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Home » I have a question for those who think Trump is the Master Persuader

I have a question for those who think Trump is the Master Persuader

The New Neo Posted on by

In the third debate, there was a moment when Trump muttered “nasty woman” in response to Hillary.

Let’s not even worry about what she had said or done prior to that, or whether his remark about her was justified. For the purposes of this post, let’s just take those questions off the table and stipulate that she is indeed a nasty woman who had said something nasty and who often does, and that he was fully correct in describing her that way.

My question is for those people who think Trump is a Master Persuader, as Scott Adams has been saying for a long time. How does this remark of Trump’s fit into that framework? Do you think it does? Do you think it was an error? Does it make you rethink the “Master Persuader” idea about Trump at all?

Because to me—and as I said, let’s forget about whether he was right or wrong about Hillary for a moment—it was a tactically stupid thing for Trump to do, one of many.

Now, in that Scott Adams post I just linked to, Adams seems to think that, prior to Trump, most people believed that other people are 90% rational. I probably am a person who believes in rationality more than most people do, and if you had asked me about it prior to Trump I would have said that most people are not primarily rational—and that is especially true in certain arenas, of which political decision-making is most definitely one. Nor do I believe most people see people as 90% rational; I have no idea why Adams says that.

At any rate, Adams indicates that he himself believes the following:

Trump says and does whatever he needs to do in order to get the results he wants. And apparently he does it well…

The evidence 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…

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).

Adams wrote that back in March, when the primaries were still in full force. There is no question that Trump managed to hammer on the emotions of enough GOP primary voters to beat the other GOP contenders, although never to “persuade” the majority. His appeal was not entirely emotional—there was content to it, as well. But I don’t think anyone disagrees with the idea that he tapped into already-existing emotions in what became his base.

But what’s happened in the general? To me, just in the tactical sense, Trump is still playing to the emotions of his base. Nasty woman is a good example. The base loves it; “yes, stick it to her!” But if persuasion and appeal to emotion is the key to getting voters on your side, and if Trump wanted to actually win the general, that statement made no sense.

Trump’s base is already firmly and safely in his pocket. He knows that. His base would crawl over the proverbial broken glass to vote for him. They don’t just think Hillary Clinton is nasty, they think she’s much worse than that and that she’s (fill in the blank with whatever pejorative word you want). He no longer has to persuade his base of a thing.

But he can’t seem to stop playing to his base. Why? He had to have known—and his advisors have to have been telling him—that in that final debate one of his main tasks was to persuade (there’s that word again) as many people as possible among those who don’t yet support him that he is stable, able to control himself, not impulsive—and not anti-woman.

His “nasty woman” remark wasn’t going to persuade anyone that Hillary is a nasty woman unless that person already thought Hillary was a nasty woman. And it most definitely wasn’t going to persuade anyone of what was Donald Trump’s emotional task (not his rational task) during that debate: to show as many people as possible that he’s under control of his emotions. In fact, that remark of his indicated the opposite: that he is given to juvenile, schoolyard taunting, in particular against women but perhaps even in general. And some of listeners might think that perhaps he would do this sort of thing as president—some time when he needed to be diplomatic, thoughtful, and controlled instead.

Trump also gave his opponents a golden opportunity to market his remarks in the same way that Hillary’s “deplorables” became a meme.

So, once again—how does this remark of Trump’s fit into the Master Persuader framework? Do you think it does? Do you think it was an error? What do you believe Trump was trying to do here, and why? Was it successful? What does it say about him?

I’d also like to point out the content/process distinction I made a while back, when I was analyzing Christie’s attack on Rubio for repeating himself in one of the GOP debates:

When I was studying interpersonal communication and how to track an argument, one thing that was very much emphasized was the difference between content and process. Content is just what it sounds like: the subject matter about which two people (let’s say, a married couple) are arguing. “Did you do the dishes last night?” Process is everything else””for example, the emotion with which something is said, the type of vocabulary used, tone, repetition, body language, and the unspoken subtext.

Trump is a candidate who uses process arguments (or remarks) more than most candidates do. It’s his specialty, and it’s part of his emotional “persuasive” appeal to his supporters. It’s also a big part of the reason for his unfavorable ratings among others, and his failure to be leading Hillary in the general. Process arguments and process remarks/gestures are not always purely irrational, but they sometimes are irrational and they definitely tend to appeal on a more emotional and less rational level than content remarks/gestures. So they fit right into Adams’ “Master Persuader” argument about the prevalence of irrationality in the human decision-making process.

