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Has Donald Trump Hypnotized the American People?
A number of you have suggested I read Scott Adams’ blog, where he advances the thesis that Trump has “master persuader” skills. I did. It’s fun, if you have a few hours to waste, and he makes a few shrewd observations.
Adams is probably better-known to you as the author of the comic strip Dilbert. He’s also a trained hypnotist. Back when all the professionals and pollsters were predicting Trump’s campaign would soon fizzle out, he was arguing that to the contrary, Trump would win a general election in a landslide. Trump, he claims, is basically the most effective mass hypnotist he’s seen in his life.
“The evidence,” writes Adams,
is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal. Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90% irrational and acts accordingly. …
Trump knows psychology. He knows facts don’t matter. He knows people are irrational. So while his opponents are losing sleep trying to memorize the names of foreign leaders – in case someone asks – Trump knows that is a waste of time. No one ever voted for a president based on his or her ability to name heads of state. People vote based on emotion. Period.
You used to think Trump ignored facts because he doesn’t know them. That’s partly true. There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them.
Right in front of you.
And he doesn’t apologize or correct himself. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump looks stupid, evil, and maybe crazy. If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions). …
Do you remember a year ago when you thought humans were rational most of the time – let’s say 90% of the time – and irrational the rest of the time? That was how most people saw the world, and still do. But Trump is teaching you that you had it backwards. The truth is that humans are irrational 90% of the time.
Hypnosis students learn on the first day of classes that humans are irrational. If you believe people are rational it interferes with the technique. Likewise, if you see voters as rational you’ll be a terrible politician. People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.
You can validate my low opinion of human rationality by asking yourself why Trump supporters don’t care that nothing he says is true. Trump literally makes up facts on the fly. Do you think his supporters have not noticed this awkward situation?
They noticed. They don’t care. And at this point they understand he’s just saying what he needs to say to get elected. Democrats will call that evil. Republicans will call it effective.
We all understand that a president has to be the leader of dumb people as well as smart people – and there are far more dumb people. So how does one kind of message get through to two totally different types of voters? Trump’s solution, so far, is to influence the dumb people via emotion while winking to the smart people so we know he is smart and not crazy. The wink is what tells you he probably isn’t Hitler. The wink says he is doing what he needs to do to get elected.
I saw the wink sooner than most of you because I study persuasion. So none of his crazy behavior looked crazy to me. It looked skillful to the extreme. So skillful, in fact, that he got to the point where he can literally say any damned thing and his supporters don’t care how true it is. They care that he is on their side and doing whatever it takes to tear down the money-puppets in Washington.
Maybe. I read Adams’ blog pretty carefully, and it’s a good sales pitch for Adams’ book. The interesting thing is that he does pretty much what he suggests Trump is doing: He makes exaggerated, suggestive claims without ever really explaining what he means or offering much by way of rational argument for them.
“People are not wired to be rational,” he writes. “Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth.” A whole world of assumptions in those assertions. Are people “wired” the way machines are? Did our brains “simply” evolve to keep us alive? Assuming so, what survival advantage would accrue to an organism unable to distinguish fact from fantasy? Why have humans, alone among the species of the planet, been able to do so much more than just “keep themselves alive” — often by means that we might casually call “reasoning?” What skill allows us to win pretty much every conflict with animals who, on the face of it, would seem to have extraordinary physical advantages over us? (You see where I’m going.)
So Adams’ blog, like a Trump speech, is heavy on language that keeps you entertained and sounds very self-confident, but light on details and evidence. (Can I see a clear definition of “rational?” How did he arrive at the 90-percent statistic? Is he ever going to explain his “Moist Robot Hypothesis,” or will he just keep referring to it without explaining why it’s an advance over the philosophical materialism that’s been posited at least since Lucretius? What does it mean to say that other politicians are 2D, but Trump is 3D? Is there a difference between a “linguistic kill shot” and “a biting insult?” Is there a difference between a “Master Wizard” and “a successful politician?”)
Like Trump, he insinuates that you have to buy the product (be it his book or President Trump) to find out just what he really means. I surmise that his blog makes many people curious to know what he means, and I’ll bet his book is selling briskly.
That said, while I don’t find his case thoroughly compelling, I think he’s on to something. He adds something useful to my General Theory of Trump. First thing, he’s right: He has been predicting Trump’s success all along. (I’d like to see how he does on a range of political and social predictions before declaring him an oracle, though.)
Second thing is I think he’s right about Trump’s deliberate ambiguity and his masterful control over the visuals. Adams believes Trump learned his techniques from Tony Robbins, who in turn traces his hypnosis lineage to Milton Erickson:
Now let me connect some dots.
Milton Erickson influenced Pierre Clement, who taught my hypnosis instructor, who taught me.
And…
Milton Erickson influenced Bandler and Grinder, who developed NLP, which influenced Tony Robbins (a self-help hypnotist). Tony Robbins (probably) influenced Donald Trump, by association. They worked together on at least one project.
When I listen to Donald Trump, I detect all of his influences back to Erickson. If you make it through this reading list, you might hear it too. I don’t know if Donald Trump would make a good president, but he is the best persuader I have ever seen. On a scale from 1 to 10, if Steve Jobs was a 10, Trump is a 15.
You know how the media has made fun of Trump’s 4th-grade-level speech patterns?
The joke’s on them.
He does it intentionally.
Because it works.
Trump is, obviously, very appealing to a significant number of voters. I certainly agree he’s appealing to some highly irrational aspect of their cognition. I’m willing to entertain the idea that his ability to do this reflects training in salesmanship and mass hypnosis, great intelligence, a extraordinary absence of vanity, and careful premeditation. I’m also willing to imagine it’s possible he’s doing this in the service of a benevolent goal. It’s certainly possible that what we’re hearing from him is something much better than halfwit cretinism from a dangerous, natural-born demagogue.
But it’s also possible that it’s not.
Adams argues, in some cases persuasively, that Trump deliberately uses ambiguous language or contradicts himself four times in the same day so that people can fill in the blanks with their own hopes and fantasies. He also hints in a number of entries that he thinks Trump could be a good president. (But he explicitly denies, in almost every entry, that he endorses Trump; that is, he himself uses the technique of self-contradiction he observes Trump using.) He fantasizes at length about the ways Trump might be able to negotiate great, rational deals starting from what sound to me and to him like bad, irrational initial positions.
But the fact is, these are Adams’ fantasies about Trump. That he’s having these fantasies suggests to me only that he’s right about Trump’s ability to make himself a receptacle for people’s fantasies.
So I’m not yet convinced that Donald Trump has deliberately hypnotized the world; and even were I persuaded, it wouldn’t follow that Trump intends to use this power for the good of my country, nor that I share his ideas about what would be good for my country.
Thus, therefore, my rational calculation. I think a Hillary presidency would probably be quite a bit like a third Obama term. She might be more competent than he’s been, if only because she’s much more experienced than he was when he entered office.
Given the problems the next president will face, the next president will almost certainly be an unpopular one. In the coming four-to-eight years, the consequences of Obama’s foreign policy will become more and more obvious to Americans. It’s unlikely the economy will improve all that much. Four years of Hillary could leave much of the world a lot worse off, could leave the country even more bitterly divided, over-regulated, less free, frustrated, and stagnant. On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “the best imaginable president” and 10 being, “the one who leads us into a nuclear war and the total destruction of life on the Planet Earth,” I’d guess Hillary would be about a 5. She’ll probably be one of our least beloved and least effective presidents.
But my guess is that we’ll still exist, as a nation, in 2020.
Trump? Could be anything from one to ten. None of us knows. He’s an absolute wild card, and if Adams is right, this is by design.
