Adams’s point about people acting on emotion and then rationalizing it later is quite obviously true. His observation that Trump was good at it is also true.
Where he went off the rails long ago is that
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He became a huge fan of Trump and started ascribing a level of brilliance to him he clearly doesn’t have, and
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He vastly overestimates his own understanding and cannot see his own blind spots.
Adams fancies himself an expert on “persuasion” because he took a hypnosis class once and has read books like “How To Win Friends and Influence People.” Doubtless he knows a lot about it - he’s a successful guy - but the combination of point 1 and 2 above have made him elevate Trump to the status of genius and force him to take insanely contradictory stances, just make shit up (like the “scandal poker comparison,” defend Trump and make claims about him that are untrue, and deny plain evidence. As it became increasingly apparent that what worked for Trump to defeat Jeb Bush was not quite up to the task to defeat Hillary Clinton, he had to keep changing his story to fit the narrative that Trump is a “Master Persuader” operating on a strategic level only people as smart as Adams could perceive; his blog on the first debate, in which he hilariously claims Trump won handily (despite objective evidence he lost badly) and then claims Trump lost the debate on purpose and is so doing won the debate - you have to read it - is a classic example. Adams is big into saying people who disagree with him are in a state of hypnosis and/or cognitive dissonance, and yet he himself exhibits more cognitive dissonance than a university course on the subject.
What Adams apparently cannot see, and yet seems very obvious to me, is that Trump’s talents of persuasion simultaneously persuaded people to vote for him and vote against him. Everything Adams ascribes to Trump as a briulliant move to persuade people to vote Trump also persuaded people to vote Clinton.
To use one example, the “Great Wall of Mexico” and his ranting on Mexicans being rapists and bad hombres, according to Adams,
- Is a brilliant persuasion move to win voters; fear sells, and fear of foreigners will win votes,
- Isn’t actually racist because Mexicans are not a “race,” and
- Is in fact merely a brilliant bargaining position. According to Adams, Trump always starts with a ridiculous opening offer and then negotiates down.
On Point 1 Adams is clearly right. The border wall probably won him millions of votes.
On Point 2 Adams is simply an idiot, and misses a key point; Trump’s positions persuaded people he was a racist. Adams will argue it’s not racism - and yet he is the one who says that facts do not matter, that emotion is what matters. In facts don’t matter and emotions matter, Adams’s incessant apologia about how Mexicans and Muslims aren’t races and his getting into the weeds of policy to explain why border walls and immigration bans aren’t racist is all, obviously, totally irrelevant in the Adams “Master Persuasion Filter.” All the persuasion is over before you can argue over the details, according to Adams, so once Trump has yelled about walls stopping Mexican rapists and banning Muslims, the moist robots think “Racist.” No policy detail that follows will change that - again, this is not my opinion, it’s what Scott Adams’s Master Persuasion Filter theory would have you believe.
So while claiming that Trump’s appeal to emotions wins votes (and he’s right) he completely contradicts himself by denying that the emotional reaction people have in thinking Trump a racist can’t be happening because it’s counterfactual. Adams ascribes all Trump-is-a-racist sentiment to male geniuses working for Clinton using Master Persuader tricks. But although the Clinton team played it up, **Trump created the image. ** It was Trump who did the lion’s share of Master-Persuading people he was a racist.
This is almost stupidly obvious and yet Adams either refuses to admit it to a ludicrous degree or is incredibly blind. He claims the Clinton campaign team created the “persuasion” that Trump is a sexist - but any damn fool can see Trump created that himself. Trump has acted like a pig in the public eye for thirty years, altering people’s emotions about him. Clinton was rather late to the game on that one.
As to Point 3, Adams is projecting onto Trump what he wants to believe. In fact, Trump’s methods for making deals, historically, have been exactly the opposite of what Adams claims. Trump doesn’t start off with a hard bargaining position; he generally starts off with a very generous position, then maneuvers himself to pay or provide less than he promised after the other party is committed.
