16 faces that are Trump related people who have had some kind of contact with Russians. And it fills the entire screen. It's like 16 people. And the funny thing is there's not one of those conversations that any of them had. This so far seems to mean anything. There's just a lot of people talk to Russians, it turns out. So who knew that if you're in the government, Russian Russians want to talk to you. But I, I'm pretty sure that all 16 of them are male, which is interesting because as I've been saying, the parties are starting to become to divide on gender lines. So it's probably no coincidence that they like to put up those 16 male faces. That probably plays pretty well. Now you may have heard that Nancy Pelosi, after the meeting about the wall, referred to Trump's desire for the wall as something about his, quote, manhood. She actually brought up unprompted Rush's need to compensate for the size of his penis by getting a wall. At least that's the way to interpret it. And I thought to myself, hmm, not really hiding the misendry at this point. I mean, it's just pure anti male stuff that couldn't possibly work if it had come in the other direction. So I started the 48 hour clock by Twitter and Nancy Pelosi has 48 hours just like everybody else. It's the same rule to either apologize for such a sexist comment or to clarify, in case we heard it wrong, maybe that's not what she meant, but I'm not expecting that to happen. But it's kind of shocking that the one thing that the Democrats like least about this president is the one thing they're willing to imitate. Why is it that the only thing they dislike about President Trump is the thing they're most eager to imitate? It's interesting. All right, so one of the big stories on CNN right now is that the timing of the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, being as it was very close to the election, is strong evidence that the president did it for election reasons. So real lawyers who get paid to be lawyers are going on CNN and saying the timing of it put pretty much tells you it was for election reasons because it was for right before the election. Does anybody see a problem with that? Does anybody see. Does anybody see a hole in that logic that you could drive a very large truck through? All right, so the defense has been from the beginning that it wasn't done just for reputation reasons. So in order for it to be done exclusively for election reasons, and that's the important part. If it was done partly for personal reasons, but it also had an election benefit, I think you're in the clear. Because if you get Botox and you're running for office, campaign doesn't pay for the Botox, but it looks like a campaign expense. Right. It's something that you wanted to do personally. Hey, I think I'd like to get rid of these wrinkles for my own reasons. But no one would doubt that looking better helps you win an election. So the standard here, is there something that is a reasonable story for why it was done for personal reasons? Now, the president's story was that it was for personal reasons, protect the family, et cetera, protect the reputation. The only problem with that, say the lawyers who were paid to be lawyers on cnn, well, they're paid to be lawyers, but now they're on cnn. They say the timing of it is the giveaway to which I say even I could be the lawyer to defend this case. And I don't know anything about the law. It goes like this. What is the time of all the campaign? What is the time that it is most likely going to happen, that somebody is going to dig up something from your past and publicize it? What is the most likely time that somebody would try to reveal this information? It's the same as the, quote, Pussygate revelation, right? The most likely time that Your opponents are going to try to bring up something like, this is the closer you get to the election. October. In fact, there is no smarter month to do this than October, because until you get there, it didn't even. It never really looked like Trump was going to win anyway. It wasn't until about October when it looked like he had a shot. That's the time you have the greatest reason to pay off people who might spill the beans. Now, here's the thing. You have two reasons to do it at that time. One is the opponents will say it's because of the election. The other time to do it is that that's when people are most incented, to embarrass you. So if your intention was to keep your family safe and keep the reputation safe, that's the time you're going to be worried the most about your personal life. So put me on that jury, and I don't think the President needs to worry. Yeah. Now, my understanding is that if it were a criminal situation, that somebody's gonna have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he didn't care about his family. How do you prove somebody didn't care about his family being hurt? I've never been to law school, but if you put me in a competition with somebody else whose case requires me to prove that my family man, defendant, that he doesn't care about his family, he only wants to get elected, he's not going to win that case, because everybody sitting in the jury box is going to say to themselves, well, if that were me, I wouldn't want to hurt my family. Of course he cares about protecting his family. Of course. Yeah. I've heard. I've heard Dershowitz say that it might fit the perfect definition of blackmail or extortion, but I don't think you even need that. All you need is that from an economic perspective and from every other perspective, it was most likely a problem the closer you got to the election. That's all it is. He had two good reasons, and one of them was personal. That's all you need. Now, I heard on CNN that Cohen may be willing to testify that the President did it for political reasons. But here's the thing. Cohen is going to jail