u can put Trump in some situations not all of them. He's not perfect for every situation but there are some situations that only a Trump can solve. And he built himself into that person. And you could take a hundred really good politicians and put them in that same position. They would do nothing.

I'll take somebody I like. Let's take DeSantis. DeSantis I have a very high opinion of. Very solid citizen character, performance as a governor. Solid solid guy. Wouldn't mind to see him president someday. Wouldn't mind it at all. Could he solve this in one day? No no absolutely not. But Trump could. He's just one-off. There's only one of them. He's the only person who could solve a war in a day. So when he said that that didn't even seem a little bit like hyperbole to me. Now I don't think it's going to happen right. I'm betting against it but there's nothing that would stop it except you know if it's illegal then that's a good reason not to do it.

All right Kamala Harris has said that the rich people should pay their fair share of the corporations and the billionaires and that's her tax policy. Don't make me give you details. I just want people to pay their fair share. And if I said fair share enough, hey I've got some words you'd like to hear. Fair share fair share fair share. Now you can't beat that because there's no details to argue against.

So there's a trick I've taught you in persuasion. It's called entering the illusion. So rather than saying you dumb there's no such thing as a fair share of anything, don't do that. That would be a sexist and wrong. So here's the right way to do it without all that sexist bad stuff you don't want. You enter the illusion and you ask them to help you calculate fairness. And you say can you give us some details? I'd like to know what's fair. I'm a billionaire and I'd like to pay my fair share. So I did some work on this on X. Let me share this with you. And I said that I'm going to need a little help figuring out how to calculate it. So really just a calculation problem. I'm buying the illusion right? I'm accepting the illusion and I'm moving inside it. The illusion is that there's something called fair and that if you work a little harder you can figure out what that is. That's complete ridiculousness. But if you say that's complete ridiculousness people will look at you and say no it's not. No that's crazy. And they look at you and go oh that's what the billionaire selfish people say. And you say no really there's fairness. It's just like this weird subjective thing. You say there's no objective standard. There's not even any way to calculate such a thing. Yes it is right? So you can't get anywhere if you stay outside the illusion. Outside the illusion you have no weapons. You got to get inside it. Inside it says all right I accept. I accept your frame that there's something called fairness and we have not achieved it. So let's calculate it. Let's figure out how to figure that out from inside the frame.

So I said how would I do that? I said for example during my adult life I've paid about 10 times as much taxes as the average citizen because things have gone well. I made a lot of money in my life and I consume relatively little in public services. So how much will my taxes be cut and how much would you raise the taxes on the middle class to get me back to fair? Because I think you would agree that if I pay more than I consume well that's not fair. Oh is that not your definition of fairness? But that's fair. The fair is that you pay for what you use. Why would I pay for more than I use while somebody else is getting stuff and not paying? That's fair. And if you say that is fair say it out loud. Just tell me that's your standard. It's something else.

Or how about this? We look at the raw dollar amount without looking at who consumed what. So forget about, let's say we forget about the part of who used the public services. If you just do the dollar amount well here again I paid 10 times more than other people so I'm expecting a big tax cut and maybe raising the taxes substantially on the middle class to get to fairness. To get to fairness. Oh okay so we're not going to just count the dollar amount but there's still other ways to do this. There are lots of ways to calculate this. How about we just factor in hours worked so that the people who work the most hours are incentivized? Isn't that fair that the people who work the most would get a little tax break because they contributed the most? Now here I'm including you could be working the most as a CEO or you could be working the most as a garbage collector, a plumber. It doesn't matter what your job is. If you're putting in lots of hours maybe that should give you a tax cut. Well I worked seven days a week most of my life probably 60 hours a week on average so I'd be looking for a big tax cut because I'm one of those people who put in longer hours because you should make more money if you work longer hours right? Isn't that fair? The people who work harder get more money. I think we all agree with that. That's fair. So that would give me a big old tax cut.

