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The Complicated Nature of America’s Best Trump Apologist
Scott Adams, the author of the Dilbert comic strip, is a Trump toady, or so say his critics.
As evidence they point to his blog where, for many a month and in Sherlock Holmesian fashion, Adams has dissected the unfolding crime scene of the 2016 presidential campaign and explained, with forensic exactitude, not only how Donald Trump has been crushing it but why.
It is not so much Adams’ past experience as a white-collar cubical drone that allows him to read the mind of real-life cartoon boss Donald Trump, but rather Adams’ skills as a trained hypnotist. Scott Adams calls Donald Trump a “Master Persuaderâ€, and he believes that it is this natural gift that has led Trump, a man whose entire career is an instruction manual on the art of dicking the public, to his current position of running neck and neck with professional pol Hillary Clinton for the most powerful job in the world.
Trump has done this, Adams says, through various mind control tactics that are well understood by hypnotists, used-car salesmen and pick-up artists. His blog is filled with examples of Trump employing “anchorsâ€, “pacing and leading†and “linguistic kill-shotsâ€. This has irritated any number of people who don’t like being told that the hearty and free-willed American race is nothing but a collection of knobs waiting to be turned this way or that by the soft pink hands of political movers and moneyed shakers. But read Scott’s words and ask yourself: do you have a better explanation for how that tangerine-colored bamboozler has gotten this far?
As a fan of Scott Adams’ blog, I hereby offer my assessment of both faces of this intellectual Janus.
Scott Adams: The Hero
Scott Adams has declined to pick a side in the presidential race (hedging his bets, Adams’ recently, though unconvincingly, declared for Gary Johnson), but his fascination with Trump has infuriated many on both the left and the right who see Adams as an advocate for a budding fascist. Liberal websites such as Salon cite Adams’ “obvious hero worshipâ€Â of Trump, while Erick Erickson, a steward of the conservative movement’s declining middlebrow wing, recently snark-tweeted to Adams: “I’m waiting for the guy who writes Dilbert to pen 5000 words on why this Access Hollywood tape is actually a brilliant thing for Trump.â€
To those who wish to throw acid in Adams’ face, I say “don’t hate the player, hate the game.†Much of what this cartoonist has to say about Trump and his mesmeric appeal is upsetting because it rings true. November 8th is almost here, and while you are watching pages fall off your cartoon-a-day Dilbert calendar, hoping that Trump will fall to the *latest* deadly blow meant to destroy him (this week it is PussyGate and the now daily parade of Trump’s molested victims), you can’t help but notice that Trump is still polling gallingly high. It is easier to hate the man who seems to know why that is then to admit that our system is that fucked and Hillary is that shitty a candidate.
If Adams’ detractors would put down their brickbats for a moment, they would see the value of his analysis. Adams brings an interesting lens to this campaign, the lens of a man who gives less than half a crap about the candidates’ policies and simply considers the contenders as the popularity contest finalists they are. How did they get here? Why is it that half the population of the country is unconcerned that Trump probably doesn’t have the attention span to read to the end of a fortune cookie’s fortune? Adams realized well before you or I (or Jonah Goldberg or George Will or the Weekly Standard) that besides having a population of utterly unexceptional Americans to exploit, Trump also has an ace up his sleeve: skills.
Adams has had the temerity to recognize the persuasive power of a man who has hijacked a storied political party and turned it into his personal bouncy castle. He saw the genius of Trump labeling Jeb Bush as “low energyâ€, recognizes the subtlety with which Trump shifts gears, how he herds his followers like sheep while teaching them to love the taste of mutton, and how he turns his gaffes into free advertising gold.
Can one truly hate Adams when all he’s done is reveal Trump’s secrets to a gobsmacked public? I mean, Trump’s idiotic Great Wall of Mexico may sound like something that would come from the mouth of an Uzbek despot, but see it as a loud, brassy sales pitch and your wheels begin turning. Then it seems possible that Donald Trump is only saying something that no liberal will listen to at a conversational level, which is that maybe, maybe just MAYBE the USA has absorbed its fair share of Mexican immigrants over the decades with little to no pushback. Hell, I didn’t realize that Donald Trump could make any sense whatsoever until Scott Adams cracked the hexadecimals of Trump’s right wing Enigma code!
