eous sip. It happens now.

Oh, that's good. Simultaneous sip.

So we've got a number of stories in the news. Most of them are minor, but because the news has to sell product they are being treated as major.

The president has a new temporary, whatever that means, chief of staff: Mulvaney. The initial reports are good. So the people who seem to know this Mulvaney guy say he's smart and he's the real deal and he could be good. So there's not much to say about that. It sounds like you may have picked a good person.

Next, there's a judge who seems to have — a judge in Texas seems to have said that Obamacare is unconstitutional, like the whole Obamacare. I don't know what that means yet. My first guess is to ignore it. Like my first instinct is that, okay, that's a big nothing. It'll be appealed. It'll get turned over on appeal. So the Obamacare story is probably closer to nothing than something, but we'll wait and see on that.

There is another story in CNN, who is always looking for trouble. They're always looking for trouble if it's anything about Trump. And the latest is that the Trump Hotel in Washington, where I have stayed — I actually stayed at the Trump Hotel when I went to Washington — last night that apparently they charged way more than normal for the inauguration. So in other words, the Trump campaign paid the Trump Hotel. This is what CNN is reporting. And they're saying that Ivanka may have been involved in some part of the negotiations for the price, and they talked about the price, and they say I guess somebody wanted to pay eighty-five thousand a night but the Trump Hotel was trying to charge one hundred and seventy-something a night.

So here's what's missing from the story. Do you see anything missing from the story? So for a big inauguration party the Trump campaign wanted to use the Trump Hotel, and the price was about double what the campaign wanted to pay, and therefore it's a scandal. Is there something missing with this story? Yes, there's something missing. Here's what's missing: it's what every hotel does. Somebody just said, do you know a hotel charges for their facilities? Here's the exact price that every hotel charges for everything they do: whatever they can get. All hotels charge as much as they can get, and that varies based on the season, the day, the occupancy. It varies on a lot of things.

Now, if your name was the Trump Hotel and your location was Washington, D.C., and somebody named Trump just won the presidency unexpectedly, what is the market value of space in the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C.? Answer: about double the market rate. About double, right? Because there was no place in Washington that would have been cooler, more appropriate, more perfect for that event for that group. Where was the second place they were gonna go? Well, wherever that second place was going to go, probably it was busy. Probably they were gonna overcharge. And if you were there you are not in a Trump property, which would have made it twice as cool.

When I visited the president in August, the only reason I went to Washington was to visit the president, and for me there was no decision about where to stay. I didn't even price any other hotels, because if you're gonna go visit President Trump you stay at the Trump Hotel, right? It just makes the whole trip a little bit more complete in some way.

So when I watched CNN cover this story I watched to see, okay, somebody's going to tell them that all hotels raise the price as high as possible for the market conditions, and that this particular case was the ultimate market condition. So was it true that a Trump hotel property — and I'm not sure exactly what the ownership is. The hotel, if it's more of a licensing deal where they're using the name, Rafi owns it. Doesn't matter really. But should they have negotiated as hard as possible with the campaign? Yes, they should. The Trump Hotel should negotiate as hard as possible with the campaign. Do you know why they should do that? Let me put that out there.

If the Trump Hotel had not charged as much as they thought they could get, what would we be talking about today? It's a trick question. What would we be talking about in the news today if the Trump Hotel had given the campaign a good price? It would have been an illegal campaign contribution. The one and only way this was legal — the only way it was legal is if the Trump Hotel tried as hard as possible to screw the Trump campaign, and if the Trump campaign tried as hard as possible to screw the Trump Hotel. And according to the story that's exactly what happened. The Trump campaign negotiated as hard as it could against the Trump Hotel, and they ended up on a price. I don't know what the price was, but if you can tell me with a straight face that that's not the way it's supposed to work, tell me how. What's the other way it's supposed to work? The other way is illegal.

We live in a capitalist country. They're both supposed to screw each other as hard as possible. That's what they tried to do. No story. There's no story there.

All right, I want to read you something that's funny to me. When I read CNN's homepage on their website — I'm not joking about this. I read it for the jokes. And when I say the jokes, I mean the things that just strike me as funny when I read CNN. So here's the top left story, meaning the most important story in CNN's opinion because they put it on the top and the left. That's where you put the good stuff. It says "Trump's Worst Nightmare." That's the big headline. And I'm thinking, my goodness, this is going to be some bad stuff. Whatever is under the headline "Trump's Worst Nightmare" in the top position in the news, that's some bad stuff. Let's see what it is.

