 Alright, I'm going to mess with your mind a little bit. Many of you probably think that Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, is a bully, a liar, a pathological liar, a sociopath, a predator, and mostly on these things you're right. You may also think he has a thin little ego, a very fragile ego, and I want to kind of do the opposite. Talk about Trump's virtues, because I want to sort of empathize with Trump's followers and see what they see in him, what is it that they think is good here. And I'll start with egotism, and I for one don't think that Trump has a thin skin. I saw the 2016 election cycle, I collected up all the beautiful, here's my collection of the beautiful nicknames people gave Trump, I also collected up editorial political cartoons about Trump, I was listening with care at all the people who were outraged, the Trump was even in the race, nobody with a thin skin would survive that unscathed. So I don't think he has a thin or fragile ego, I think he's got a gigantic ego, and in fact his ego is fueled or fed by all the attention. He would love for it to be approval and good attention, but he's perfectly happy with negative attention, it actually feeds his combative nature. So I don't think he has a fragile ego. Trump is also incredibly patient, he has been wanting to be president, he's been flirting with being president for over 30 years, you can find old videos of him on talk shows because he loves the media so much that there are old recordings of him, and he's been joking about it forever. And he sees the moment at one point, but I think partly what I'm saying is, Trump is a much more strategic thinker than most people give him credit for, and I don't mean that he lays out a strategy and he understands how all those things work, I mean that he has an instinct for the long view, and he picks up on trends and takes advice well from other people who have some of the intellectual sort of underpinnings, let's say a Steve Bannon or a Roger Stone or a Roy Cohn, those kinds of people, who give him all sorts of advice, but he absorbs it and he aims in the, I'm going to call it the right direction, because who's president right now, right? Trump is tireless. He can do five events in a day, he went to Wisconsin multiple times, Hillary completely ignored Wisconsin's scent proxies. When have you ever seen him exhausted or not tweeting at all hours of the day, he may be petulant and argumentative and insulting and all sorts of things, I mean I can think of a whole bunch of different descriptors for Trump, but I think he's tireless and I think his admirers love that, he's always on the job, he's always doing this thing they think is virtuous for him and for them. Trump thrives on brinksmanship, he needs it, he needs it to survive, his whole existence has been one of brinksmanship. At one point Trump was in debt to two-thirds of a billion dollars to Deutsche Bank and he not only got a sweet and renegotiation of that deal, he got a monthly allowance of $340,000. If it weren't for Deutsche there would be no Trump as president, he owes a lot to them and probably to other sources of funds, but he was too big to fail and he knew it and he knew that Deutsche couldn't see that much money go away, so got himself a sweet deal. Remember that Trump's early mentor was Roy Cohn, lawyer to scumbags. Roy Cohn was Joseph McCarthy's lawyer during the Army McCarthy hearings and has represented more scumbags than most lawyers, maybe a close one or up these days would be Alan Dershowitz, but Roy Cohn was a master and saw in his protege these talents and trained him really well on how to do this. Before the election of 2016 I read the making of Donald Trump by Alan K. Johnson, a very good investigative reporter, who among many interesting things says that Trump and the Trump Organization have been sued by more than 4,000 parties. There are more than 4,000 lawsuits that have come in to them and I have to say you probably are thinking this like you don't sue Donald Trump lightly because he is going to darken this guy with lawyers, he's a countersuer, a counterpuncher, he's going to come back at you with everything he's got because he hates these things and he thinks he can win his way out of them. So those 4,000 are not light-hearted, frivolous lawsuits. Those are really angry people because Trump's MO, and this is also in the book, Trump's MO was a vendor which showed up with his invoice and Trump would look at it and say, hey great work and the vendors thinking glad I got this job I'm going to get a halo effect from working with Trump and his hotels and Trump was doing everything he could to make his name famous, which at this point he really succeeded in that. And Trump would look at the invoice and say I'll pay you half, I'm not that satisfied with what you did. And the vendor would say yeah I'm a small business, you can't really do this to me because I'll go bankrupt and then Trump would shrug and go so sue me. Trump's basic MO is to fuck everyone, except maybe family, but he doesn't care, he really doesn't care and