Episode 2134 Scott Adams: Trump Gets Indicted & Takes Pence Out Of The Race, UFOs, Cuba & China
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 22 minutes
Words per Minute
149.01106
Summary
Trump has been charged with 7 counts, including espionage and not cooperating with the Department of Justice, and could be facing up to life in prison. What does this mean for the future of the Trump administration? And what will the other candidates do about it?
Transcript
00:00:00.800
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
00:00:05.780
Well, maybe. We don't know about these UFOs yet, but I think this is the highlight of civilization.
00:00:14.740
But if you'd like to take it up to another dimension, well, all you need is maybe a CERN collider.
00:00:24.200
But you could also use a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen, jug or flask.
00:00:31.720
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine the other day.
00:00:55.700
So, I don't know if you were checking the news, but...
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Turns out, ex-President Trump has been indicted.
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Is this some kind of weird groundhog day situation?
00:01:16.180
I just feel like every, I don't know, six weeks I'm here.
00:01:19.780
I know, but this is the, this is the one, this is the one that gets him.
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All right, so as you know, the indictments are coming down.
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There are going to be seven counts, including espionage and not cooperating with the Department of Justice, I guess.
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But it looks like he's looking at maybe life in prison.
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Disgusted, hunted, helpless, BS, lawfare, rigged, angry, irritated, angry.
00:02:21.280
I'm worried that they wore you down, or they wore all of us down.
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And that the anger that you should be feeling about this, you all already used up in the prior indictments.
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It's like, oh, and then you go away, and it's like, oh, but it feels like a repeat now.
00:02:39.640
I found that I couldn't generate the same amount of anger I generated with the last indictment.
00:02:49.760
And it has nothing to do whether he did or did not do something illegal.
00:02:56.360
It has only to do with the fact that it's the, I don't know, third, fourth, tenth time he's been in great legal jeopardy.
00:03:04.300
If you count the impeachments plus the legal issues, I just feel like I'm worn out.
00:03:13.280
Now, that's a pretty good strategy for the Dems,
00:03:16.740
because I think, I worry that they've exhausted your outrage.
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You know, once you're out of outrage, because there's so much to be outraged about,
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It just seems like there's so much that I'm just, I'm just empty.
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Number one, how the other candidates treat this will make a big difference to the outcomes.
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Specifically, if it turns out that Trump has taken a left with people who talked about it.
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And if they talked about it wrong, they are dead.
00:04:10.720
So, let me give you an idea of what the three major candidates said, Republican candidates.
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And this, by the way, is an excellent, excellent answer.
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Why so zealous in pursuing Trump, yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?
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The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias, and weaponization once and for all.
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Because he didn't say Trump is good or Trump is bad or Trump should be anything.
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He just said that the Democrats are weaponizing it.
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So, if Trump went down and DeSantis was your choice, you know, if you're a Republican, he ended up to be your choice, would you be happy with that response?
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Did DeSantis say he would pardon some of the J6ers, and would that include Trump?
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Did DeSantis say he would, he did say he would pardon Trump?
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So, I would say DeSantis is perfectly clean on this question.
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Just on this question, he's perfectly clean, right?
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He will support the Republican nominee no matter who it is.
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And then, when asked, does that include Trump, he said, well, he won't be the nominee.
00:06:01.340
And then he said he would not pardon Trump, or I think anybody else.
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How do you feel about no pardons for January 6th?
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You know, I think his performance as vice president was tremendous.
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He does not get even a reasonable consideration from that point of view.
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Now, his is kind of lengthy, but it's also very good.
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So, I'm going to read the whole thing, if you don't mind.
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Another for peaceful protesters on January 6th.
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I never thought we'd see the day when the U.S. president deputizes the DOJ to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election.
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Obama shamefully tried to deputize the FBI to infiltrate Trump's 2016 campaign, but they're leaving nothing to chance this time around.
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The federal police state is outright arresting Trump.
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We cannot devolve into a banana republic where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents.
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It's hypocritical for the DOJ to selectively prosecute Trump, but not Biden.
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Pretty much every one of you agrees with that, I'm sure.
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There are also serious legal questions about the president's power to declassify documents and the potential illegality of the overclassification of federal documents in the first place.
00:08:05.440
That's for the courts to decide, but we the people decide who governs the nation.
00:08:14.480
It would be much easier for me to win this election if Trump were in the race.
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Are you allowed to stand for principle over politics?
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So I think he's telling you the absolute truth.
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He says, I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20th, 2025, and to restore the rule of law in our country.
00:09:02.020
I commit to pardon Trump promptly on January 20th, 2025.