Or we could go by percentages. Percentages would be good. If you don't want to go by raw dollar amounts let's figure out what's fair on percentages. Let's see I'm in California so we got a lot of state taxes. It's over 13%. Now and if you add my federal taxes to that my property taxes and my sales taxes I pay around 60% of my income in taxes. 60%. So that would be a lot more than the middle class. So again I would expect a big tax cut to get me back in the range of fairness which would be something under 50% probably. It could still be progressive by the way. I'm not arguing against progressive tax rates. You could still be progressive but you'd still have to give me a big big tax cut.

Or that's not the only way. So we've got the raw dollar, the hours worked, the percentages. Those would all give me a tax cut. But there's another way. We could tax the unrealized gains on assets. Now that's what Harris is recommending. The unrealized gains. So for example if you owned an asset, a farm say, and it had tripled in value she'll start taxing you on how much it went up in value which is a problem because the only way you'd be able to pay such a tax is by selling your farm or part of it. So that would be called not so much taxation. There's another word for that. What do you call it when you take from somebody something that they have and you've been told that they could keep it? That'd be called theft. Theft. The word is theft. That would be government theft of something you'd already paid taxes on, put into an investment form and then they told you you couldn't keep it. They're going to take some of it. Theft.

Now you could pursue that to give fairness and that would achieve fairness. I know this is going to surprise you. I do consider that fair. And what I mean by fair is I would get the out of this country. I'd move to El Salvador or somewhere that doesn't do that and I'd go get me some fairness. And then everybody who stayed and loved it they'd be living in the country they loved because it'd be all fair. But all the smart people who make some money would get the out of this losing country that's trying to steal our money and I'll go anywhere where to keep your paw off of what I worked my entire life to keep.

But the main point here is not which of these methods you pick. The main point is I'd like to get inside your illusion. Let's do a little calculating and let's show our work.

Meanwhile Mayor Adams, no relationship to me, in New York, he's being indicted for, it's a little murky to me just because I haven't looked at the details. It's not murky but to me it is. So I guess he accepted a bunch of business upgrade luxury travel stuff from some entity in Turkey at the same time he was being asked to help get some approvals of a building that the Turks wanted to build in New York City that had been held up by some kind of regulatory thing. And he did. So the news says he did intervene and I think it made a difference. It may have sped it up. Now should he go to jail for that? So he accepted luxury travel from some Turks who asked him for a political favor in return which allegedly he did. He did the favor. So that's a bribe right? No it isn't. No it isn't.

Now put me on the jury. Can you put me on the jury? Let me explain how this works. Telling an entity in New York City while you're the mayor that they should hurry up in their regulatory stuff because there's no reason it's been delayed, that's your job. That's your job. In fact I've done that. I've told you this story before. Years ago when I was in my 20s I had some issue with the government, an entity within the government. So I wrote a letter to my California senator. It was Pete Wilson at the time. And I said I've got a problem with this other government entity. They're holding something up. And they said we'll look into it. And then I said to myself well that's the end of that. They're definitely not going to look into it. And then they followed up and they said we looked into it and they actually got me what I wanted because when they looked into it it wasn't really reason for the delay. So the delay stopped and a whole bunch of people benefited because Senator Pete Wilson did a great job for a member of his state. I described a situation where he could just do his normal job for his constituents then he would do his normal job and we'd be happier and then he did his normal job and now we're happier.

So Turkey gives him some luxury accommodations. How much do I care? Not at all. Not even a little bit. If somebody who's a high-level person who could garner that kind of thing, fine. It doesn't bother me a bit. I wouldn't care if China paid for it or Putin. I'm happy he was comfortable. No problem. Now maybe there should have been some disclosure or something. I don't know. But I don't care about it. Now do I care that Turkey in return now that they had sort of a relationship they used their relationship? Is that illegal? Is it illegal to form a relationship and then use it for access? No no that's not illegal. And then they asked for something that would actually be the job of a mayor to make sure that something that's being held up in red tape get solved. So then he went and solved their building problem. Was that bad for New York City? Is it bad for New York City that a building gets built fast and accurately and then it gets filled with tenants who pay rent? No it's good for New York City. That's his job. His job is to make sure New York City runs.

