Author and Dilbert creator Scott Adams has a new book being published about the persuasive tactics of candidate Donald Trump, titled “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” He appeared on Fox News to discuss the book on Tuesday:
Adams has a psychologist-marketer point of view, and he recognizes candidate Trump’s brilliance in not talking in terms of wonky policies, but visually and concretely when possible. As a builder, Trump is particularly adept at pitching “the wall” to block illegal immigration.
As Adams described, “A lot of people don’t know that his pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s all about thinking your way into a better future, kind of the mind leading reality, and you see that in what the president does. He’s always making us think past the sale: we’re not thinking should we build a wall, we’re looking at eight prototypes. We’re thinking, well which one do we pick. He’s continually making us think about the future and imagine it visually.”
Furthermore, the candidate knew how to connect with his audience, observing, “A hypnotist would call it pacing and leading. First you match your audience in whatever ways: it could be physically, it could be the way they speak, and he speaks in a simple, relatable way that you can quote, you can remember it, you could repeat the phrase.”
Candidate Trump also matched his patriotic audience by connecting with them on the immigration issue, understanding its importance immediately. Americans who believed immigration should legal, controlled and reduced were impressed. While many Washington swampers treat immigration enforcement as a borderline racist issue, Trump understood the centrality of law and sovereignty.
