Episode 48 - Trump’s Brand Helps Him in an Unexpected Way
Date: 2018-06-17 | Duration: 40:50
Topics
President Trump isn’t judgmental about people He can deal with dangerous people like Kim Jong-Un Dennis Rodman is a friend of President Trump Scott hanging with the “bad behavior” crowd as a kid You can like them without necessarily agreeing with them Claiming the right to associate with whomever you want
Transcript
[0:08] Everybody come on in here, gather round, find a seat. Make sure you’ve got a piping hot mug, cup, or a vessel full of coffee. Could be a different beverage; I won’t judge you. And here it comes: the simultaneous sip.
So, this morning I want to talk to you about the power of brand. Now, it’s sort of obvious that having a good brand helps you in a variety of ways, but I want to talk about one particular way. Imagine, if you will, that just hypothetically President Trump threw a party and he invited everybody he hangs around with and would call a friend, or knows real well and is chummy with. So, it’s just everybody he considers a friend, and he throws a gigantic party.
[1:11] First of all, it would be a really big party. I’m kind of amazed how he can even remember all the people he’s met. His life is sort of like meeting a bunch of people every single day; I don’t know how he keeps it all straight. But I believe if you were to look, let’s say from a hobby drone just above the party—this hypothetical Trump party—it would kind of look like a pirate ship had collided with a billionaire’s cotillion. Meaning that a lot of people there would be billionaires and beautiful people and the intelligentsia and the people with old money and everything else, but a lot of the people there would be Don King, Roger Stone—sort of a rogue’s gallery of people that you don’t know if they’ve done anything wrong, but you suspect maybe they did.
[2:15] And you see that Trump seems to be willing to be friends with absolutely anybody, whether they’re good, whether they’ve committed crimes, whether they have a terrible reputation. Doesn’t matter their race, their ethnicity, their gender. If you would look at the people he calls his friends, it would look like just the weirdest collection from the dangerous, crazy rebels and pirates to all the good people.
Now, what does that buy you? So that’s his brand. His brand is, “I could talk to anybody.” So when Kim Jong-un is looking at President Trump and trying to figure him out, and he’s trying to say to himself, “Okay, this is somebody I can deal with,” the answer is yes.
[3:22] It’s not an accident that Dennis Rodman was friends with Trump and Kim Jong-un. If Kim had his operatives trying to figure out—tell me more about Trump so I know what I’m dealing with here—one of the things that he surely learned is that Trump doesn’t seem to be judgmental about people. I know it’s weird because you say to yourself, “Well, now wait a minute, that’s crazy. Everything he says is judgmental. He’s like the most judgmental person ever.” But if you think about it, he tends not to be judgmental about bad behavior. He has shown a capability, at least if it’s not directed to him, he’s shown a capability to deal with dangerous people all over the place, and he seems to do it easily.
[4:23] Now, I’m taking this brand idea and moving it over to Kanye. So Kanye was sort of stuck in a channel. He was an African American—well, he is an African American rapper, musician, superstar—and he wasn’t really allowed to deal with other people. It’s like he would be deeply judged if he put on a red hat and talked to President Trump and retweeted me. It’s like, “How? You can’t associate with the people on the other side.”
But Kanye is saying, “Hey, my brand is I’m gonna love everybody, gonna talk to everybody, gonna listen to everybody.” That has nothing to do with agreeing with them. That’s just a whole different category. I can love them, hang out with them; I don’t have to agree with them. And I believe that’s sort of a superpower for your brand if you can get away with it.
[5:27] You may have noticed that I have for a long time been trying to create the same brand power. Some of you watched the saga when I was invited recently to be on InfoWars and I tweeted that I was going to be on there. And of course, all the people who think that InfoWars is a blight on the world came to me and said, “Oh, you can’t talk to them! You’re gonna ruin your brand, Scott! Don’t do it, don’t talk to them!”
And of course, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, now I’m definitely going to talk to them.” Because the moment you tell me who I can’t talk to, who I can’t like—okay, I love who I can’t spend time with—we’re parting company. Because that’s one of my most fundamental rights that I exercise as much as possible to make sure it doesn’t atrophy: the right of free association.
[6:28] And this started earlier with me. It started when I was maybe 12 or 13 and my friends—the people I hung around with—were all the “bad kids.” Now I say bad kids without judging. the ones who were in trouble with the law, the people who broke every rule. They were doing drugs, they were drinking, they were having sex when they were too young. They were doing everything the kids are not supposed to do, and those are the people I ran with.