he thinks that's just the nature of business. I think his father sort of raised him with that kind of ethos, that kind of attitude and then he's had all sorts of reinforcing mentors since then that said that. But Trump is completely willing to break as many eggs as it takes to make the omelet and his followers appreciate that. Trump is fearless and shameless. He has the balls to say just about anything to anyone. I was watching a video last night where Trump talks about how he is the most followed person on Twitter and just remember man of course you know I'm the most followed person on Twitter. I go Google this and it turns out he's maybe number nine. Barack Obama at this point has 113 million followers. Trump has 72 million. This is February of 2020 and but Trump just sort of blithely makes that statement just as he said that his crowds were bigger than Obama's and everything else. These are very intentional lies. These are sort of practice lies. These are throwaway lies and I think what Trump is proving by lying so often and so brazenly is that first he's got big brassy balls and he can say anything he wants to and create his own reality. He's gaslighting us all the time and his followers think this is necessary. They admire this. They want somebody with conviction, somebody with big brassy balls who goes out there and makes change in the world and shakes things up and you can't argue that he hasn't made change of that nature so his followers are happy. His followers think the system is broken and they see the other alternatives. The other people running as feckless and those other people need to get some feck. I'm unclear what the right antidote to Trump is. This is a bigger question raised by my whole investigation in this series of videos but what is the right antidote to somebody who's willing to say or do anything? Do you lower yourself to their level? Not sure. You clearly have to go meta. You can't just be in the arena not talking about the arena and talking to the audience in different ways. I mean that seems to me to be an obvious thing but I'll get back to that in future videos. Trump has won himself more elbow room than any president in recent memory. I mean Bill Clinton was a reasonable Republican president. He did nothing I can tell that was actually progressive. He sort of broke the welfare state. He did a bunch of other things that I consider stupid and Obama was in a straight jacket for eight years. The largest scandal in the Obama presidency is maybe the day he wears a light gray suit and the media goes crazy Fox and friends go nuts because he knew that if he stepped too far out of line or got angry ever he was going to get bounced and on any given day Trump does 10 things that are worse than that and remains in office. The double standard here, the hypocrisy is insane. It's unbelievable and it continues to this day in the Democratic primaries. You can see it at play in the primaries and how people are responding to the Democrats who are running for to replace Trump. Remember the Dean scream back in 2004-2005? Howard Dean screams to his supporters a little hoarse but he's like trying to charge them up and a couple days later he is right out of the campaign. That is somehow an outrageous thing that bounces him from from running for president. I never quite fully understood that and Trump you know with the pussy gate videotapes he's sitting there saying unspeakable things which for a couple of days dump his supporters like the conservative wing and evangelical Christians and everybody are like oh my god this guy's terrible we can't possibly support him a lot of them remain quiet and a couple days later everybody's back in line. This discipline, this ability to create message discipline and to keep everybody in line which is not just Trump but a combination of Trump and a whole bunch of other operatives who have seen that this is a winning game a winning hand this is really impressive and it's part of one of Trump's virtues. You see it in the acquittal in the Senate where only Mitt Romney voted on one of two counts to impeach and remove President Trump. Otherwise it was a straight part of the voting vote which then they used to say this was a partisan rigged trial by the Democrats which is really amazing because if you can maintain a cohesion on your party it does look pretty partisan because nobody crosses over. This did not happen in Watergate. This did not happen with Clinton's impeachment trial. Anyway this is the the funny world that we're in. Finally I'll say and I've said this elsewhere in the series that Trump has delivered for conservatives. Trump is a goldmine for conservatives with Supreme Court seats and maybe more on the way good health to Ruth Bader Ginsburg but also the federal bench and a series of deals that Trump is cutting that are moving the needle and shifting things around in a landscape that was seen as heartened and muddy and maybe a big quicksand pit which is now not a quicksand pit maybe it's more like a minefield but Trump's followers are good because change must be good.