Truth and the Last Days of the Trump Presidency

Whether Donald Trump concedes to defeat or not, the writing on the wall says that he is not going to be in the White House come January 21^st, 2021. In fact, things are starting to happen right now that signal the end of the Trump era. What is Trump’s team doing in the last part of their performance? What becomes of the Trump voter who has become so heavily-invested in him? Bill Stierle and Tom put themselves in the shoes of this 80 million strong cohort for a while to see things from their perspective as Trump lives out the last few weeks in what he passes off as a presidency.

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Bill, we are in a different place than we have been in a long time in this country. It’s uncharted territory with what’s happening to the truth here in the last days of Donald Trump’s presidency.

There are some very different things going on. We’re now at the point where he will probably never concede. President Donald Trump at least understands the writing on the wall that he’s not going to be in the White House on January 21st, 2021. The transition has now started in earnest from a government funding and acknowledgment perspective with the General Services Administration. They finally came out and wrote a letter that the transition is going to happen. The money is allowed and the vetting by the government of administration staffers and cabinet people, nominees can happen. Things are starting to happen now. I’m curious, what’s going to happen next. You’ve got almost 80 million people that voted for Joe Biden. Let’s talk about some of those realities. Can we put ourselves in the shoes of Donald Trump voters who were so heavily invested because there’s a lot of them?

The big thing is we’re at a moment of time that’s very similar to the quickening of an announcer’s voice at a gymnastics meet when they’re on the balance beam and they’re going to do their dismount. The announcers know that it’s coming. The audience knows the dismount is coming. There’s a difficulty to make sure that they stick the dismount. They’re wondering if the dismount is going to be wobbly or not because that’s one place that most people can see that votes can be taken off or points can be taken off by not sticking the dismount. There’s the anticipation of, “I wonder if it’s going to take place or not. I’m wondering if she or he is going to make the dismount.”

As we often say, is he or she going to stick the landing?

All of this energy, the resistance, and what are the different moves that Donald Trump and his team are doing in the last part of their performance. I didn’t even call it a presidency. I called it a performance. That’s the last part of the performance. They’re sticking the landing somehow. The rest of us as an audience member, it is forcing us into the stand. Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his team are already sitting on the bench on the court and waiting to go on and play the game. They’re going like, “He’s not getting off the court. Why don’t we get on the court and start playing because he’s dragging this thing out? We’re not going to sit here and watch this. We have work to do. We need to go out there, get off the bench, and do this.”



The anxiousness, nervousness, worry, and scare that people feel is, what is he going to say or do at the end? The people that don’t want him to leave the court are in the place of, “Don’t go. You told us that there were fraudulent votes. Why are you leaving when you told us there were fraudulent votes?” “You have to leave because the,” and then just fill in whatever thing. The deep state and the Democrats won’t let you. The Republicans around you are too weak to stand up to the Democrats. They’re not looking at the 79,000,819 votes at this time and counting for Joe Biden versus the 73,000,879 votes for Donald Trump.

That’s over six million vote differential.

Here’s an important marketing propaganda piece. If the votes would have been three million over, the way Hillary Clinton was three million over, it would have been a dog fight for the next 40 days because the propaganda message was accurate. A propaganda message becomes a true message because it’s already planted as the seed. Because it’s double the amount, he’s on the wobbly ground now. How did they get six million more? How did they get three million more than the other three million that used to call fraudulent? How did they do that in different states? It’s not congruent. The propaganda message is sour.

He always said that he didn’t lose the popular vote because there were 3 to 4 million fraudulent votes cast.

If he would have started that, it’s like, “I would’ve won much more. There were over six million votes.” If he would’ve started that message in 2016, he would be sitting in this cupboard seat and we would have a firestorm in front of us because people’s belief tends to lean towards a repetitive message. You say so much about Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7 Up, I’m doing all the major soda companies so I could cover my bases. If you keep the messages putting forward and you put the picture of the bears for Coca-Cola and the imagery for Pepsi on Sunday football and stuff like that.

Each of them is trying to nudge its brand into a person’s purchasing moment. That’s what they’re doing. This is another brilliant Donald Trump branding, marketing, selling person doing the same thing. I wish that there was a little bit more integrity or effectiveness in his presidency. The obstacles were not in the way, the way he was talking about then being in the way because nobody started the counter-messaging on COVID. If he was pro-COVID and pro-protection which he is not because he doesn’t know how to sell a Band-Aid.

