De-Escalation Of Conflict Language: Show Compassion And Empathy
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The truth is boring. That’s why no matter how hard you throw it to a person’s face, it just doesn’t work. Beyond telling the truth, people in the government and media need to learn the language of de-escalation. How? In this episode, host Bill Stierle with co-host Tom talk about empathy and compassion, and how adopting a quality of listening help you understand another person’s pain points, and communicate accordingly. Bill also discusses how President Donald Trump has successfully become a star in keeping conflicts tight and leading people far away from the truth. Hear Bill and Tom’s banter on techniques on how you can de-escalate The President and make him say ‘yes’ to you – something that his cabinet members should have learned before they slapped him with the truth.
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Bill, I’m excited to jump right in. We had such a great conversation about the four horsemen. We ended with how to escalate the words and that path to escalating conflict and left everybody hanging there. I’m excited to bring it all back and say, “Now that we whipped up trouble, how are we going to learn how to de-escalate?”
Tom, thank you again for doing this. It’s been a delight to be able to contribute to people to both talk about how to escalate and de-escalate conflict with the language that we use. You can use very specifics in order to do that. With that said, we have some problems in media and we have some problems in the government because the escalation and de-escalation make good ratings.
There’s a feel to get eyeballs in the direction of the conflict. If you need to keep conflict and keep conflict tight and keep attention to conflict, Donald Trump as a reality star, he’s really good at getting eyeballs moving in the direction.
The only challenge with that if you’re always hitting the bar and taking an energetic dope of anything from cocaine to heroin to any other drug that can get you hooked on that hit of conflict. Conflict works very much the same as gambling does and works very much the same as many drugs that cause that stimulate to take place. There’s nothing better for media and capitalism to get hooked on purchasing a product or service and paying attention to a product or service by grabbing a hold of a stimulant and then throwing at people and then taking it.
Like a lure with the fish, you’ve got to pull the lure at the right speed and you’ve got to jerk it. You’ve got to jiggle it, you’ve got to let it sink to the bottom and bring it to the top, reel it in faster and reel it in slower. The problem with media is that as soon as the truth is being spoken, dopamine gets dropped inside the human’s body and they start clicking away because they have to deal with a complex issue. That would cause a feeling of frustration to show up. That would cause irritation because it’s not easy to get done. It’s not a sound bite, though sound bite is like a jiggling lure. The purchasing of truth has to do with this constant stimulant that’s showing up in the environment. Whenever I could take a shot, I’m going to take it. That’s what’s happening and regrettably, it makes it very hard to deal with because you’ve got to come up with your own very interesting sound bite to counteract the other person’s sound bite.
Didn’t we talk a little bit about that escalates the conflict?
It’s going to escalate the conflict and escalate the ratings. It’s like CNN it’s going to become the most popular network ever. Their ratings were all very low because they kept reporting the truth. They kept staying on facts and information in an accurate way as a news agency. They had that focus. It’s like, “CNN lose their things because look at their ratings.” Their ratings are low because their facts are high, their truth is high and it’s boring a little bit.
It’s boring, but it’s also counterintuitive. I’m sure everyone at CNN and whoever’s the head of the news division or establishes their policy thinks that coming back at the president, the administration or anybody they interview who they think is moving further away from the truth is to “Throw the facts at them. Put them in their face. Pull the mirror up to them.” It doesn’t work.
It becomes, here’s a boring person that I don’t trust and here’s an exciting person that has got me addicted to following him and I’m going with the exciting person, even though he’s leading me off the cliff. He’s leading the brand damage to America. When you do this off enough and if you keep it light enough and it’s not all the time, this is why Donald Trump has and the Trump name has been licensed on different product properties because, “I remember that Donald Trump guy, he was on The Apprentice. You only had to see him every once in a while. You don’t have to see him that often.” In a government position where the government is designed for stability and infrastructure, to keep an eye on the bad guys and provide protection. You’ve got somebody from a reality show that is going to hype it every 30 minutes with a new slogan, so they come back after the commercial. It’s a little problematic because the person has to rely on guilt, criticism, punishment, blame and shame. When he does that, then all of a sudden those other people will have this because the rewards, there’s got to be a lot of winning. You’re going to get tired of winning.