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Now, how do you like his answer compared to DeSantis?
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Who do you think did it better, DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy?
00:09:23.980
Yeah, but he was also super direct about the pardon.
00:09:32.220
Now, here's what I like about his take on this.
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You know, if he became president, and it turns out that the charges were way worse than anybody imagined, he could change his mind.
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I mean, but he'd have to have the facts on his side, right?
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If the facts were not on his side, then changing his mind would be a pretty bad idea.
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If it turns out there's something we don't know, and it changes how you feel about it, he could change his mind.
00:10:03.640
But at the moment, with what we do know, and his position, which I agree with, on the weaponization of the Department of Justice, this is a strong statement.
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Does this, everybody's been saying, oh, this is the one you've got to worry about.
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You know, the bill bars, the people who actually know what they're talking about.
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When it comes to some of this legal stuff, I don't trust my judgment.
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But I see a bunch of people who do have the knowledge and the background and the judgment saying this is the one.
00:11:14.720
Do you think that there's anything about what he did that would sound to your mind, now this is not the, I'm not talking about the legal technical definition of espionage.
00:11:25.400
He may, in fact, have tripped over some technical definition.
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But in your mind, does espionage sound anything like what he's accused of doing?
00:11:38.920
At the very worst, he was playing fast and loose with some confidential information.
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Now, so there's some details of the story we'll talk about.
00:11:55.400
So, I think the most interesting part of the story is that there's an audio recording of him saying something along the lines of Mark Milley, General Milley, was blaming Trump for wanting to attack Iran, allegedly.
00:12:14.280
That was Mark Milley himself who drew up the attack plans.
00:12:18.800
So, he's basically countering Milley in this audio.
00:12:22.320
And he seems to be at least rustling papers and referring to something as if he has in his hand, maybe something he's showing to people, in which is something about an attack plan for Iran.
00:12:36.800
Now, how would you feel if there was a secret attack plan for Iran and Trump had removed it and potentially somebody could see the actual attack plan for Iran?
00:13:06.120
You'd be okay if the president allowed that into the wrong hands.
00:13:11.400
I mean, just put it in a risky situation by having it not as secure.
00:13:19.840
Well, we don't know if it was in the wrong hands.
00:13:21.480
No, we're only talking about the risk of it getting in the wrong hands.
00:13:24.060
But he was clearly talking to some people who did not have security clearance.
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I mean, if the audio is correct, and we don't know if it is, but, all right.
00:13:36.720
So, we don't know if anything about that's true.
00:13:39.940
If it were true, I would be a little concerned about it.
00:13:43.500
Unless it's so generic that it doesn't mean anything.
00:13:47.720
Because you can imagine it being super generic.
00:13:50.460
It's like, well, we would start with an aerial bombardment.
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Obviously, they'd start with an aerial bombardment.
00:14:03.300
And then it would be, we would work carefully with our allies in Israel.
00:14:09.620
Obviously, they're going to work carefully with our allies in Israel.
00:14:15.500
Do you think it really said, here's the beach we're going to land on?
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Do you think he had a document that said, here's the beach.
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This is where we're going to have our beachhead.
00:14:26.260
Like, something that really would make a difference.
00:14:35.940
That said something along the line of, we'd start with an aerial bombardment.
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We'd have to take out their anti-aircraft first.
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My guess is it's the world's most generic battle plan.
00:15:02.980
But wouldn't you feel different, or differently, if you knew that the plan was just a bunch of generic BS?
00:15:19.900
I have a hard time believing he would have taken that out of the office and waved it around if it really was the secret stuff.
00:15:26.900
I mean, I'm sure it was classified, but it just feels like it would be generic.
00:15:35.940
What kind of document does the president get shown in the first place?
00:15:39.760
Do you think the military comes in with a 25-page detailed document of the battle plan and hands it to a president?
00:15:47.180
Or do they summarize it in one page, and it's just so generic by the time it's summarized that there's just no details there?
00:15:54.680
If I were the military, I would never give the president those details.
00:16:00.440
Because it would increase the number of people who saw them.
00:16:05.340
I would simply keep the detailed plans into the smallest, smallest group of people,
00:16:11.700
and I would just tell the president that you had a plan.
00:16:31.440
If Trump wasn't reading the briefings, how much of a document is he going to read?
00:16:40.820
I guess there was some rustling of papers, so it might have been more than one page.
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The news will try to convince you that it's really some good stuff in there, but we don't know, even if it exists.
00:16:56.020
I would say if that document is real, and they can determine it ever existed, correct me if I'm wrong.
00:17:02.940
One, every document that goes into the Oval Office is digitized, yes or no?