He’ll sell sizzle but he can’t sell something to fix something. This is why it’s going to be difficult and there’s going to be a gradual shifting that’s going to happen in the last days of the Donald Trump presidency because there’s the predictability that’s going to show up. There’s a certain set of needs that are going to take place between here and January 20th. He’s going to be meeting several needs. You mentioned the pardon parade. Who the heck is he going to pardon? I thought it was the funniest thing ever. How is he going to position the pardoning? When is he going to do them? He’s got 30-plus days to do those.

If I remember my history correctly, a president will sign a whole bunch of pardons on his last day in the office or sometimes the very morning before the inauguration, if not the day before because a lot of times, they end up being quite controversial. He doesn’t want to hear or deal with it. He’s on his way out, he signs pardons and it’s done. Nobody can do anything about it. I honestly expect Donald Trump to be a bit more brazen and unapologetic about it because that’s his style. My expectation is he’s going to pardon all the people that were loyal to him that got in trouble like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone who he committed his sentence.

He’ll probably pardon him just to erase his conviction. He might pardon Paul Manafort. Somebody who even is already serving time, people who don’t get pardoned, or somebody like Michael Cohen who turned on him. He was loyal and went to jail because of it. He turned on him later. Donald Trump is like, “You’re dead to me.” This is my feelings on it. There’s no evidence behind this. That’s why I called it a pardon parade. I expect him to abuse that power of the pardon.

It’s interesting that you use the word abuse there because it’s not necessarily about I am going to right a wrong. It’s my version of justice versus justice’s version of justice. It was not just because these people were being falsely accused and overcharged that were made up, or not true, or not that big of a deal. One of the comedian shows did a list from A to Z of all of the things that Donald Trump has done that were illegal, all the letters in the alphabet. We could do an entire episode on Purchasing Truth which is you have all these things on this list that media and the court system would call “wrong” or legally chargeable.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where do they sit? That’s where truth is. It’s a process, it’s not necessarily a result. If we want to Twitter quote, “Truth is a process of finding out where truth is.” Scientists know, “I can’t give you the truth about the vaccine because I don’t know. We’re finding the truth about this and we are practicing medicine.” It doesn’t mean they’re any good at it. It just means they’re practicing it. Everybody gets their chance to practice. If you do not have a degree or you don’t have any skill in medicine, then your opinion would be low on the practice scale.

You’re like a T-ball player because you can’t do a scientific method. You can’t perform a hypothesis to prove it’s wrong or right, and then redo it in order to prove it. There are people, including us, that says, “I know something.” “Do you have any skill at it?” “I’ve been doing high conflict mediation for many years. I’ve got some skill at this.” “That won’t work with my mother-in-law. That won’t reduce the conflict.” I’m going like, “I have experienced here that this will work.” You have to practice it. You can’t use it once and then think whatever. You’ve got to be a part of it. To pay attention and get used to the process of truth-telling and what is the version of justice that we want to assess.

Some of the things that Donald Trump said and did over his presidency were a level-ten bad. Some of the things that he said and did were a level-two bad, and some were level-five good. They helped certain people in certain situations. They were five. They weren’t great for the greater good but they were good for the individual good. You can’t say they were bad because they met a need for certain groups of people that benefited. That’s why I love doing this show with you, Tom because it gives us an opportunity to explore and spread out what truth is and get some perspective on this.

It’s been an experience for me over years of working with you to realize that, unfortunately, what became a meme that Rudy Giuliani said that truth isn’t the truth. While on its face it seems absurd, there’s some truth to that. Bill, what can we expect or what should we be looking for in the remaining days of the Donald Trump presidency? I wonder if we can look at some of the needs that the Donald Trump loyalists who are now very disappointed, to put it mildly, that their guy is not going to be in the White House for another four years. What do they need? It’s important not to lose sight of that and not for us to just be like, “We won, you lost. Deal with it.”



Even Bill Maher said on his show, “We’re in a relationship with each other.” He talked about a mother whose daughter was caught up in a cult. The way the mother got the daughter out of it was to keep reminding the daughter of the goodness inside of her. It’s not to go head-to-head with the cult leader but remind them, “We’re in this together. I’m here for you always.” Gradually, the shininess of the cult leader started going away. He and his voters will be fighting and they’re still yearning for their needs to be met.

I don’t remember where he was from.