“Evaluate what I’ve done.” This is the most it’s ever been, but we’re not going to check that, “I’m the most transparent president in history.” It’s a lure that people that are already on the hook would take again. He is the most transparent, but he’s not going to give them that documents. That doesn’t really count as transparency, does it? Their mind gets stuck between the punishment and the reward, between the criticism and the expectations, between the guilt and the evaluation. Their brain gets stuck between those different language narratives and he just plays the song as a part of it. It’s heartening.
It seems that this particular president who cares more about ratings, his own popularity than pretty much anything else is ideally suited to take advantage of the media and continue to perpetuate whatever narrative that he wants. It seems that other than his own cheerleading squad on Fox News, it was seeing the other news agencies are unable to help themselves but play into a dialogue that they want to help. They think it’s going to help shine some light on how far away from truth he is. It isn’t working.
Conflict works very much the same as gambling does and as many drugs that cause stimulation to take place.
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No, it doesn’t particularly work. It doesn’t matter how much you think you’re in the right and how much you project to the person the wrong. You don’t realize that you’re on the other end of the gerbil wheel. You don’t realize that I’m fighting for what’s right, but that’s not what’s needed. What’s needed is what is compassionate. What’s needed is what is grounded. What’s needed is a heart-based language, not a head based language. I don’t need a devil on one ear and an angel on the other. That’s not what’s needed. I needed something that’s more solid to get us back. This is why the Nancy Pelosi go on, “I want an intervention.” When she did that, he got forced into the, “She’s crazy.” It’s like, “No, she’s not crazy. She had a moment of compassion.” I pray for America. I pray for the president. There’s something wrong over there.
When she talked about his family or his cabinet, somebody needs to have an intervention. Do you think that also was a compassionate expression?
She was close to it. That it’s regrettably though it doesn’t land as much as that the president had some strong feelings about what I said about him. He didn’t like that truth around cover-up because that’s what resisting a subpoena is, it’s a cover-up. Let’s realize that the president could be furious about that because he’s doing the best he can in this role that he has. It’s not fully suited for him.
You did that much better than she did. I agree. It seemed to me like the intervention comment was a little bit of a backhanded label. The, “I prayed for the president,” I think landed as more compassionate and cause people to pause and think, “She’s praying for the president before at that point. All we can do is pray for things to get better. How bad are we?”
The empathy sentences is that she’s feeling helpless and hopeless about having a forward-moving governmental discussion with him on infrastructure and anything that they’re working on. The Congress is passing things. The Senate will be blocking those things.
They could say nothing is being done, but what they’re doing is they’re trained to do the people’s work, which is considering the best options to deliver stuff and not hunkering in on something that is not the best option or is not the best strategy to deal with the problem. If you want to deal with the problem, you use the best strategy and you put the right amount of money on that strategy. It’s proportional. You have an influx of people coming from other countries, South and Central America because of the political unrest and because of the economic collapse, that’s problematic. There’s a humanitarian peace. It’s not like Europe. Europe is going through their stuff because of the crisis that we created. We’re a part of creating in Syria, and how we’re dealing with that situation. As well as other Middle Eastern countries that are not stable because they don’t have stable governments that are working together to come up with a solution for the people that they’re supporting. That’s problematic, too.
I’m realizing that after this whole situation or that blew up with Nancy Pelosi saying the president is involved in a cover-up, him having a knee-jerk, negative reaction to that. That escalated the conflict. Eventually, she gets to the point where she says she prays for the president. That offers a little empathy and starts to de-escalate it, but the president didn’t like where things are going. With even what she said there about praying for him, I’m sure he didn’t know how to deal with it and then I’m realizing what happened next. The president tried to create more conflict by now authorizing the attorney general to declassify information and go after the people who started investigating him in the first place.
This creates a whole lot more conflict where he’s going to be in his happy place. I’m realizing why he did that then because he didn’t know how to deal with the very notion that Nancy Pelosi would say, “I pray for the president or he needs an intervention.” He was like, “I’ll show you an intervention. Here, take this.” It does show me that when you de-escalate, when you use empathy, he’s completely off his game. He does not know how to deal with that. How can people get to this place of de-escalation? Empathy we’ve talked about and I see that as a path but help us understand how we can de-escalate it. I’m sure it may have felt good in the moment for Nancy Pelosi to say, “The president is involved in a cover-up.” Is that going to help the situation? Probably not.