And Adams’ has even pointed out crucial missteps by the unloved and unlovely Hillary Clinton. For example: how her dumb campaign slogan “Love Trumps Hate‖clearly written by the wordsmith herself–is two thirds of the phrase “Love Trumpâ€. And have you ever noticed that you can’t name a single thing Hillary plans to do as president, but can recite a dozen things Trump will do? Trump is sticky, and Adams knows why. If Hillary goes down in flames on November 8th, the desperate denizens of the Hillary Bubble will at least find that an autopsy has already been written for them.
So kudos to Scott Adams for pointing out that beneath Donald Trump’s brutish orange rind there are the thousand flashing LEDs of Lt. Commander Data’s superbrain, and that we were fools for not seeing it sooner. Trump isn’t a pig that learned to walk erect; he’s Good Will Hunting!
Scott Adams: The Dick
Did I say Good Will Hunting? I meant Rain Man.
Trump’s genius in this race has not been any spectacular gift at mental manipulation. He fell ass backwards into the truths that conservatism, the mythic shibboleth of the Republican Party for two generations, is entirely moribund, and that the race for the presidency, already a shallow spectacle, was ripe to be transformed into an outright television program. All one had to do to steal the show was abandon all dignity, statesmanship and pretense of intellect. Decades of groundwork by Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh had already rotted the thought processes of the Republican base. It only took Donald Trump, the Vandal with a heart of gold, to shatter his opponents’ remaining delusion: that anyone cared about their pedigrees.
Donald Trump, casino mogul, knows better than most that the world is full of rubes waiting to be fleeced, and his oversized personality, a combination of John Gotti and Richard Dawson, is a proven hit. Add to that the unexpected humility of a billionaire Narcissus willing to descend a golden escalator to enter the squared circle with Stone Cold Steve Austin, and buddy, how could this guy not shine like a supernova compared to ghouls like Ted Cruz?
To listen to Scott Adams, however, you would think that he had decoded Trump’s DNA and found that he’s the Fifth Element! In reality, Trump is only the biggest termite chewing up an already rotten log.
But while it is true that Adams is not an outright lickboot for Trump, and though he does provide a valuable service demystifying the man for the hair-pulling masses, you have to wonder: how can Adams write so often and in such depth about Donald Trump while never directly saying what he believes four years of a Trump presidency would mean for the very schlubs whose shoulders are bearing his litter?
As compelling as Adams’ analysis of Trump the Master Persuader is, Scott Adams himself seems to be in the thrall of the Maestro, and the cognitive dissonance he often spies in others is the timber in his own eye.
“For starters,†Adams tells us in August of 2015, at the beginning of his journey into the Heart of Trumpness, “Trump literally wrote the book on negotiating, called The Art of the Deal. So we know he is familiar with the finer points of persuasion.†Indeed, so persuasive is Trump that he has persuaded Adams to ignore the fact that said book was actually ghostwritten by a man who now calls Trump a sociopath with ADD. Does this stir Scott Adams’ conscience at all?
How about the apologia Adams has written regarding the women who have charged Trump with molestation? Adams concludes: “I doubt Trump ever leaned in to kiss anyone unless he interpreted their actions as willingness.â€
Why? Why does he doubt these women who say exactly the opposite? Even Trump, in his now famous “Pussy Grabber†video, admits that he kisses first and asks for permission later. “And when you’re a star you can do it. You can do anything,†Trump reveals. This is what being a Master Persuader really is, from the mouth of the Master himself: star power plus Tic-Tacs equals “who’s gonna believe her over me?â€
This would all be irrelevant if we could take Adams at his word that he is above questioning Trump’s character, since he is no less trapped than we are between voting for a Giant Douche over a Turd Sandwich (to quote South Park). But he is going to vote, right?
