Episode 151: Scott Adams Doesn’t Know Why Putin Would Meddle in our Election
Date: 2018-07-21 | Duration: 19:01
Topics
President Trump removed Putin’s reasons for messing with us in the future Michael Cohen taped conversation with Trump CNN discussing Putin’s offer to interview our former diplomat Harnessing flying unicorn energy
Transcript
[0:06]
Hey everybody, come on in here. I’m coming to you from my phone instead of my iPad, so the sound will be a little bit different. I’ve been thinking about this story that now seems like it was a year ago, but do you remember—are you old enough to remember the summit with Putin? I think it was a week ago. It seems now so many news cycles ago. There are a few things I want to say about that. First of all, have you noticed that the Michael Cohen story has just pushed the summit stuff down to the minor news footnotes on the page of CNN? Sure enough, new news pushed the old news down the chute a little bit.
[1:09]
I wanted to talk about the most puzzling part about the last week, and I have to admit it was puzzling to me too. But I want to propose a way to look at it that would make sense. The thing I’m talking about is when President Trump was asked if he thought that Russians were meddling with our elections. President Trump said, “I don’t know why they would.” Now, later he corrected that to, “I meant to say I don’t know why they wouldn’t,” to make that compatible with what he’d said several times before, which we have on videotape. He said it in public a number of times that he does believe that they meddled. So he was making a statement in public compatible with what he said before and what he said after, which is:
[2:10]
Yes, they meddled. So he said, “I don’t know why they wouldn’t,” but most people clearly heard “would.” It’s puzzling. Why would you stand up there and say that? It doesn’t even make sense as a lie. It was just sort of weird. So I proposed a way to understand it. If you think of President Trump as someone who is talking about facts, then it doesn’t make any sense at all. But he doesn’t usually talk about facts; he is living in the persuasion realm. He’s persuading and he’s selling all the time. We see with Russia that he’s brought the carrot and the stick. The carrot is that they can be friends and they can make a lot of money and we could all be safer if they’re our friend, which I don’t think:
[3:10]
has ever been as clear before with prior administrations. With Trump, it seems true that we could get along. Then the stick, of course, is the sanctions and the threat of getting worse if Putin doesn’t be our friend, essentially. If you look at it that way—that what Trump is trying to do is persuade—the reason he’s being nice to Putin in public is that he’s trying to persuade. Somebody online was saying that it was embarrassing, and I thought to myself, “There’s a good example of someone who uses ego as a tool versus an obstacle.” Trump was putting his own ego lower than Putin’s for the purpose of persuasion.
[4:10]
He was using his own ego as a tool. Now, we don’t believe that the President thinks he has any confidence problems, so it’s obvious that you saw him ramp down his ego for a specific strategic purpose: to persuade. Now, when he said, “I don’t see why…” think of that like a hypnotist. Imagine that President Trump isn’t a normal politician; he’s a master persuader. When he stands next to you and he says, “I don’t see any reason he would,” it just doesn’t mean the same thing as when somebody else says it. Because “I don’t see why he would” doesn’t get to fact. It’s not a:
[5:14]
fact; he’s getting through reasons and he’s getting to motivation. He’s basically framing the situation as “Putin no longer has a reason.” It wasn’t intended to be factual. This is just one hypothesis of how you could understand it—that it wasn’t intended to be factual; it was intended to frame it and be persuasive. Because he just gave the carrot: “If you’re good, gigantic stick; you’re in super trouble if you do anything like this again.” And given that frame, “I don’t see why he would.” Everybody who’s evaluating that has evaluated it as a statement of fact—that “I don’t see why he would,” meaning meddle in the election, is a statement that he:
[6:16]
doesn’t believe he did. In other words, a statement about what the facts are. But if you look at the sentence “I don’t see why he would,” it’s talking about Putin’s motivations. “I don’t see why he would”—what’s the reason? He’s not talking about whether it happened or didn’t; he’s talking specifically about Putin’s motivation, which he had just changed. In other words, he just came from a meeting in which, in all likelihood, President Trump made a big impact on Putin’s motivations, his reason for messing with us. Now, if you think that Putin messes with the United States and we don’t mess back, or that it’s not at least some kind of a tit-for-tat forever—if you don’t think that’s what’s going on, it just looks like Putin is being a dick and it’s hard to imagine what he would get out of that. The only way Putin’s motivations:
[7:18]
make sense—and I’m not a super spy, so maybe somebody else has a better sense of this—but the only way it makes sense to continually poke a superpower that can poke you back very, very hard is if the superpower is already poking, in which case you’ve got to create enough pain in the other direction that you’ve got a little bit of mutually assured destruction going on. It’s entirely possible that what President Trump did was remove Putin’s reasons. Now, how do you explain that to the press? You can’t. President Trump can’t go to the press and say, “I talked to Putin, I removed his reason,” because that would be bad persuasion. If Putin saw that, he would say, “Are you trying to manipulate me?” It was just the sort of thing you can’t say if you’re:
[8:20]
being effective. So, if you look back on that event now, where if you imagine that the President just came out of a meeting where he had removed Putin’s reason and he was also—here’s another key part of this—was also in effect, these are my own words, giving Putin a virtual pardon for past deeds. Now, that’s not to say any of those past deeds he’s accused of are okay. I’m not minimizing them; I’m just saying that for practical reasons, you may have to not focus on them in order to move forward. And so if the President removed Putin’s reasons for messing with us in the future and he thought he was giving him a virtual pardon at the same time, suddenly the sentence makes sense: “I don’t see why he would.” Am I crazy? If you imagine that:
