I first heard of Scott Adams in July 2017, just after he’d been dubbed America’s “smartest Trump supporter.” The accolade had been bestowed upon him by the audience of author Sam Harris’s podcast, then titled Waking Up; Adams, best known as the creator of the brilliantly funny Dilbert comics, had appeared on the show to argue that the mainstream media had been taking Donald Trump literally and as a result, misunderstanding him.
At a time when America’s elites (myself very much included) were struggling to understand Trump’s appeal, Adams strode onto the scene as a kind of “Trump whisperer.” Drawing on his longtime study of the art of persuasion, Adams took what he’d learned and applied it to Trump, arguing that statements which often looked lunatic at first glance were in fact evidence of elite persuasion skills.
I don’t think I bought Adams’s thesis at the time, but when I heard yesterday’s tragic news that Adams had died after a battle with metastatic prostate cancer, it occurred to me that whatever my disagreements with him, Scott Adams influenced the way I think—for the better.
Here’s how Adams’s thesis worked in practice: During Trump’s first presidential run, Adams considered his promise to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it an absolute masterstroke of persuasion—precisely because it was so overly simplistic and technically inaccurate. Fact-checking outlets destroyed Trump’s idea on the basis of all of the financial and technical details—pointing out, for instance, that a solid wall didn’t make sense for many kinds of terrain—and for legacy media, the wall became Exhibit A in proving that Trump was both a racist and a total moron. But for Adams, the avalanche of criticism Trump provoked was a feature, not a bug. Here is how Adams framed it in his 2017 book, Win Bigly:
