Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Current stage: bargaining.
Only if “worse” is taken in a wide-enough sense. There is not just the question of who would be the least disastrous President over the next 4-8 years. There is the question of what such an outcome would do to the parties – established and to come – and various national and international institutions.
If I was someone who really believed that the post-war international institutions as developed in the cold war and tweaked in the post-cold war context were important – like NATO, for example – I might well conclude that the United States’ partners would weather a Trump administration (“clearly an anomaly to be worked through”) much better than another 4+ years of the Obama doctrine (“the US foreign policy establishment really does hate the West”).
I am not a Trump supporter, but it’s the “never Trump” people that have pushed me into his camp. Electing Hillary because you don’t like Trump is about as anti conservative as it gets. Plus it’s the intellectual elitism of George Will (not Claire’s), who I find absolutely repulsive these days, has also made me see that I too was looking down on Trump supporters rather than trying to understand where they’re coming from.
Is it only Ricochet and National Review that are “never Trump”? Because I don’t meet any other conservatives in person where they have this feeling.
Insofar as we don’t know and can’t know what Trump really believes or would do, she’s the most conservative candidate. Because we do have some idea what she’d do, even if we know we won’t like it. The phrase “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” has apparently been traced back to a 1539 collection of proverbs by Richard Taverner. So I’d say that’s a well-established conservative principle.
I don’t know, but it’s definitely not just National Review, and Ricochet is — as I’m sure you know — not a beehive with a single mind, by any means.
OP: Is he ever going to explain his “Moist Robot Hypothesis”…?
He has. But it will cost you about $10.
Claire, I don’t think you can mean this without further explanation. If you are certain the devil you know is going to do very bad things, why would you not risk the unknown devil? It seems to me that this comes down to “how bad?” rather than “known bad.”
I have said this before but I would rather gouge out my own eyeballs then vote for Hillary Clinton. I am not a Trump supporter but I will enthusiatically vote for him over Hillary, hands down. Talk about crass behavior, Yes, Donald Trump says bad things and uses bad language but Hillary DOES bad things that end up with innocent people being harmed or killed. She is a disaster.
Also can we take a step back here and looked at how a Hillary or Trump may govern. We still have separation of powers, sure they have been eroded by the Obama administration but that is because he’s a young, black Democrat and has been allowed to get away with all of this because of Political correctness, no one wants to be called a racist. Trump is an old, white Republican, there would be no reason for the media to protect him and for congress not to fund his policies if they don’t think they would be good for America. Clinton would have all the protection Obama has, no one will want to be called a sexist. This is why I don’t fear a Trump presidency as much as others.
I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean exactly, but I have always enjoyed Claire’s posts and share many of her point of views. At times in my life I have proudly worn the banner of intellectual elitist. So I hope Claire doesn’t feel disparaged when I called her that. But at some point one has to look outside oneself and try to understand the phenomena that is going on contrary to one’s understanding of reality. I too looked down and disparaged Trump all summer long, frankly, ahead of the curve here on Ricochet. About a couple of month’s ago it dawned on me that the fault was in me, and that Trump supporters had real gripes with where conservatism had gone, and it had nothing to do with “the establishment.” We are not addressing their real issues, and that somehow, if we want to be a majority party, we have to synthesize their concerns into our political principles. I don’t know how to do that and maybe no one does. It might be a process we have to feel our way through. But Trump is the start of that process.
LOL! I think I went through those stages myself with Trump. I’m now at the acceptance level. ;)
This has placed me in an interesting position in that Claire has now allied herself with a political force that has proudly and repeatedly declared me as a NRA member to be its enemy. Does this now make Claire my enemy? If so what actions do I need to take to counteract her new status? I have alway thought fondly of Claire but to find out that she is now in the Clinton camp, a group of people that have targeted me in such a way is saddening.
Because I think there’s almost no chance she’d behave in a radically different way than most postwar presidents have. She would probably make the same kinds of mistakes, and this would probably be quite bad. But I don’t think there’s much chance of her going totally rogue.
I can’t rule out, to my own satisfaction, that this isn’t true of Trump. It even seems plausible to me that Putin’s got something on him, or that he does in fact admire Putin. I can’t rule those ideas out or convince myself he just says things like that to get elected. I can’t rule out the idea that this is how he really thinks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E4JFFpfNIY
He either authorized or didn’t object to that “What good is a nuclear Triad if you’re afraid to use it” comment. When we hear things like that out of Khamenei’s mouth, we think, “pre-emptive strike.” And we think it for a reason. Other countries will not be able to convince themselves that we just say these things for domestic popularity — or at least, any sovereign country responsible to its people will have to organize its defense posture around the outside possibility that the President of the United States is a complete madman. And they will also have to organize it around the idea that we have a population to whom that idea appeals.