Here is this group of people that we need to be worried, scared, and fearful about it. When they are in charge, they are going to do bad things. We’ve rather tolerate the person that’s in front of us that at least makes us feel better because he is standing for the identity that we crave as Americans, that we’re number one when measurably we’re not. We’re not number one in a lot of different things which is very unsettling. You’ve got to work at being number one and make a commitment towards being number one.

You can also be indifferent to something or turn a blind eye to it and become number one. We’re number one in COVID deaths and COVID infections. That’s not the number one we want. That’s nothing to be proud of.

I feel so sad about all the deaths of people dying in disbelief that their last breath was a hoax. Their last conscious thought was, “I’m helpless and hopeless.” That’s the way many people are going to feel at the end of this. Tom, has there been a time when you have ever bought something and somewhere between the excitement of buying and getting it, within 1 or 2 months, the things started falling apart? It wasn’t quite right. The color was off. There was so much emptiness at the end of it were at the beginning there was so much excitement about it.

That’s happened to me.

There’s a list of things that I can immediately think of them. I’m thinking of my mom and the Ford Fairmont because the car fell apart. It was planned obsolescence but in two years, the whole thing was going to fall apart. That was a little too much obsolescence there so nobody would buy it again. That’s what’s going to happen to 73 million people. What was this shiny lure that we’re on the hook? How do we get that feeling back again? Is there anything for Joe Biden to get us to rally behind? He’s going to have to slog it out and do infrastructure and climate things, which is something that my grandkids are going to enjoy, but I have to suffer through because I have to change my habits to get it? This is hard talk and truth-telling.

It is hard stuff although there is a short-term urgent need to get the virus under control, get life back to normal, and for economic recovery and restoration. There are a lot of people, restaurant owners, workers, cooks, and wait staff, all sorts of people that are out of work. That’s one example. There are so many retail businesses that are suffering. Those businesses need Coronavirus relief which was held up here. The administration and the Senate would not address or pass Coronavirus relief.

It is interesting because my father-in-law felt that once the election was over, now that we know what’s going to happen, the Senate would get together and pass Coronavirus relief. We were saying to him, “They’re not going to do that before a new Congress gets installed because the Republicans are going to exercise their power and it’s not their priority.” My father-in-law was dumbfounded. He was like, “What? Do you believe that?” Coincidentally, the next day, Mitch McConnell came out and said, “We’re not going to address Coronavirus relief in this Congress. Not until January 2021.”

It is hard when they put the party ahead of the nation and people’s needs. It is such a hard thing just for a voter to maintain loyalty. He sent everybody home. He sent all the Senate home. He’s like, “You guys go home. We’re not doing anything.” Why? He doesn’t want people interviewing them and the Senate saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and that becoming a press whatever.

I don’t think they want to give something that would appear like a victory to anybody else. This is where his true colors come out. I don’t think that the President, in his last days of presidency, is interested in doing something that meets the needs of others. He’s more interested in doing things that meet his needs.

This truth-telling is very unsettling because our consciousness as human beings struggles with the thought that the person is going to do good and turn around. Throughout the whole Donald Trump presidency, is he going to pivot now? He’s going to pivot on this one. He is going to be presidential. As soon as he did one little tiny moment of a pivot, a lot of the news are like, “He sounded presidential there. He looks like he’s going to figure this job out. The answer is, he didn’t try to figure the job out at all. He didn’t do any skill. You and I have hired employees like this. It’s like, “I thought they were going to grow into the position.” They weren’t into the position. They were into the paycheck. They now have a paycheck that they’re going to do the smallest amount of work for it and it’s going to be a reduction of effort between the time I hire them to the time I let them go 3 to 6 months in because they keep doing less. They’re not stepping into. They don’t have enough structure, and there’s not enough foundation for them to step into it. That’s the tough thing.



This virus and the economic restoration are the things that we’ll talk about next time around because the angry, sad, fearful, helpless, scared, hopeless, depressed people are going through the emotions of loss. They’re letting go of inspiration and passion because they can’t express their passion. They can’t wave their flag anymore. They can only praise in private. They feel proud and confident because he stood for it and stands for something. What is the standing for? It’s the beliefs that he has fed them. That’s what he stood for. They said, “You’re standing for this. I’ll stand for that too.” They felt good about that because that’s what they voted for. It’s the guy that was going to shake it up. I’m going to throw some sand in the gears because somehow, I got the message that the gears were working poorly. They weren’t until people started throwing sand in them.

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