I remember there was a teacher who pulled me aside and said—I’m paraphrasing—but he said, “I’ve got some life advice. You really need to stop hanging around with the bad kids.” Because even at that age—I don’t know how to tell the story without sounding like a jerk, but you need to know this fact—even at that age I had been identified as probably going to be a valedictorian someday.
[7:29] I was probably gonna get a college scholarship, which nobody from my school had ever done before. My entire school had never produced anybody who ever got a scholarship to college—the one exception was a sports scholarship. But even at that age, my school was already thinking we might have the first person who would ever go to college and get a scholarship. In fact, I was, according to my school.
But people were worried because I wasn’t spending time with the “good people.” I spent all my time with the criminal types, the kids who were in trouble all the time, the kids who didn’t get good grades. And it was always for the same reason. The reason I hung out with the interesting crowd is because they were interesting. I didn’t do any of those things.
[8:29] All of that bad behavior, I wasn’t really part of that. When they would go off to do the bad stuff, I’d be like, “Okay, I’ll go ride my bike.” So I was not inclined to participate in all of the things that they were doing, but I just liked them better. They were more fun, more interesting, they had a higher risk profile. Everything about them was just a little bit more fun, and they were taking the risk, not me.
So I’ve kind of taken that to my adult life. You remember when I first started writing about Trump, I tried to make sure that people understood that I’m closer to the left of Bernie than I am closer to being to the right of Trump. That too allowed me a bigger field of operation because I was making sure people could not pigeonhole me and then say, “Hey, don’t get out of your box.” Likewise, if I’m talking to Black Lives Matter or anybody else, it doesn’t matter.
[9:31] I reserve the absolute unfettered right to associate with anybody I want and to like them even if they’ve done bad things. I just claim that right for myself; nobody can take that from me. Now, I would also say that although I’m sort of wired that way—it’s just sort of a personal preference, so it makes it easy—it’s also a superpower. It’s a superpower to not judge people for the mistakes they’ve made or the decisions they made that are not the same ones that you would.
Now, I don’t know—this is a mystery about myself—I am insanely non-judgmental about other people, and I don’t really know if I was just born that way or if it’s something I reasoned my way into over my life. I don’t know exactly how it came about, but it’s like a superpower.
[10:35] It allows people to trust me in ways that other people wouldn’t be trusted, and their trust is well-placed because I’m not judging them. So if you look at some of the top persuaders, you’ll see this happen fairly consistently.
Let me put a button on my point about President Trump and Kim Jong-un. One of the biggest problems in getting a good solution in North Korea is that we have this American history of not being so good to people who surrendered. Gadhafi is always the example we give; it’s like, “Well, he gave up his nukes and look what happened to him.” But President Trump was not the President then, and that creates a different set of circumstances. Do you remember when the criticism was fairly intense that President Trump had said some positive things about Philippines President Duterte?
[11:36] Now, I believe that Duterte is an accused serial murderer. Even the words sound funny when they come out of my mouth. No, I take it back—he’s not an accused serial murderer, he’s a confessed serial murderer. So he’s a guy who confesses to murdering people personally and professionally. Now, of course, they’re drug dealers, and I expect that a lot of the country is on his side or he wouldn’t be where he is.
But the President, instead of saying, “This is a terrible guy,” and all the things that your moral code tells you you should be saying, he just says, “I could work with that guy. He’s doing a good job over there.” Now, what does that do?
[12:38] That approach to him, that approach to Putin—what does that do when Kim Jong-un is looking at his off-ramp? He’s like, “How do I get out of this mess? I’m in a jam. How do I get out?” And he sees that President Trump is completely okay with people who have horribly questionable backgrounds. He’s thinking to himself, I imagine—I can’t know what Kim Jong-un is thinking, can’t read his mind—but one person in that situation is gonna look and say, “All right, what else has Trump got? What is the Trump background and philosophy here?” And I think it wouldn’t take long for them to figure out that they can work with him.
So here is a President that is probably the one person that a dictator who’s in a bind and looking for an off-ramp thinks, “I think I can work with this guy.”
[13:38] “He’s not going to be judging me. He’s just gonna figure out some practical thing that’s good for his country, and he just doesn’t give a rat’s ass what I have or have not done in the past.”
So I think that’s a superpower that Trump has. I think it’s a superpower that Kanye is trying to develop, and you can see the pushback. It’s hard to get there. You’ve seen the pushback with me; you’ve seen me get just disemboweled by people who think I shouldn’t be talking or even liking or appreciating anything about other people. And I said this before: when Alex Jones invites me on InfoWars, Alex Jones is really nice to me—respectful, nice, generous. Every part of my interaction with him is great.
