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

By Amanda Marcotte

Senior Writer

Published June 8, 2016 9:57AM (EDT)

Donald Trump, Scott Adams   (Reuters/L.E. Baskow/AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Donald Trump, Scott Adams (Reuters/L.E. Baskow/AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

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:

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.

Trump pushes the conspiracy theory that climate change is a hoax, which alarms people who know that it is not? Adams responds with a blog post reassuring everyone he doesn't mean it and that he's totally going to get on board with fighting climate change because "he is a rational person in his private dealings" and therefore he just needs a policy briefing to get with the program.

Not that someone who believes that should ever be considered a legitimate judge of what is "rational".

Now Adams has a real doozy of post, where he pretends to endorse Clinton, but of course it's a cover story for his real endorsement: Trump. In the post, Adams literally accuses Clinton of trying to get Trump killed because, "once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him."

(Worth noting: Clinton has not defined Trump as Hitler.)

"So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, for my personal safety," Adams adds, arguing that if Trump is in danger from the supposedly murderous Clinton crew, then so is anyone that doesn't support Clinton.

Obviously, this is not a Clinton endorsement. The purpose of this is to try to convince people that Clinton is some kind of dangerous fascist demagogue who will send her brownshirts into the street to force people into compliance with violence. This opinion, of course, has nothing to do with the real life Clinton and everything to do with Adams's fantasy version of her.

It's a fantasy version of Clinton that is quite obviously a direct result of Adams's own bizarre hang-ups about women. Adams has a long history of being obsessed with the idea that women have grown too powerful and they are pushing hapless men around in our new feminist dystopia.

For instance, there is the classic post where he argued that ours is a "female-dominated" society, because, in what he clearly believes is a grave injustice, "access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman." They are allowed to turn you down even if you pay for dinner first. And you ladies think you have it bad just because you get paid less, are far likelier to be raped, and have to endure politicians trying to force childbirth on you against your will.

Or, in another post, he moans about how unfair it is to hold men responsible for " behaving badly, e.g. tweeting[by which he means sending harassing messages and dick pics to women], raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world."

"The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable," he continues. "In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes." He concludes that the only solution to this problem is to "come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated" and eliminate all copulation, because clearly, in his mind, the only way men can express themselves sexually is by abusing women.

Under the circumstances, it's no surprise that Adams loves Trump, a man who clearly shares his worldview where men and women are natural enemies and sex isn't a mutual desire so much as what happens when a man conquers a woman. The only real question is why Adams doesn't just come out and tell the world the truth about his Trump love.


By Amanda Marcotte

Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.

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Dilbert Donald Trump Elections 2016 Hillary Clinton Scott Adams