a networks are trying to make a big deal out of the fact that according to Woodward, Trump had made available to Putin during the pandemic some COVID tests because Russia was having trouble getting them. And Trump made them available to Putin personally, not for the country of Russia but just for Putin's own use. Now the news is trying to make that look like a bad thing. When I read that I said, what? Why is that a bad thing? What am I missing?

Here's what I understand. See if it compares to what you understand. The job of a president is to manage relationships with all the dictators and allies and everybody else. So how well you manage your relationship with the most important allies and even adversaries is the key to you doing a good job. Now you could call that a sales job. It's a persuasion sales job. You're trying to sell yourself and the country to a variety of different world leaders. Have you ever heard of the salesman trick called reciprocity? The most basic persuasion trick. Hey, I'm going to give you something that you couldn't easily get yourself. I'm not asking anything in return. That's it. That's the trick. That's what salespeople do.

When I worked for a big bank, it was my job to pick vendors, you know, which vendor would be selected for big contracts. They were multi-million dollar deals. And so AT&T, which was always one of the vendors that was under consideration, would offer me tickets to sports events. Why were they offering me tickets to sports events? Was it because it was my birthday? No. It's because they were creating reciprocity. They were giving me something so that when I was deciding or helping the company decide which vendor to choose, that maybe, just maybe, I'd be a little bit more biased to the people who like to give me gifts. Now of course I was a good employee, so I just reported it and didn't accept the gifts. So my boss said nope, you do not have the right. No, you're not going to accept those tickets. And I would say, really? I can't accept those even if I promise not to be biased? No, you're not going to accept those tickets. So I didn't.

Now so you see Trump, the salesman in chief. He tells you he's a salesman. He says I'm trying to sell the country. And then you see him do the most common, most reliable salesman trick. Hey, how would you like some COVID tests so that the next time they have to talk about something important, Putin is not going to have this giant hard-on bad feeling about Trump. He's going to have a little bit of a, you know what, when I got in trouble you gave me a little hand there. Now it's not going to completely change the relationship between the two countries, but persuasion 101 is to make the person you're persuading feel good about you. That's rule number one. If you start out with you're a fascist, I'm going to do everything I can to kill you all, right? Let's negotiate. That's what the Democrats do. We're going to try to put you in a prison, kill you. Let's negotiate. What? No, you give him some COVID tests and then you negotiate. That's how it's done. That's how persuasion works. It's what Trump understands. And of course the news can count on the public not knowing how anything works, so they'll just say, well he must be Putin's puppet because he's giving him stuff that he could have used in America, which is dumb. So for the price of a few COVID tests, the smallest price you could ever pay, Trump bought some goodwill that probably remains to this day if this is true. By the way, we don't know if it's true.

All right, what else did Woodward have? He says that, well this is weird. Apparently according to Woodward, Joe Biden thinks that Obama is to blame for being too weak when Crimea was taken over. And that the reason that Putin went into Ukraine is Obama's fault. Now hold on. So we're going to have to figure out what this means. So Bob Woodward, you would expect would be totally in the tank for the Democrats, right? But yet his book seems to be negative about Obama, which wouldn't make sense if they're all part of the same deep state network, which you probably thought they were. So why would Bob Woodward throw Obama under the bus on something this important? This is not trivial. It's a war. He's throwing Obama under the bus on a war.

Well here's my take. I think this is a better indication of who's really running things. You know we like to say that Obama is the real power behind the power and that Obama is like puppet mastering the Democrat Party. But then how would you explain this? If Obama's the puppet master, how does Woodward, who's deeply connected to that whole part of the world, how does he print something that's so obviously anti-Obama? Well here's a possibility. Here's a solid rule. The people who are really in charge only care that we're tough on Russia. This seems to be the only through thread. The one thing that connects everything, the one thing that connects everything is that we have to be hard on Russia. So it could be that the deep state, you know the military industrial complex, is not exactly on board with Obama and maybe never has been. So it could be that in truth Obama is manipulating the puppet strings of the Democrats, but that there's a power higher and that the military industrial complex is above Obama in their influence when it comes to war at least.

So it looks like the Woodward take is to make sure that anybody who allows Putin to do anything, including in the past Crimea, anybody who does that is a bad person. And that pushing on Putin is the only thing that works. So there are two Putin-related stories in Woodward's book. One to make Trump look bad for trying to work with Putin and one making Obama look bad for caving into him. That tells me that whoever is really in charge, if you assume that Woodward is connected to any deep forces in the government, it would be that there's somebody who's a higher rank than Obama and Trump and Biden, at least when it comes to war. And we do suspect that might be the case. So I think the most accurate way to look at who's really in charge behind the curtain is more than one person. And that they have areas of interest where when it comes to the war stuff it's maybe names we don't even know anyway.

I wouldn't trust anything that comes out in a Woodward book or any political book that involves what somebody said behind closed doors. This getting back to my earlier comment. I don't think there's any credibility about a political book saying that something was said behind closed doors. So this one also is low credibility.

All right, as you know, Kamala Harris is on her media blitz. And she had been sort of doing the hiding from the press thing for most of the summer. But now apparently the campaign has decided they better send her out to the friendliest interviewers you could possibly send her to. So avoiding the hard news by sending her to the friendliest people possible. Now here's what that means. Imagine being the Kamala Harris campaign and you narrow down your two best strategies to these. These are your two top strategies. Number one, hide her so the public can never hear her. And that strategy, hide her so that the people can't know who they're voting for, was at least almost equal to the second choice strategy, which is actually the first choice because they did it. And the first choice was to send her to talk to people who would absolutely be in the bag for the Democrats and would try to make her look good.

Now both of those choices are pathetic. They're pathetic. Imagine that being your only two choices. Imagine if Trump, the only choices he had were, well he's going to hide or he's only going to talk to Hannity and nothing else. Would you support that? You wouldn't even support the Republican under those situations, would you? Would you even support your own team if they said I'm only going to let him talk to Hannity but nothing else, just Hannity? Of course not. Of course not. The fact that