oming into the country so it just becomes too persuasive when you get down into the details. So I don't want to be that persuasive on something that is uncomfortably identifying certain groups of people as troublemakers. Now I know that's not the intent. The intent is just to have secure borders and protect ourselves. But when you talk about it as an anecdote it takes your brain to a different place and I don't like going there.

All right. Now here's the most interesting thing I saw yesterday. I saw Jake Sullivan who's one of the big principals in the Biden administration for what they're doing internationally and he appeared on Fareed Zakaria's show and I just saw some jaw-dropping takes. Number one Fareed Zakaria he said that Biden deserves some credit. I'm paraphrasing here but he deserves credit because people don't realize how much weaker Biden made our enemies while the United States got stronger. So he said we made Iran, Russia and China much weaker through economic means, through war, through tariffs and all that stuff, blockades and boycotts and whatever we did. So they're all weaker now. Like I said I'm not so sure Russia is falling apart or that China is but there's an argument for it. There is an argument that they're very weak and Iran some say is weaker than ever but again is it? Do we really know? I mean Iran was supposed to go out of business a long time ago right but they're still here.

So here's what Fareed said. He framed it as Biden being successful because he made our enemies weaker. Here's my problem with that. I don't love calling China an enemy while we're dealing with them. Right if we're going to trade with them and President Xi might visit and our embassies are open I don't like calling them enemies even if you think they are. I feel like that's bad persuasion. And if you're in China and you see on CNN that Fareed is calling you an enemy wouldn't that harden your resolve to build up your military and all that? Why don't we call them future friends and say we got a ton of problems, you know fentanyl at the top of the list, but we think we can be future friends. We just can't give you a leg up on us because we're competitive.

But here it got more interesting. So Jake Sullivan in the outgoing Biden administration, what would you expect him to say about the world in the context of Trump coming in? Wouldn't you expect that he would say we did a great job and Trump might come in here and ruin everything? Don't you expect that? He's a super insider, prominent, powerful Democrat whose team just lost and their greatest nightmare Trump is coming into office. So naturally he should be saying everything's going to go off the rails. Trump's going to ruin everything. Chaos, racist Hitler's coming in. Right? Should sound like that. He went the other direction and I'm trying to figure out what happened.

Jake Sullivan essentially said that Biden has weakened the competitors and it's going to allow Trump a really good base for negotiating. And I was waiting for like another shoe to drop. You know something like but of course Trump's a big evil lying genius so no big lying racist so we don't think he could succeed but we hope he does but he's a big lying racist so you know why would he succeed? None of that happened. Instead if you had never watched anything about American politics you wouldn't even know he was a Democrat. He actually said it's sort of like a one-two punch. Biden set him up and now the great negotiator, and by the way I think he referred to Trump as a solid negotiator, he said now the negotiator can come in and mop up. Again I'm paraphrasing but does that blow your mind? It completely blows my mind.

And here's what I'm thinking. It could be that they're trying to save Biden's legacy and therefore their own by showing that it's part of a one-two punch and without the one you couldn't have the two. And you know what? He actually sold that to me. I ac