Worst Explanation

Is This the Worst Explanation for Why Trump Won?

The creator of Dilbert wrote a book about the president’s powers of persuasion. I wasn’t persuaded.

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

If you’re worried that the Trump-vise crushing your American skull is losing its grip, I’ve got just the thing to tighten up the temples: Scott Adams’ Win Bigly.

For a mere $27, you can own this new book, a hymn to President Donald Trump as huckster, by the inventor of the cartoon Dilbert. Win Bigly is like an oxygen-free cubicle into which is piped a barking infomercial for the president. If you buy the book now, I’ll throw in a monthlong migraine absolutely free of charge.

Indeed, Win Bigly is a grind, a sales pitch that aims to convince readers, by applying max rhetorical pressure, of two twisted notions. First, that Trump is a high priest of seduction—a kind of political pickup artist with a game so masterful no voter can resist him. And second, that there’s something supremely admirable in pickup artistry, even when the pickup involves extortion, simian dominance moves and flat-out lies—the stuff that, in courtship terms, is closer to rape than seduction.

As Adams sees it, Trump didn’t win because historical odds had the Democrat losing after winning two prior presidential elections. He didn’t win because working-class men were suffering in Michigan. He didn’t win because of that felon he ran against, or because of voter suppression, or because of Russian influence operations. He was also not what the people wanted. He won because of his world-historical capacity for sales gibberish, and that is a good thing, if you ask Adams, because he loves the spectacle of a mesmeric businessman making chumps of his enemies.

Win Bigly is a hybrid of victory lap, self-help and ode to the confidence game. It’s a victory lap because Adams, to the bewilderment of Dilbert fans, came out during the election as an admirer of Trump as a master of persuasion’s dark arts. At first, he could pass it off as sympathy for the devil, but then it became clear that Adams had actual stars in his eyes. His rep now rested on a Trump triumph, so he was gunning for it. Although Adams styles himself as an “ultra-liberal,” as he says in the book, he has somehow convinced himself that Trump is no threat to his ideals. In Adams’ telling, Trump is just a wily old geezer—and a real riot once you know what he’s up to.

The lion’s share of Win Bigly is set during the 2016 election, which, as history has recorded, Trump won. (Small blessing: We don’t revisit Trump’s New York days as a self-styled deal maestro, whose thuggish offers-you-can’t-refuse in real estate were part and parcel of his moral, and then actual, bankruptcy.) But Adams’ choice to stick with the overparsed election is ill-conceived, too. As 65,844,954 American voters soundly snubbed Trump in favor of his opponent, it’s hard to claim that he is the irresistible Ryan Gosling of the girlish electorate.

Nonetheless, Adams makes a manful effort. He believes that he, like his hero, is powerfully persuasive. He finds it important to tell us over and over that he’s a “trained hypnotist,” and his watch-swinging tone of voice sure enough makes the reader believe she is supposed to be getting sleeeepy. As for Trump, here are his trove of superhero persuasion tricks, as glossed by Adams: Trump repeats himself; he asks directly to be believed; he keeps it simple; he’s ambiguous. He does everything but neg you to get you to succumb to his charms.

Adams’ aim with this book is not to unearth these techniques as a public service or a warning. Instead, he seems to want to redeem the rhetorical skills of the serpent, persuading readers to love the conman’s hiss, fangs and poison for their own sake. This means accepting Adams’ view of his readers and Trump voters as “moist robots”—or, “programmable entities”—who are both barely human and infinitely vulnerable to manipulation and suggestion. A hundred percent of Trump’s supporters are a basket of moist robots? Unlike “deplorable,” I doubt “moist robot” is going to go into any Trumpite’s Twitter handle anytime soon. Maybe when you’re a star, they let you do anything, but my first reaction to Adams’ attempted hypnosis in this book was to try to Mace it.