And when Adams actually cops to being moved by an issue, surprise! Trump is always the one with the right answer. Whether it is the “great deal†that Trump will offer the suicide cult of ISIS, or simply the prospect of Trump rescuing Adams from a post-mortem tax levy, one can scarcely escape the conclusion that Trump has dropped an anchor in Adam’s mind that will not be persuaded away.
“I have been trying to unhypnotize the country on this matter [Trump] for the past year,†Scott Adams writes in advance of the third and final debate. Then, in an exaggerated tribute to the persuasive talents of Hillary Clinton he tells us that
Clinton’s team of persuaders has caused half of the country to see Trump as a racist/sexist Hitler with a dangerous temperament…The majority of Trump supporters … just want change.
But for the sake of mere “change†Scott Adams appears to have inured himself to the endless erratic prevarications of Donald Trump, and surely the decades-long video record of Trump’s orcish attitudes towards women requires no elaboration on Hillary’s part.
Going into the home stretch, Scott Adams insists on standing aloof from the darker questions Trump’s ascension has raised, such as: why does Trump’s beautiful mind only have the power to persuade the mob? Why does he leave newspaper editorial boards reaching for the Lysol when he departs their interviews? And why have so many intelligent elected Republicans, desperate to reclaim the White House, instead sent up one signal flare after another that this man is catastrophe on legs?
Who’s really hypnotized here, buddy?
I don’t think Trump is Hitler. Hitler had a plan, and focus, and a party that wasn’t flying apart at the seams. But you can’t really blame Adams for not wanting to admit to his own leanings, given a climate where he is likened to Joseph Goebells  merely for having an opinion. That comparison is unfair for two reasons: 1) fascists don’t have a sense of humor, and 2) fascists have convictions.
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Last week was a week of transformations in this despairing political season.
First, The Pumpkin King performed his first political punt. While on the campaign trail, Donald  Trump once invited Caitlyn Jenner to visit any of his properties and squat in whichever bathroom she preferred, a revolutionary gesture from the party of “It’s Adam & Eve, Not Adam & Steve”. Last week, however, while appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live,  Trump reversed course slightly and declared that poo-poo and wee-wee is a state’s rights issue that should be left to local neanderthals to decide. Someone must have must told him that he’ll have to bend the knee to those Southern states after all if he wants to be the boss. This is Trump finally acting “presidential”.
So, a win for the GOP establishment. Bathroom prejudice, extinct as a national agenda item since the era of MLK, is back and ready to embarrass conservatism once again.
But last week also marked a turning point in the Democrats perception of the race as well, at least in this observer’s opinion. I do not know exactly what the triggering event was, just as no one can tell which bird is steering a flock as you watch it dip and dive through the air in choreographed fashion, but in one day both my mother and a close friend communicated their grave concern that Hillary is not going to pull off a victory in November. Perhaps owing to Hillary’s forceful declaration that there is “no way” she won’t be the Democratic nominee, the reality of Trump’s omnipresence and the Left’s collective ambivalence toward Her Nibs crashed like a wave in their minds, and the possibility of a President Trump suddenly leapt from nightmare to reality.
In the immortal words of Scooby Doo: Ruh-roh.
The entirely foreseeable mistake the Democratic party made in throwing its weight behind the unliked and unprincipled human dart board that is Hillary Clinton is now bearing its fruit. The only silver lining to hope for is that Donald, who gobbled up his competition faster than Pac-Man on meth, may tire himself out delivering crotch kicks to Hillary before July’s Democratic convention. Then she can stagger, bloody, into Philadelphia to receive her laurels.
I am actually stunned at the ferocity of Trump’s viciousness with six months still left before the election. Without even allowing for the brief hope that this campaign will be based on anything resembling a competition of ideas and leadership skills between the two parties’ nominees, Trump has come out of the gate with a blitzkrieg attack, resurrecting conspiracy theories about the death of former Hillary associate Vince Foster and blasting Hillary’s cred as a defender of women’s dignity, going so far as to call out Bill Clinton as a rapist. (Under normal circumstances, it would seem fitting for the press to demand to know why, then,  Trump donated hundreds of thousands of dollars  to the alleged swine for over a decade. But the media must have by now abandoned all hopes of pinning the man down on matters of credibility that would already have any other candidate flying to Russia to room with Edward Snowden.)
