e simultaneous sip.

All right, we got stuff to talk about. I just retweeted a tweet from your favorite economist, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist. So let me frame this by saying you don't really win a Nobel Prize unless you're pretty smart. All right, I'm talking about the scientific economic prizes. You don't win those unless you're really smart.

So Paul Krugman, by any objective measure upon which you can measure intelligence — you know, either his grades, his accomplishments, his credentials, his Nobel Prize — smart, smart guy, right? So I think we'd all agree that on raw IQ, very smart. Smarter than me. Smarter than most of you.

But here's what he tweets today. So it's on part of a tweet storm about the president and how he's treating Saudi Arabia. So Paul Krugman says, "So the supposed economic payoff from dealing with a murderer" — he's talking about Saudi Arabia here — "is a mirage. Why does Trump keep talking about it?" Now here's the fun part. "Unfortunately the answer is obvious. He likes autocrats who murder journalists and is looking for excuses to stay friendly with them."

What? So let me give this to you again because you probably have the same reaction I did, which is it looks like he's saying two plus two equals orange. I have no idea how he gets to this conclusion.

So the context is he was talking about how we have far more in economic connection to China than we do to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is just a tiny dot, and the deals that we have that Trump is talking about are very small compared to our economy. So that much I assume is true. I doubt we got that wrong. But then he takes it from "why is he treating Saudi Arabia different than China" because the economies are so different. You think it would be the reverse. He should be harder on China and less hard on Saudi Arabia if economics was really Trump's reasoning.

I'm okay with questioning the size of the economic impact. So far, perfectly reasonable. But then he jumps from that to "why does Trump keep talking about it? Unfortunately the answer is obvious." Now whatever follows "the answer is obvious" is usually something that's just batshit crazy, right? "Unfortunately the answer is obvious. He likes autocrats who murder journalists." He likes autocrats who murder journalists. How the hell do you get from comparing the economies of China and Saudi Arabia to "Trump likes autocrats who murder journalists"?

I'm pretty sure that's not the only explanation of the facts that are in evidence. Here's another solution. Here's another set of facts that would help explain why Trump treats Saudi Arabia the way he does. How about Saudi Arabia is critical to peace in the Middle East, and peace in the Middle East is critical to our security? How is that? You know, I can't read Trump's mind, but if you're leaving out the possibility that the Middle East has something to do with world security and the United States security, I think you're leaving out a pretty big hypothesis.

So it's really fascinating to watch somebody who is — and again I'll say this and I mean this — if you were to just measure Paul Krugman's IQ, it would be higher than probably all of us. You know, not all of us. Some of you are pretty smart. It would be higher than mine. I'm pretty sure if he and I took an IQ test he would outscore me. And I'm pretty sure if we did a test of general knowledge about politics, about economics, he would kill me.

You can see the Trump derangement. Yeah, the TDS. It's a case of Trump derangement syndrome. I guarantee you that when he wrote this he thought to himself, "This makes sense." I would be very surprised — and again I'm not reading his mind, I'm just saying this is, I'm speculating that this is the most likely explanation — is that he wouldn't put a public tweet out unless he thought it was a pretty good one. Which means that he thought this made sense. I can't imagine that there's any other possibility for why you put that in a tweet if you didn't think it made sense. Why would you do it?

All right, that's enough about that. It's mind-boggling when you see it. I also am amused by the comparison of the way Trump treats the media, the news media in particular, and dictators. So people are trying to draw the comparison between what happened with Khashoggi versus what President Trump does when he talks about the media.

So here's what they're comparing. So according to Trump's critics, the following two things are roughly equivalent because that's their point. They're making an equivalency here. They're saying that Trump calling Chuck Todd "sleepy eyes" is very close, and it might be a slippery slope from calling Chuck Todd sleepy eyes to dismembering him with a bone saw. You know, as soon as you start making fun of somebody's sleepy eyes, slippery slope, and the next thing you know, bone saw time.

And I'm thinking to myself, do they really think that makes sense? Given that — and here's the part everybody leaves out — when people criticize the president for criticizing the press, here's what they leave out. The press really deserves some criticizing. If the press were not fairly corrupt in terms of the way they skew stories, if the press were not corrupt, would the president be trash-talking them? Well, maybe. But we'll never know. We'll never know because there's a lot of fake news and he does call it out. Now he may overplay that, but he overplays