Episode 62 - Khomenie Reads Fire and Fury: What’s that mean?

Date: 2018-06-16 | Duration: 15:25

Topics

Khomenie appears to have a sense of humor Korean Summit in Singapore No US Ambassador for Singapore?

Transcript

[0:06]

I do bump up. Yes, I’m back. You can’t get enough of me. We’ve got lots going on. One of the things going on is our situation with Iran, so I’m going to talk about that in a minute after I have a beverage with you. Do you have your beverage? Lift your beverage.

How many of you saw the photo that was on social media of Khomeini—if I’m pronouncing it right, Khomeini—at a book fair? He’s browsing through a copy of what appears to be the Farsi version of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s book that was very anti-Trump and gossipy and made a big, big splash. Now, here’s what’s interesting about this. It took me a few days to believe that this was a…

[1:09]

…real picture. First of all, because I thought to myself, “Oh, that’s just obvious Photoshop.” But then, apparently, it’s on his—I just checked—it’s on his Instagram page. I think that’s his real Instagram page; there’s over a million followers. If it’s on his Instagram page, assuming this is really him, it means he approved the picture because nobody would take a chance of posting a picture that would get them in trouble. Obviously, he personally approved the picture.

Now, what does this tell us? You remember there was a tweet not too many days ago in which he insulted the president—President Trump—and said something about how he will be worm food…

[2:12]

…and the Iranian nation will go on. Now, when I first read the tweet, I didn’t quite know how to interpret it because there are cultural differences. Is “worm food” the worst insult you can say? Is it like throwing your shoe at somebody? Does it have any special meaning, or is this something you say at a party because it sounds funny? It’s like, “He is worm food.” So, I couldn’t tell: was it almost a joking kind of insult, or was he just talking in a serious way with colorful language? It was hard to tell.

And so, I jokingly—but not completely jokingly—I tweeted that, “Oh, it looks like there’s an opening now.” I was harking back to Kim Jong-un’s Twitter, or at least public exchange with President Trump, and how when it became personal and joking, it probably personalized…

[3:14]

…their relationship in a weird way and may have actually contributed to the summit. So I said to myself, “Is Khomeini trying to do something like that because he saw that it got a good result?” And I thought, “Well, maybe.” But you can’t really tell from that one tweet.

And then this comes out: the picture of him reading Fire and Fury. Now, there’s no doubt that that’s a joke now. It’s meant to be kind of a trolling poke at the president, but it’s so non-traditional to do it this way. Obviously, he meant the people who would read this—maybe his followers more than the president’s—would sort of laugh at it and say, “Oh, that’s pretty funny that he picked up that particular book to learn about the president.” Now, somebody may have handed it to him…

[4:14]

…I doubt that he planned it, but he certainly approved the picture. He approved the message that it was going to send. So what does that tell you?

Well, at first I thought to myself, “President Trump’s going to have trouble dealing with this guy,” because you’ve got the Ayatollah who’s serious all the time, and then President Trump is just sort of the opposite of that. So I’m thinking, I don’t know how that’s ever going to work. Whereas it was obvious to me when you saw pictures of Kim Jong-un; he was always laughing and having a joke, and he was friends with Dennis Rodman. From the first minute, you could say, “Well, I think those two could get along all right.” So it was a little bit more obvious with Kim Jong-un, but it feels to me like Khomeini is sending a message about his human side, if you will. And I don’t know any reason that you…

[5:16]

…would do that other than to lighten the mood and to at least test, in a very small, incremental way: could we be walking toward each other instead of away from each other? Is there anything here?

There’s a lot of reading between the lines. I don’t think you could conclude with any certainty anything at this point, but this is very unusual that he would respond to us getting out of the nuclear deal—a life-and-death, top-priority, important issue, totally serious—with a jokey kind of social media response unless he was trying to humanize it. And I don’t think he would try to humanize it just for strategic stalling reasons or anything like that. It feels…

[6:16]

…like the carrot-and-stick offer that the president has put on the table, which is: “It’s going to be very bad for you if you don’t play well with us, but it could be really, really good for you if you do.” We like to make other countries successful; we’ve got a pretty good track record of doing that if they’re nice to us.

So yes, somebody’s saying he’s trying to bug Trump, and certainly it’s meant in a trollish way. But because he’s trolling with humor, and that seems a break with the dark, gloomy posturing we’ve seen before, it feels like he’s trying to humanize the situation, which could be good. Now, check this out that just happened moments ago on social media. I’m going to look up Khomeini again.

[7:16]

Khomeini—K-H-O… how do you spell his name? Let me not try that. There’s things you shouldn’t do while you’re live. How can I not find anything in my phone when I need to?