William Blake once said that John Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” He meant that Milton wrote the character of Satan so vividly he must have subconsciously adored him. Certainly there are always people who admire the swashbuckling rebel evil of the Ozzy Osbourne variety. A small subset of those of Satan’s party, however, are not amused spectators but aspiring sadists themselves, and Adams has somehow become one of those. Like Trump, he now seems to enjoy the pain of others. When observers expressed “anger, fear, disappointment and shock” at the outcome of the election that brought them up short, Adams saw their anguish as “a show of cognitive dissonance so pure and so deep that it was, frankly, beautiful.”

Why this new crusade for Adams? Well, if he’s to be believed, and he cautions us not to believe him for a second, he’s not out to get rich. He is already too Dilbert-rich. (Sound familiar? “I don’t need your money” is the first line of hokum of many cons, and surely a way to get into your pants … pockets.) Adams is also, he says, not partisan. In one of the weirdest passages in a weird book, he spells out the eccentric “ultra-liberal” policies he advocates, including that only women should decide abortion laws and that generous reparations for slavery should be underwritten by a 25 percent tax on the top 1 percent of the population. These rhetorical postures are meant to make Adams sound like he has no dog in the bygone 2016 race. Yet, he clearly does. He has made a second career as a moony Trump admirer. And Trump, so far, has said very little about reparations or female separatist voting blocs.

When a book feels like a psychic trap, often it’s because it is built on a tautology. Win Bigly is. Trump won the election because he’s a Master Persuader; the proof that he’s a Master Persuader is that he won the election. Round and round Adams goes, as if he is offering lordly wisdom about overmastering other people from Trump’s playbook. By book’s end, Adams has become a kind of cartoonish Goebbels—and not Goebbels meaning “Nazi,” but the historical Joseph Goebbels, famous for announcing he was the king of lies. Arguments, Goebbels believed, should be “crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect.” He also believed that “truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and instincts.” Oh look, here’s Adams’s subtitle: “Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” (Adams, for the record, has said he does not like being likened to Goebbels.)

In his own commitment to bypassing everyone’s intellect, Adams nearly always uses “persuade” without an object, as if one might be persuaded without being persuaded of something. The proof that someone is persuasive is that he has changed your mind, and yet Adams offers no proof that Trump’s rhetoric changed anyone’s mind. Registered Republicans voted overwhelmingly for him. Some Barack Obama voters who felt left behind by the Democratic Party voted for him. Those who favored the deportation of Mexicans and Muslims voted for him. Those with contempt for his female opponent voted for him. These reasons may be savory or not, but they are not the reasons of brainless chumps.

“Is this sort of framing unethical?” Adams asks in curiously small print in the book (which he reserves for his reprinted blog posts). Maybe, he says, when negotiating with a family member or a friend, but when bullying an adversary, anything goes. To Adams, as to Trump in Adams’s surmise, the American people are an adversary to be strong-armed into casting their votes for a fraud.

The book, which praises Trump with hyperbole usually reserved for Trump when he’s talking about himself, notably never makes a case for Trump as president of the United States. Adams admits his reasons for supporting Trump were careerist: Once he got himself into a lather about the candidate’s virtuosity, his professional standing rested on his being right about Trump’s victory. Anyway, as Adams makes clear, endorsing a candidate is only ever a pose, and Adams went through four of them. He first endorsed Hillary Clinton because he feared that her army of trolls would physically harm him if he didn’t. (“Clinton supporters have convinced me—and I’m 100 percent serious—that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump.”) He deciding that Clinton, with her tax plan, was trying “to rob my estate.” He endorsed Trump only to have that cost him speaking gigs and draw trolls on Twitter; scared again, he switched to Gary Johnson. But it seems he was still mad about his estate being robbed and those mean tweets, and he decided he needed to stand up to the “Hillbullies” using his indomitable powers of persuasion.

And so, Adams re-endorsed Trump. He nursed his contempt for Hillbullies. He savored his sense of himself as better at persuasion than everyone but maybe Trump. And then he wrote this sorrowful book.