The Trump strategy is bound to work in the short term, as he raises subject after subject that are so toxic Hillary cannot hope to fire back lest she be forced to answer uncomfortable questions which would send her into one of her frequent coughing fits. Trump, the remorseless pig, does indeed have her number. And what exactly can she come back at him with? Scuzz is the man’s meat and drink. And trying to outshine him with her qualifications is a non-starter as well. Trump just doesn’t do policy.
Hillary’s only hope, unless Trump lifts his shirt to reveal a missing dragon scale that she can fire an arrow into, is that with so much time left before the election the population will sicken of Donald’s meanness or–dare I dream?–realize that the man is a genuine imbecile on the topics most likely to affect their lives. Then, with our heads clear, we can select either a game show host or an exemplar of Beltway cronyism to represent our American Dream.
Zoinks.
Conservatives Lament Not Liquidating the White Race
Last week was  blistering  for the Republicans. The withdrawal of Marco Rubio from the race for President means that the contest is now between a man whose face could curdle milk, a bowl of soggy Cheerios…and Him. The true horror of Trump is finally sinking in.
Actually, “sinking in†is too generous a term. Trump is now like Wilfred Brimley in The Thing, shoving his fingers through the soft tissue of the Republican Party’s face, making their flesh one with his.
This passing of the era of dignified politics has led to numerous finger-pointing dispatches from the Establishment, a sub-genus of the Republican party that didn’t even know it had a name until the Trump campaign turned its habitat into a brownfield.
For David Brooks, the Week the Music Died arrived with this revelation: there are economic classes apart from the one he inhabits! And guess what? They vote! David has promised to investigate this phenomenon further in the years to come, and will report on his findings in his upcoming book Bobos of the Apocalypse, which will be completed just before he is strapped to the hood of an armored Crown Victoria and driven across the desert at 80 miles per hour.
Politically ever-so incorrect conservative Ben Shapiro is now a #NeverTrump after parting ways with the hack news site Breitbart.com, for whom he has served as a writer and editor. Ben laments that the website—the creation of the late, fumigating Andrew Breitbart—has abandoned its mission of declaring anyone with a camera phone and a hatred for feminist theory majors a â€journalistâ€, and has instead become Donald Trump’s official fluffer. Breitbart’s response to Ben’s resignation? A Trump-worthy defamation.
Meanwhile, Right wing goblin Ben Stein is prepared to blame any future Trump triumphs on blacks (as he is prepared to do for almost any catastrophe short of an outright sharknado). Ben declares himself “terrified†of Trump, all the more so because, as he puts it, every Black Lives Matter protester who shows up at a Trump event puts a thousand more white bigots into Trump’s column. Still, Ben vows to continue to support his party against Hillary, who he still finds more frightening than Trump, a man who has boasted that he can simply order China to assassinate Kim Jong Un (perhaps by threatening to waterboard Bei Bei the panda).
Meanwhile, Trump gleefully grinds his boot into the face of any Beltway Menshevik who still defies him, George Will and Charles Krauthammer being favorite targets. And in the wake of the most recent primary results, Krauthammer, who blew the call repeatedly during the rise of Trump, has conceded the man’s dangerous unpredictability. Poor Chuck. A lifelong Reaganite, he can’t even sit by the old man’s grave to speak to him anymore, as Ronald Reagan’s spinning corpse has reportedly bored its way down to the kingdom of the Mole Men.
But the “Golden Load in the Pants” trophy for last week’s biggest shit fit clearly belongs to Kevin D. Williamson of National Review, who blasted the traitorous scum of conservatism as though he were imbued with Cyclops’ eye lasers. It’s truly must-read stuff.