for lying. He is literally a famous liar. You might have asked yourself, why isn't that? Trump surrounds himself with liars. And I'm thinking to myself, well, if they ever have a story to tell about you, nobody's going to believe it, so it has that benefit. I don't think that's why he does it. But, yeah, I understand Stormy Daniels has some legal bills to pay because of not prevailing in court, which is funny. So Stormy did not seem to come out ahead on all this. All right, Now let's talk about the negotiation for shutting down the government. This is one of the funniest things you're ever going to see. So the shut down the government thing is sort of a game of chicken. You're trying to see who blinks first. Now, President Trump has wisely, wisely said he set the table for it, and he said, these are my words. But this is essentially what the President is saying. If I get the money for the wall, I win. If I don't get the money for the wall, I close down the government over the wall and I win. He only has two ways to win and no way to lose. Schumer can only lose. He doesn't really have. Schumer doesn't have a winning path. If he gives Trump the money, well, that doesn't look like a win on his side. But if he closes down the government, then he's the guy who's closing the government and punishing Americans to protect illegals coming into the country. It's not really a strong position to have. And so the smartest thing that Trump did is take away from them and take away from the news cycle the idea that closing the government would ever look bad for Trump. In fact, he said he wants to brand it the Trump shutdown. It's like, yeah, this one's mine, the last one was yours, but this one's mine. I will close the government over border security and the wall in particular. And I'm thinking that's probably the safest position anybody ever took in public. He has two ways to win, no way to lose. Now, the other thing that Trump has going for him is that his reputation, and indeed the reason his base voted for him, is that he's willing to go farther and he's going to be more of a badass, take more pain if necessary, to get where he needs to get. The Democrats brand is if you're negotiating, let's say, with China over trade, you don't want them to get mad, so you should surrender. The Democrats position on trade negotiations with Canada, if I recall, were you don't want them to get mad at you, so you should surrender. I believe the Democrats position on trade negotiations with Mexico were we don't want to get them mad, so we should surrender. I believe the negotiations with South Korea and Japan, the Democrats position was trade wars are bad. We don't want to get them mad, we'd better surrender. Now they come into this negotiation with the President of the United States, how can they be consistent with their philosophy? The surrendering so you don't make the other side mad is always the best way to go. I think they're going to have to surrender to keep Trump from getting mad because he might close down the government and of course he will. Now, if they're smart, they'll get some kind of an agreement that says something along the lines of, it's not all wall. The Democrats need something that looks like a win, or they can spin it as a win even if it isn't. So both sides need something like a win. And my guess is that the win will look like, yeah, maybe they'll throw in some daca. It's possible. But I think they're just going to say, we didn't fund the wall. And then the President will say, we did fund the wall. I think that's the. Because there's nothing to stop them from having a completely 180 degree difference in interpretation of what just happened. It would be exactly like every other news story. Every news story we watch people walk away thinking an entirely different thing happened than the other side thinks. Why should this be different? All they have to do is Trump say he got money for the wall, Schumer say we gave money for border security, and we don't think it all needs to be a wall. Now. I don't see any way the Democrats can win this. It just doesn't look winnable on their end. There's going to be something like walls getting built. And, you know, although Trump gets a lot of pressure for not delivering on the wall, so his base, and I think Ann Coulter leads the pack of people who criticize him every day for not having the wall built. But it's hard to watch him operate in this context and, and not think that at the very least he's putting it all out there. He has not delivered the wall for those who want it, but it does look like he's putting it all out there. He's not really. It looks like he's leaving it all on the field. And the hilarious meeting today with Schumer and Pelosi was sort of classic Trump. And one of the things that he likes to do is bring the battle to his home field. And you notice that if he's debating you in public with the cameras on, that's his home field. And you can see Pelosi quickly realizing that she had to shut this down because this wasn't working for them. Hey, maybe we should negotiate in private. Yeah, private, let's negotiate in private. To which I say, who wins? If one of you says, I can't talk about this in front of the voters, who wins that round? If one of them says, how about more transparency? Let's do it right here while the cameras are running, and it's a simple enough topic that you actually could do it right there. There's not a lot of fact checking you need to do. And one of them says, no, we shouldn't do this in front of the voters who are paying us. Now, as I said before, there are lots of good reasons to not negotiate in public. That's not surprising. But this probably isn't one of them, because the public fully understands this topic. And I believe Pelosi is the one who said, let's not connect it to anything. If they had connected it to anything, such