“Nasty woman” was a process remark of Trump’s. And as I said earlier, it wasn’t the least bit persuasive, except to those who already agreed with him. And it solidified the idea many people have that Trump is even nastier than Hillary. If Trump loses—and I believe he will—it will be mostly for this reason: he has failed to persuade people that he is stable on an emotional level.

Comments

I have a question for those who think Trump is the Master Persuader — 55 Comments

  3. For a rich man — as he so often likes to remind us — Trump as rhetorician is distinctively poverty stricken.

    Seems as though he has never bothered to come to grips with himself on that score; but then, being so very wealthy, why would he take the trouble? Or have had to? I mean, y’know, he’s self-financing.

  4. Probably because there are wikileaks emails in the pipeline that are going to make her look like a very, well, nasty person. By preemptively labeling her as a “nasty woman”, that’s the label people will attach when the emails come out.

    I don’t think that Trump is behind the wikileaks, but I definitely think that he’s getting tipped off on the contents prior to general release.

  5. I never understood the idea that Trump was a great communicator. He is a good bunco artist though. He can sense certain sore points with his audience and play to them. But a communicator explaining his ideas? Bah!

    Myra Adams went back to Donald’s announcement speech today.

    http://www.redstate.com/diary/6755mm/2016/10/28/myra-adams-need-know-trump%e2%80%99s-demise-learned-announcement-speech/

    Here is a Trumpism on ISIS

    “Islamic terrorism is eating large portions of the Mideast. They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them.” What????

    His junior high name-calling was effective in that his GOP rivals did not know how to respond to someone that juvenile.

    With regard to Scott Adams, I gradually found Dilbert less funny as my years away from cubicle land increased. I knew that Scott never really left big corp. From his IMDB bio

    “…kept his day job at Pacific Bell for 8 years after the comic strip was launched, partly for financial security and partly for relevant material. He was finally asked to leave by a new boss because of “budget constraints.””

    Adams wants to blow up the bosses but never having to manage anything but his comic strip he misses the hard work entirely. Trump is the same, saying he will just slap a tax on Ford for moving jobs to Mexico without thinking about the fact that Congress and others are involved. But that would require communicating patience to his supporters. No way

  6. I’ve seen women describing themselves as”nasty women” since the remark and saying it was just like Clinton’s “deplorable” comment. Trump said it specifically about Clinton while Clinton said it specifically about Trump’s supporters.

    Trump does make his attacks mean but generally personal. Clinton called his supporters”irredeemable” depersonalizing them as so great an enemy as to never be a part of the whole.

    While I may see the difference, others do not. A lot of people took the deplorable term very personally.

  7. Maybe now that the FBI has reopened the Hillary investigation, we can stop the (dare I say?) tiresome blather about Trump and return our focus to the criminal Hillary effort to size the presidency.

    Scott Adams? Can we get serious?

  8. Frog:

    Oh yes, tiresome blather—if it doesn’t agree with your agenda.

    As for Scott Adams—I have almost never written about him before, but over and over and over in the comments section, people have talked about him and linked to him approvingly as though he’s a brilliant thinker and has the last word on Trump, the Master Persuader. And not just on this blog—I see such comments and posts all over the blogosphere. I thought it was time to address Adams’ stupidity instead of ignoring it as I mostly have till now.

    Hey, I’ve got an idea: why don’t you start your own blog, where you can talk about what you want to discuss and not have to put up with my tiresome blather? You can post your own tiresome blather.

  9. Trump’s idea of great communicating is a sit-down with Howard Stern. You know, getting deep down into the finer points of … [fill in the blank].

  10. “Hey, I’ve got an idea: why don’t you start your own blog, where you can talk about what you want to discuss and not have to put up with my tiresome blather? You can post your own tiresome blather.”

    I used to run a blog (it’s been years), and felt this way often as well.

    No offense, Frog – but Neo’s right, she owns this place, she can decide what she talks about.