That’s the best sentence she had and that’s the best sentence that he had. Neither of them are able to see each other’s pain very well. When you start seeing the other person’s pain, it allows you to slow up a little bit. For example, if I were in the room, I like these kinds of scenarios.
I’d love it if you’re in the room.
If I’m in the room with three sentences. He would say yes to me three times. It might sound like this, “Mr. President, you feel furious because you don’t want to be seen as a person that does cover-ups, is that right?”
Yes.
“Mr. President, you’re feeling furious right now and you really want this investigation to stop, is that correct?”
Yes.
“You want to contribute, move your agenda forward and you’d like people to work with you, is that correct?”
Yes.
“It’s hard to do these two things at the same time. You’d just like to walk out right now and not do the infrastructure. You’d like to go on to do something different, is that what you like to do?”
Yes.
I’m de-escalating him. I’ve been in many large size rooms. If I walk into a room full of 250 screaming people at a city council meeting, somewhere between 17 and 23 minutes, I will have that room quiet, why is that? It’s adopting a quality of listening that most people as they’re speaking, they’re saying the same sentence over and over again. It’s hard to adopt this. It’s burned at the top of my head.
It’s a very simple sentence. Here it is, what’s coming out of their mouth are words, but the meaning underneath it is, “Please, help me understand my pain.” That’s what they’re saying. Furious is a lot of pain. Irritated is pain, exasperated and overwhelmed, those are all pain points. In mediation, it’s like the stock ticker tape or whatever the thing is that goes across with all the codes. That’s the same sentence. Put it on their forehead. “Please help me understand my pain.” The same with your kids.
The motion you’re doing with your head about this message on their forehead to me was a metaphor for the red hat, “Make America great again.” It really was. Right on their forehead. They’re wearing that hat and they must subconsciously be feeling the same thing.
“Please help me understand my pain.” That’s what makes America great again. The pain is the America they grew up with is not the America that we live in. There are three major elements that have changed. Number one is the ’40s, ’50s and ‘60s high-school purity.
You can come out and get a job. You can have your own house. You could take a vacation and it’s not going to break your bank. You have downtime at the end of the day to connect with your kids. We don’t have that. The middle-class dollar value has not went up. I watched it impact my dad in the ’90s where his dollars didn’t get them there anymore. When he was younger, his dollars easily got him there to raise eight kids on $25,000 a year. They were scrapping it. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t have a lot, but it was doable with shelter. It was doable with food. It was even doable with private school for all the kids. There was a lot of sacrifices. That is not doable.
What does it mean when you press down on the middle-class? You’re getting people to experience pain because they’ve got to work a second job. They’ve got to get longer. The college is not available for their kids. The upper mobility is not accessible as it was for me. It was accessible. I had a government loan that helped me through it. It took me twenty years to pay it back at $30 a month. I could do it. It didn’t kill me and it didn’t knock me out of a spending economy. It didn’t stop my upper mobility. These kids, that has changed. That’s level pain number one.
Pain number two has to do with the shifting of jobs and job values from stuff jobs that you could get a pretty good wage from service industry jobs where those jobs were a little bit more entry-level in the past. You could work at McDonald’s and it was a good entry-level job for six months or three months over the summer. There was a manager and he trained you to do some stuff and you flip burgers for a little while, but you weren’t going to stay there because you were going to college or doing the next job. People are squatting in there. They’re squatting at Starbucks, they’re squatting at service-level jobs. It’s not to say that I don’t appreciate my 20 to 35-year-old person working at Starbucks. I’m not sure if that’s the best way to spend our intellectual challenge to do that.
The service jobs have only increased more as the manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. That’s a big part of it. There’s this education available for everybody as long as you can pay for it. With that education, what kind of jobs are there for you to take when you get out? I do think that there’s been a shift that the idea that you can do at least as good as your parents did and probably do better than, I don’t think the whole people believe that anymore because I did think their experience is evidence to the contrary.
