Dilbert has gone fascist: The strange unrequited love Scott Adams seems to have for Donald Trump
The Dilbert creator insists he's not a Trump backer, but the way he talks about him suggests otherwise
Skip to CommentsTopics: dilbert, Donald Trump, Elections 2016, Hillary Clinton, Scott Adams, Politics News, Elections News, Media News, News
Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” wants you to know he does not love Donald Trump. Sure, he probably sleeps with Trump’s picture under his pillow every night and spends his days imagining himself running, hand-in-hand, with Trump down the beach, laughing at all those liberals and how sorry they’ll be when there’s a President Trump. But he is totally not a Trump fanboy and he isn’t voting for him. He swears!
Of all the bizarre spectacles that the Trump campaign has created, at the top of the list is the obsession the “Dilbert” cartoonist has with trying to convince America that his obvious hero worship of Trump is somehow a cool, detached analysis from a man who isn’t even interested in voting for the guy.
Adams talks about Trump a lot, but always hastens to assure people that he is in no way supporting Trump. In an interview with the Washington Post back in March, Adams insistently demanded that he doesn’t think his “political views align with anybody” and that his praise for Trump should not be mistaken for support. He tacitly admits that Hillary Clinton has “greater mastery of the issues.” Nearly every post he writes includes some kind of disclaimer about how he has “disavowed all of the candidates.”
Adams really, really, really wants you to believe he’s not a Trump supporter, because he knows, on some level, that outing yourself as a Trump supporter is like admitting in public that your mom still pins your address inside your clothes in case you get lost. But, for all that Adams loves to wax on about how he is an expert on the art of persuasion — he even brags about his supposed ability to hypnotize “everyone” — he can’t even manage, despite intense repetition, to convince readers that he wouldn’t lick Trump’s shoes if given the opportunity to do so.
Some phrases that Adams has used to describe Trump:
- “fIf you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. “
- “The Master Persuader will warp reality until he gets what he wants….”
- “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.”
- “Trump has the best persuasion skills I have ever seen.”
- “You see apple pie and flags and eagles coming out of his ass when he talks.”
In the real world, Trump has off-the-charts unfavorability ratings, but in the world of Scott Adams, Trump is a svengali of politics, headed for a landslide in November, due to the enormous persuasive power of racist cracks and non sequitur ramblings. If you read enough of Adams’s blog, it becomes quickly apparent that the only reason Adams thinks this is because he himself is persuaded to vote for Trump. And, like his fellow narcissistic Donald Trump, Adams mistakes his views for the majority.
Despite claiming not to support anyone, Adams has largely handed his blog over to defending Trump from his critics.
Trump makes a blatantly racist remark about Judge Gonzalo Curiel being “Mexican” and therefore, in Trump’s opinion, unable to render an impartial verdict in the Trump U case? Adams says that Trump critics must therefore be saying Curiel is a “robot” because “100% of humans are biased about just about everything.” (Except, of course, Adams, who is most definitely not biased towards Trump because he is infatuated with him.)
People note that it’s dangerous handing the nuclear codes to Trump, a man who is so vindictive he denounces entire countries because he made less money than he hoped on a business deal there? Adams writes a whole blog post sneering at the very idea that one is capable of predicting a person’s future behavior on their past record.