  11. How about Trump is like that and happened to be the guy who accidentally and automatically connected with base. It wasn’t an effort. So the idea of modifying his approach did not occur. He hasn’t modified or tweaked or modulated anything. That such might be necessary is not in his uuniverse.
    BTW. Somebody, maybe DJT, said the US tax remittances to Mexico and that’s how Mexico pays for the wall.

  12. Frog:

    Don’t use th “FrogBlog.com” you will be foldded with angry folks thinking it is about Pepe the Frog , Eveyone will be very dissapointed in you. And then there was “Froggy Ruminations” a blog by a former SEAL, but that’s been many years ago. You may have to go with “ToadBlog.com.” Just trying to help. 🙂

  14. Neo:
    “So, once again–how does this remark of Trump’s fit into the Master Persuader framework? Do you think it does? Do you think it was an error? What do you believe Trump was trying to do here, and why? Was it successful? What does it say about him?”

    My take:

    For the alt-Right activists who’ve engineered the Trump phenomenon, their principal objective in the 2016 election has been to establish the Gramscian march of their social activist movement. Winning the presidency for Trump has been a useful organizing framework and a goal as such, but not their primary purpose.

    (Recall that I’ve advocated for conservatives to spin up a 3rd option in order to similarly exploit the 2016 election to establish a permanent competitive social movement for the displaced Right, which Team McMullin does list among its purposes.)

    For Trump during the GOP primary race, it didn’t seem as though he was of the alt-Right like Obama is of the Left. Rather, their relationship struck me as symbiotic based on cost/benefit rather than a shared tribe. A business relationship.

    I speculated that, when faced with the different demands of the general election, there would be a point Trump would need to pivot and don an altogether new electoral persona, and at that point, the Trump campaign proper and the alt-Right activist engineers of the Trump phenomenon would confront a break-up of their fruitful alliance.

    It would be an amicable break-up for the alt-Right because they’ve already won. Their activists are playing with house money. They harvested more than they needed, and probably better than they expected, from the GOP primaries to establish their Gramscian march.

    But for Trump, I questioned whether a pivot to a normal general campaign strategy which separated him from the alt-Right would be feasible vs the mature Dems Left alliance backing Clinton given the obvious deficiency of the Trump campaign proper and his evident dependency on alt-Right activists for the Trump phenomenon.

    Now at the tail end of the 2016 election, the record shows Trump has made some accommodations for the general election, but either by choice or compelled by necessity, he has stayed in touch with the alt-Right activists rather than pivot away from them.

    It looks like what started as a symbiotic but disparate relationship has progressed to where Trump is setting up to join with the alt-Right Gramscian march in the post-election transition.

    Of course, if Trump’s Russian ties are deep, that would imply an early close relationship to the Russian-fueled alt-Right.

  15. IMO, neither Trump nor Adams are master persuaders of people who have spent time examining issues and ideas. Of course that is a fairly small percentage of the population.

    I find Trump to be an inch deep in his understanding of the way government and foreign policy work. So, he has not persuaded me or many other people who have more than a passing knowledge of the issues.

    Adams believes, as do most advertisers, that the vast majority of people can be manipulated if you can get to their lizard brains because that’s where many people function. Greed, fear, envy, anger, self-satisfaction, and other emotions can be played upon to get the desired result.

    The Michael Moore video analyzing why people go for Trump is spot on. They are hurting and have been taken for granted for so long they are open to the message he is bringing. If you don’t know people like them or can’t identify with them, which is what the GOPe’s problem is, then you can’t understand what Trump’s appeal is.

    The election is essentially over – unless the new e-mails that the FBI has found are truly devastating. I’ve moved on to what things are going to be like under Hillary.

  16. The thing about Adams is that he foresaw Trump winning the GOP nomination. Last year, in August.

    http://blog.dilbert.com/post/136261193951/ranking-the-best-political-pundits-of-2015

    Maybe that’s a blind sow finding an acorn in the woods. But I think not.

    As for the subject at hand, it only affects the “undecideds”. Some will be offended. Some will look at Hillary’s record, particularly her treatment of women coming forth to accuse WJC of sexual crimes, or her blatant lies to the Benghazi next of kin, and not be put off by it.