as daca, even I would have said, hey, maybe, you know, maybe you shouldn't do this in public because you need to do a little trading under the hood. You know, I'll give you a little bit of daca, you give me a little bit of wall. But because Pelosi said, we're not going to connect the wall to anything, the wall has to stand on its own. That's what made it simple enough that you ought to do it in public. If you're really just going to talk about the wall, what is it that we voters can't hear? I can't think of anything. If you throw DACA in there, then you have to do it behind closed doors. But that's not what's on the table right now. I'm seeing some of the social media comments like Rob Reiner saying that it looked to him as if Schumer and Pelosi just ate Trump's lunch. They ate his lunch. They ripped him apart in that meeting. Now, I'm willing to bet that most of you watching this periscope had exactly. Had exactly the same kind of impression I did, which was nothing really happened. But in terms of positioning, the president absolutely won. There was no real negotiating happening. So what the president won was that he branded the shutdown as good for him and his brand. That's pretty good setup for what's to come. He also got Pelosi to go full sexist and question his manhood associated with the wall. That, too, is a victory for Trump because he caused her to get down in the mud and really overshoot the mark. And then he offered to do it in public. He offered to do it right in front of the voters, right there. And she said, no, we can't do this in front of the people who are our bosses, the people who pay us and elect us. We can't do it in front of them. Who wins that round? Trump. So to me, it looked like from a negotiating standpoint, Trump had two and a half, at least major victories that came out of that and she had none that I could see. But to Rob Reiner, that looks like victory. Somebody said they thought it was also about putting the GOP on unnoticed to vote for the wall. Well, I think that's, I think everybody's following the issue. So nobody really had to be unnoticed, did they? Yeah. The news today was that the Google CEO said that Russia paid a total of $4,700 to Google to influence the elections. And I keep saying this, I keep saying this, but if you're going to compare explanations for what was happening during the election with Russia and interfering, the thought that Putin and the KGB were behind it and there was a high level national effort to destroy our election, that doesn't really match what happened. Because what happened was it was not even a half assed effort. It was about a 1,256ass method. Half assed would be way better than what they did. I don't believe anybody who actually looked at the memes that Facebook passed around, or at least they had on the platform. If anybody looked at those memes, I don't know how they could conclude that Russia, the state and the KGB had a brilliant plan to disrupt our election based on that. It Scott, this is so beneath you. We'll get rid of you so whoever thought it was beneath me doesn't have to watch me now. You're a smart man that can be so dumb you don't have to watch it. Blocked. And by the way, you've watched me long enough. You know that I don't mind if somebody has a reason to push back. It's just the people who come on here and say, Scott, you're so dumb, but I don't have reasons. I don't like what you said. It does not agree with what I said I've said before, but I don't know exactly what's wrong with it, but you sure are dumb. Blocked block. Now here's an example of how I don't mind a reasonable pushback happened today. So I had made the point in an earlier periscope that the skeptics of climate change always leave out the fact that the problem is the rate of warming, not the fact that the world always changes temperature. So I made a big deal about how if you're ignoring the real argument that the rate of change is what's changing, not that it's just getting warmer, you know, none of that. And then of course one person said, but Scott, you're lying because, you know, why are you leaving out the fact that the temperature hasn't actually gone up? To which I say, I'm not sure you want to die on that hill, because it does seem that the, the number of new high temperatures is breaking records every year. So it does feel like the temperature is going up at a high rate. But so here's my point. Somebody on Twitter, I forget who, pushed back and said something very reasonable that actually does counter my point to some extent. And they said you can't really tell how fast or at what rate things warmed in the past. You can't tell. You can measure the things were relatively warmer or whatever, but since you're looking at these eons, apparently it's not easy to tell how quickly anything went up in the past. So if you're saying the way things are going up now is at a high rate, but. And then if you finish that and say we've never seen high rates of increase before, we don't actually know that. Apparently there's something about the way we collect the information that's a little more, let's say it's a grosser picture. You can't see the details of something going up in a hundred year period, something like that. Yeah, the granularity isn't there. So I said, that's actually a good sounding point that I can't verify one way or the other. But I asked for a link and I'm perfectly open to looking at that argument because it sounds reasonable. Sounds like a reasonable argument. I just don't know if it's true or false. All right, is there anything else we need to talk about? I don't want to use up all my A material before the morning because, you know, we have to have coffee in the morning. I'll probably have to repeat some of this tomorrow. All right, Anything else? Oh, Google. Yeah. So I only watched a bit of the interrogation of