Dilbert creator Scott Adams said Friday afternoon that if Donald Trump survives the ongoing controversy about whether he made fun of New York Times reporter’s disability, he will be a lock to win the presidency.
“If he survives this one, he’s invulnerable,” Adams said.
Adams took to Periscope on Friday afternoon to promote his new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, and answered questions from fans.
Recently, Adams has written about his conviction that Donald Trump will win the presidency, based on his use of sophisticated techniques of public persuasion. Adams told Reason magazine that Trump uses perceived insults to beat back opponents:
“What I [see] in Trump,” says Adams, is “someone who was highly trained. A lot of the things that the media were reporting as sort of random insults and bluster and just Trump being Trump, looked to me like a lot of deep technique that I recognized from the fields of hypnosis and persuasion.”…
Similarly, where the media see random insults, Adams sees Trump creating a significant polling gap between those who attack him and those who compliment him, resulting in chilled aggression from his opponents. Trump, says Adams, uses “anchors,” which are big, visual thoughts that drown out any other argument. Think, for example, of the billionaire’s florid descriptions of a Mexican border wall.
Trump stands accused of having mocked the Times‘ Serge Kovaleski, in a spat originating in a dispute over whether “thousands” of Muslims had cheered the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks from Jersey City. Trump maintains he did not mock the reporter and has demanded that the Times apologize to him rather than the other way around.
None of the past controversies seems to have dented Trump’s lead in the polls, especially as broader news events, such as the Paris terror attacks, seem to be boosting his national lead in the Republican race.
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