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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
I’m in agreement with this.
Years ago I went to a hypnotist to quit smoking. I smoked a cigarette on the way home. I am totally nonplussed to hear some of you even entertaining the idea of voting for Hillary, let alone saying it out loud. Stop the madness!
Amen!
If you are not assuming anything about what is in other people’s heads, absence further evidence, could you not also conclude that Trump knows a lot of stuff?
I really don’t want to be in a position of defending Trump. The choice here is he may make a mess vs she will make a mess. I just don’t think there is anything rational about the idea that Trump=nuclear war. Nor is it rational to look at the outcomes of Clinton’s experiences as Secretary of State and make the claim that this time at State makes her a better choice. Everything she was involved in is much worse off for her efforts.
Yes. And remember, people! There is a trail of actual dead bodies behind the Clintons. Remember Vince Foster. Remember Ron Brown. [Ricochet’s code-of-conduct discourages appealing to conspiracy theories.] The problem is that it’s pretty easy to believe of these vile and despicable people the Clintons. Never let them anywhere near the White House again.
Hillary for prison.
Sure you are. To say a thing is either true or not true is always true (as long as your logic includes the Law of the Excluded Middle).
I agree that Hillary is the status quo candidate. The flaw in the argument in my view is: that makes her Marie Antoinette in the Very Ugly Revolution of 2020, not necessarily a safe harbor.
Flatly, no. He has shown time and again that he doesn’t know “a lot of stuff.” Scott Adams says that this is a calculated ploy. But until Trump shows otherwise, I have to judge him solely by his words and actions, which up until this point show that he is ignorant in the extreme.
I never said anything about Trump=nuclear war or about Clinton’s experience being a plus. I agree with you on these issues. I think Ms. Berlinski is wrong and a President Trump isn’t any more likely than a President Clinton to precipitate a nuclear war. You may wish to redirect this part of your reply directly to Ms. Berlinski.
I was wondering how long it was going to take you to get to that. So far all the talk about The Donald has left out this very important aspect. HRC is a womyn. When elected HRC represents the historic first womyn POTUS. Class/gender solidarity will make many if not most womyn be drawn to her. Being that the womyn minority represents the majority of the population, the majority of the electorate and the majority of the active voters this give HRC a tremendous advantage. I think many womyn are going to look at Clinton vs Trump. Not see much of a difference between them and side with HRC out of solidarity and to be on the right side of history. After all womyn “have an obligation to help one another” and “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
This is one of the reasons that I cannot get excited about Trump. I just do not see any path to victory with Trump as the nominee. Too many things against him, not enough things for him.
I don’t think it matters. I think that glass ceiling was long ago shattered in people’s minds, even if the US hasn’t yet had a woman POTUS. Enough countries have had significant women in power, and we have enough women in positions of very significant power, that I don’t think anyone cares anymore.
So then what form will your campaigning for Hillary take?
Anytime a womyn gets to be the first anything it is all over the media for weeks. It is on every news channel, every magazine, every newspaper, etc. It must mean something to somebody since it seems to attract eyeballs. Will it cause a landslide victory just for this reason? Maybe, maybe not. But we live in a time where a few percentage points of turnout in minority voting blocks swing elections. In such an environment a little higher turnout of the largest voting block voting for HRC will mean quite a bit. It might just mean everything. I suspect it will.
I’m not sure. I’ve never been in such a weird position. I can’t in any way honestly say that I think she’d be anything less than a disastrous president. Only that I think Trump is apt to be far worse.
“Vote for the crook, it’s important?”
But even if you’d vote for her, which I’m sorry but I can’t fathom, why compound it by actively campaigning for such a person? I’m trying to understand some of the things people are saying. I’ve never been more flummoxed. I mean I agree with people’s objections to Trump, and I get it and everything, but there sure is a lot I don’t get.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.
Sorry if this violates C of C, but Hillary Clinton is evil. I will not stand on the sidelines.
Claire,
No need to sell your soul to one devil to save it from another devil. We will be damned anyway.
If Trump is the nominee I will be voting for Gary Johnson – and I am one of the fiercest libertarian critics here on Ricochet. A 20% showing for the Libertarian party will send a message without selling out.
It’s not a woman thing. Claire is too sophisticated for that. It’s a globalist thing. Welcome to the New World Order.
Because self-flagellation is a path to sainthood. I say that somewhat facetiously but there’s an element of truth there.
