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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
Poppycock…. A Clinton presidency will likely be similar to the previous two democrats to hold office. We survived one and did pretty well under the other.
I hope you folks aren’t losing too much sleep over this. November is a long ways off, an eternity in politics. It’s not a certainty that Trump and Hillary will be the nominees. If they are, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it, and you don’t have to decide who you’ll vote for now. Let’s see how things develop, who says and does what, and what surprises are in store. There are always surprises in store.
Trump not only wins, but defeats the Hildebeast in a 1980-style Reagan landslide.
LOL! Not bad, I’ll admit.
Claire,
Not voting I could understand. Voting for a symbolic third party candidate as a protest I could understand. However, voting for someone who is either the greatest incompetent to ever reach an office as high as Secretary of State or a felonious criminal who in league with her corrupt rapist husband has been selling the interests of United States to the highest bidder.
You are not voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton. I forbid you!
Regards,
Jim
Claire, I sometimes think you write these things just because you enjoy the attention/interaction that results from making deliberately provocative comments. I am guessing tomorrow you will write a post stating the above sentence does not actually represent your thoughts but rather it was the slightly modified version of a sentence written by someone else about his/her thoughts.
I don’t write this to be sassy. I write this because it is difficult for me to believe any “rightward” thinking person would even have such a thought/idea beyond the initial emotional reactionary outburst to a situation he/she is unhappy about. Right? Wrong? You always keeping me guessing.
And, Yes, I would ask you this question if we found ourselves sitting next to each other at dinner table, although, the question would most likely be asked as: You’re just toying with me, aren’t you?
Not sure about the polls here. He wasn’t so tough when facing them on stage.
If you really want Hillary to be President , you won’t have to do much.
Trump has everyone on the right intimidated, and Republicans – conservative and moderate – seem to wilt in his presence. They simply don’t know what to do.
Democrats are a different story. They will handle Trump and make it look easy. They are old hands at demagoguery and they know Trump. He is one of them.
I predict no luck with the hypnosis, in the general election.
Agree, this thing is a done deal.
Trump rickrolled the GOP and the fell for it time and time again.
I can’t vote for either DJT or HRC, both have proven they are evil and better deserving of a jail cell than the oval office. I will however be secretly slanted in Hillary’s direction. I honestly doubt she’ll be able to dismantle the 2nd amendment and Americas gun culture in the span of 4-8 years.
Trump on the other hand could vary well whined up passing his proposed 43% tariff, successfully shuttering down thousands of small business and losing many more people their jobs (including myself.) All in some vain promise that we’ll be able to get factory jobs putting together old-school radiation tubes for RCA.
So am I expected to support the man that seeks to destroy my way of life and give him the means to do so, or am I to cautiously hope for the candidate who hates your hobby?
I must be living in an alternative universe. I’ve said this a few times:
To put it slightly more graphically: Voting for Trump over Clinton would be like playing Russian Roulette with a revolver with one bullet in the cylinder. Voting for Clinton over Trump is like sticking a loaded shotgun in your mouth and pulling the trigger.
The one (and only, as far as I can tell) positive of a Hillary Presidency is that there’s a hell of a crash coming, and it would be nice to have a Democrat take the blame instead of a Republican.
meh… he lost me when he started talking about the development of our brains. I think Adams is clever, but I don’t think he is right.
Don’t you realize it all started under GW Bush?? Sheeez. pay attention.
I realize it’s hard to quantify, but I think for a number of reasons that — assuming the traditional six bullets — Clinton is one bullet in the cylinder and Trump is two. Odds are we’ll survive, either way, but Trump seems to me twice as risky. I wonder if there’s any way for me to make the argument for this more persuasively. Let me see if I can’t figure out better why I believe this.
Hillary made her philosophy very clear during the HillaryCare debacle. When asked why she disliked medical savings accounts, she said that the government will spend the money more wisely than Americans would. Given the expansion of US indebtedness and her immigration plans, “we” may survive but four years will be enough time for her to make Obama’s transformation impossible to reverse in your lifetime.
We know what her Supreme Court nominees will be like. Imagine the Federal Civil Service after four more years of hiring by radical leftists. Or eight more. She has been compromising US security for decades. She has made a lot of money doing it. What makes you think she will stop just because she’s back in the White House?
I don’t. Do you see me arguing that she’d be a great president?
Let me add to that. Trump has vowed to end Obamacare, have a sane pro-America energy policy, and end common core. These are his staked out positions.
To those who say he doesn’t have to keep them, baloney. In business your word is your bond. Trump has given his word on his “deal” with the electorate. If your word is meaningless, then all future negotiations are futile. Trump knows that. He wrote a book on that. He may very well go outside the conservative playbook on future issues, but on these he’s committed to. That’s way better than anything Hillary will do to throw a bone to the moderate middle.
But you said you would actively campaign for her! Why would you do that?!
Because I think Trump would be much worse.
Which proves that Stockholm syndrome is no longer just for Stockholm.
Trump can only be worse if you think he will launch a nuclear attack. There’s a small chance he will be much better, and a likely chance he will be slightly better. But worse? Feel free to campaign for Felony Clinton in Paris. I can live with that.
It looks as though Claire would rather live in a society governed by the faculty members of Harvard University than in a society governed by the first few thousand names in the Boston phone book.
I can’t rule that out. He hasn’t persuaded me that he in any way has a sense of right and wrong. I see “giant con man” written on him, and most extremely successful con men are psychopaths. I don’t think he’d launch a nuclear attack for no reason, but I can’t satisfy myself, in my head, that he’d really understand why that was wrong. I keep going back to that “What’s the point of having a Triad if you don’t use it” comment. Too serious to just brush that off as a joke or a flub.
Claire: try to write a scenario where Trump causes Armageddon. Don’t leave out any steps or resort to handwaving or amateur psychology or appeals to authority. Don’t forget there are a squillion hangers-on, advisers and career civil servants and/or soldiers involved. Perhaps you’ll convince us. The “I don’t know but it feels scary” isn’t convincing me.
BTW, everyone on this thread should really go watch this video:
http://ricochet.com/best-trump-ad-ive-seen-in-my-life/
Then please explain how Trump could be worse than the folks running the GOP.
In addition to the above, don’t forget that the press will never give him an inch. If Hillary’s in charge, they’ll look the other way no matter what horrors she commits. I can’t find a way to believe she would be better than Trump. Claire, you have a platform. I beg you not to use it to help her.
Because the alternative would be worse. Recognizing someone as the lesser of two evils doesn’t mean you think she’s no longer evil. It just makes her second worst.
Sorry, but I am appalled.
I think you are trying to be persuasive here. I am just one person but the end result is having the opposite reaction for me. I don’t want Trump to be President. I agree he is very likely a con man. I think I am your target audience. Someone who does not support Trump but is not full #nevertrump.
The idea that you will campaign for Hillary because Trump could cause a nuclear war just goes to far for me. It actually makes me take Trump more seriously rather that less.
Could you provide any level of background here? Who would we attack? Why would we do this? Just some country because Trump is not a good foreign policy guy is not persuasive.