Um have you seen her record, her instincts are horrendous. She’ll get rolled by every single world leader just like Putin rolled her with that “reset” button. Also do we know who has already paid her off and who hasn’t. She’s already sold her influence to the highest bidder, that will effect our foreign policy tremendously .
It is a well-established conservative principle. However, I don’t grant the premise that makes it applicable, for Hillary Clinton has built her career on secrecy and deceit. From the Rose Law Firm, to Hillarycare, to Benghazi, to her private email operation, we see Hillary only through prison bars dimly. We know little about what she’s actually done during the most consequential times in her career.
Both she and Trump will be Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates.
I agree. It’s quite something that the GOP has managed to find a frontrunner who frightens me even more. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in American politics. I’m still hoping for some kind of miracle.
That is absolutely right. I have no idea where this “dictator” concern is coming from. Do you believe in the constitution to protect our freedom or don’t you? And Trump is (1) a negotiator, which is actually the opposite of a dictator, and (2) not an ideologue, so he will work with his administration. His administration will be Republicans. His dictator-esk persona is a personality trait to show leadership. No one elects a pusillanimous president. Especially people on the right.
Fair enough – that’s an exaggeration. But you can only define Trump as any brand of conservative if you select out the things he says that sound vaguely conservative and ignore all the times he later contradicted those statements. So he is a complete unknown except for his historical leanings as a NY Democrat, and if he takes office and pursues liberal policies he will do in the name of conservatives. At least with Hilary we know what we’re dealing with for foreign policy and whatever she does at home won’t be our fault.
Your confidence in this seems misplaced to me. Say you’re 80 percent sure. Can you accept a 20 percent risk that this is just the way he is?
Claire, give it until the convention where the party platform gets filled out and a vice president is picked. If you still feel terrified, then vote for Hillary. But you really should let the process – which is a moderating process – work itself out before making rash decisions.
And voting for Hillary is the most god-awful rash decision I can imagine. ;)
When the alternative is Hillary, yes. Plus I trust in the constitution.
Plus, I’m a New Yorker. Trump’s persona is very New York. I know exactly where he’s coming from. Rudy Guilliani has the same persona, just not quite the showman Trump is.
What if you could prevent more murders by doing it?
Clearly this was a much better approach to Putin’s aggression:
And let’s not forget that her email operation almost certainly exposed codeword-level secrets to the Chinese, Russians, and whomever else they shared those with. Did you know that she tried to implement such a parallel operation in her husband’s White House? Praise Crom, she was stopped by career staff aligned with Bubba.
Who will stop her now?
I pointed out in comment 39, why a Trump presidency will not be as bad as a Clinton one. He’ll have no protection at all, not media protection no Washinton establishment protection. He won’t get away with the authoritarian type moves that Obama has. Also, Trump loves this country, Clinton hates this country and not for nothing Trump talks out of his rear end, when I hear the handwringing from media and establishment types about his comments on immigration, Islam, etc…. I know this is a campaign and what they say in a campaign is supposed to reflect their policies, but Trump has no policies he just talks, and I doubt he has much knowledge about what he says, you can tell.
Trump reminds me of the guys who used to go to my dads bar.
You might have a look at Edward Luttwak’s take on “Trumphobia.” There is a difference, too, between “an awful person” (which is how I see Trump) and “a complete madman.” The latter he is not.
I’m a New Yorker also, so I guess I’m used to guys like Trump which is why he doesn’t bother me as much as most. But again I’m not a supporter per se but I will vote for him if he is the nominee.
I’m not seeking to define Trump by any measure as a Conservative. What he is not is a Saul Alinsky communist.
This is logical but flawed in my opinion. We really don’t know what Hillary would do either do we? Trump has at least said some conservative things and surrounded himself with some conservative voices. His power base is largely “conservative”. He would have a Republican House and Senate at his back. Both Clinton and Trump are open to being manipulated by the social and political forces of our country. Who is most malleable to conservatives?
Why? All we know about her is that she has hungered for power for decades, and has been willing to do anything — including lying and breaking the law — to get there. Are you really so confident that having seized the nuclear football she will relax into the Georgetown verities with a satisfied sneer on her face and do nothing more? What would such a woman be prepared to do to secure a statue for herself or a title of nobility for her child?