Well she can continue doing what she is doing. Using her position and influence on a center right conservative site to elect a progressive Democrat and undermine the support for the GOP canidate. A site known to produce contributors for talk radio, Fox News, etc.
This is just the polarization of our politics. People complain that Trumps supporters don’t accept criticisms of Trump. That when Trump is attacked his backers dig in and like him more.
This is just the other side of the same coin. People who don’t like Trump but see him winning are digging in. So as Trump wins primaries they start with Trump will create war and Hillary is really the conservative choice. This is not a rational position it is an emotional dislike of Trump.
I share the objections to Trump. I do not ever want to vote for him, but I might. I would never vote for Hillary.
I am still trying to understand on what world that HRC is the conservative choice for anything. Are there people to the left of HRC? Certainly, but it is not Trump. Granted that Trump is more progressive than most members on this site, but to say he is more progressive than HRC is borderline insane.
As for political experience. HRC definitely has Trump on this category. Trumps political inexperience is going to cause him to make mistakes on the other hand HRC political experience is not really in her favor. In any situation if you take HRC’s nature political instincts and do the exact opposite of them you are probably on track. But I doubt she will do that so it is a wash in that while Trump will make some mistakes , HRC is going to make a mistake every time.
Sanity. This is the worse category for me. I believe both these individuals to be the worse of human beings and both have enough mental disorders that you could spend a lifetime writing them up. You would have to flip a coin to figure out which one is the craziest from my point of view.
Statist tendencies. Another wash. I have no doubt that HRC would line the conservatives up and execute them if she thought she could get away with it. Trump the same. HRC as a progressive has a better chance of doing it then Trump as a conservative can.
I don’t think it’s a hard case to make that HRC is a more conservative candidate than Trump. Unless as Claire referenced above you assume/know that Trumps schtick is a deliberate ploy, it’s pretty easy.
Hillary is the “conservative” choice when you have backed yourself into a rhetorical and intellectual hole. A lot of people have said Trump would be bad (I think they have made good arguments for this position). Trump kept winning. They said #nevertrump. Trump kept winning. They claimed they would vote for Hillary, Trump kept winning. So now we have Clinton as the more conservative option and we should campaign for her.
This position is not based on anything Clinton has ever done or said. Nor is it one that I would expect many Republicans or even many #nevertrump people to support. It is and should be a big leap for a Republican to go from ” I will not vote for Trump” to ” I will campaign for Clinton”.
I really don’t want Trump as President. I question whether I belong in a Republican Party or Conservative group that would ever, ever actively support Clinton.
Trump is supposed to be a fighter. Will he fight Hillary? The media will be on her side and loaded for bear.
I can see him denouncing Hillary while on the campaign trail, but not on the debate stage. Remember how he did in face to face confrontations with Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina.
I would hold my nose and vote for Trump over Hillary, but I don’t believe he has what it takes to beat her.
His poll numbers went up when he bashed Kelly and Fiorina, Why wouldn’t he think the same would hold true for Clinton?
What if Trump, from about now, until November, softens his approach and image. He choses Gov. Martinez for VP. He rolls out, and talks about issues in depth. He treats almost everything horrible he has so far said as a kind of demo of what he will turn on Hillary. Does he flip states? I’m finding if improbable but not impossible that he could win New York. New York State isn’t just the Upper West Side and Park Slope.
If I must, I will vote for Satan Minor over Satan Major.
I would rethink my position, if the Donald started to get serious about the issues, started to exhibit a more appropriate temperament for leader of the free world. I don’t expect it to happen. And yes voting for Hillary is voting for the least bad candidate.
It sounds like you have developed a stron case of normalcy bias Claire.
You have learned to live with the anti-American conservative-hating style of Obama and Clinton.
Really the trajectory a Clinton presidency is more of a nightmare to me as an American Ally than Trump. Clinton will not fight Islamic Fundamentalism. She will not reign in China’s militarism. She couldn’t give two figs about the middle class. She won’t stand with Israel. The philosophy that animates her whole existence is “whatever right-wingers hate, do it”. Which is essentially the same as Obamas. A Clinton presidency will be the end of the west basically.
In other words, I think you scored her far too generously. You should give her a 1/10, not a 5. For reference I would give Obama a 1 and GWB a 3 or 4.
So If Clinton is a 1, and Trump is a 1 to 10 wild card, that really means the worst of Trunp can’t be worse than the worst f Clinton can it? In any case this is not a testable hypothesis. When one is elected you will never know if things would be better or worse with the other.