00:17:11.860
Every document that enters the Oval Office is digitized and kept forever, independent of the piece of paper.
00:17:18.000
So in theory, in theory, they should be able to do a global search, look for Rand, look for Mark Milley as the author, look for the president as the recipient.
00:17:35.300
There's no way that was only on a piece of paper.
00:17:43.280
So you find out what it was, and then you ask him to produce that document, and if he can't, or if he does it now, which would be almost as damning,
00:17:53.840
that would suggest that he really knew he had something that was confidential and that he really was trying to hide it, which would really be a problem.
00:18:10.040
Well, what kind of a fucked up comment is that?
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Ben Shapiro is literally, like, isn't he a lawyer?
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So is that some kind of insightful comment, that a lawyer has a little better insight on a legal question?
00:18:37.820
And then we have some anti-Semitic stuff, because, of course.
00:18:44.100
Can I just ask you once as clearly as possible?
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I don't care what you think, but don't do the anti-Semitic stuff in the chats.
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Go off and have your own little fucking bigoted thoughts.
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You can do that, but don't put it in this forum.
00:19:13.400
I don't think that Republicans are going to care what he did or did not do.
00:19:21.420
You know, the ones who go on TV will say, oh, the law is the law, nobody's above the law.
00:19:25.780
I feel like that's the way you should say after every time somebody says it, because it's so boring that the next time somebody goes on a TV show and says, nobody is above the law.
00:19:39.900
That when you do an impression of them, they should go like this, nobody's above the law.
00:19:46.760
Because it's just so fucking stupid, it bothers me.
00:20:03.600
Are you talking to somebody who thinks that the law should be different for different citizens?
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The only thing about Trump is whether he's being treated below the law.
00:20:16.680
If they start saying nobody is below the law, that would fit perfectly and also be a new thought.
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This is only about somebody being treated below the law.
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If you let this story be about above the law, who's above the law?
00:20:52.200
And if anybody who ever says, he's not above the law.
00:20:58.120
I would say that the allegations against President Trump seem pretty serious.
00:21:21.120
Like, oh, maybe nothing bad happened, but potentially it could have.
00:21:26.240
So you can't let people get away with stuff, because the next time maybe something would happen that's bad.
00:21:31.400
You don't want to set a precedent of not prosecuting people for putting your secrets at risk.
00:21:37.220
On the other hand, it's going to look like a weaponized Department of Justice.
00:21:45.320
Given that DeSantis and Vivek Ramoswamy and Trump himself have all decided that the weaponized Department of Justice should be the biggest issue.
00:22:00.600
I feel like everything they do to Trump, they're doing to me.
00:22:10.260
Because, you know, I have a public profile and I have my own troubles.
00:22:16.320
But I feel like whatever they do to him, they're doing to me.
00:22:34.140
I've never had a feeling where the politician was a proxy for me as a citizen.
00:22:43.460
Can you think of any time that's ever happened where the candidate became a proxy for you?
00:22:54.340
I just don't know that other people could have done that.
00:22:58.280
But it takes a really unique personality to make you feel him, especially after all he's done.
00:23:10.700
That the love-hate relationship with Trump bonds people to him in a way that I don't think ordinary political observers understand.
00:23:29.160
And part of the way that he addicts you to him is by disappointing you.
00:23:39.760
If he didn't disappoint you in a fairly, you know, hard-to-predict way, but you know it's coming, you just don't know how and when,
00:23:46.680
you wouldn't be as in love with him if, in fact, that describes how you feel.
00:23:54.660
There's something about the fact he does, he'll do six things that you love, you just love.
00:24:03.760
And then he'll do one thing and you're like, holy cow, what?
00:24:09.480
But then he does six more things that makes you love him.
00:24:11.640
And you're like, ugh, ugh, ugh, why does he keep doing this to me?
00:24:19.300
So I do believe that there's a, you know, the Democrats call it a cult.
00:24:28.980
Like, I get what they're saying, and that word is not so wrong that I would mock them for it.
00:24:48.920
It's not even about, you know, the community or the other Republicans or anything else.
00:24:55.680
Now, the reason I talk like this is that I have exactly the same feeling.
00:25:04.000
Like, you know, I've met him, so you have a different feeling when you've met somebody.
00:25:13.160
So, I mean, I get just jacked back and forth like crazy.
00:25:17.280
You know, on some level, I would love to have a Trump-free existence.
00:25:22.280
My life would probably be better if I didn't have to deal with it and, you know, have to explain it and have to be associated with it so more people hate me than already do.
00:25:36.460
But, on the other hand, oh, my God, does he deserve to win.
