According to one observer, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, Donald Trump's rhetorical style is a masterpiece of persuasion. Consciously or not, Trump has mastered the art of speaking to our intuitive-emotional unconscious minds to persuade people to his side.
On his blog, Adams describes his take on the human condition like this: “For new readers of this blog, my starting point is the understanding that human brains did not evolve to show us reality. We aren’t that smart. Instead, our brains create little movies in our heads, and yours can be completely different from mine.”
Adams is an aficionado of hypnosis and the art of persuasion via rhetorical tricks. He knows something about human cognitive biology. Rhetorical tricks can fool our cognitive biological processes to create realities the speaker wants to create, regardless of how well or poorly tethered to objective reality they may be. Those tricks are persuasive to our unconscious minds. For the most part, the tricks bypass conscious reasoning. Tricks can and do make us believe that false realities are true.
After hearing Trump in the first primary debate, most people thought Trump's performance was the death knell of Trump's candidacy. By contrast, Adams saw in Trump's rhetorical style the makings of an election victory based on his mastery of the art of persuasion. In an interview with Caroline Winter for Bloomberg Businessweek ( Mar. 27 - Apr. 2 2017 issue, pages 58-61), Winter writes of the debate: “In August 2015 viewers of the first Republican primary debate could be forgiven for thinking that Donald Trump was finished. “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” the moderator, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, said to him. “You once told a ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” Trump didn’t act contrite, or statesmanlike, as conventional candidates might have done. Instead, he interrupted Kelly with another nasty dig, about Rosie O’Donnell, and volunteered that he’d probably insulted others, too. Many pundits proclaimed that the response cemented Trump’s unelectability.”
Winter writes that Adams saw in Trump's performance “something different. In that moment, he realized that Trump might be a kindred spirit—a fellow “Master Wizard,” Adams’s term for experts in hypnosis and persuasion. Watching the debate alone at home, he grew excited. “I really got out of my chair and said, ‘Whoa, there’s something happening here that’s not like regular politics,’ ” Adams recalled. As he saw it, Trump had deftly defanged Kelly’s accusations by replacing them with a powerful visual: the iconic O’Donnell, “who is very unpopular among his base,” Adams said. “It was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” A week later, he published a blog post titled ‘Clown Genius.’ In the 3D world of emotion, where Trump exclusively plays, he has set the world up for the most clever persuasion you will ever see.”
The persuasive techniques that Trump uses include deft application of the powerful unconscious bias called anchoring[1] in a game of 3-dimensional emotional chess.
Finally, Winter observes in her article “Of Trump, he [Adams] wrote: “There is an eerie consistency to his success so far. Is there a method to it? ... Probably yes. Allow me to describe some of the hypnosis and persuasion methods Mr. Trump has employed on you.” At a time when virtually the entire professional political class was convinced Trump would self-immolate, Adams’s essay reframed his actions as the deliberate work of a political savant. Trump, he wrote, was using such “Persuasion 101” tricks as “anchors,” “intentional exaggeration,” and “thinking past the sale” to wage “three-dimensional chess” against his opponents and the media, including Kelly and Fox News. “Now that Trump owns Fox, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public,” Adams concluded, “I’m going to predict he will be our next president.” . . . . “My predictions are based on my unique view into Trump’s toolbox of persuasion, . . . . I believe those tools are invisible to almost everyone but trained hypnotists and people that study the science of persuasion.””
Adams is a Trump supporter. He sees his blog as doing a public service. He is right about performing a public service by helping to describe why Trump's rhetorical style is so powerful.
Questions: Assuming that Adams is right and Trump is a master of persuasion, does that mean that Trump will always work toward the right thing using his powerful talent? In other words, is it possible that a Master Wizard always acts in the public interest, or can there be White Hat, Black Hat and various shades of Grey Hat Master Wizards?
Footnote:
1. According to Wikipedia, “anchoring is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent [unconscious] judgments. Once an anchor is set, other [unconscious] judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias toward interpreting other information around the anchor.”
B&B orig: 4/1/17; DP: 8/11/19
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