the Google CEO today, but it didn't look like he was doing well. And it's not because he's not good at what he does. He does seem, he seems like really smart. He seems like he's really capable. But the questions were just so damning that it looked to me, like he was getting slaughtered. But I don't think it matters because I don't think that the news carried much of it. And if you see any of it out of contacts, you'll see a little clip here or there. It's not going to probably make that much difference to Google. Something tells me that although they did not really have all the right answers, that probably nothing's going to change. So those of you who never get to see me live, this is for you. Yeah. The $4,700 that Russia spent on Google to influence the election was hilarious. I think all they spent on Facebook was like a few tens of thousands, something like that. And now compare the official story. Again, compare the official story with the alternate explanation of the Russian hacking thing. Did the troll farm do this bad a job working for the kgb, which feels a little unusual, or were they a commercial enterprise, which is what they presented themselves to be, where people can go there and hire them? Well, we know that's true. They were a commercial enterprise where people can go hire them. Now, given that they did some. Some memes that were anti Hillary, but far more memes that were. Yeah, they did some anti Hillary stuff, but also some pro Hillary stuff. There was far more anti Hillary than pro. What is the best explanation of the facts in evidence? Is the best explanation that this troll farm is so bad at their job that they accidentally made anti Hillary memes and they were working for the KGB in this top priority Putin authorized scheme? Maybe. I mean, I've heard of bad employees, I write about them every day. But it doesn't seem likely that you. That somebody could say, hey, your job is to make pro Trump memes. And then one of the people hears it wrong and he goes and makes and actually publishes a bunch of anti Hillary memes. Is that really what happened? Or was it a troll farm that will take anybody's money and somebody bought some anti Hillary memes and somebody bought some anti Trump means, which is more likely given that they were a commercial enterprise that sells their time to whoever pays them money. All right. Oh, yes, the Monopoly man was hilarious. That's one of the best political pranks, if you could call it that. All right. China lowering tariffs on U.S. automakers. Well, allegedly, everything about China is a wait and see. I don't believe that. I don't believe that they're going to do most of what they say just in general. So I'm not going to believe anything about fentanyl from China until I hear that their top dealer has been executed short of that, I'm kind of not going to believe anything they say because they know who's doing it. They know his name, they know where he lives, he's very well known. And if he's still alive in six months, we can say for sure that China never meant to crack down on fentanyl. Yeah, Canadian executive was arrested in China. So China's putting the, putting the pressure on Canada. And here's a question that I have for you. If China holds this Canadian guy and you hear that the charges against the Canadian they're holding are obviously just, you know, baloney and they just grabbed him to use as pressure against the person that Canada grabbed, the cfo. Would you ever travel to China again if China grabbed a Canadian just to hold him as a hostage to get somebody back who had committed a pretty serious crime? I would sure never go to China. Not for business, not for anything. I definitely would not go to China. Now the other day I made the accident of buying something that was made in China and it angered me because, you know, I, I'm not very pro China at the moment. My son in law died from an overdose and fentanyl, China is the primary, primary pusher of fentanyl. So I thought to myself, why isn't it more obvious when things are made in China? I would definitely alter my behavior to buy fewer Chinese goods if it were more obvious to me when I shop. Maybe we should have a law that if you're buying on Amazon, just to pick one example, that it has to say prominently whether it's made in any way made in China. Now I think you'd have to distinguish between American companies that are using Chinese manufacturing versus being an actual Chinese product. So maybe that matters. You know, it's surprising enough that there's a law that this says where it's made, but why can't it be more prominent? Why can't I know what is made in China so I can avoid it? That's just information. It's not a government anything. Because I'm pretty sure that American consumers can get China to give us a good trade deal. Because if I'm not happy, I'm going to be looking at labels pretty pretty extensively. So my personal thing is that I wouldn't deal with China under the current conditions. So it's not a, you know, I hate to call it a boycott, it's just that China is an enemy of the country at this point and it wouldn't make sense to give money to your enemy. It doesn't make sense. All right, Yeah. So in most cases, if you're buying stuff in the store, it's easy to read the label. What I'm suggesting is that if you're buying stuff online, they could put that right in front of you and make you actually make a decision about whether you want to buy Chinese or not. I want it to be a decision. There should be a pop up that just says you're buying from China. Did you really mean to do that? That's legal. You can have a law that says that. Just make sure that Americans know they're giving their money to China. All right. I think that's all we need for now. Some of you need to go to bed. I see. And to you, I say good night, and I'll probably see you in the morning. Bye for now.