I’ve heard some here make arguments to this effect: “At least, with Trump, there’s a hope of a good presidency. There’s a hope he’s just saying some of these things as an opening bid, or to damage his rivals, or to hypnotize the voters. In office, he might actually prove to be a good and reasonable man and a great president.”
Sure. It’s possible. But if we allow that it’s possible, we must allow that it’s possible he’s exactly as stupid as he sounds and every bit as crazy. We also have to allow the possibility that he’s highly intelligent and competent at acquiring power, but seeking this power for malevolent ends. Trump’s presidency could be anywhere from a one to a ten, in other words.
So Clinton is the rational and conservative choice, particularly because the 1-10 scale isn’t really accurate. It’s not linear at the extremes: There’s a limited upside and an unlimited downside.
In a different era, or in another country, it might make sense to say, “What’s the worst that could happen? Let’s take the risk.” But we’re the United States of America in 2016. A worst-case scenario is so terrifying that no one rational would take even a ten-percent risk of it. Even a one-percent risk is too high. The fact is — and this is true no matter what anyone feels — the American president, while constrained to a large extent by the courts, Congress, and the Constitution, is nonetheless the commander-in-chief of a military that has the power to destroy every living creature on the planet. This could happen in an afternoon, and almost has happened a number of times before.
In the coming years, many countries are apt to try to acquire nuclear weapons. The number of post-Cold War foreign policy mistakes that have eroded the global non-proliferation regime have been myriad; many administrations share the blame for this. But no matter whose fault it is, these are the facts now: North Korea threatens to destroy us with nuclear weapons every day. We’ve freed Iran of economic sanctions without demanding it permanently dismantle its nuclear-weapons facilities. International norms against the use of chemical weapons have been eroded. Putin, likewise, regularly threatens to settle his disputes with us with nuclear weapons. We’ve communicated to our allies and enemies alike that we’re not committed to maintaining our traditional post-war role and the Pax Americana. So the coming decade will be dangerous.
It’s possible that Trump completely understands this, and knows what the Triad is. It’s possible he’s pretending not to understand any of this because it’s all part of his master-persuader hypnotic strategy.
It’s possible that Trump fully understands the importance of NATO. It’s possible he knows how dangerous Putin is, how much damage Russia has already inflicted upon the West, and how much more it could. It’s possible he understands that Japan and Germany are critically important allies, not enemies. It’s possible he understands our law-of-war obligations under the Geneva Conventions. It’s possible he understands perfectly the consequences of starting a trade war in an already precarious global economy. It’s possible all of his intimations to the contrary are exquisitely-calibrated displays of political genius, and that he would, in office, be the most strategically cunning president we’ve ever had.
But it’s also possible — would Adams concede, say, it’s 10 percent possible? Would you? — that he’s a short-fingered cretin who says whatever the heck he feels like saying and doesn’t think facts matter. And doesn’t know any of this. Or think it’s important. It’s possible he doesn’t even find it agreeable to surround himself with people who think things like this matter, or who contradict him in any way.
So, if presented with a choice between Trump and Clinton, I will not only vote for Clinton, but actively campaign for her. She would be the rightwardmost viable candidate. It’s increasingly looking like I’ll have to do that.
Funny old world, isn’t it?
Published in General
Being curious about hypnotism and whether or not it works, I once volunteered to be hypnotized at an assembly along with about nine other people. Several of us were quietly asked to leave the stage as the show proceeded and we were not getting hypnotized.
Seeing the subsequent antics of the ones who were successfully hypnotized I was quite glad that I was not one of them…
Nonsense. This is the precautionary principle applied to a ridiculous degree. For all the stones cast at Trump’s business record — and it is highly patchy, to say the least — he has operated in a world where failure has consequences. Clinton, patently, has not.
Both Trump and Clinton are empty, ideology-less fabulists. But at the end of the day, Hillary ‘reset button, Benghazi’ Clinton is Hillary ’email server, Clinton Foundation’ Clinton. And Teh Donald isn’t. Advantage Trump.