The, “Please helped me understand my pain,” is the level of complexity has also increased. I was at a Memorial Day party and I was sitting around the table with six adults and we’re all talking about kids and stuff like that. I was talking to them a little bit about this show. Around this table, there were a lot of middle-class folks working jobs in different industries. I said to everybody, “The truth is that all of us here at this table have more access to information at our fingertips than Ronald Reagan did. We have more information than the president did over 30 something years ago. It’s a little wacky but we do. The problem that we have is, how do we process and sort that? We don’t have a team of people to go through it and put the most important thing in front of us like he did. Here’s the most important thing that he needed to look at.” We don’t have that. We don’t have a team. We don’t have vetters. We don’t have people that have perspective about the information. There’s nobody with a real plan that’s doing it. We’re getting pounded from all directions. Make America great again means, “Please return me to the simplicity that I grew up with. Please return me to that because it’s too complex.”
Isn’t that a little bit putting blinders on a horse or it doesn’t really see what’s all around them though?
It’s not that people don’t want to move forward, learn and grow, but it’s too much.
They want the simpler time. I get it.
There’s a part that’s gone, “That’s interesting. That’s great.” Certain countries, I saw a big story about the 5G that China is developing in its advancements in technology. Literally, we’re way behind and they’re way ahead. If we want to make America great again, it’s different than making America number one again, which a lot of people do not want to believe that we’re not number one in a lot of things. If we were playing the game the way that America needs to play the game is going like, “Who’s doing things best? What are the best practices? Both parties get together, we’re doing that. How can we make it work and how can we make it work the American way? How can we add to it and make it better than what they do? We could see their problems. We know the problems that they have. How can we be number one because currently they’re number one? How do we do that? How about in school system, make it a three-day school week? Certain countries are getting better test scores because they’re doing that. Why are they doing that? A lot more free time, a lot more availability to people to discover their own passions and desires.
Let’s not make America great again. Let’s make America number one again. Here are the three categories we’re going to take on.
These are the ways that I’d like to make America great again. Not great again but I want to make American number one again. Here are the things we’d like to be number one in. We’re currently not number one in these things, but I really trust American ingenuity.”
Can you imagine if a democratic character would take this one on? It’s different. I don’t want to be great again. I could appreciate the simplicity of that and it is great only if you’re number one and not if your number 47th.
That would make certainly a lot of news. It would start getting a lot of people excited.
It’s similar to the Kennedy speech of, “We’re going to go to the moon within the decade, not because it’s hard.” We’re Americans, we can do hard things. We don’t have to make America great again and go to a barbecue at a football game. I love barbecues at football games, but I would like to do something hard before then so that I can agree to have some easy energy. I want some stability along the way. I don’t want to just gasp on my way and crawl into the weekend and being exhausted. The big thing is changing perspective on how we see the other.
The biggest thing is you’ve got to hold the point of view that the person on the other side is doing the best they can. This is the best they have. This is the best that Donald Trump has. This is the best that Nancy Pelosi has. This is the best Chuck Schumer has. This is the best they have. They don’t know how to engage in the process of both standing firm and have compassion for somebody else losing it. When somebody else is losing it and you pointing out somebody losing it rather than compassionately turning it to something that’s going to be productive. Do that rather than what you’re getting stuck with. That’s a big part of it. Realize that it’s like the many words that are spoken, the many actions that are taken.
If any politician were to get a hold of this one, hold the mindset that many times the person’s expression is a tragic and sometimes a suicidal way for somebody trying to get their need met. When a Fox’s person is interviewing a person, it’s a tragic, sometimes a suicidal way that they’re approaching it. Most politicians don’t know how to listen from that perspective as that person is going for a limited need or a very small truth perspective. They’re not going for a large truth perspective. They’re not dealing with the complexity of truth. They’re dealing with a small sliver of the pie. They’ll even cut videotape, which they did for Nancy Pelosi. They also did with Pete Buttigieg. They cut the little slice of what the person said, edited together to wedge a truth perspective.
We’re learning more about this technology with AI that can even take a still picture of a person who was not alive at a time when there were moving pictures. Somebody that lived prior to video and they can create a complete video and have them appear to say whatever they want. This is a very scary thing in terms of truly fake news and changing the narrative to that. Trying to say somebody says something they didn’t know. That’s going to be an even bigger issue going forward in terms of purchasing truths or trying to prevent it from being hijacked.