00:25:46.400
There's some sort of karmic justice that I feel just hanging over me like a weight.
00:25:56.960
It just feels like almost an external force that's going to set this right by putting him back in office.
00:26:05.460
But I've got to admit, this legal jeopardy does look pretty serious.
00:26:10.220
If I had to rank it on a scale of 1 to 10 for seriousness, it's at least an 8.
00:26:30.720
All right, well, I'm going to wait for Dershowitz and then alter my opinion.
00:26:38.560
If Dershowitz disagrees with me on, let's say, a legal issue,
00:26:43.660
I will immediately alter my opinion to match his.
00:26:50.220
Well, I'm sure he's been wrong about something.
00:26:52.280
But he's, you know, far more likely to be right about this than anybody else.
00:26:56.120
And the reason he's far more likely to be right
00:26:58.500
is that Dershowitz and also Turley are two people that you can depend on
00:27:18.640
when they give an opinion about a political figure.
00:27:39.740
Do you think that this indictment will guarantee Trump wins
00:27:58.700
I don't know what that's going to do to my brain.
00:28:04.360
Because part of me thinks he's never going to be taken down
00:28:14.160
I think I would be done with the United States.
00:28:32.000
And I believe that one of the purposes that I can serve,
00:28:47.380
do better than others in being independent thinkers
00:28:55.340
And, you know, yeah, Sernovich, he's an internet dad.
00:28:58.540
I don't believe he's just politically motivated.
00:29:00.680
I think he's looking for what makes sense, what works.
00:29:21.360
And I'd like to make sure that the Democrats are aware
00:29:38.020
But whatever would happen would be fairly extreme.
00:29:44.960
I do think people would die if he gets indicted and goes to jail.
00:30:05.000
I think taking down Trump is an existential threat to the republic.
00:30:13.700
But I think it's a solid 10% risk to end the republic if they jail.
00:30:25.160
but if they're willing to take a 10% risk to end the republic,
00:30:44.780
so they don't have a result before the election.
00:30:48.260
I believe that there will not be a court result before the election.
00:30:58.360
The last thing the Democrats want is a legal result before the election.
00:31:07.440
It doesn't matter what the result is, they lose.
00:31:13.800
half the country is going to flip the fuck out.
00:31:23.500
Nobody's going to think that was a real election.
00:31:26.740
Nobody is going to treat whoever gets elected in that scenario
00:31:32.280
I would not consider whoever wins to be a legitimate president
00:31:41.120
because that's a different situation where you're replacing like with like.
00:31:44.740
But if the Democrats win because they figured out how to jail Trump at the last minute,
00:31:59.120
But I don't think they're going to play it that way.
00:32:01.200
I think they want to put the clout over him until he gets elected.
00:32:15.580
they would have to delay the legal process for another four years
00:32:18.540
because they don't like to prosecute sitting presidents.
00:32:23.820
I think the Democrats, through their surrogates,
00:32:40.820
half the country, well, 40% of the country is just going to flip out.
00:32:54.160
and I thought it was outrageous and inappropriate,
00:33:02.720
that's when I would lose every bit of trust and love for my government,
00:33:10.280
In fact, if the country allowed that to happen,
00:33:15.920
I would lose all respect for our country if we let that happen.
00:33:30.740
and almost all of you think the UFO story is BS.
00:33:33.320
But I love the fact that there are so many credible people who are saying it's credible.
00:33:43.600
The only thing that fits all of the facts and evidence,
00:33:48.080
because the whistleblower story has some weird holes in it,
00:33:56.740
All the UFOs are crashing in the United States,
00:34:11.820
Nobody's, no citizen took a picture and put it on the Internet.
00:34:17.900
You know, this story doesn't hold together if you do the really test.
00:34:22.980
Every single time, the government got there first.
00:34:26.960
Did they all crash next to a U.S. military base?
00:34:31.600
How did all of them only get captured by the military?
00:34:45.380
I mean, I'll always be open to recreational belief,
00:34:53.380
But here's what I think is the most likely explanation.
00:34:58.080
That the U.S. is starting this rumor as disinformation
00:35:21.980
China and Russia are never going to believe that.
00:35:27.440
There are members of our own government who believe it.
00:35:30.400
You don't think that there are members of the...
00:35:32.120
You don't think there are members of our own military
00:35:39.800
you think not one of them would think that's true.
00:35:52.760
There's some high-end members of our government
00:36:03.100
and we're taking them apart to learn their secrets.
00:36:16.560
You know, it doesn't mean that Putin himself believes it
00:37:29.720
Suppose people actually told him these stories,