Episode 538 Scott Adams: President Trump Walking out of Chuck/Nancy Meeting

Rough Transcript

So this will be just a short Periscope on one topic. I'll tell you - historians are some day someday going to give President Trump more respect than they, than people give him now, and this is one of those situations I could not love more.

The fact that Trump walked out of the infrastructure meeting with Chuck and Nancy - if you haven't seen the news - there was a follow up infrastructure meeting in which Schumer and Pelosi and Trump were going to meet and talk about how to pay for things that largely people on both sides want to do in regards to infrastructure. But the President showed up, made it a 3-minute meeting in which he said that you can't have two tracks - you can't have a permanent investigation track at the same time you're doing real work, and so he excused himself to go do real work.

He didn't say it that way but that's kind of what happened.

Now here's everything I love about this. Let us start on the factual level first, which doesn't matter to anything. Yeah, if I've taught you nothing - the facts don't really matter. The reason, the rationale - the thought we can talk about those but then I'm going to dismiss them.

So let me say right up front - OF COURSE the government can have two tracks at the same time.

That's what a government does - it has lots of things that it does at the same time. Of course, Trump could - if you wanted to - do infrastructure at the same time that there are investigations, so on a logical factual rational what the president did makes no sense.

I would not be the one to defend it, but this is what makes him special.

He KNOWS that it doesn't matter - I mean, he knows that the rational factual part is just not the important part.

The rational factual part is that he saw an opening and he took it, and the opening was this, I think.

He was probably waiting for this - I'm not going to read his mind - but I think you know at least one possibility is that he was looking for an opening to do something.

I like what he did - and what he did is, he framed the Democrats in a new way.

The old framing had been the witch hunt. So the witch hunt framing says that you're a victim and people are coming after you so that's that's what the President has been under for the last three years now.

A witch hunt is actually an improvement over what the public was thinking - at least a lot of the public - is that he was guilty of colluding with Russia. So when the President reframed colluding with Russia to a witch hunt, that was an upgrade. A witch hunt.

It's better to be the victim of a witch hunt - assuming that you get - you know, you don't actually get burned at the stake .

It's better to be chased on false charges - way better than it is to actually have committed treason, so he reframed it to the best he could do, which was to call it a witch hunt.

And now he just took it to another level, because the witch hunt thing - even though it was better than the alternative still frames him as a victim.

This is not really the president who likes being framed as a victim - it doesn't really work with his brand. He likes to be on offense, and so he saw the opening and he took it and he has just reframed the Democrats, thanks to the fact that the Mueller report is out and there's enough out they can tell the story that the investigation has been done and anything else you do is just incompetent.

So he's reframed it from: "Hey! - you may or may not be guilty of treason against your country" up to: "Well, this is a witch-hunt!", and he sold it.

Most of the country sees now - certainly not the hardcore left, but most of the country - sees that it was closer to a witch hunt than anything else, and now he's taking it to the next level because he had this opportunity and he's reframed at another time and the new reframe is that they're completely incompetent and they can't even work on the business of the government and he's not even going to be in a room with people this useless.

Now, remember - on the logic, the facts, the reason level - none of this makes sense, of course. He could be in the baby - of course, he could sit at the table, of course, he could make infrastructure decisions. But, man - was this a good time not to do it - wow, it was so good!

Now, he uses this imagery of the two tracks - which is another Trump signature move - it's visual - you literally see two tracks. He goes - "You can't be on two tracks at the same time", and you say to yourself, "Well, yeah - if I were trying to be on two tracks at the same time I'm only one person - how can one person be in two places?"

Makes no sense at all, but it's still persuasive. This is a persuasion trick - reasons that don't have real reasons are actually very persuasive. It's the thinking behind what I call "the fake because".

If you say you should do X, "because" - you don't even have to have a good reason after "because" - simply framing it in the form of a question makes people think that the "because" means something - so the fact that Trump says "You can't be on two tracks at the same time", and your mind goes to a physical place where you actually couldn't put your body in two places at one time.

You say: "Oh, yeah - I guess you can't really be in two tracks at the same time".

Completely ridiculous imagery because being in a meeting talking about infrastructure is not a track.