Moments ago, here we go. So his latest posting was just a close-up of him. I don’t know how well you can see it. Is he smiling? That’s interesting, because if we look at the rest of his page recently, he’s doing a lot of smiling. And then you don’t have to go back too far to see the stern look. So it looks…

[8:22]

…like the smiling stuff is pretty recent. I haven’t looked at it enough to see if there’s a pattern, but if he’s got a sense of humor, that’s good news. He has—this is a weird thing to say, but I think some of you will know what I’m saying—yes, “Moar-ized” Khomeini does. He looks like a smart guy. And if he’s a smart guy with a sense of humor and he wants what’s best for his country—three assumptions that I feel I can make—we’ve got something to work with here.

Hmm. That’s all I wanted to say on that topic. Let me bring up a second topic. The summit with North Korea is going to be in…

[9:22]

…Singapore. And here’s an interesting fact about Singapore—a few interesting facts. Number one: they are a small city-nation, tiny little dot on the map. Number two: they’re super rich. They’ve got a crap-ton of money and they have a lot of money to invest. I know this from my sources: Singapore wishes to invest more of their vast wealth in the United States, but they have a problem. Singapore wants to put money into this country, but it’s hard. Do you know what’s holding things up? We don’t have an ambassador yet to Singapore. Mind-blowing. What’s holding it up? Well, the Democrats, just slow-walking everything.

[10:23]

We don’t have an ambassador to Singapore. Singapore is hosting the most important summit of my lifetime, critical to everything. What do we want to accomplish in Singapore? We want to go to Singapore and make sure that North Korea knows that we’ll keep our commitments—whatever we promise, that we’ll keep our commitments. And we’re set to go to a place that we haven’t even kept our commitment to put an ambassador in place? Seriously, that is a terrible look.

We should put the ambassador to Singapore front of the line. If there’s anything that the Democrats and the Republicans can agree on, it’s that the meeting in Singapore is super, super important, and you want to get it right in every way you can.

[11:24]

One of the ways would be to show Singapore some respect by putting them to the front of the line. They’re doing us a solid favor here. Singapore’s stepping it up. I don’t think it’s cheap and I don’t think it’s easy to do what they’re going to do for us—which is to help host, which is a lot of security and everything else—and we can’t give them an ambassador so that they’ve got a connection to invest their vast wealth in our country more efficiently? This is free money. This is low-hanging fruit. This is nothing but us just deciding to do the smarter thing and pushing their ambassador to the front of the list instead of wherever they are.

Let’s give Singapore an ambassador. Let’s show North Korea that we can take care of our friends. Let’s show them how to make money. We’ve got stranded money that could be coming to this country in the form of investments that the Singaporeans are saying, “We don’t quite know how to make the…”

[12:26]

“…connections. Can you give us an ambassador to sort of be a rainmaker for our investments?”

So here’s my suggestion to the Trump administration: just raise this issue a little bit. See if you can get the Democrats to agree on just this for national security. This isn’t like every other little ambassador to a smallish nation. The world’s watching Singapore. Everybody is going to be in Singapore. And if that’s not good enough reason, keep in mind that when the summit starts, there’s going to be a whole lot of news coverage before there’s much news. So you need somebody to be on there talking up your side, and the key people are not going to be talking—they’re going to be in the meetings. So there’s going to be a whole lot of secret meetings and a whole lot of news cameras with nobody to talk to for a while. Let’s get them an ambassador. Even if it’s his first day on the job, or her, the ambassador should be…

[13:29]

…the voice of our Singaporean relationships and should be part of this story. It frustrates me when I see something this obvious that’s an easy fix. Just move it from the back of the line to the front. You make the summit go well, you open up those investments that they want to make, you treat a trusted ally the way you would want them to be treated and the way you’d want to be treated. It’s a win for everybody.

Does anybody disagree with that? It feels like that’s something that no one disagrees with, right? There’s no disagreement. So let’s do that. I’m going to be pushing on that point a little more. One of the interesting things about the Trump age, I guess, is that I have this feeling…

[14:32]

…like it’s audience participation all the time. Don’t you feel more engaged in the political process—far more than you ever did before? And here’s another example where I think We the People can directly ask for something that’s not controversial. It’s easy to explain. We the People can say, “Give Singapore an ambassador.” Treat them with the respect that they are clearly earning. Let’s step up our game a little bit. Let’s put a good look on this.

So I’m going to be pushing on this topic a little bit more, but that’s all I have to say for today. I might be back later today; we’ll see. I’ll talk to you later.