[14:40] He’s a great guy. Now, if you want to judge him about anything else he’s done, have at it. I’m not even gonna judge you for judging. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong; I’m not gonna judge it at all. These are opinions about other people who have made other choices, and you’re welcome to them. But my interaction was all good, and I’m going to accept and appreciate the parts that are good. And if there’s something that I don’t like, I’m not shy about saying that either.
I’m watching—slight change of topic—many of you saw my list. I tweeted it around and blogged about it. It was the many different reasons that President Trump is deserving of credit for progress in North Korea. We don’t know how it turns out, but so far progress looks good. And are you watching any of the reactions to that list?
[15:41] I gotta say, it’s a pretty persuasive list. It would be hard to read my list of the reasons that he deserves credit and come away thinking he doesn’t deserve any credit. And yet, that’s what’s happening. The criticisms are hilarious because, obviously, what’s happening is it triggers cognitive dissonance at the highest level. The thought that this President, that they had such a low opinion of, could solve the unsolvable is just sort of a mind-breaking experience. So people are having a legitimate mental problem because the reality is not conforming to anything they think is possible. When they look at my list, it is persuasive.
[16:43] They have to explain it away. Their brain has to guard: “I’ve got to find a reason that this is not persuasive.” So here are some of the funny pushbacks I got. My favorite one was somebody challenged me in the comments on Twitter to say, “Oh yeah? Name one of those things on that list that deserves a Nobel Prize.”
That’s not how it works. That’s like saying, “Name one part of my car that you can drive. Can you drive a tire? Can you drive a hubcap?” Wait a minute, I’m doing this all wrong. You know who’s coming. “Oh yeah? Which part of the car allows you to drive it? Is it the glove box? Is it the turn signals?”
[17:44] Try driving a car with just turn signals and nothing else. That won’t work. So the idea that you could look at any one of the many things he did and say that’s the part that gets him the Nobel Prize—I don’t think it works that way. It’s kind of all the things you do or nothing; it’s the package.
The other funny pushback is—and it goes like this: “Dale, can you tell us the other funny pushback? Tell us one thing on that list that any President wouldn’t do. Name one thing that any other President wouldn’t do.” Well, Dale, here’s one thing that no other President would do: solve the problem.
[18:46] How do you argue with the fact that the things he’s doing are getting to a good result? Now, you can argue whether, if you take some variables out, you would have gotten the same result. I would consider that somewhat silly. After 70 years of doing the same stuff and getting no success whatsoever, the very few months that President Trump is operating differently is when all the success happens. Could be a coincidence—I’m not the guy who’s gonna say coincidences don’t happen—but that would be a really big coincidence.
In particular, the things that are on the list that are not normal for other Presidents: the war on companies instead of countries. He went after individual companies; that was strong.
[19:47] He put more pressure on than anybody’s ever put. He used more verbal pressure, and he also opened up the possibility of being friends. So there’s just a lot going on with his relationships with the other leaders and everything else. It’s a pretty strong package. If you see my list, you’ll see that it’s a strong package.
“All right, oh yeah? How can you trust a liar?” Now, I don’t know if you’re referring to our President or Kim Jong-un, but let’s talk about both. So one of the big criticisms I’m getting goes like this: “Oh ho ho, let Scott study his history! Because if you had ever opened a history book, if you’ve ever taken five seconds to Google North Korea…”
[20:51] “…you would know that they always do this. They promise to get rid of the nukes, but they don’t do it.” And you know who doesn’t know that? John Bolton. John Bolton has never noticed that sometimes North Korea doesn’t keep their promises. I don’t know—maybe it’s his mustache. Maybe his mustache is keeping the knowledge from going in his ears, but he doesn’t know.
Of all the people! What’s funny is all my friends know it; everybody I talk to knows that. Look, my other friend—my other friend Dale—his name is Dale too. Ask him; he’ll tell you he knows North Korea does not keep their promises. But does John Bolton know that, even though that’s his whole job and his reputation? He does not know that. I don’t know why.
[21:52] So there’s a belief among my critics that they alone have noticed that North Korea has a history of being undependable with these agreements. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say John Bolton probably knows that. I can’t guarantee it—I’m not a mind reader—but I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say I think John Bolton has noticed that they’re a little bit undependable. And maybe you need a little bit more insurance; maybe you need to have their nuclear program already on a boat and floating away from the island before you loosen up on your sanctions. Whatever they’re doing, I’m pretty sure they’re dealing with that problem.
All right, so let’s see what other pushback am I getting.