Now I think there was a related part where some Turkish or other funders were doing some kind of fake grassroots donations to make it look like it wasn't one entity. Now that stuff just sounds illegal but I don't know the extent to which Mayor Adams was even involved with that. So that part I have some questions about. But the part where Turkey gives him some nice trips and then asks him to do his job and then he does his job and it's good for New York City and it's good for Turkey, that's a little bit too much for, I mean to me that looks like lawfare. It just looks like lawfare. And although we don't know this for sure it would suggest that maybe the real problem here is that he was anti or he wanted to be tougher on immigration and that was causing a problem for the administration so they lawfared him. Could be.

Well in the news Black Lives Matter of Greater New York got a little attention because they're very much opposed to Mayor Adams. Now they just say he's a bad mayor and they've got all kinds of complaints about him in general not just this. But who do you think was a representative of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York? Well it's our old friend Hawk Newsome. Hawk Newsome. Now if you don't follow the news closely you might confuse Hawk Newsome with Diddy. Completely different. Well as far as I know maybe he's been to a Diddy party maybe he hasn't. I don't know. But in general I'm going to assume that Hawk Newsome and Diddy are completely different concepts so don't get that confused with the story whatsoever.

So Hawk is a founder, co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York with his sister who was also with him who is the other co-founder. And they were against Mayor Adams despite the fact that it's Black Lives Matter and he's black. Now if you didn't know anything about let's say the background of the story you might accept it a little bit differently than I do because I got to work with Hawk Newsome back in the original BLM days 2020 probably. No when was it 2018 or something. I forget. But I think that Hawk got excommunicated from Black Lives Matter the national version. So I think he's got sort of his own little local thing. I'd be surprised if there are more than 10 people in his organization. I think it's under 10 people. But he's really good at getting attention and getting in front of the camera and making his point. But it's funny that Black Lives Matter kind of got disgraced and we don't hear about it much. And when they do come back in the news they're against the black guy. Now I'm not going to say that they don't have a point because I do not know the performance of Mayor Adams as mayor. So maybe they have really good points maybe they don't. I don't know one way or the other. But it's definitely not something coming from Black Lives Matter. It's coming from Hawk and you know maybe two or three people agreed with him in his organization. That's it. That's the whole story. It's Hawk, his sister and maybe two or three other people. National news.

All right anyway there's a new poll Emerson College that says that Harris is way ahead in New York state. Now everybody expected that but she's according to them she's pulling 54 to 40. That's a big difference. However just for some recreational fun there are 8 to 9 million people who live in New York City. Mayor Adams would be the most powerful political figure among that 8 or 9 million. And at least there was I think there was a 2 million difference of votes in New York state between Biden and Trump. Two million voters. So he could influence a population of 8 or 9 million. Of course they're not all voters and the old margin was only 2 million. It looks like it might be a bigger margin this time but it could be smaller because remember this is just one poll and we don't trust the polls.

So it does seem to me that, well let me speculate. How many of you think that Mayor Adams is a good negotiator? We don't know but what do you think? So he was a police chief and now he's a New York City mayor. Could you possibly do those jobs without being a tough negotiator just in general? Because he you know he's probably negotiated with everything from criminal people to every bureaucracy to his own political party. He's probably really good at negotiating right? Now imagine you're in a room with him during the time he was complaining the most about the migrant burden on the city. If he's talking to a Democrat who's stonewalling him and saying nope you're not going to get anything for your city. No we really really need it. The migrant thing is killing us. Nope you're not going to get a thing. Okay I don't think you understand. We need this. This is you're killing me politically. You're killing me and you're killing my city. Nope you're not going to get a thing. What would you do? You're