[9:22]
we’re not talking about the facts, we’re only talking about Putin’s motivation and the President believes he had just got done with a meeting in which he had changed Putin’s motivation. Whether he succeeded or not, we don’t know, but he probably thought he did. Doesn’t it sound entirely plausible that you would say, “I don’t know why he would”? Now imagine the press interprets that as you don’t believe it’s true, and then they challenge you on it. What would the President say to that? Under this theory, would he say, “Well hold on, I was just trying to persuade Putin. That wasn’t for you guys; I was just trying to persuade Putin”? He can’t really say that, can he? So you’re going to have to:
[10:24]
come up with some ridiculous story about why you framed it as you did, which was a frame that removes the reason for the war. Now, keep in mind that this is the same thing that Trump did with Kim Jong-un. President Trump removed Kim’s reason for having nukes because he offered him a better deal. He made a credible offer partly because he’s Trump and not an ideologue; he’s not connected to the military-industrial complex there. He could make a credible offer to Kim: “Look, being our friend’s a great deal, being our enemy’s terrible.” So he just took the reason away. Kim doesn’t have a reason anymore. He’s got a lot of inertia and it’s not going to be easy to move to a denuclearization—it might take a while—but he doesn’t have a reason to build up nukes and send them our way. If you look at:
[11:28]
that same strategy, which was apparently successful, and you see that he’s applying it in the Russia case, it’s one way to understand it. And I don’t know if that was true, by the way. Somebody says, “Your voice makes me smell my grandma.” I’m not sure I know what that means, but it’s funny. Anyway, now that you’ve heard that potential explanation of events, does it sound feasible at all? Do a little, not fact-checking, but give me the smell test on it. I got some “yes,” “no,” “yes,” “yes,” “thumbs up,” “feasible,” “yes,” “sure.”
[12:29]
I’m not going to say that that’s actually what happened, but I am going to say that it makes perfect sense given that it’s the same play he did in North Korea and that a master persuader would stand next to somebody and say something like, “I don’t know why he would.” That reframes the reason away. Let’s talk about Michael Cohen. Apparently, Michael Cohen taped his conversations with President Trump and there seems to be, as far as we know, at least one problematic tape talking about paying off the Playboy Playmate. Now, if you were just narrating this like a movie, how interesting or coincidental is it that only just a few:
[13:31]
days ago, what was the top story? That President Trump was doing something humiliating. And already the story is that you can’t hear that story without thinking about him getting busy with a Playboy Playmate—Playmate of the Year, I think. It takes your head to such a completely different place. But the people who are Trump supporters have already made peace with that. They knew what they were getting. There’s a great scene from the old Sopranos show where Tony Soprano was having an argument with his wife and Tony Soprano says, “You knew what you were getting.” And:
[14:32]
I think when we elected Trump, I would have been a little bit disappointed—and I’m not even kidding when I say this—I would have been a little bit disappointed if there had never been any Karen McDougal, Stormy Daniels kind of stories. Didn’t you spend a little bit of time thinking, “I know there’s got to be better stories. I know somebody’s got something better than the mean thing he said once. There’s got to be something there”? So I would have been very disappointed if we didn’t have a little something. The people who were imagining that Michael Cohen was going to be the ruin of Trump, maybe they’ll still have their day, but if I had to bet: minor irritation.
[15:34]
It’s entirely possible there might be something horrible on those tapes that will take the President out, but I’m going to say the likelihood is that it will sound interesting enough to be headlines for a while and it’ll just be a minor irritation. That’s my prediction: minor irritation, not a kill shot. Could be wrong, though. Nobody knows. You’ve got my prediction. One more thing: I was watching CNN talking about the ridiculous offer that Putin made that Mueller could go talk to their suspects if he could talk to some:
[16:36]
people in this country, including our diplomats. Of course, the Senate voted 98 to zero to not let that happen. I don’t know what power they have over that. And of course, the public was pretty much 100 percent against making that happen. Even the diplomat was like, “What the hell? Are you kidding me? Are you even considering this?” Here’s one of those cases where I’ve argued that social media is running the country. Because even if the Senate had not voted 98 to zero against it, even if the President hadn’t already said, “That was never an option, we were never going to send anybody to Russia to be interviewed,” the public was pretty much 100 percent:
[17:36]
against that, so it really couldn’t have happened. CNN is covering it as if it’s something that could have happened. “Can you imagine that this was on the table?” It’s a little like saying, “Let’s harness the energy from all the flying unicorns,” and then having CNN argue about how much energy you can or cannot get from a flying unicorn because there are no flying unicorns. If somebody says we’re going to harness the energy from a flying unicorn, it doesn’t really make sense to argue about how much you’re going to get. It was the same thing with this Putin offer of “Oh, you can talk to our guys, we’ll talk to your guys.” It was sort of a flying unicorn. You don’t really need to treat that like it was ever possible. It never:
[18:38]
crossed—it never got into that general realm of “maybe that might happen.” That was never a possibility. That’s all I got for now. I got other things to do and I’ll talk to you later.