 Another angle on modern power. It's very meta. It may look pretty simple. It's like like Trump uses third-grade language and repeats himself all the time and can't seem to find his words. Really, you want to encourage him to like use his words properly. But he's busy using mainstream media and new media all sort of synergistically together. The GOP built an echo chamber over the last 30 years actually invested in AM radio AM talk radio and and basically creating think tanks in a series of ways in which they can take and amplify any kind of message. And Trump understands this dynamic. Now the press and the left and everybody else seems to take Trump at face value. They take seriously everything he says. Selena Zito put it beautifully in her article in The Atlantic. The press takes Trump literally but not seriously. His followers take him seriously but not literally. That's super interesting. Trump is in a meta dialogue with his followers. There is an inside joke going on where every time Trump pokes at somebody those people froth up and go into a rage at justifiable rage. They've just been provoked, insulted, targeted, beaten a whole series of things in full public view now by the president back then by a clownish competitor to become president but now by the president. So Trump understands that he provokes them. His followers understand that this provocation is completely intentional and that frothing of the recipient of the abuse disables them, neutralizes them, makes them incapable of actually being in the arena and participating in what is going on at the time. This is really interesting. This is subtle, new, different. So Hillary needed to go meta some. Now Hillary was the wrong candidate for the Democrats to field. That's a whole different, longer discussion but in the second debate when Trump is busy stalking her, instead of training up on the topics and issues that would win a debate, Hillary should have trained up on bully interventions and she should have stopped, turned to Donald and said, Donald, you're a bully and we all know you're a bully and then taken steps through what you do with bullies and gone meta and talked to the room, talked to the audience and said, is this what we actually want? Do we want to be subject to a bully? Might have helped. But Hillary was incapable of going meta. She was taking this whole process as a serious political campaign, not Calvin ball, not a game that could be invented and reinvented, shredding the overton window of what is acceptable to do in all different directions. Many people had super useful analyses of Trump's behavior in the run up to the election of 2016. One of them was Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, the comic. Adams was really perceptive on this. He looked, he did a piece analyzing Trump from the persuasion or seduction community perspective. And this is a community you can find all over the place online, on YouTube, on wherever. Basically, men trying to get laid, of men trying to figure out, how do I use neuro linguistic programming or other kinds of strategies short of drugging somebody? How do I actually make myself so appealing that somebody will go home with me? If you look at what Trump was saying and how he was saying it from those perspectives, from comes out looking like a genius, the constant repetition, very simple language. My friend Al, a week after the election in 2016, asked me so. So Jerry, what was Hillary going to do on inauguration day? And I looked back at him and I kind of had a bit of a glazed look in my eyes, I'm pretty sure. And I said, I don't know, make sure Pell grants don't go away. Double down on the Kyoto protocol, I'm not sure. And he said, so tell me what's Donald Trump going to do on an inauguration day, which at that point was still a couple weeks in the future, mercifully. And I said, well, he's going to build a big, beautiful wall, he's going to block Muslims from it. Oh my God, I have memorized his program. So from the persuasion community's perspective, Trump comes out looking pretty good. All of this conversation about modern power and meta dialogues and inside jokes brings me to a point about Trump supporters. They're not all misogynistic, sexist, homophobic, idiot, racist morons. They're not. There's a bunch of those because he's attracted those. And he happily wears those badges because it causes everybody else to go into such a froth. But a lot of people are the same people who voted for Bernie Sanders or would have voted for him had he been the candidate. There are people who agreed that the system is broken and rigged against them. They really wanted the system broken. If you've heard of the jobs to be done framework, people hire things, people, objects like milkshakes for a purpose. They're trying to find something that will sustain them through the morning that is slow to drink, for example. And while they're in their car going from job site to job site, they can kind of slurp on that's that's why McDonald's suddenly realized they were selling a lot of milkshakes. Well, what job did people hire Donald Trump to do? I think they hired him to shatter the existing government. And far as I can tell, he's doing a pretty reasonable job of it. He's doing a reasonable job of breaking it. He's also doing a reasonable job for conservatives. Donald Trump is the best conservative president in memory. Can't remember one that pushed through as many things did as much for the conservative cause. Certainly the Supreme Court, the idea that Merrick Garland was postponed into the next administration never made it onto the Supreme Court, which ought to be punishable as a crime, but it's not because we have norms, not laws on these sorts of things, which galls me. But we're basically in a completely different game at this point. And to Trump's supporters, if he happens to enrich himself in the process of breaking the government, that's fine. I don't think they particularly care. It's kind of cute they know Trump in a weird way is like Las Vegas. In air guitar, there's the first chapter is a pay in to Las Vegas, which the author claims is the most honest city in America, because what you see is what you get. And Trump in a weird way is like that. The things he says are kind of how he goes about things, even though there's this dual dialogue going on. But what he's presenting, if you understand the full the full loop of it, is like, well, okay, guess I'll let him go ahead and go ahead with that program. It's really a horrible thing to behold. And a fascinating thing to behold much like watching a train wreck, except it involves our actual real lives.