I will never vote for Hillary, a callous murderess who left American servicemen to die at Benghazi.
I’m not convinced by Adams. He is not taking into account the times in which we live. A perfect storm of circumstances, much discussed here, have led to this. In most years, Trump would have been laughed off the stage. Rather, in my view, he is very much a product of the sketchy post-modern relationship to truth, political correctness and perceived conservative leaders’ shortcomings. Unlike Adams, I believe truth is real. Humans are not just puppets to be pulled along by the latest demagogue or hypnotist, be it Adams or Trump. If Trump really were what Adams claims, he’d have way more people in his camp than he has.
There is nothing conservative about a candidate who wishes to extinguish the American nation-state by flooding it with third-world immigrants either ignorant of or hostile to our traditional culture.
And also, I suspect, of this. A combination of bad education and increasing global competition. And Adam Garfinkle makes a point here that I think is absolutely correct, and so obvious that it’s surprising I’ve not seen anyone else make it yet. It’s not China that’s stealing men’s jobs; it’s women.
Too much time is spent on political correctness and not enough on education. I agree that women are taking many of the jobs, especially since women are earning more of the degrees, but then they are apparently not becoming more knowledgeable in the process! I guess we need a Sputnik moment right now.
Scott Adams certainly made a miscalculation here: “Democrats will call that evil. Republicans will call it effective.”
For years we’ve heard ‘I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.’
So one of the 400 has come forward, and the DC faculty, like clockwork, throws tomatoes.
I am far less disgusted by Trump than I am with Hillary. Her ego is much larger than Trump’s, and at least Trump loves America.
I talked to a hypnotist once. He said the very intelligent and the very stupid are difficult to hypnotize – which lets me out.
He said something about the Queen of Diamonds too, but I can’t seem to remember what it was…
End of story. Even some of his supporters are probably voting for him because he is sticking it to people they dislike, not because they have any great hopes for what he will do. The group most hypnotized by Trump has been the press.
This. Times a million.
This is nonsense. This implies that people don’t do things in their self interest. If people are not wired to be rational, then democracy is a failed experiment.
This is nonsense too. All presidential candidates don’t fill in the details. They can’t, and frankly the effort to put together details to satisfy people would be extravagant, all to be torn up when Congress does their work. Did you know the details of Obamacare before he enacted? Did anyone know the details of Bush’s medicare part D, Clinton’s tax cut (which turned out be a tax increase), or FDR’s social security or Johnson’s civil rights legislation?
This is intellectual elitism. Did you ever think that Trump is addressing issues that conservatives and libertarians haven’t, or worst yet, have been working contrary to their interest? Did you ever think he’s hit on something?
This is what all politicians do, some better than most. Did you ever think that Trump is a master communicator?
The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
I’m certain that Scott would be happy to come on the flagship podcast to discuss the topic. Many great political thinkers have been on and few of them have been correct. It might be fun to have an engineer with an MBA and a very successful writing career on who has been correct at every turn since last August. After all he is predicting that Trump will win in November in an historic landslide. Seems like that might make for an interesting discussion.
This. I am baffled by the fact that the same people who complained loudly and endlessly about first McCain and then Romney being forced onto their pure, conservative hands who are now almost giddy at the prospect of the center-right types like me being faced with a Trump we can’t stand. All those lofty conservative principles were, it turned out, just an excuse to complain – it’s that they don’t like “Washington” is some vague, undefined way, not that they actually want the most conservative president possible.
I agree that if it’s Trump/Clinton, Clinton is likely the Buckley Rule choice. And I can’t stand it.
You are still missing the point of what Trump is. He is not getting votes because people want to make America great again, although in their minds that is needed. Nor does it have anything to do with ideas or policies. Trump is a vessel. He is the giant middle finger that many people who feel betrayed by the upper crust of society are giving out. It could have been anybody but it was Donald J Trump.