And it says, "Weeks of devastating revelations — oh my God, devastating revelations. These are not normal revelations. These are devastating — have left the president's political career clouded by criminality." Ah, and his life under a legal microscope. Wait, what? What did that say? "Clouded by criminality." That means other people's criminality. Do you know who else's life is clouded with criminality? CNN, you, me. We're all clouded with criminality if "clouded with criminality" means that people you know well or have worked with have been criminals. Well, I'm pretty guilty of that. I have known people who I've even had friends — I've had friends who were total criminals. I didn't know about it until they went to jail. So clouded with criminality? Yes.

So if you noticed, CNN must have a whole department whose only job is to come up with new ways to say that the president is a criminal without actually saying he's a criminal. So you want to say things like "the evidence indicates" or "the evidence implicates the president" or "he's under a cloud of criminality" or "there's a swarming turd parade around him." You know, they're just coming up with more and more clever ways to say he hasn't done anything himself. But yeah, the walls are closing in. The walls are closing in. That's one of my favorite ones. And "worse than Watergate." Worse than Watergate. Compared to Watergate this would make people tremble. It'll make people tremble.

And then you actually look at the news and you say if everything about the Cohen story is actually the way it's reported, there's no problem.

Let me tell you something that you're gonna be mad you haven't heard on television if you're watching the news. All right, I'm gonna tell you something that's insanely obvious, insanely obvious, but only after I say it. And watch how this hits you. True or false — and I believe everyone on all sides of Trump-related things would acknowledge that the next things I say are true, so I don't think there would be any dispute on what I'm going to say next.

There are very highly qualified lawyers who say that the president of the United States has broken laws and that he's in serious legal jeopardy over this Cohen situation. True? We'd all agree that's true, right? There are a number of highly qualified lawyers who say that this president has broken laws and that the Cohen situation is a dangerous legal jeopardy for him. True.

Everybody would also agree that there's another set of lawyers, more pro-Trump lawyers, who are also highly qualified, highly paid, highly accomplished, who say there's no problem here at all. Right? Now I'm not saying which one's right. I'm saying that as an observer it is objectively true that there are highly qualified lawyers on opposite sides. Some say he's guilty as hell and in a lot of trouble. Some say there's literally nothing here.

Right now, can you remember, what is the standard for conviction? Is the standard for a conviction some people say he's guilty and some people say he's not? No, that's not the standard. The standard for conviction is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Did I just describe guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? If I can fill a stadium with highly qualified lawyers who say, in my opinion, there's not even a law here that's been violated, is that guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Not even close. Not even close.

Now, do you feel angry that nobody put it to you the way I just did? If you take into consideration the size and the quality and the experience of the lawyers who say there's no real problem here, it doesn't matter if they're only ten percent and there are ninety percent saying the other thing. That doesn't matter. Ten percent of highly qualified lawyers who are not even involved in the case who say, I don't see it. It looks to me like it's confusing. The law's ambiguous. It's not being applied evenly. There's nothing to see here. That's a hundred percent good enough to guarantee this president's not in trouble legally. Politically? Yes. But legally? No.

So now that I've said that, how do you feel about the president's legal jeopardy from just the Cohen stuff? We're just limiting it to the Cohen stuff. But so somebody's saying Judge Napolitano on Fox News said the president's in trouble. I didn't see that, but I saw the headlines. Does that matter? Does it matter how many lawyers say he's in legal trouble? It doesn't matter. It only matters that there is a substantial number of legitimate, well-trained lawyers who say, I know it looks vague to me. It looks like the standard is not useful. There isn't the slightest chance, given all of those lawyers who say it's not even illegal, that he's going to get convicted.

Now keep in mind the lawyers who say it's not even illegal are not saying that he didn't do it. Everybody's looking at exactly the same facts. We're not even arguing the truth of the facts. Even the people who say there's no law assume that all the facts that have been in evidence are the facts, right? That there was a payment, blah blah.

What logical fallacy is stacking the deck with all those lawyers? What I'm saying is that there is no stacking the deck. As long as there are plenty of lawyers who say we don't even — we can't even determine that there's a real crime here, you can guarantee that no jury is going to be a hundred percent on one side if you can't even get the lawyers to agree if it's illegal. Because that's not the case with anything else, right? If you said somebody murdered somebody, could you find a lawyer to argue that murder isn't actually even illegal? I don't think so. Anyway, that was a bad analogy.

CNN also has an article on here called "Impeachment 101." It says here's how it would work — and then in parentheses, if it actually happened. What persuasion technique are you seeing when they write an article that says "Impeachment 101: Here's how it would work if it actually happened"? All right, that's not news. That is persuasion. They're making you think past the sale. So they're making you think past the impeachment as if we're just accepting that as sort of a routine thing and now we're thinking about the details of it. Yeah, so that is just persuasion. Now it's