You can certainly have a meeting, but you still uncritically process it like "It's impossible! I can't be in two places at one time", so persuasion wise, it's really strong, and Pelosi and Schumer were caught off balance, and they were left hanging AGAIN. It's like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football - I mean Trump basically rebranded Schumer and Pelosi as Charlie Brown trying to kick the football.

And Trump is like: "Hey, hey, Nancy! Hey, Chuck! You want to kick the football? This time I'm gonna keep it here! No, no - I'm not moving it - no, we got a meeting. We all agree on infrastructure - who would disagree on infrastructure? Come on, kick my football! Here you come - here - yep, whoops!"

Okay, you know that Trump is always playing on several levels at the same time. One of the levels he plays on is that he is literally and consciously - and this part I know for sure - is entertaining his base.

He is literally entertaining us! Were you more amused by anything that happened today than the first time you heard that Trump once again walked out of the meeting with Chuck and Nancy? Was there anything that made you happier today?

Nothing, if you're a Trump supporter. If you're a Trump supporter, nothing made you happier today than knowing he did that. That was for us, right?

Though that was like he pays us back - you know, when people support him, he pays you back. You know it's a very, very conscious decision to give you back a little entertainment but it was more than that it was functional it reframed Chuck and Nancy, and here's the best part.

They didn't have time to prepare their responses, so if you saw their responses individually - Pelosi and Schumer - their responses were so bad.

So Pelosi tried to turn this, and she tried to go back to one of the old - the old attacks, so she described it as "bizarre". It was just, it was just "bizarre", so "bizarre".

So she was trying to sell it as "Trump is unstable, crazy, unpredictable", whatever.

So she was trying to go back to an old "there's something wrong with his personality" thing, but I don't think anybody sees it that way.

Because for me, walking into a meeting saying: "I can't work with clowns like you", and walking out is sort of the opposite of being crazy. It's sort of - sort of, perfect.

So Pelosi just failed hard because she just didn't have anything except it was "bizarre", "It was weird, I didn't know what to do".

Yeah, it's the first time anybody walked out of a meeting. Never saw that before in the history of humanity.

Schumer was even funnier because he tried to sell it as part of a clever plot by the President to avoid saying where he would find the money for the thing he wants to do.

Do you think this president can find money for something he wants to do? You know maybe they have a disagreement about where to find the money but both sides want infrastructure and they know it costs money.

That was the weakest defense by Schumer to say - "Um, I think he's just trying to distract, yeah, that's it!"

Yeah, yeah - I'm going with this! "He's trying to distract from the fact that nobody has figured out where to get the money and he didn't want to say where to get the money!" Credibility level - ZERO.

Trump just slapped them down so hard, and I have to say - persuasion aside, just as a citizen - I so support this.

I so support the President walking out of that meeting and telling them that he's just not going to deal with them, when their primary job is to destroy the government.

And we have a country that's running pretty darn well right now, and they're trying to stop whatever good is happening with their small machinations.

Now the other thing that's sort of new-ish is that there's definitely some kind of investigation fatigue, and I'm pretty sure that even the Democrats are getting exhausted looking for things and waiting for things and praying for things and imagining for things, and not getting any things.

So I think the country doesn't care enough - doesn't pay attention to the "small ball".

You know, "the lawyer said something to a lawyer that might not have been true".

It's like the same story over and over again - you just change the name of the lawyers. "Let's change the name of this lawyer and just rerun the story! It's the same story - we just changed the names of the lawyers!".

So he knows that the country is exhausted - and by the way, one of the reasons that this President understands that the mood of the country so well is EXACTLY the thing that he's criticized for the most.

Which is watching a lot of CNN and Fox News on television.

If you are trying to understand the mood of the country, reading a deep investigative report in The New York Times won't do it. It'll just tell you what one reporter and some editors thought about a topic, that's it.

But if you want to understand the mood in the country - if you want to know how people feel - why you're skipping back and forth between CNN and and Fox News will really give that to you pretty quickly and I think this president is brilliant for knowing that that's the lever that moves the world. It's the thing that touches our emotions the most.

