I risked my career to predict Trump would win

On June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump rode a golden elevator in Trump Tower to the lobby, where he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Like most observers at the time, I didn’t fully understand what I was seeing. It wasn’t until the first Republican primary debate that I realized what was happening right before our eyes. Trump was no ordinary politician. He was no ordinary businessperson either. In fact, he wasn’t ordinary in any sense of the word.

Trump is what I call a Master Persuader. That means he has weapons grade persuasion skills. Based on my background in that field, I recognized his talents early. And if after watching him in action during the election, I have to say that Trump is the most persuasive human I have ever observed.

President Trump carried those persuasion skills into the White House, where his supporters say he has gotten a lot done, and his critics say he hasn’t. Supporters pointed to a decrease in illegal immigration, a strong stock market (at this writing), high consumer confidence, progress fighting ISIS, a solid Supreme Court nominee, and a stronger-than expected foreign policy game. Critics saw “chaos” in the administration, slow progress on health-care reform, and maybe some kind of nefarious connections with Russia.

President Trump’s critics (and mine) asked me how I could call the president a Master Persuader when his public approval levels were in the cellar. The quick answer is that low approval didn’t stop him from winning the presidency. And according to his supporters, it didn’t stop him from getting things done on the job. His persuasion skills, combined with the power of the presidency, were all he needed. Keep in mind that disapproving of Trump’s style and personality is a social requirement for people who long for a more civil world. Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill.

I label myself an ultraliberal, and by that I mean liberals seem too conservative to me. Policies aside, I was clearly a Trump “supporter” in the sense that I spoke glowingly of his persuasion skills, his humor, and his business talent. I was among the first observers—some say the first—to identify his political maneuvering as solid strategies borrowed from the business world. I was making that point while most pundits were labeling him an unhinged clown. I know a lot about business because I’ve observed it, and lived it, in a lot of ways.

I write about business in the Dilbert comic, and I’ve published several business humor books. I also spent sixteen years in corporate America, first at a large bank and later at a phone company. I held about a dozen different jobs at those companies and got to see business from the perspective of technologists, marketers, strategists, leaders, followers, and more. I also have a BA in economics and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. And I’ve managed several different types of businesses of my own. 

This is a good place to tell you where my credentials rank in the field of persuasion. I am a trained hypnotist. I label my persuasion skills commercial grade, meaning I successfully use persuasion in my work. A few levels above me in talent and credibility are cognitive scientists who study this sort of thing for a living. A cognitive scientist tells you I got something wrong in this book, trust the scientist, not me.

In my view of the world, the few individuals I call Master Persuaders are a level above cognitive scientists in persuasion power and possess what I call weapons-grade persuasion skills. The qualities that distinguish weapons-grade persuasion from the academic or commercial types are the level of risk taking and the personality that goes with it. Trump the candidate had an appetite for risk, a deep understanding of persuasion, and a personality that the media couldn’t ignore. He brought the full package.

Here’s the summary of the persuader types. The most powerful are at the top.

• Master Persuaders (includes several presidents, Steve Jobs, Peggy Noonan, Tony Robbins, Madonna, etc.)
• Cognitive scientists
• Commercial-grade persuaders (people such as me)

But Scott, Trump is a horrible monster, isn’t he?

Trump’s critics were appalled that I could say anything positive about this horrible monster that they expected to sprout horns at any moment. To them, my so-called support of Trump represented a big risk for the country, and it was the most despicable thing I could do. They worried that my writing would help get this racist, sexist, disrespectful, xenophobic hater elected. And they asked me how I could live with myself as Hitler’s Little Helper. Wasn’t I taking a risk with the future of the entire planet? Was I putting everyone’s life in danger just to have some fun and get some attention?

The simple answer is that I didn’t see any of their concerns as real. In Trump I saw a highly capable yet flawed man trying to make a positive difference. And I saw all of his opponents’ fears as the product of heavy-handed political persuasion. No one becomes Hitler at age seventy. We would have seen lots of warning signs during his decades of public life.