  17. Dear Neo…you are in my top 5 websites, but with Trump, I’m afraid I’ve tuned you out, you just don’t seem to get it. I was a Cruz man with reservations (the border) because he was the strictest constitutionalist. Then Trump said “build a wall”: addressing the decades-long connivance of the authorities abetting illegal immigration, including both Republicans AND Democrats. Trump is like a wrecking ball to the establishment, which is what is needed for the false dichotomy we’re given. Since after Reagan, the offerings of the Republicans are merely less bad versions of the Dems. God help me, I’d go for stupid Bernie Sanders merely because he might not be a crooked insider. A job of a CEO is to kick ass and make things work, so yes, Trump is brash, annoying, and a SOB…but he’s going to be MY SOB. In addition to the above, he IS NOT PC. Political Correctness is control of language that forestalls being real in discussing problems, and frames issues so that in framing them, only leftist solutions are possible, in other words, NewSpeak. And that is double-plus-ungood.

  19. The Michael Moore video analyzing why people go for Trump is spot on.

    Both political parties share that problem. Remember: the establishment on both sides of the aisle have more in common with each other than they do with the typical American in fly over country. And both look down on such people with a mix of disdain and pity.

    I’ve moved on to what things are going to be like under Hillary.

    Two generations of single party rule? corruption off the scale? autocratic rule via the Supreme Court? Hillary being named as President for Life?

    “Well, Doctor, what have we got–a Republic or a Monarchy?”

    “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

  20. Trump is a clown.

    And Clinton is beholden to a great number of special interests who have competing interests.

    You think she got those 6 speech honorariums simply because Wall Street wanted to hear the wisdom of her experience? or the Saudis and Qataris made generous donations because they’re just really nice guys? and Putin…wonder what Putin expects for his money?

    I’ll take my chances with the clown. The clown I fear is better than the devil I know.

    Also, there will be no restraint laid upon the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, the ATFE or any of the other corrupted federal agencies when they go after her political enemies here.

  24. “Adams believes, as do most advertisers, that the vast majority of people can be manipulated if you can get to their lizard brains because that’s where many people function. Greed, fear, envy, anger, self-satisfaction, and other emotions can be played upon to get the desired result. “ – JJ

    Good point.

    I don’t think advertisers think that is the end of it.

    However, this has an element of truth to the degree that the audience the advertiser are targeting are trying to sway people on low info decisions (e.g. toothpaste), or are trying to get people to consider their product / keep it top of mind amongst competitors (e.g. car) – to later have someone “close the deal”.

    The reality is probably a LOT more complex with people crossing a broad spectrum of how they “decide” things for any given item to choose, and they may well change within a range on a given day or moment. Advertising is a whole specialization of study.

    That adams boils it down to merely “master persuaders” and “meat puppets”, then relating it to trump, plays to an audience who might then buy his books (a new one is now available for pre-order on next week’s release – surprise!) and other merchandise.

    It vastly oversimplifies what I think should be a very complicated process for most to make a decision on.

    If it were so simple, it wouldn’t take $1T to run a POTUS campaign (at least, that was the case for each in 2008).

  25. Just for clarification – I’m the obnoxious NeverTrump Bill who’s been commenting a lot the last few months.

    “Bill” who commented above (October 28th, 2016 at 4:20 pm) is not me.

  27. To capstone my comment at 3:54 pm, my answer to “What do you believe Trump was trying to do here, and why?” is Trump is virtue signaling to the ‘base’ of the alt-Right activist-engineered Trump phenomenon.

  28. @Orig Bill – so that other was the “Evil Sock Puppet Bill” commenting?

    Was wondering if you were having a spot of trumpitis for a moment.
    /jk

  29. @Eric – if I were to guess, trump is looking to stay relevant, if he can, for the next four years, be that trump tv or some other media play that would also earn him money. He will have many hangers-on and supporters looking to cash in on their association with him too.

    I also believe guys like steve bunion will be the ones who will try to make a “movement” out of the election ashes, using trump, if he can.

  30. J.J. Says:
    October 28th, 2016 at 3:56 pm
    IMO, neither Trump nor Adams are master persuaders of people who have spent time examining issues and ideas. Of course that is a fairly small percentage of the population.
    * * *
    The “small percentage” is not the audience for Trump; it may be for Adams, who I am finding vastly more entertaining than any other pundit — Neo is thought-provoking, but sometimes that can be entertainment, for a fairly small percentage of the population 😉 — but only time will tell if his predictions have any validity.