You know, if you can understand those two views in the world - and you have to see both, you know - no fair just watching CNN or just the Fox News. You have to watch both, or you don't get the mood to the country.

I think he has properly deduced the following about the mood of the country:
Number one - everyone agrees we need more infrastructure improvements
Number two - nobody's quite sure what these infrastructural improvements would be, or exactly how they would affect their lives personally.

It's sort of a big vague thing that you know is important, but you can't put a picture on it. There's not a person or a face involved with it - it's just this big concept.

It was the PERFECT meeting to walk out of. If he had walked out of a meeting about - you know - "how do we negotiate with North Korea?", that would look like the end of the world.

If he'd walked out of a an ordinary budget meeting - you'd say, well, who's running the country? Somedy's got to come up with a budget.

If you'd walked out of most other kinds of meetings, people would said - Trump, you know - do your job, get back in the meeting, yeah, your job is to be in that room and go back in that room!

But because it's infrastructure, which people know is important - but not exactly how. I don't know - we'll go away - I don't know, am I going to get faster internet?

Something like that. Well, what's gonna happen with this infrastructure? I have a better bridge, but I haven't seen one fall down in my lifetime - at least not personally. I know they fall down.

So he picked the exact right spot to humiliate and rebrand the Democrats as the worthless party that is so worthless you can't even sit in the room with them.

You can't even sit in a room with them because they're so worthless. They're so busy trying to destroy the government that they can't even do their job.

Now, again - none of that is true - none of that is rational, none of that is reasonable - anything I just said about, you know, the functioning of the government or people doing their jobs, people can do all this stuff at the same time.

We do it all the time - we can walk and chew gum, as they say - but in terms of how this feels, how that looks, it looks like the president just reframed from "witch-hunt" up to "so worthless they can't even sit in a room, you know, without messing it up with investigations".

So I love everything that the President did - I'm a hundred percent supportive.

And by the way - I'm pretty sure I would say this:

If the parties were reversed - I know that's not true of most people - but in my case I would definitely say, if the situation were reversed, that was, have fewer investigations.

In fact, when Bill Clinton was being investigated for all of his many many issues, I also decided to help out less than that because we don't care about his sex life.

So I've been consistent on this, and I think most of the country would like a lot fewer lawyers in the news, and a lot more, you know, progress in the news.

All right - that's the only thing that I wanted to say.

That he [President Trump] made a brilliant reframing, and I think history will record that nobody ever did this sort of thing better, and it's very impressive.

So I just wanted to share that with you and I will talk to you later.

“they’re completely incompetent and they can’t even work on the business of the government and he’s not even going to be in a room with people this useless.”

HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA...HA

Thanks for posting the transcript. SO ENTERTAINING. Very persuasive analysis.

Bkmk

The Demonicrats, including Pelousy and Schmucky, are at hull-crushing depths below totally “useless.”

Two Trillion Dollars has got to include a LOT of walking-around money for the D’rats. Maybe this delay is a tactic to deprive the D’rats of said money they’d otherwise use to grease palms, buy votes, and print extra ballots (to be filled in and harvested as needed).

Scattered on the sea floor like the Thresher...

"Scattered on the sea floor like the Thresher..."

Or, as a more accurate analogy for Demonicrats, scattered on the sea floor like whale crap.

I think that he may be overthinking this. My take is that Trump just didn’t want to deal with people who were smearing him on one hand and wanting to make deals with the other. I think he was just too disgusted to be in the same room with them.

I think that he may be overthinking this. My take is that Trump just didn’t want to deal with people who were smearing him on one hand and wanting to make deals with the other. I think he was just too disgusted to be in the same room with them.

Exactly why meet with people who just dumped on you

NO meetings

Nanzi Piglosi and ChuckUtheSchmuck are outmatched by Trump and they know it. That’s why they are both cracking up. Piglosi’s press conference last night and today were epic displays of a blubbering, stuttering moron who belongs in the geriatric looney bin. She can take TheSchmuck with her and have him measured for a rubber straight jacket so he doesn’t hurt himself.

Never misunderestimate President Trump by trying to simplify him...about everything he does (or doesn’t do) has a purpose and he leverages what the Dems provide for him to keep showing them for what they are.