And I kept in mind that most Republican candidates for president have been painted with the same Hitler brush, and it hasn’t been right yet. In a similar fashion, I knew President Obama was not part of an Islamic terrorist sleeper cell, as some of his critics claimed. I saw candidate Trump as the target of the same sort of partisan hysteria. Like much of the public, I saw a scary extremism in Trump’s language and policy preferences during the campaign. But I recognized his hyperbole as weapons-grade persuasion that would change after the election, not a sign that Trump had suddenly turned into Hitler.

When Trump said he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants who were otherwise obeying the law, his critics saw it as the beginning of a Hitler-like roundup of the people who are “different” in some way. I saw it as a thoroughly impractical idea that served as a mental “anchor” to brand Trump as the candidate who cared the most about our porous borders and planned to do the most about them. Never mind that his initial deportation plan was mean, impractical, and—many would say—immoral. Trump’s position gave him plenty of room to negotiate back to something more reasonable after he was in office. that’s exactly what happened, even if you don’t like where he ended up. As I write this, President Trump’s current immigration policy is focused on deporting undocumented immigrants who committed serious crimes after entering. His critics probably felt relieved because his opening offer (mass deportation) was so aggressive that his current policy seems more reasonable than it might have without the opening offer for contrast. That is classic deal making. You start with a big first demand and negotiate back to your side of the middle.

When candidate Trump answered questions about policies, it was clear he didn’t have a detailed understanding of the more complicated issues. Most observers saw this as a fatal flaw that would keep him out of the White House. I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as Trump recognizing that people don’t use facts and reason to make decisions. A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful. Candidate Trump matched the emotional state of his base, and matched their priorities too. His supporters trusted him to dig into the details once elected, with the help of advisers and experts. And that’s what happened.

I was far from being a true believer about Trump’s policies. But unlike most of the world, I recognized his campaign promises as more persuasion than policy. I never took his policy positions too seriously except in a directional sense. And directionally, Trump wanted the same things the public wanted: strong national security, prosperity, affordable health care, personal freedom, and that sort of thing. Although Trump never said it directly, he branded himself as a flexible leader who would work out the details after election. And sure enough, we observed President Trump working out the details after election on immigration policy, health care, taxes, fighting ISIS, and more.

I made a point of sampling the election news on both sides of the political spectrum. I’m not sure how common that practice is. Most people are habit bound to the news sources that tend to agree with them. The voters who were consuming only left-leaning news were convinced Trump was a monster. The voters consuming conservative news were convinced that Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate. If you don’t sample the news on both sides, you miss a lot of the context.

Had I seen signs that the worst accusations against Trump were even 1 percent likely to be true, I would have backed off my support. But as a trained persuader, I saw the scariest accusations against Trump as routine political persuasion, not an indication that Hitler was coming. I never had a moment of doubt on this point. Based on my lifetime of experience with persuasion, the situation was both simple and clear: It only looked risky to the untrained.

I had a lot of advantages in understanding Trump’s communication style and his powers of persuasion. But when it came to communicating what I knew, I had one enormous advantage that almost no one else covering the election had: I wasn’t doing it for the money.

I’m already rich. No one owns me. The common business term for that situation is having F?you money. And I have it. That gave me the freedom to say whatever I thought was both useful and true. And thanks to my popular blog at Dilbert.com, I had a direct channel to the public.

I also knew there would be plenty of haters coming at me as soon as I started saying good things about Trump’s talents. And come after me they did—amateurs, professionals, and paid trolls alike. Luckily for me, I had a three-word philosophy beginning with F and ending with “money” that covered that situation. And I made sure my readers knew that’s how I was thinking. the freedom to say whatever I wanted to say—and to do it publicly—was half the fun.

Excerpted from Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter by Scott Adams with permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ? Scott Adams, 2017.