Samantha Bee did a good piece on that where she actually had the people responsible for that technology, put somebody else’s face over her face. I think it was Nicolas Cage’s face over her face. She was talking and it looked like this Nicolas Cage was coming out. It was like, “That’s weird and I’m unsettled. This is coming.” Not only we need to as Americans and as people of the world realize that these messages can be crafted in a way that is not going to necessarily be in alignment with truth, but it’s going to be a manufactured slice of perspective instead.
Given what we’ve been saying, won’t the damage really have been done when something like that comes out? What we’re saying is if you’re going to argue facts against something like that, it’s not going to be as effective.
You’ve got to step into it a little bit more. You can’t use the fact there. You can’t say, “I didn’t say that.” “Yes, you did.” “No, I didn’t.”
Notice I reframed it in an empathy way. I said, “I feel.” I’m owning it. “Doubtful and skeptical.” That is my truth or my expression. Let’s take a further look at how that image made it onto media like with Nancy Pelosi and Pete Buttigieg. The thing they needed to say next is something that was more compassionate for the strategy that the person used rather than defense of the illusion that they promoted. It might’ve sounded something, “I feel disheartened about the way that video of me was edited.”
This is Pete Buttigieg, “It seems like they’re really trying to validate something that I didn’t say. Yes, those are my words. Yes, it was edited from things I had said, but it was not in alignment with my beliefs or the meaning in context about what I was saying. It took me a little longer. That was a little bit more explanation than I would like. I would like it to be pithier and a little bit more edgy in a way that reclaims the truth back on my side rather than letting the dangling image of the way they cut it together.” I was literally shocked when I saw what they did to his footage. I went, “That was the worse bit of propaganda I think I’ve ever seen on American TV.” The way they cut it together about what he said.
I haven’t seen that one. I saw the one with Nancy Pelosi where they tried to make her sound like she’s slurring her speech when the point of adjusting hers was to make her seem old and incompetent or mentally deficient. I didn’t see Pete Buttigieg’s.
Pete Buttigieg’s was simple. He did a Fox News town hall.
I did see that but I didn’t see the doctored video.
When the question was asked, what about Thomas’ Monuments? The things that the Founding Fathers said and did. It was in light of what we know about their histories, probably some people would think about naming a street name after them. He didn’t say anything about removal. He said that people would think about it before they would say, “This is Thomas Jefferson Avenue, right through a black community.” That’s the extreme, it’s like, “From what we know about,” and what they did was cut it into, “Isn’t it a disgrace?” What he said about the Founding Fathers. He didn’t say anything like that. It was pretty bad.
If there’s any candidate on the trail, they can handle something like that with compassion. It is him. I’ve been very impressed and I found it very interesting because he’s actually tracking in the polls down pretty far. He’s not even number four or five the last one I saw. It’s still very early, but when the news broke about Donald Trump siding with the North Korean leader about disparaging comments over Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg is one of the people that the news media asked about that. He gave a quote and he gave a very compassionate response to it and made him look like the most adult person in the room.
He’s very smart. He can shift into compassion and empathy for others very quickly. He has tremendous amount of courage. He knows that people are going to take a shot at it. He’s gone like, “I’ve been there and done that. I’ve got a couple extra chips I need to have some toughness about.” It’s like, “I’ve got some different things about me that a lot of people don’t like. There are some different things about me but I’m a smart guy.” He’s a Rhodes scholar. It’s like, “I think I can do some compassionate empathy for where people are. I’ve got some tools.” That’s one thing I do appreciate about him, too. He does do more empathy before problem solve. He does demonstrate compassion before he tries to slug it out with some nutmeg, but he’s also gone like, “I’m not going to sit here and take it either. I won’t be used.” Empathy is not a nice language. It’s one of the most honest language.