  31. Orig Bill, you now have a new handle? It should fall to the other Bill to correct his as I did after realizing that a long time original “Chuck” posted here. He’s from Utah I think and has been awol for awhile, but he was here first and deserved deference, as do you.

  32. I R A Darth Aggie Says:
    October 28th, 2016 at 4:38 pm
    http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/26/watch-donald-trump-force-liberals-contradict-everything/
    * * *
    The list of “liberals” (aka leftists, progressives, and all of the anti-American Dems) who turn on a dime to contradict previously held positions is so extensive one article is insufficient to display them all.
    FWIW, I turned away from the Dems permanently after the display of blatant hypocrisy from the RadFemLibs over Bill Clinton’s rampant adultery and oppression of women.
    If Trump being FOR same sex marriage and other positions really is enough to get the Left to repudiate them, I would vote for him on that basis alone.

  33. Scott Adams goes on like he’s got the keys to the secret Master Persuader kingdom because he’s done some reading, some NLP and some hypnosis.

    I’ve done that too. I’m a certified Master Practitioner in NLP and I took just about all the Tony Robbins courses, as well as doing much reading. Not that I think that makes me a big deal, but I did touch those bases.

    I’ve seen some top-notch persuaders along the way but none of them behaved like Trump. The persuaders I saw were always exquisitely aware of who they were interacting with and how they were perceived by others. They might be harsh at a key moment or two, but it was always controlled and in service of a higher purpose.

    From what I can tell, Trump is a sledge-hammer con-man with poor self-control who just doesn’t give a shit. That has its advantages but is not what I would call Master Persuader territory.

    Most of his effect IMO came from being a billionaire, reality-TV celebrity who could garner huge amounts of media exposure based on his outrageousness and fame. Kinda like Madonna or Marilyn Manson.

    I’m not sure how cynical Scott Adams is — whether his Trump as Master Persuader wasn’t just a cynical Trumpian move on Adams’s part to garner more exposure and fame which would be fungible into cash for Adams.

  34. If Trump were a Master Persuader with a fiendishly clever plan and the skills to become the most powerful man in the world, he wouldn’t have been up at 2 am a month ago tweeting stupid offensive attacks on yet another woman thereby extinguishing his campaign’s last bit of momentum.

    Women are the key demographic for Trump to persuade or at least neutralize. There is absolutely no mystery here.

    Yet Trump has repeatedly crippled his campaign by attacking women for no good reason other than IMO his own uncontrollable misogyny.

  35. I R A Darth Aggie:

    I’ve seen many people call Trump a clown.

    I’ve never been among them.

    “Clown” trivializes and minimizes what Trump is. He is no clown. He is much worse than a clown.

  36. Bill (not the original Bill; the other Bill):

    I’ll tell you what I’m extremely sick and tired of being told: that I don’t “get it.”

    I get it. I got it long ago. I accept that you and other people who agree with you have tuned me out.

    That’s your prerogative. And mine is to say what I think is true. Why else have a blog? I’m not catering to some special interest group.

    I also get Trump’s appeal. I get the anger. I noticed it many years ago, wrote about it, predicted this war on the right.

    So you can say many things to me, and criticize me many ways, but “not getting it” is not one of them.

    I wrote about the hopeless counter-productiveness of that “wrecking ball” philosophy many times (the “burn it down” crowd, that is). I also have written many times about the fact that Trump was not the only one talking about a wall, and that that was a falsehood promulgated by the pro-Trump crowd.

    It’s all water over the dam now, though. Trump is the nominee, and I think it’s about 90% certain he will lose.

  37. I R A Darth Aggie:

    So, Adams predicted Trump’s victory back in August. Big deal.

    Guess who else though it was very very possible? Moi.

    See this post of mine from August 22, 2015:

    From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him–although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

    If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

    I certainly was very scared. And one of the reasons I was very scared was that if he was nominated I felt virtually certain he would lose the general.

    So believe me, Scott Adams doesn’t impress me in the least. Au contraire.

  38. Eric:

    You write that Trump might change his tack “either by choice or compelled by necessity.” Problem is, I don’t think he is capable of changing this; it is part of his impulsive, childish personality. He can change it a bit, for a while; keep it under wraps and under control, as it were. But not for long. Then it bubbles up and out, needing a release. Like Popeye, he is who he is.

