It's Thursday, February 26, 2026 from Peachfish Productions. It's the GIST. I'm Mike Peska.

And today's a Not Even Mad day. Do subscribe in the Not Even Mad channel. We have bonus content with our guests, Andrew Eger and Austin Berg.

But what we're talking about on the show today is mostly inspired by the state of the

union. We do have an excellent segment on what the Pentagon is doing, trying to bully an AI company.

And that AI company, this disclosure, is anthropic. They advertise on the gist we should mention.

I kind of totally forgot about that during the interview. So if you want to know where my mindset is, but we do need to disclose that.

I don't think you'll hear that discussion in too many other places.

But I was, of course, thinking about Trump's rhetoric because Trump wants us to think about his rhetoric.

And there is a taxonomy to be done of the rhetoric.

A lot of people have analyzed it as taking it seriously or literally or zoologically. And I think that there are a few levels to the rhetoric. In fact, there are probably sub-levels I'm not going to hit. But there's level one rhetoric, which is just a ridiculous thing he said. And the most benign of this, maybe you would, if you deride Trump, like you probably should,

would look at tweeting the word cofefe like, what's the president doing? This is a crazy

misspelling. Doesn't reflect well in the presidency, but we move on. And there, I'm going to jump to

the worst of his kind of rhetoric that is still just rhetoric, which is insulting Rob Reiner

and his memory after he's been murdered by his son.

And so that's some of the worst kind of thing he could do, but it's still rhetoric.

I think about the level up where rhetoric is intertwined with policy.

And the reason he takes policy positions is policy as rhetoric.

And we see some examples with immigration, where everything that Christy Noem, who is not that clever by herself, but everything she did to wrap herself in athleisure, she goes down to SICott and to cut these tough talking videos, is policy.

I'm going to act really tough and cruelly punish these people in the service of a message.

And Donald Trump does this too.

He does this with Doge.

And he or his people do this with the analysis of the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Priddy.

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