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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
Trump has not hypnotized anyone, he’s just applied modern marketing principles to a Presidential campaign.
For him, it is all about the narrative, about instilling feelings first, then backing those feelings up with (some) data.
“We don’t win anymore”. “Make America great again”. Everything he talks about appeals to the emotions of the center-right. He’s winning because any competent marketer will tell you we make buying (or voting) decisions with our emotions first, then back that up with our intellect. Trump isn’t just the candidate for the poorly-educated, but also for the people with low emotional intelligence.
It’s brilliant, and his success is well-deserved. I just regret that it was someone like Trump, with a yuge authoritarian streak, who finally caught on the fact that the GOP’s narrative to people who aren’t already conservatives has sucked for the last 30 years.
Jack Kemp, where are you when your party needs you the most?
My difficulty is the premise that people are being persuaded by promises that they know are false (Mexico will pay for a wall) or promises that Trump contradicts almost immediately when questioned. Trump’s words are meaningless. You can argue that facts don’t matter and he’s appealing directly to emotion … but his appeals are conveyed by words. If the words are meaningless (especially when everyone acknowledges that they’re meaningless) then the appeals to emotion are also meaningless. How can people be persuaded by words they know are meaningless? Adams’ answer: because they’re stupid. If you buy a promise that you know is false, you’re an idiot. But if so, Trump’s success has everything to do with the gullibility of the people rather than any clever manipulation from Trump.
My own take is that people associate wealth with success, and success with skill. His supporters believe that Trump is vastly skilled because of his vast wealth. And, moreover, that he can bring those skills to government – i.e., that business skills translate smoothly into government skills. They believe that all of his bluster is just a skillful tactic, so they dismiss it as part of his game.
Same with me. I’m not a supporter.
That is true too. If people remember, Bill Clinton ran on a tax cut, and yet his first major policy was a tax increase! Remember that? Details from politicians, especially the Clintons, on their promises aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Actually now that I think of it, and I shouldn’t bring this up since I loved Bush 41, but remember: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”
Details are worthless until they are at the point of a Congressional vote. I think Trump really understands that.
Claire, I’ve a quick question, written in haste while my trailer is being loaded for the next run. Using your expertise in foreign policy, would you say that America’s adversaries would be more or less likely to attempt the sort of aggressive behaviors that liberal administrations usually invite if Trump becomes president? The obvious example I’m thinking of was Iran’s release of the American hostages almost immediately after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. I wonder if all that talk about him being a trigger happy cowboy had a deterrent effect back then and if a similar hesitance to poke a stick at us might result if Trump were to win. We know that a Hillary victory would roll the red carpet out for our enemies, yes? How might they react to a Trunp victory?
I’m a New Yorker…in the business world and I’ve never run into folks like Trump. At least not anyone to be taken remotely seriously. As a businessman, he is largely considered a joke by folks Trump would consider to be his “peers”. That may not matter and perhaps shouldn’t matter but it is a fact.
Americans are already hypnotized and Trump is disrupting the sleep. This is one reason why so many are apoplectic with anger with him. He’s disturbing the background of comfort and expectation.
Nearly everything said in media is constructed around a falsehood. As long as the falsehoods agree, then it seems like the truth.
Trumps imprecise language goads pundits to be imprecise themselves and now we are all flummoxed. But some, like myself, see through the façade. For example, whatever Trump says, do you think he’s a racist because other people say so? Because he failed to immediately denounce some group? This is a game many of us are completely sick of playing, and the charges against us we will now ignore – as Trump himself does.
Mitt Romney, altar boy for the Church of Saint Dole, glowingly accepts Trump’s endorsement in 2012 (which many of us were unaware) and then denounces him as a “lifelong Democrat” in 2016 and we aren’t supposed to be confused?
As much as some of us may want a strong man, others are afraid of a strongman.
The chaos that is this world has been neatly ordered for us into a narrative that ain’t necessarily so, but it provides comfort to many.
Trump has upset the already teetering GOP narrative, an applecart begging to be overturned as an attention-getting device.
His contempt for the truth equals the media’s and the two are cancelling each other out.
Great piece, Claire. Reminds me of Thomas Mann’s story, “Mario and the Magician.”
He endorsed and campaigned for Joe Lieberman over liberal Republican Lowell Weicker in 1988. I remember in 2004 Lieberman asked Rich Lowry if he could count on National Review’s endorsement again and Lowry had to say sorry, we’ve already endorsed Dean:
So far the effect of his campaign has been to terrify our allies and thrill our enemies, or at least, that’s the sense I get from reading about it from here. I don’t know what China’s really thinking. I don’t know what Putin’s really thinking either, for that matter, but definitely he’s thrilled by the idea of Trump. Whether he should be, I don’t know.
Claire, I have two thoughts. First, it is not yet over. It is not time to throw in the towel. Rubio’s withdrawal is Cruz’ opportunity, and we should back him with everything we have.
Second, if Trump wins, we should wait to see what he does, what the platform looks like, whom he picks as his vice-presidential nominee.
The news, so far, is awful. But we should keep our powder dry.
The idea that she could be more competent because of her experience doesn’t work for me. Her experience in foreign affairs should be a disqualification for the Presidency. She had failed at everything. She bungled the “reset” with Russia, she helped to mess up Libya and Syria. She lied about a stupid video causing an Ambassador to be killed. She has flip-flopped on TPP.
Point to a single Hillary success or policy that gives you confidence? To me she has experience at making things worse. So I would see Hillary as worse than Obama on foreign policy.