  39. huxley:

    I believe that Scott Adams is extremely cynical.

    This has been a gold mine for him.

    I also think there is something very “off” about Adams, but I can’t say what it is. I just don’t know.

  40. neo: I only know what Scott Adams said of himself on his blog. Which may or may not be reliable.

    As I recall, he fell into cartooning by doing some Napoleon Hill exercise in which he wrote thousands of self-affirmation lines, even though had no background in cartooning.

    He got by on his minimal drawing skills via his verbal cleverness and his memories of a dreadful office job he had. Since he got his strip going, he boasts he now gets his ideas entirely from those sent in by his readers based on their dreadful office jobs.

    So Adams feels he’s a pretty special guy to have beaten the system as he has, in part by using the powers of mind he believes he developed by reading/doing some of the more esoteric self-help stuff out there these days.

    My guess is he doesn’t feel he deserves his success. He’s got a point — he didn’t work all that hard for it compared to the 80+ hr/wk monomania of most successful cartoonists. Perhaps from there his cynicism springs.

    Agreed. Anyone who refers to most of humanity as “meat puppets,” I would say is very cynical, if not extremely so.

  41. Scott Adams is a murder of crows blip on the radar. Investing pro or con on his djt shtick is fruitless. Trump is indeed a master persuader: he has convinced me he is a blowhard buffoon that I would not allow within 50 feet of my female grandchildren. Hillary is also a mistress persuader: I would not allow her within 50 feet of my grandchildren female or male. If either should suddenly spontaneously combust in front of my house I would not dial 911 or piss on them to quench the flames.

    Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum, we are down the rabbit hole.

  42. I don’t know if investigating and studying the issues is an important factor in this election. Nobody knows what the new POTUS and legislature and the tens of thousands of federal ‘coats are going to do about anything.
    That leaves…what?
    IMO, the one least likely to and least capable of weaponizing the federal government against the rest of us.
    I mean, for example, you could have studied health care until your friends went the other way when they saw you coming at them with The Look in your eye. But Obamacare passed anyway, voted for by people who knew exactly what it would do, and by people whose minds were clouded by some kind of self-virtue signaling.
    self-virtue signaling is a concept i just made up to explain some people I know. Might have some weight, now that I think about it. Of course, it doesn’t keep them from boring the rest of us, too.

  46. This proposition Mr. Aubrey makes — “IMO, the one least likely to and least capable of weaponizing the federal government against the rest of us.” — actually has within it what we can make out as a certain sort of appeal, albeit narrowly perhaps, from the one point of view inclining to what we loosely term “idiocracy”.

    If we suppose the “. . . least likely . . . and least capable . . .” is taken as a sort of positive injunction to prefer the most idiotic type of ruler, the gravest bumbler, as the one who would be least probable to do harms, whether harms great or small to the ruled. This simpleton sort of ruler, it may be supposed, can’t be clever, and therefore, it might be assumed, cannot conceive of harms to do, or if he does conceive them, then cannot conceive the means by which to accomplish them. Possibly in amplification of this, he may be indolent, simply too lazy to work himself up to vigorously chasing after new projects by which to torment his subjects, but prefers to seek his physical pleasures in women and song, say, if not in liquor and pharmaceuticals (for we’re told he’s a teetotaler by choice). Heap him with babes, money, and praise and we’re good to go.

    It’s an unusual approach to thinking about our government, sure. But in some measure, it surely also seems to be an approach gaining traction among us today. In the condition of an increasing rule of experts in bureaucracies [the managerial state] insulated from correction by the ruled, it’s possibly not so improbable that the ruled would turn to the notion of their salvation in something akin to a perfect opposition to their current oppressors: namely, from “wise guys” (yes, a mafia) to “imbeciles”.

    Odd, maybe, but not altogether surprising.

    Of course, there remains that tiny little problem concerning his lunatic ambition (so once again a question of character). Yes. One can only guess at where that might lead.

  47. None of us can tell what Trump will do should he win, but if you look at his history he’s used plenty of lawfare to go after enemies. His prime weapons have been public insults and lawsuits.