[22:52] Oh, here’s another one. It goes like this—to my list, if you’re just joining, these are the pushbacks to my list of why President Trump deserves credit for progress in North Korea. All right, so why he doesn’t deserve credit: “I got my reason.” It goes like this—somebody will read my long list of why he deserves credit and then they’ll leave a comment that goes like this: “LOL! Are you crazy? Are you serious? Seriously? Seriously? You’re saying that the stuff on that list deserves credit?”
[23:58] “Oh my, oh my, this list! Ho ho ho!” And scene. And they just leave out any reasons. Or the other one is, “Oh, you think this deserves a Peace Prize? You do understand everything on this list is like threatening war, and you think that deserves a Peace Prize?”
So I’m getting that one. I think people don’t understand that this whole Peace Prize thing is not exactly what they imagined. If they looked at the winners of past Peace Prizes, you’re gonna see some people who have done some violence or threatened some violence. And if it takes a little threatening of violence to get to your peace, well, that’s one way to get there.
[25:00] I was gonna get to the question of President Trump’s lying. One of the criticisms I get is—I’ll say something like, “I’m glad we elected this President because I was hopeful—sort of hopeful, short of confident—that he could make something happen in North Korea where others could not.” And here’s another one of the pushbacks I get: “He lied 3,000 times in one year!”
And I’ll say, “He avoided nuclear war and solved the hardest problem in the entire world by getting a good result in North Korea,” or so it looks so far. And they’ll say, “How could you have a President who lied so many times? He lies!”
[26:01] And then I say, “Could you give me an example of how the lying has influenced an actual thing that matters?” When you list the things that have been damaged by all the lying, how big is that list? Is it a concept that’s the problem? Is it a worry for the future that it will turn into a problem?
Have you noticed that the problems that people have with President Trump, you can’t photograph? Let me explain that. You could take a photograph of North Korea, you could take a photograph of nuclear weapons—there they are. And then when they’re removed, you could take the photograph of the empty building.
[27:01] The economy: you could see people going to work that didn’t have jobs. You can see a statistic that looks good—that employment looks good. So the things that he’s doing well, you could see. For example, the embassy moving to Jerusalem. Wherever there’s an actual accomplishment, there’s something you can see: either a statistic, a photo, a person—you can see it.
But the things that people have in terms of problems about the President, you can’t see that. They’re all in the “invisible class.” It’s like, “He keeps lying! There’s all the lying!” True. But where’s the problem? Where’s the part where my arm is bleeding because of it? Where’s the problem where I didn’t get a job because of it? Where’s the problem that somebody bombed us because of it?
[28:02] Most of the problems that people have with President Trump have something to do with their imagination of what’s happening in his head, or their belief that something bad will happen in the future, or their belief that something’s happening now and it’s making them feel really bad. So if you were to take all of the criticisms about this President and sort of put them in a list, it would be all the invisible stuff, if you think about it. You could do this exercise at home: take all the complaints. It’s like, “He is a racist! He’s got an invisible racist whistle!” Well, let’s measure that. Well, I can’t. Let’s take a picture of it. Can’t get a picture of an invisible whistle. “He’s crazy!” Well, we can’t test for it. We tried to test for it, and he aced the test.
[29:04] “He makes decisions that are without thinking!” Again, can’t take a picture of a lack of thinking. Can’t get a photo of it. Can’t measure it. How do you measure somebody’s internal thought process? “He keeps saying things that might cause trouble with our allies in the future!” I can’t get a picture of that; I can’t measure it.
Is it a coincidence that all the things he’s doing wrong can’t be measured? I mean, that doesn’t mean that there are no such things as things going wrong that can’t be measured—there certainly are—but it’s getting fairly consistent at this point. Accomplishments: you can photograph them and you can measure them. Every one of the problems is sort of “how I feel about something.”
[30:06] “I imagine in his head he might do something wrong,” and “I think he made somebody mad,” and “I believe he offended somebody that isn’t me.” It’s all invisible. Can’t measure it, can’t photograph it. What can you photograph in terms of North Korea nukes? Well, I’m being conceptual here. In theory, at some point soon, there will be a photograph of a nuclear test site, and then there will be a photograph after everything’s been removed. I would imagine we’ll see those photographs.
Now, it’s early, so it’s too early to say that North Korea is going to work out. Pompeo has told us the same thing; he said, “Well, we’re optimistic, but it’s too early to say this is going to work out.” Oh, am I saying “measure” in an upstate New York way?