The idea that Trump would go “rouge” and start a nuclear war is silly. What possible benefit would he gain from this? The guy is a narcissist not a lunatic.
I don’t think he’d start one deliberately. I think the signalling he’s giving is so confused and confusing that the likelihood of it happening accidentally under Trump is higher than under Clinton.
I don’t disagree that Clinton is almost the last person in the world I’d want as Commander-in-Chief. I discovered while listening to Donald Trump that when previously I said, “last person in the world,” I was exaggerating. I would also prefer Trump to any number of floridly schizophrenic Americans on psychiatric wards, etc. But the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency scares me more than a Clinton presidency. My instinct is that his authoritarian side is the real side of him, and that he’s on the side of our enemies, not our allies. Or at least, on Russia’s side. And I fear he’ll signal that, and then one of our crazy enemies will do something really crazy, thinking that we don’t actually care about our allies. And then they’ll find out that we do. And from there, things can escalate very badly. WWI-style. It’s happened before.
Not one. I’m really just thinking how we bargain for time and survive until the next election.
Oh come on are you really going to say that Hilary is even close to as acceptable a politician as Leiberman? First Mona and now this. You guys are losing your very minds.
Vote for Hillary? No freaking way. Her State Department gig, particularly Libya and her email server, tell you all you need to know about her so-called “competency.” Not going to happen, ever.
I appreciate your position but I think this is overstated.
Look at our foreign policy lately. Our response to the Arab Spring did not make the world more safe. The Iran deal (which Iran is already violating) increased the likelihood of a nuclear event in the middle east. In Russia we reneged on our commitment to the Ukraine and surrender it to Putin. A continuation or slightly lesser version of our current foreign policy seems just as likely to result in your feared outcome.
I am not a Trump guy, I would consider voting for him in the General and would never vote for Clinton.
You assume things could get bad under Trump. Based on the historical record I can say with some confidence things will get bad under Clinton.
They will — I’m pretty sure — get very bad under either. Obama made a series of disastrous choices. This happened as a number of other countries began going through the industrial revolution. The world is a very unstable place now because of this. Anyone who bets on “stability” in the coming four years is a fool. Trump seems to be campaigning on “abandon our allies,” “embrace our enemies,” “bomb things,” and “to hell with the Geneva Conventions, but maybe I didn’t mean any of that.” I think this is more dangerous than, “Known establishment figure who at least sounds like a normal State Department hack when she speaks.” If we can’t for the life of us guess what he’ll do, how on earth will other countries? It’s a recipe for horrific miscalculation.
I’ll say that Hillary is worse than Lieberman, and Trump is a worse prospect than Weicker was, and I’m not motivated to find out the ratios because neither one will receive my vote in November.
If I had to guess, I don’t think Buckley would endorse Hillary, but I don’t think the case Claire is making here is crazy.
So who is going to overreach themselves? Putin into Poland? China into Taiwan? China not holding back the Norks? Iran nuking Israel? Argentina into the Falklands? Russia into the Baltics? Turkey into Greece? Greece into Turkey? Venezuela into Colombia? I’m struggling here…
Claire, I think you’re a little too dug in. Hillary made all of these bad decisions with intelligence information that the general public doesn’t get. She had knowledge of the all the threats against us and still made a hash out of it. Trump has no clue and is just talking, he doesn’t have the intelligence information, so you really don’t know how he will react with that information. It may sober him, he isn’t a lunatic as Conrad Black noted about him, I’ll take his word for it.
I guess we will just have to respectfully agree to disagree.
Other countries have no idea what we will do right now. We turned our backs on questionable but “safe” leaders in Libya and Egypt. We drew meaningless red lines in Syria. Abandoned the Ukraine. Clinton/Obama supported a military coup over a democratic election in Honduras.
In the face of disaster and inconstancy of the Obama/Clinton policy, your argument is Trump is inconstant and not clear. So exactly the same as our current foreign policy.
Consider any other profession that requires you entrust your life to someone. Airline pilot. Neurosurgeon. Would you prefer the doctor who’s performed the surgery a few times and screwed it up? Or the guy who literally has no clue, hasn’t bothered to read a medical textbook, and doesn’t seem to know basic things, like “If you screw up neurosurgery, you can easily leave someone brain damaged, paralyzed, or dead?” Serious question, because this is a seriously horrible choice, and that’s what’s at stake.
I still don’t know why you seem to think Hillary will do anything you say she will. Also to reward a woman with the presidency who left her own ambassador and other Americans to die for political reasons, and then spent all that time and energy lying about it to cover her tracks and is still lying about it. To reward a woman with the presidency who set up an unsecure server to pass classified information which put American security at risk for her own convenience and/or political protection, and she did all of this knowing the risks to the United States. Trump may be a lout but dear lord Hillary is evil.
That is not the choice before us. To take your annaolgy we are being asked whether to trust the guy with no clue (who may at least try to get good advice) or the surgeon who has left every patient brain damaged, parlayed or dead (whose advisers helped her kill all the patients)
“It’s possible that Trump fully understands the importance of NATO……”
One of the things I’ve learned over my 54 years on this Earth is to not assume anything about what is going on in others people’s heads. Therefore, without any further evidence, I would have to conclude that Trump doesn’t understand anything on your long list.
What that Trump is going to start a nuclear war? It’s crazy.
Does the doctor think she’s screwed it up? Or does she think she’s a great neurosurgeon?