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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.
…
I wrote a graphic novel called Weapon Brown that makes Dilbert and other comic strip characters fun to read again! Why not check it out?
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.
Sheesh! This “wrapping up Weapon Brown” thing is more agonizing than I thought! Still, I will keep to my damn schedule, even if I bend my rules a bit. Even if I have to make rule origami out of them.
With few pages left to go, the very last installment may come with a week’s delay, as I will probably make it a multi-page spectacular, so prepare for that and save your snark for the newspapers which, by my reckoning, haven’t run a new Charlie Brown strip in years. Hey Schulz! Your vacation’s over! Get back to work!!
Now, can we PLEASE stop talking about the thing that brings you to my website and talk politics for a change? You probably all noticed that a certain someone-someone was elected president again, after the longest and most bruising campaign in our nation’s history.
Let’s reflect on that for a moment.
Without falling for the “there’s no dif’rinse ‘tween ’em!” cynicism of the dejected independent, I proudly cast my vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Were I a resident of the Swing States of America, I may have voted differently, but I am not. I am a citizen of Blutopia, the land that the candidates forgot. And though the admonition not to “throw my vote away” rang in my ears, I understood that to vote for the candidate who already had my state in the bag would be the true waste of my vote.
I’ll be honest and admit that I did not even take the time to research Stein’s positions, so perhaps my vote was tinged with cynicism after all. One should vote for the candidate one would like to see in the Oval Office. Obama, be-warted liberal that he is, did fulfill the only pledge I would raise a pitchfork over, that being healthcare reform. Tepid, unambitious healthcare reform that, despite it’s overall modest character, Obama endured dragonfire to achieve. Had I been asked to vote against Romney to cinch that accomplishment, I probably would have. But in New York State, my approval was simply assumed.
Yes, this is what I wore to vote. |
However, this was the first election where I divorced myself from the horse race in one significant way: I refused to watch the debates.
I had always given those glorified press conferences the benefit of the doubt as significant battles in the war of ideas. Not so this year. This year I finally cut the cord and stopped pretending that the debates aren’t staged spectacles, founded on plain collusion between the Democrats and Republicans to lock out all third party candidates, and the selection of safe, predictable moderators bound by blood oaths to lob softballs at the candidates. This year I chose to let the scales fall from my eyes, and sure enough, the conversation in the press that followed each debate betrayed a cynical consensus that elections are simply quadrennial Super Bowls, jazzed-up campaigns to sell Dorritos.
Ads! Another thing I was mostly exempted from, owing to my lack of cable and my citizenship in Blutopia (unlike Swing Staters who were, by all account, subjected to a level of  brainwashing akin to what Alex endured in A Clockwork Orange). Nevertheless, with the 1% sensing a tax hike on the horizon (despite the heroic efforts of lobbyist cockroaches like Grover Norquist) America’s “makers”, “job creators” and other pious Scrooge McDuck’s poured out so much uninvested, non job-creating cash into the campaign that by the end they were turning themselves into YouTube celebrities (as my Thomas Peterffy cartoon illustrated).
Substantively, one thing was crystal clear: the campaign, though it focused on the economy, was all about austerity, the “Fiscal Cliff”. Having been put on the ropes by the conservatives in 2010, Sugar Ray Obama’s gambit was to push off the coming holocaust over debt and taxes until the start of the next term, and to let the people decide which party should set America’s pain threshold as the depression slogs on.
To protect their assets, America’s pharaohs absorbed and branded a grass roots movement, then ran a candidate who was the exact opposite of  what their grouchy vassals were screaming for: Mitt Romney. Never has a near-unanimous second choice advanced so far in American politics. And in the end, we will always have Karl Rove’s election night exasperation to make us feel good about the good guys winning. But it will quickly fade as our satisfaction over Obama’s re-election settles back into the anxiety that has been the national mood since his first win.
Never, too, will we again see so clearly the way populism can be pumped up and shrugged off by the Two Party State. The Tea Party and Occupy, the twin insurgencies that raised the flag of Revolution as they came to recognize the scope of the choices facing the country, were broomed off the stage to make way for a resplendent campaign by the Powers-That-Be. The Tea Party, which in 2010 made the first true dent against politics-as-usual in a generation, could not have been further from the core of Mitt Romney, the great white hope of the resurgent establishment whose agenda (gutting the New Deal, keeping the wealthy dressed in fine silks and only sorta worrying about the Debt) was a light year away from the actual gripes of the elderly who are the true believers of that movement.
Meanwhile, Occupy, a dream that lives in the hearts and minds of newspaper columnists more than the masses, found no favor whatsoever amongst the Democrats who, after all, are its legitimate targets. That Elizabeth Warren eked out a win against former Tea Party star Scott Brown in Massachusetts to become that state’s newest senator may be considered a win for the “99%”, but her victory owes more to the stirrings of liberals than to the deeds of those more radical rascals of the Left.
So what is  my takeaway? First, the Republicans, and conservatism, are at long last in marked decline. The Bush years have been rebuffed twice, and the party’s message is now so scrambled with propagandistic noise that it is impossible to separate the intelligentsia from the fucktards. In trying to defeat Obama the GOP had to scrap half of their normal program, that being championing our wars abroad, and focus exclusively on the hardest subject for anyone to pretend they understand: macroeconomics. Unable to describe at all how they would grow jobs, the Republicans reduced their argument to one (ironically) bite-sized issue: the national debt. Unable to explain how to tackle that without serious bloodletting (except for putting Big Bird on a rotisserie), they placed all their chips on a racist smoke-and-mirrors campaign that would have made Goebbels clutch his heart. The people, however, voted their interests, and proved that the Third Rail of American politics still has electricity crackling through it.