    He’s also shown an almost self-destructive inability to let go of insults, pulled endorsements, etc. I read this morning that he’s now going after a Republican governor (Kasich). He can’t handle it when people oppose him or mock him and he seems to have a very highly developed revenge motive.

    The idea that when he has the full Executive arsenal at his disposal he won’t weaponize it (or continue the weaponization) to go after his enemies is really wishful thinking, I believe.

    Someone suggested last time I brought this up that it won’t happen because the bureaucracies are generally liberal forget that a WHOLE LOT of Trump’s “enemies” are Republicans.

  48. Trump’s bellicose personality is winning by intimidation. Possibly he could have another best-seller on his hands, were he to write the book.

  49. Sdferr Close. But the other point is that the DC establishment and the MSN and various Fed agencies won’t cooperate and cover for DJT as they would for HRC

  50. We only have to assume “won’t cooperate and cover” is going to be pendant on some impingement of these various insiders’ preferences, perquisites, etc. (“Insiders” I term them just for short — we could also say vested rent seekers, or term them in other such relations of power and money). But that implies the new ruler is making waves, doesn’t it? That is, so long as the new ruler goes along to get along, cooperation and cover is an easy exchange for his having buttered their bread.

    In which case, the ruled are more or less stuck where they’ve already been. And therefore the ruled would have to seek other ways to end their oppression.

  51. Scott Adams is that creepy, double-plus-unhot guy who studied hypnosis and NLP so he could “get chicks.” Just look at him.

  52. But the other point is that the DC establishment and the MSN and various Fed agencies won’t cooperate and cover for DJT as they would for HRC

    Typical shortsightedness and lack of accurate human analysis. When Bush II did things the Left liked, like the TSA (after he opposed its creation) and No Child Left Behind, of course Leftists and the media covered for him.

    The Left knows the difference between carrots and sticks even if the American people has no proper education in the Art of Propaganda and conditioning.

  53. And by typical, I don’t mean the person, I mean humanity in general and Americans in this specific context.

  54. I’ve seen some top-notch persuaders along the way but none of them behaved like Trump. The persuaders I saw were always exquisitely aware of who they were interacting with and how they were perceived by others. They might be harsh at a key moment or two, but it was always controlled and in service of a higher purpose.

    People who had to use NLP and other fruits of the reverse engineered PUA nerd pioneers, had to put in extreme amounts of work, in order to emulate the effect that power and wealth naturally conveys to the Trums of the world. If you or any normal person were caught with half the things Ted Kennedy was caught with, you would be destroyed, not a US Senator until death. Same for HRC or Bill or Epstein.

    NLP and various other human manipulation technologies, are designed to produce through work and self transformation, what the wealthy and powerful naturally have and didn’t have to work for.

    MollyG Says:
    October 29th, 2016 at 3:57 pm
    Scott Adams is that creepy, double-plus-unhot guy who studied hypnosis and NLP so he could “get chicks.” Just look at him.

    Adams has perhaps transformed himself and become a better marketer for his life long gain. But that just means he is in search of a King, and not someone who should be trusted precisely because unless you have equal or better psychological manipulation abilities as Adams, then your defenses are no where near close enough to filter out the bs from the deception vis a vis an Adams production.

    Hypnosis and NLP, which Hussein O has also used in his speeches, is not about using reason to convince people who have a lot of “information”. In fact, the easiest people to con are the “experts” and high intellectuals.

    From what I can tell, Trump is a sledge-hammer con-man with poor self-control who just doesn’t give a shit. That has its advantages but is not what I would call Master Persuader territory.

    The only ones that can lay claim to that mantle and title are the Alt Right pioneers who run Trum’s early and middle game media narration online. Or Trum’s own family clan, which seems a lot more competent than the usual corrupt staffers from DC (Recall McCain’s staff that went after Palin and benefited from Democrat collusion).

  55. The reason Trum’s children would be more competent in human maniplation is precisely the same reason Bill Clinton became the human he is, surviving under a drunk father fosters certain emotional survival tricks and senses.

    You have to Notice what Sets Him Off. Same with Trum. Trum’s children didn’t get to be where they are, without learning how to deal with Trum, a narcissist, although perhaps not a malignant narcissist. They know what sets Trum off and can manage him, although few else can or will try to.

    Trum’s children, adults if I recall, are like Valerie Jarret. They have their reasons for managing the guy.

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