the president who's ever said these things don't work. No, that's not true. They're citizens who say they don't work but certainly not Trump. And this is amazing.

All right. I would like to frame Trump's handling of the coronavirus this way. When you have a leader, leaders have two roles. I held up three fingers there when I said two but you know this one doesn't count. Two roles. One is to lead the public where they don't know they want to go. That's really where leaders get the most credit. If a leader can tell the public, all right it's going to be tough. We've got to go to war for example. It's going to be horrible but we've got to do it anyway. That's leadership. Getting the public to do something they didn't think they wanted to do but it's good for them. The other kind of leadership is giving the public what they want because it's legitimate, right? So the public wants — let me give you an example. The public wants freedom of speech. If the president simply didn't put his own opinion on it and just said all right everybody wants freedom of speech. I'm your leader. I'm going to go get you some freedom of speech. That's not really leadership in the other way where you're giving them something they don't want or don't know they want. You're giving them what they want.

What was the coronavirus? Was the coronavirus the first kind of leadership where the president was leading people to do something they don't want? Or was it more the follower kind of leadership where you say all right everybody's on the same page. This is what you want. I will simply deliver it to you. I think it was more the second part. There was a little bit of the first part. You know you got to social distance and we're gonna close the economy. So there were parts of that. But here's the part that I think nobody has talked about. And it goes like this. The public had a vote. It was never the president's decision. The president never had the power, never had the ability, probably never had the desire to override the citizens on this question. Because I think the citizens had enough information to make their own decisions. And the citizens said in effect — they didn't say it explicitly but in effect — yeah we're willing to risk a few hundred thousand lives to run the country a little bit more closer to a normal situation. Keep the economy strong. Keep our national defense strong. Protect the poor especially. Do what we can with the vulnerable people especially. But the citizens decide. The president didn't have a choice. If you think the president could have made the citizens respond much differently I would say that's a very unsupported assumption and doesn't track.

Imagine if you will a President Obama. All right that's a completely fair mental experiment. Imagine a President Obama and he told the country you've all got to wear your masks. What do the conservatives do? Do the conservatives say, oh President Obama says we have to wear masks. I'm in. Because the way he said it was very credible and he's a man of science. He respects science. So if President Obama says we conservatives and Republicans should wear masks, I'm in. I'm wearing a mask. No. In your wildest imagination you can't see President Obama getting more compliance from the public. Do you know why? Not his decision. It's not. Watch this. This is me not wearing a mask. If I want to I can walk outdoors and I can walk into a store without my mask. I'll get kicked out but I could do it. I have the power. President Obama can't — he couldn't have made me wear a mask if I didn't want to. He couldn't make me not meet with my friends if I wanted to. President Trump doesn't have that power either. So as soon as you imagine that the president was leading in that first way which is getting the public to do something that maybe they didn't want to do, you end up with the wrong answer. Because if he had been trying to do that he failed. I would agree with that. If he had been trying to make everybody wear a mask and trying to make everybody socially distance the way he was telling you were the experts, yeah that didn't happen. Was it ever possible? Was it? No. Because he didn't have the only vote. This was a situation where every one of you had a vote and you voted. You voted with your actions. And if you look around you see a lot of people who said you know I know that a few hundred thousand people are gonna die if I act this way and other people act this way. Yeah. I was just reading your comments. That's why I was pausing here for a moment. So whoever the president was they were going to get the same response from the public. The public was going to vote. Americans have voted. Americans have chosen freedom and growth and prosperity over absolute safety. Do you know why we chose that? Because we're Americans. There's nothing more American than that.

If you say to an American here's your deal. The only way you can keep the economy going is a few hundred thousand people are going to die. We don't know their names but we know it's going to happen. But it's the only way to keep this engine working. And this engine is what has made the world as good as it is. Do you want to break the thing that made everything work? I mean basically the whole rest of the world benefits from a strong United States. I feel that's a safe thing to say. So that's my take. The public voted. The president basically agreed with the public and we got exactly what we bought. If you go into a store and you say I'm gonna buy a loaf of bread. I've got my whatever bread costs. I don't know, four dollars? What is bread cost? I have no idea. I don't buy bread. But you give them four dollars for your loaf of bread and they give you a loaf of bread. What do you say? Do you say that was a failure? No. No. You had money. You wanted bread. You gave them money. They gave you bread. It's what you wanted. It's what they wanted. Everybody got what they wanted. Nobody failed. If the public of the United States said yeah I know it's going to cost us a couple hundred thousand lives and more and I'm still gonna go get that loaf of bread because you know what? I know what a loaf of bread costs. I know it's not free. I'm not asking for free bread. I'm American. All right. Americans don't ask for free bread. You know we know it costs something. We're gonna pay it. So Americans paid it. The president allowed the transaction. Let me say that that way.

All right. That's all I got for now. I will talk to you tomorrow. All right. Periscope is off. YouTube is still on. I like to hang around and just take some extra questions on YouTube. Somebody said Harris had less time than — or Pence had less time than Harris. I saw that but it's funny how it didn't seem like that, right? The impression of it was different than the actual math of it I think. Somebody says social media ruined politics. Yes I would say that the artificial intelligence ruined social media which ruined politics. Because the AI dete