In sticking it to the ersatz conservatives of the fruiting Trump movement, Williamson shows just how interchangeable the right’s enemies can be. For example, conservatives often accuse liberals of needing the tender grip of some Stalinist state to complete them, but Kevin finds that The Donald fits the bill for Republicans just as nicely as Uncle Joe does for Democrats.
It is easy to imagine a generation of young men being raised without fathers and looking out the window like a kid in an after-school special, waiting for Daddy to come home.
Many of them slip into harmless Clark Griswold–ism, trying to provide for their own children the ideal families they themselves never had. But some of them end up grown men still staring out that window, waiting for the father-führer figure they have spent their lives imagining, the protector and vindicator who will protect them, provide for them, and set things in order.
This vainglorious delusion about what makes a blue collar American tick is exactly the tone-deafness that David Brooks only just caught on to. Matt Taibbi diagnosed the same malady in a recent Rolling Stone piece.
What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems…But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.
This insight will continue to lay beyond the grasp of many conservatives. It certainly eludes Kevin, who goes on to rip the lungs out of working class whites in a spittle-flecked rant worthy of the one Hitler delivered in Downfall:
The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to…The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists†and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,†but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves…the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America….The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.
By the end of Williamson’s ejaculation there are only two things left for him to do: marry Eva Braun and blow his brains out. Given his snobbery, I dearly hope he avails himself of the latter.
The collected greying temples at National Review, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, et al., are being rubbed raw these days as the smartest minds of the Op-Ed page try to figure out which part of their governing equation didn’t account for Trump. Perhaps, no…did we fail to correctly balance the stagnation of wages and lead in the drinking water with enough cheap flat screen TVs?
Little did they realize that one day a billionaire jack-o’-lantern would break ranks and reveal the Establishment’s dirty little secret to the Republican base: their party also, not just the “Demoncratsâ€, were the ones who sent the choicest grunt work over to China (or, as the pumpkin king himself says it, to “CHY-NAH!â€).
For eight years the Republican party put all their chips on doing nothing but holding the nation hostage after America’s first black president arrived two centuries ahead of schedule. They are just now discovering that even white Republicans expect to escape their thirties with a job that doesn’t involve piloting a cash register.
Dr. Benjamin Carson is black. Did you know this?
This fact has eluded many people, but it cannot be denied. In Ben Carson’s genome, the continent of Africa is being forcefully expressed. And yet amazingly, this new political media darling, whose name may well be forgotten three memes from now, is the newest hero not of the Democratic party, who will presumably one day found the United Federation of Planets, but of the Republicans, who would probably prefer the future envisioned in Gattaca, with its routine genetic purity tests (as long as they are performed by nice, sanitary corporations and not a federal bureaucracy).
What a difference two Novembers make! Obama’s re-election is now universally recognized as the triumph of demographics over race baiting, and the Intelligent Design of conservatism is being annihilated by census-driven Darwinism. It is time to adapt or die. Whether they are hyping Marco Rubio or Bobby Jindal (not to forget plucky pizza mogul Herman Cain), the Republicans are embarking on a full court press to make their cricket league look more like a basketball team, and Dr. Carson, the genial Christian neurosurgeon, is the latest draft pick for the Washington Elephants. (How’s that for an over-extended metaphor? Take a lesson, Tom Friedman!)
Carson has been around for a while. He has authored five books and inspired documentaries and movies about his life’s work in medicine, and advances what appears to be a convivial evangelism that nonetheless contains many of the tropes of the radical right. But his coming-out party was in February when he spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. There, in an overexposed address, and with Barack Obama sitting mere feet away, Ben Carson politely rebuked some of the Democrats’ platform, while humping for the Republicans by telling the President that God Almighty wants a 10% flat tax.
Ben Carson has gone on dazzle the right wing press through one talk show love-in after another, touting his spitting and roasting of the President as a thumb in the eye to “political correctness” (what could be more politically correct, however, than Obama’s obligatory appearance at a national religious spectacle founded and run by fascists?).
