ow the fake news has tried to turn that into what if the Russian intelligence agencies offer you information. So the first thing they do to turn it into fake news is they change the example, the hypothetical.

But let's go to the whiteboard and I'll show you why President Trump's answer is the smart answer. Let's say you've got a situation where you've got a Russian citizen who offers you some information. What are your objectives? So the moment this situation arises, there's a Russian citizen — not the intelligence agency, you don't know that, it's not Putin, you don't know that. The only thing you know in moment one is it's a Russian citizen and they're offering you some information that might be useful to you because it's bad about your opponent.

What are your objectives? Objective number one: protect the country. Right, that's always objective number one if you're a presidential candidate. Avoid blackmail. You don't want to get in a situation where you can get blackmailed. You want to get the information, of course you do. And you don't want to waste the FBI's time.

So compare what all the smart people are saying Trump should have done to what Trump says that he would have done in this hypothetical. The smart people say tell the FBI before you listen to the information. That accomplishes step one: protect the country. It works. Avoid blackmail, definitely, because you've told the FBI. You're clean. You avoid that blackmail. But you didn't get the information and you probably 95% likely you wasted the FBI's time because 95% of the time when people say I have information for you it's just BS. It's not useful. It's something you already knew. It's meaningless. They're just trying to get you in the room. And in fact that's what happened.

President Trump's technique was well first I'll listen to it and then I'll decide and if it's a problem I'll share with the FBI. His approach protects the country because the FBI is informed. It avoids blackmail because he immediately told the FBI, right? There's no blackmail if you told the FBI what happened. He gets the information. Bing. And he doesn't waste the FBI's time because he vetted it first. He goes to the meeting, the hypothetical meeting. He says what do you got? Nothing. There was a 95% chance it was gonna go that way. I don't waste the time of the FBI.

So you've got all the smart people in the world telling you that this is smarter than this. What do I keep telling you about this president that makes him different? There's Boo, the cat's tail. She likes to participate. What I keep telling you is that this president can find free money on the table and pick it up and others don't do it for reasons that are unclear.

All right, if she's tried to steal the show here. So in my opinion there's no comparison between the dumb way to handle it in which you leave money on the table, you don't get the information, and you probably wasted the FBI's time. There's no comparing that to what Trump said.

So if you were to look at what Trump said from a logical, rational point of view — which I know nobody does — but if you did, what he did was the smart adult way to handle this. Unambiguously. It's not even close. The smart way to handle it is to find out first and then deal with it.

All right, but so here's my summary of that. From a standard political frame the president did not handle the situation right because he created a situation which he should have been able to see coming that allowed things to be taken out of context. But it's also — and I'm going to say this as clearly as possible — it's also what I like about him. He was completely transparent. People say you shouldn't answer a hypothetical question, to which I say I don't know. I see what trouble it got him in but I kind of liked it because it taught us something. It was transparent. He opened up his brain and said look inside. You know if you don't like it you don't like it but here's what's in here. This is complete transparency. If this were to happen again this is how I'd handle it. How do you not like that? How could you ever live with a president who won't do that for you? I mean seriously.

It felt like he was doing it for the public. In other words the public actually wanted to know the answer to the question so Trump says, you know I don't want to read his mind but based on his actions I assume he heard the question, he thought yeah the public would like to know the answer to that so I'll just give them an honest answer. I can't dislike that no matter how much the press wants me to.

All right, let's talk about Iran. The interesting thing about Iran is that we have the strangest situation of two countries, the United States and Iran, and arguably the other countries are involved but let's just talk about the US and Iran, in which we have a war-like situation. You know where they're presumably doing some stuff in the Gulf that is military, attacking some tankers and causing some trouble, and we're moving some assets in there. So it looks like it's a military confrontation.

But what's weird about this military confrontation is that there's nothing that both countries want less than war. There's nothing they want less than war. I would say the odds of the U.S. and Iran actually having a full-scale war — I mean there could be a missile attack here or there — but the odds of a full-scale war with Iran are pretty close to zero because we don't want it and they don't want it. And we want war far less than we care about the alternative. And the alternative is these low-level skirmishes.

So how do you get out of this situation? Because normally you would solve this situation with a war if you can't solve it any other way. We just turn it into a war or the war would happen, somebody would win, and then you've got a solution even though a lot of people are dead.

So I would like to suggest an alternative framework. Now I'm not suggesting that Iran will hear this and say oh that's a good idea, we'll adopt this way of thinking. But it is an escape hatch. So you might have to try a bunch of different escape hatches. But you have this situation where both parties are locked in so you have to give them an escape. There has to be some way out with honor. That's the important part. Iran has to get out of their situation with some kind of honor, respect, religious integrity intact. That's sort of a solid requirement. You're not going to see them budge on that and that would be the last thing they would want to budge on. And the US wants to get out of it looking good too.

So what would be an escape hatch for both countries where we both came out looking good? And here's the idea. I brought this up over a year ago but it's worth mentioning now because of the recent events. I would suggest to Iran that they should catch up with modern technology essentially and bring their war to a war of ideas. In other words instead of saying Iran stop trying to spread your power and your message and your religion with military means, why don't you trust your God? Trust your God and do it through information. Put your best argument on the internet. You open up your internet and let your people see the options and trust your God.

So this is the key statement: we'd like you to trust y