The Democrats were the tortoises in this race, and my hot-blooded sympathy for radicalism aside, Aesop was proven right again. The country is not, after all, peopled by fools, and this election turned on the public realizing, however subliminally, that the 99% question was more than just a meme. Occupy can take some satisfaction for having stirred those coals.
However, those who are waiting for Obama to transform from Mace Windu into Shaft in his second term will be sadly disappointed. Had the Republicans recognized Obama as the pragmatist he is they would have had a lot better shot of beating him with one of their own. Now it is time for the Democratic voters to swallow their medicine as the man who coddled Wall Street takes on the Fiscal Cliff, agrees to postpone the day of reckoning for six months or so, and ultimately delivers what he is best at: a less than stellar bargain for the working classes.
Soon you will all vote in the most important election in all of earth’s history! An election more historic than the one where the dinosaurs voted to defund their asteroid shield! But before you do, let Thomas Peterffy, right wing billionaire, try one last goddamn time to convince you to vote Republican!! (Warning: nothing on the Internet is safe for anywhere, especially work).
Don’t forget to cast your protest votes, kids! And as long as you are in a voting mood, vote for my cartoon on Newgrounds!
I’d been preparing all day to give you my review of the second Obama/Romney debate, but I kept getting distracted by this “Internet” that is all the rage. I tell you, the Internet is like some sort of LSD carnival ride though Willy Wonka’s factory! It is damn near fucking impossible to deliver sober political analysis with the Internet tugging at my sleeve. So, I’ll try to stay on target, but I apologize if my attention wanders.
The debate then: I didn’t see it. I told you I’m not watching these dog and pony shows! Anyway, you can learn a lot more just by following the coverage the next day, and the verdict seems to be in that Obama didn’t suck like he did in his first go, but also that Romney didn’t falter in any major way either. So, they are tied after two rounds and, according to Hollywood logic (which appears also to be newsroom logic), one of them will deliver a knockout in the final debate in the form of the world’s most dazzling laugh line or (less likely), a gob-smacking show of political gusto.
(Hey, Is Nancy an imp from another dimension? This recent cartoon leads me to wonder…)
Meanwhile, back at the circus, the real action was taking place outside of Hofstra University, where Green Party candidate Jill Stein and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, were arrested for attempting to attend the debate.
Denying the Green Party (or any third party) a presence in the Presidential debates has been a quadrennial event since the Commission on Presidential Debates was formed to replace the League of Woman Voters, who withdrew from moderating the debates in 1988Â when the Democratic and Republican parties entered into collusion to exclude third parties from participating.
That collusion was codified by the CPD itself, which is operated by Democrat and Republican mucketymucks in a manner very much like a crime syndicate. They alone decide the rules on who may stand  for president in the most significant forum imaginable, and exclude anyone they think can’t win the election (based on their own polling, rather than the candidates’ placement on national ballots).
Now, you may think that the CPDis full of itself, Â but theirs is as nothing compared to the ego of the Pirate Bay!
The Pirate Bay, your one stop P2P shop for downloading the entire Starship Troopers-for-Christ saga or Cinderella’s greatest hits, recently announced it’s evolution into a higher life form thanks to the Cloud:
The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.
This hubris of a digital fencing operation portraying itself as some sort of Tibetan deity put me in mind of my favorite scene from the movie Excalibur:)
(Haven’t seen Excalibur? the Pirate Bay probably has it, and dubbed in Esperanto!)
Back to the debate. Given that both major parties, then, are signatories to a pact that denies a voice to legitimate third party candidates, why should anyone take seriously the resulting publicity stunt? Forget the Green Party, Constitution Party and other excluded participants whose ideology you probably don’t endorse anyway. When you watch Obama and Romney debate, the only matter that should concern anyone in our “free ” land has already been settled: neither one of them has faith in democracy.
This is not to say that the two behemoth institutions the candidates represent have anything to fear from the mice that are America’s upstart third parties. But we regularly applaud when competition is forced on a corrupt system, whether it is at the expense of Microsoft or Hosni Mubarak. Why then are we so indifferent to the  obvious cartel that is our own political system?
I’ll let you chew on that thought for a moment. Meanwhile, you  all know what a cool guy I am, but the art below will probably get my picture into the Cool Guy Hall of Fame, where it will hang between Fonzie’s jacket and some of the bloody glass Bruce Willis pulled from his feet in Die Hard:
Pictured here is the cover to the new electronic sci-fi ‘zine Perihelion, operated by Whatisdeepfried homie Sam Bellotto. Pay a visit and tell ’em Jason sent you, and that you want some protection money or you’ll break Sam’s kneecaps.
Anyway, with one debate left to go, I urge you: join me in tuning this nonsense out. Not because we as a nation consent to having legitimate contenders for President arrested as though they were opposition candidates in Putin’s Russia, but because… oh wait, that is the reason! In fact, in a true democracy, that would be all the reason anyone would need to doubt the legitimacy of the entire process.
Election Day is November 6th. There is an 85% chance that Dr. Jill Stein is on the ballot in your state.
Happy voting.