It’s an honest language because you’re talking about what’s happening at the heart. You’re not getting stuck in head talk. It’s not nice. It’s the way to think about a good metaphor. A giraffe can kill a lion with one kick, one of the gentlest creatures on the planet. One of the ones with the biggest heart can kill a lion with one kick. They line up. Positioning the back of their body and the lion charges. Right to the forehead, the lion goes down and either gets stunned or gets killed. The rest of the lions go, “You may want to leave this creature alone, did you see what happened with Joe, the lion? He got tagged.” Empathy is like that. If somebody crosses me, I will bring a giraffe kick right to their forehead in a kept passionate way.
Does that mean that empathy not only de-escalates the situation but you can weaponize it?
That’s correct. It’s weaponized in a compassionate way, but it’s in service to the lion like, “I’m more dangerous than you think I am.” The lion doesn’t think that. That’s why the traction of, “I’ll pray for you. We pray for the president.” We need to get an intervention to take place, something to think. Look where compassion has pushed him into the corner where he needed to get his staff to only say the same thing. It was hard.
To say that he wasn’t having a temper tantrum in the room and storming out that. “He was very calm.” Does this seem like every movie you’ve ever seen about a dictator who needs everyone to love him? He needs to hear all this reinforcement that he’s the best. He’s infallible. It’s not him. It’s everybody else. This was so sad in a way to me to see that display. It was in the Oval Office.
It was during a press conference. That’s what empathy does, it puts the person in a place. I’ve taught this to attorneys. I said, “You can get in there and try to prove facts to the judge or to the jury. What’s going to make a difference is have moments that land where they start getting compassionate and empathy for your client.” It doesn’t matter what side that it’s on, if it’s the person that’s defense or the person bringing this suit. Compassion and empathy for what has happened to the person or what the person’s experiencing is the thing that makes the biggest difference.
It forces the other side into a narrative of blaming the other person and calling the other person names. Donald Trump naturally goes to name-calling because he doesn’t have the skill of empathy or consideration. He has the value of loyalty but loyalty at the cost of service to him. In service to him is when he says something he wants it done no matter what the cost is. All of these enterprises have been run that way. “I don’t care what the cost is. I want porcelain, marble sink inside this plane.” “Mr. Donald Trump, that will throw off the weight of the plane.” “We needed it to be luxury, so I wanted it in there.”
All of a sudden, you’ve got a plane that’s too heavy or tilts when it takes off. He’s not considering the full needs of it. “I want to have a steak company and we have a good contract with Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers is known for its high-end gadgets and let’s do the steaks with them because I want to be involved with higher-end purchasers. Trump Steaks belongs there.” “Mr. Donald Trump, I’m not sure if that’s a good fit. I’m not sure that people are going to buy steaks from a gadget store. The contract that we got with them is very short-term.”
In business, you absolutely can be a dictator to the extent that you can afford it financially and it’s entirely different from running a government. The government structure is not in alignment with his leadership style.
It is not in alignment with his leadership style. There are many business leaders that have bad days. The former owner of Uber, they have bad days and those days get amplified. When they do the stock price would fall and the stockholders go, “Can you recover?” The answer was no, they couldn’t recover a deal with that guy’s shenanigans. If it was a onetime thing, he would recover. Clearly, there had been a history of that noise. It’s like, “Please, take your money and go.”
We’ve talked about it I think at least once briefly, but you look at everybody who has ever told the president no or not told him exactly what he wanted to hear and his cabinet is gone. Those people that lined up, when Donald Trump said, “How was I in that meeting?” They learned from their predecessors. We can’t say we feel or we’re gone. We’re going to say what the president wants to hear.
Here’s something interesting, Tom. All those people didn’t have to go. If they would have used anywhere between one to three lines of empathy first before they told him no, all of them would still be on board.
If you’re Rex Tillerson and maybe he sabotaged himself by calling the president of moron and that came out. What would they say?
For him, it might’ve sounded something like, “Mr. President, I see the value in which you’re going for and you’d like me to hear the way to deal with the Russians is this way.” “Part of me feels a little doubtful and skeptical that we’re going to get him to go along with it. I think that we have three other options. Which one of these options you might like the best?”
You’d turn it around and make it his idea to choose an alternative.
That’s right, the same as the twelve-year-old. With kids, adults, even spouses, you’ve got to get them in the game. Even though you might have the best answer. It’s not the smartest person in the room. It’s not the Stable Genius that is there. You’ve got to get the collaboration and cooperation of others. That style of leadership is the one that makes profitable companies, which we’re finding out how much unprofitable his companies were. How he spent and throw money at stuff? I don’t care, let’s do it this way. He likes a gambler who would make money and get some money back.