Saying A or not A is intellectual elitism? No, it’s a tautology.
Nor is it elitism to espouse a view (not A) held by the majority of Americans.
Hilary the Buckley Rule choice? Are you freaking kidding me? Hilary is every much the Alinsky-ite pig that Obama is. She wants power for the sole purpose of transforming the US and punishing those who stand in the way of her wielding that power. Say what you want about Trump but he at least has a genuine sense of what America once was and wishes to get back to that. Hilary wants to be Mamma Moa. There is no way Buckley would say vote for her.
I think the idea that you vote for Clinton rather than Trump because she speaks more “rationally” borders on crazy. We know she is a liar, and that she has lied about very important matters. Just because she doesn’t come off like Trump and his theatrics is no reason to believe that she would govern any more rationally.
Dude. This is Claire Berlinski you’re talking to. I don’t think “intellectual elitism” sounds disparaging to her.
Trump might be an arrogant corrupt fool. But at least he claims to be for the working class and has not declared me his enemy. HRC has PROVEN herself to be corrupt, lying, self serving, incompetent, fool that has repeatedly declared that she is proud to consider me her enemy (NRA member). If it comes down to the two of them, do I really have much choice of which one I vote for?
He has lived in a world of false liberal narratives and real estate. He now has to pretend to be a conservative and has nothing to draw on. Once president he’ll draw on what he knows– real estate and false narratives. Who knows what this means? Maybe he’ll sell off our parks to China once they’ve doubled their purchasing power by being forced, like brer rabbit, to sell off their dollars.
At least Claire has the moral courage to come out for Clinton in preference to Trump. This is the only coherent position for anyone who seriously believes that Trump would be worse than Clinton (a belief which I do not happen to share, I’ll take the “short fingered cretin” over the mendacious criminal).
My offhand prediction for what’s going to happen is that either the nomenklatura of the Republican Party and their apparatchiks in the Conservative media succeed in juggling the nomination away from Trump, in which case he stomps off and starts a third party; or Trump wins the nomination and the nomenklatura stomps off and supports Clinton (the “go to” move when the party elites don’t get their way), stays home, or starts a third party (too much work, too many burned bridges, not very likely).
Either way it’s President Hillary Clinton come January 20, 2017. Brought to us by the allrightniks of the Republican Party who have safe electoral and cushy sinecures in government and the nonprofit world.
Unless the real wild card comes up, nobody gets a majority of electoral votes, big states are split three ways, and a couple of key states are like Florida in Y2000. Chaos ensues and Obama declares he’s going to stay on until things settle down (who would stop him?)
Meanwhile, Scott Adams’ books really are worth reading. I quite enjoyed “How to Succeed by Failing at Nearly Everything.” Smart guy, quite a personal story.
Yes just remember there is only one front runner who has explicitly stated that one faction of US citizens is their enemy: HRC talking about Republicans. All of Trump’s enemies seem to not be Americans at all. That alone gives me all the insight I need.
I’m sorry, but I think that’s ridiculous. Hillary’s on the same plane as Obama—Remember HillaryCare, the predecessor to ObamaCare?
Do you seriously think Hillary’s going to have even one advisor like Jeff Sessions?
Waiting for the Rational Trump to kick in, right?
I guess I’m not enough of an intellectual to understand this. :-P
Well, the election isn’t over yet, and Trump’s negatives are a result of his crass behavior, not his policy thrusts. Even so, there are millions of Republicans who have rejected the superstar Republican field we had in this election for Trump, and to say it’s because of being “hypnotized” rather than voting for their self interests is most definitely elitism.
It’s kind of Ricochet’s point, though they phrase it differently.
I can see simply not voting for Trump. I can see voting for Trump over Hillary. I cannot see how Hillary is worthy of a conservative’s vote, never mind one’s time and treasure.
How on earth is Hillary Eleanor Iselin Clinton rightwardmost?