Did you hear President Trump's fairly long press conference yesterday? It really was a sort of a masterpiece of Trump being Trump. And I was in the car when I was listening to it so I didn't write down all of the things I wanted to write down to talk about because it was just packed with things to talk about. I'll give you some of my favorites that I do remember.

So the president had this line. He said if walls don't work you better tell the Pope because the Vatican has a wall. Now here's what's beautiful about that. I always talk about how the president likes to talk in visual form. He talks in pictures because our visual senses are most powerful and it's the most persuasive way to communicate. If you can put something in the form of a picture you can actually pull somebody into the scene. They'll remember it. It'll have more influence on them, etc.

And when you see the consistency that President Trump talks in visual language compared to people who are not good at this, you really see the power of it. So he said that. So as soon as he said you better tell the Pope that walls don't work because there's a wall around the Vatican, didn't you immediately imagine the Pope? And even if you don't know who the Pope looks like, which I don't, if you asked me to recognize the Pope on the street, if the Pope showed up in my room tomorrow and he's not wearing the Pope outfit I wouldn't even recognize him. But I have this general feeling of he's an old white guy in that Pope outfit. So I immediately picture him and then I immediately picture the Vatican and I immediately picture the wall. And so he just brings me right into the scene.

Prior to that the president said that the Obamas in their new home have a ten-foot wall around it, which caused the news to go out and try to debunk him by taking multiple pictures of Obama's house. Now I'm not sure that was good for security. The last thing that the Obamas need is lots of pictures of their personal home with a story that says the fence situation isn't that high. So I don't think that the president was intending to do this. So I'm not going to say that this was any kind of a plan. But the outcome of it was that the anti-Trump media, which loves President Obama, they love President Obama, they went and took lots of pictures of his security situation at his personal home.

What actually happened, the main story was well President Obama doesn't have that much security. I mean, we're all wise now of course. President Obama has plenty of security. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking well I'll take a run at him, don't do that. Because apparently even the street approaching the house has choke points and security. So you can't even get to the street. You can't even get to the house much less get to the wall. And if you got there there would be lots of people with machine guns. So you wouldn't want to try to climb that wall.

But just the theater of it that the president caught that caused the mainstream media, the lovers of Obama, to expose all of the weaknesses in Obama's personal security situation. It's awful and it's funny at the same time. But again I don't think the president was intending that to happen. But I think what he was intending was to put a picture in people's minds.

So now I have, I didn't have this picture before this discussion, of Obama's wall around his own house. Did you know what Obama's private house looked like? I'd never seen it. I know it's been in the news but I've never seen it. But now I've seen it. I know exactly what Obama's house looks like and I know what his little wall looks like. And you could argue whether the wall makes a difference or not but clearly the Secret Service thinks the wall works because they've got some fencing on the back or something. I think it was added. The wall was beefed up a little bit.

And the other thing that the president did, besides giving the press two visual images of walls that are working in ways that they like because the press likes the Pope and they like Obama and they both have walls and it's both visual. So this is just classic Trump taking your attention to where he wants it and making sure there's a picture there.

The other thing he did was it looked like he was testing a new brand for Syria. And he said it a few times. He said Syria is nothing but sand and death. Sand and death. And he repeated it to make sure we didn't miss it. Sand and death. It's pretty good isn't it? Yeah. Sand and death. Fire and fury. Sand and death. Do you see how similar they are in terms of the stickiness?

When you take the entire, here's what the president does well. He takes this big complicated situation and then he boils down all of that complexity to the part that matters at least in terms of communication. So you could argue that other things matter but in terms of how you communicate he's boiled all the complexity down to sand and death. What value is sand? Nothing. And the other thing is death. So basically we're dying for nothing. If he said we're over there dying for nothing that would be a concept. You couldn't see it. You couldn't feel it. It wouldn't be as real. But when he says the entire situation is nothing but sand and death, that's really good branding-wise.

Again, separate his branding and persuasion from whether you like the policies or don't like the policies. Those are good questions but we're separating them for now. Technique-wise, sand and death is really good stuff.

The president also, you could tell that he was going to drive the fact-checkers crazy because in the course of I don't know an hour or whatever he talked he said so many things that are directionally true but maybe not precisely true. One of them was that he essentially fired Mattis. He essentially fired him. He didn't fire him because Mattis technically, not technically but literally resigned. But the president's statement that he technically fired him makes the media have to deal with that question because they're fact-checking it, trying to debunk it, etc.

And so how far off is it to say that the president essentially fired him? Because remember the situation was that Mattis and the president no longer were on the same page. If you're the boss and your employee won't do what you want him to do and then the employee resigns, is that really a resignation? Is it a resignation when you know you're going to get fired? Or if you know that you can't do what your boss asks you to do? Well technically the person who writes a resignation letter is the one who resigned. That is technically not being fired. But what the president says, I essentially fired him, it's not that far from false.

I think the fact-checkers would be on solid ground to say it is false. What is so close? And he does this all the time. It's kind of close, right? Because once you know the thing that the boss is not getting the employee to do what he wants and he's not happy about it and your boss is the most famous firing boss ever, it seems to me that Mattis wisely just got in front of it. So it looks like Mattis might have been fired if he hadn't resigned. And if somebody says if you don't resign I'm gonna fire you or suggests that maybe if you don't resign you're gonna get fired pretty quickly, is it unfair to say that you essentially fired him? It's not that far off. But it's perfect fodder for the fact-checkers to talk about that question.

All right, the funniest part that the president said was he said he called up, I don't know who he called up, Saudi Arabia or he called up the OPEC countries or something. He said he got on the phone and he simplified this big complicated situation about oil prices and the geopolitical stability of the world and supply and demand, this big complicated ball of stuff that determines what the actual oil price is. He simplified this too. He made a phone call and said you've got to lower those gas prices and then they did.

Now I don't know a lot about geopolitical anything and I wasn't there when he made the phone call and I don't remember exactly who he called. But it's hilarious because you can, he draws a visual picture. You can see him in your mind on the phone talking to someone on the other end who's dressed in traditional Saudi clothing, whether it's a Saudi or somebody else. So you've got this picture. He's on the phone. He's the president. He's in the Oval Office. And you imagine him talking to somebody who's dressed in Saudi kind of clothing saying you've got to lower those gas prices. All right good. You gotta lower them. Great. I'll announce this at the press conference.

Like now, did something like that actually happen? Probably. He probably was on the phone to various people who could control how much pumping of oil there was. He probably did ask them to do this and sure enough gas prices are in a better range. So I don't know if the phone call made the difference but the way he turned it into a story and simplified this complicated situation down to the president made a phone call and made it happen, to me was hilarious and effective. But maybe won't exactly make the fact-checkers happy. But it was just kind of a perfect persuasion.