But can Carson aid the GOP’s effort to re-brand itself as a political Snickers bar, becoming the chocolate coating on a pasty white interior wrapped around a core of nuts?
Despite being a celebrated surgeon who performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins joined at the head , the plain fact is that but for his skin color, Carson might rise to the heights of a keynote speaker at CPAC, but little higher. Intelligent and friendly, Carson’s contribution to the political dialogue at the national level is not awe-inspiring. Republicans, preferring as they do firebrands like Texas senator Ted Cruz (who recently endorsed skinning endangered lizards for which to make his boots) would be the first to toss mild-mannered Carson out with the soup bones if he didn’t serve a convenient role at this point in time, which is that he can wag his finger in Obama’s face and get away with it in a way that a blonde Arizona governor cannot.
If I sound like I am reducing Ben Carson to a piece of Machiavellian PR, then I am coming through clearly. No one can pretend that the biggest transformation happening in politics today isn’t the white power structure’s haphazzard attempts to share authority with those who came over on the Amistad and not the Mayflower (I’d include a vessel from the Mariel Boat Lift if I could name one). This is part of a long evolution in American politics to be sure, but Obama clearly upped the ante. Even black pop culture was dispirited about the chances for a black President in this century right up until Obama’s first nomination (all that “elected on a Friday/assassinated on a Saturday” jive). With the last hopes of the revanchist right and its billionaire generals exhausted by  the 2010 Tea Party putsch that sabotaged Republican hopes of reclaiming the White House, the entire Republican party is in play. And the first honest wind to blow through their think tanks is the recognition that the day of racial reckoning has arrived.
Things had to get pretty FUBAR to inspire that brainwave, however. The public face of conservatism is now safely in the clutches of the Joe Arpaios and Donald Trumps, and new conservative media is caught in a vicious circle jerk where founding journals like National Review compete with upstarts like Breitbart.com to out nasty each other, all in service of scoring the most picayune victories over the middling Left. Meanwhile, Rome continues to burn, and establishment Republicans must find a way to work with establishment Dems to avoid the next blow to the nation which, as the Cyprus debacle shows, could arrive at any moment. All this while the plutonium of the of the GOP base continues its meltdown, burning ever hotter as it does.
So the GOP is not merely reevaluating itself, it is faced with a self-inflicted existential threat, and they realize it. But can the institutional GOP conduct a Renaissance while its conservatives continue their jihad?
Possibly. The GOP is too big to vaporize overnight, and if nothing else, they love a good gimmick. That is why they will continue to position men like Ben Carson front and center. He is their new Sarah Palin. Carson even tickles the Republicans balls with hints that he might run for president, a joke which everyone enjoys, and which lets the GOP remind itself that when they aren’t organizing nationwide efforts to discredit a black man’s birth certificate, they can toy with being progressive too.
Carson’s day in the sun as poster child for a self-reflective Republican party is complimented by RNC chairman Reince Priebus’ freshly minted $10 million dollar initiative for GOP outreach into previously untapped minority communities. But this effort is at least half a generation late, with half as many dollars being pledged as needed (Jesus, when you think of the $20 million alone that shrunken apple doll Sheldon Adelson dumped into Newt Gingrich’s campaign to keep that turd afloat…!), and with the wrong chairman in charge of the task (should Michael Steele not have been permitted to launch this effort rather than being forced to drop and give Rush Limbaugh 20?)
The Republicans have tried every trick in the book to make themselves look like the party of inclusivity instead of the party of Voter ID laws, all of them shams. Now the real heavy lifting begins. When it does–if it does– the Republicans will come face to face with the reality of school lunches and public housing and migrant labor, issues they have only observed from the owner’s box until now. Conservatism will confront the final limits of its rhetoric as it tries to sell bootstrapping door to door, and the Democrats will not feel the effects of this for some time. After all, when you ask a white Republican to name a black Republican, they list names like Colin Powell and Condi Rice, struggling for a moment before they come up with Alan Keyes. When you ask a white Democrat to name a black Democrat, they list their friends.
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