[31:07] Is there a different way to pronounce that? It might be. So, too early for you to say it is an accomplishment. The other criticisms people are giving me: “Nothing’s happened in North Korea! Nothing’s happened! You keep saying he’s accomplished something, but nothing’s happened!” Well, technically true. You have your technical truth, but have we ever been talking like this before? We’ve never been in this situation before. It would be very hard for this to start walking backwards. It could, but we’re probably in the 85% chance of moving forward instead of backwards. Now, that doesn’t mean we won’t walk away from the table. I told you before, there’s probably at least one walk-away in this process. The President even mentioned it in his speech…
[32:10] …to the NRA. By the way, did anybody catch his speech to the NRA? That was probably his best work. I thought his NRA speech was just—he’s getting so good at the comedy when he has a friendly audience. It was really good.
All right, let’s talk about this Judge Ellis—T.S. Ellis—who CNN called at least once “T.S. Eliot,” but only once that I heard.
[33:13] So he did some pushback on this old Mueller thing about Manafort and said, “Hey, you’re not really after Manafort; you’re just going after him to find a problem so you can go after the President.” Now, I try not to get too deeply into the legal analysis because I don’t have any skill in that area—no expertise, nothing to really add. And I think that we civilians are continually surprised…
[34:30] …at what is possible and what is not possible in terms of the law. If you had told me a few days ago that it’s possible for the judge to say, “Get the F out of here,” even if you did commit a crime—“I don’t care about it because your real intention is to go after a third party”—I didn’t know that was a thing. And I’m not sure it is a thing. I suspect he’s just pushing back to make sure he has all the information he needs, and it’ll probably proceed. But I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. So I think the pushback was unexpected but entirely appropriate. I don’t think it necessarily signals how it’s going to turn out. I think it might be just a normal judge pushing back. So, could be nothing there. We’ll see.
[35:31] By the way, one of the big unspoken facts is that—should I say this? I don’t know if I want to say this without the benefit of statistics, so let me say it as honestly as I can. I don’t have statistics for what I’m going to say; I’m being told by somebody who should know, but I don’t have statistics to back it up. And that is that the African American citizen population is not so much against tough immigration policies. I think the country in general is kind of soft on the people who are already here, whether legal or not, if they’ve been good citizens for a long time—or good residents, I guess you would say. But I don’t think the black community is for…
[36:33] …open borders, because why would they be? It’s just competition for resources. It’s easy for a rich guy to say, “Yeah, I’ll open those borders, I’ll get more free labor.” But if you’re competing for jobs, why would you want more competition?
So I think—just a guess—but it looks like President Trump is gonna start cranking up his outreach. He’s already talking about it more. Kanye made it easy; he gave him something to talk about that’s positive. I think he likes to show progress, and until he had something to show—black unemployment is at its best level ever—Kanye is saying, “Hey, give him a try.” So now he has something to talk about, and over the summer, I think he’s gonna get a few more things to talk about. So the midterms are going to get really interesting.
[37:36] Is Kanye’s attention increasing my video views? Probably, yes. My video views seem to be way up; my tweets and retweets are way up as well, even though my Twitter population is not up that much. But it could be just that I’m hitting the pocket on what people are caring about. The Kanye part might be a 5% difference, 10% difference.
Ben Shapiro had me on? What do you mean? You mean he talked about me? “How do you know this isn’t what Trump and Kanye spoke about?” Well, I’m sure it is—maybe not specifically what’s happening, but I’m sure that President Trump was smart enough to say, “Hey, why don’t you just say you liked me?” If he didn’t ask for the sale…
[38:38] …that’s one of the tricks of a salesperson: you have to directly ask for the thing you want. So he probably did. That doesn’t mean that’s why it’s happening, but I would imagine he did.
“Ben loves me?” Good to know. I think that would be an unverified observation, yes. Let’s talk about Pastor Scott’s effort. Looks like they’re talking about having two get-togethers: one with athletes, one with artists. There’s a risk with this that it looks like it’s just for show, and the bigger the group and the more celebrities you put in it, the more it looks like it’s just for show. On the other hand, President Trump is really good at putting on a show. So the risk is that it…
[39:41] …looks like you’re putting on a show and you don’t do it well. That’s the big failure. But if it looks like you’re putting on a show and you do a good job of it, it could look like a different thing. In other words, it is important that people that influence others are the first ones who get to have a chance to have a change of mind, I suppose, or at least to speak their mind. Either one would be good. I would rather see a smaller group of people who have solutions than I would just a photo op with some rappers who are complaining about something and have no particular solutions.
“Reaching out to his opposition is a winning strategy.” That is correct. It doesn’t matter how the meeting goes; the outreach itself is at least something.
[40:43] All right, I am going to go do something else now and I will talk to you all later. Have a great Saturday.