Bill, let’s do one more of these because it helps me understand and hopefully the other readers, too. How to de-escalate conflict, but turn it around to something productive? Let’s take the Homeland Security Secretary who of course is in charge of the flow of people coming across the border, the national emergency the president declared and she got forced out clearly because she was understanding what could be done versus what the president wanted to do. Would you have a suggestion for what she could have said to him?
There are so many opportunities of things that she could’ve said and done to be able to get him to make it to be a win. He could’ve got a lot of wins down there. The problem with this narrow-minded thinking is, “I want it done this my way and I’m going to fail.
Then I’m going to try a new way because I’m listening to somebody else and that’s a person that likes me now and I’ll take that new way.” He takes the person that has the new way of doing things. Also, the ones that are left are very either myopic or submissive. I never thought I was going to use or hear the word sycophant or whatever it’s called, the enabler. Those words were going to be used over and over again. The problem is that most people don’t know what they mean or that there’s a definition, it’s like, “They’re calling us a name again.”
Instead of like, “I don’t know if you really took the time to learn that definition, you might as well use that tech pesky Google thing that we have now instead of a dictionary.” With her, the main thing is that we’ve got to balance, “Mr. President, you may want to message this so that we can balance how we care for the people that are there as well as protect the border. Please mix the care narrative in with protection of the border and you can still get the recognition and acknowledgment you’d like and get a greater win out of this for yourself.”
That bait that she could have put up there for him of getting a bigger win, you’d think he would have latched on to that?
Instead of, “Legally we can’t do that Mr. President because the courts have defied this.” “What do you mean?” “I know those courts.” The other thing that he’s not aware of is that courts, when they want to, they can move fast. He’s been able to stall judges and courts. His attorneys have been able to stall things of the past. He doesn’t realize that judges can make things go quicker. In government, we most certainly can make things go quicker, especially when the rule of law is settled and there’s some integrity, protection, respect and some foundational things, they’ll make it go quick. He and his attorneys had been stunned over this, going like, “The judge said no, the justice ordered it and gave me no recourse.” All of the attorneys who used to be able to bring on board could stall everybody else and drag it out. Usually, the other person he was against ran out of money.
He’d run the clock out of him.
In this case, the federal judges are going like, “No, that’s not the president. You guys are out.” If they’re Donald Trump’s attorney, they got to be surprised because they’re unaware about judges moving things faster. They have been able to stall it. It’s like a class-action suit. You can stall something like that for three, five, seven, ten, twelve years before you settle it and then it’s pennies on the dollar, and half the people are dead. They don’t have to pay it, they run the clock out on the poor people. Regrettably, we’re in a bit of a mess. The tools are available for people to use, yet regrettably, Tom, you and I are in the 10% of people that know this stuff.
That’s very charitable. Do you think 10% of people really know this stuff? I’m not sure how you feel about it but what I hope people know is there is a path to battle this situation that we’re in where truth is under attack every day.
All the leading candidates need to add this narrative to what they’re doing, whether it’s Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, all of those current front runners. They need to add a narrative of strength with compassion, not nicey your poor heart stuff or I’ll pray for you is not as strong compassionate narrative. When they do and added with the narrative that they’re using, they’ll get there. Their points will move up. They’ll start to gain their points. Once you’re there in that space and using a narrative and you’re able to flip some of these very solid things, it’s not “Make America great again.” It’s, “Please help me understand my pain.” They don’t even understand how their pain is coming from those three areas that I described. They don’t understand it.
They know they’re in pain. The politicians are great at explaining it. They’ve been left behind. Their jobs have been outsourced. That’s not understanding a person’s pain. That’s explaining the solution or the problem, and you have the answer about why they’re in pain.
Explaining it isn’t going to get them where they need to go. I feel good. That was great. I really enjoyed that. I hope that our audience did, too. It was quite illuminating.
Thanks, Tom. This has been great. It’s a good discussion.
Thanks. I’m excited for the next one. We’ll look forward to that.
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