#348 / Trump As A Technique

Scott Adams' cartoon, above, was published on Sunday, December 10, 2017. While the cartoon did not directly accompany a San Jose Mercury News article about Adams, also published on December 10th,  perhaps it should have. 

The Mercury News article was titled, "‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams talks new book and why he backs Donald Trump." The main point of the article, at least from my perspective, was Adams' claim that the general public, and particularly the Democratic Party establishment, has vastly underrated the president's political skill, if "political skill" is taken to mean proficiency in public persuasion. 

Trump as "Wally," in other words, may know just what is is doing, however out of touch with reality he might appear.

I don't share Adams' good feelings about president Trump, but I do agree with the point Adams makes about the president's persuasive powers. I certainly recommend the article, and I think we would all benefit from listening to what Adams has to say:

"In my opinion, understanding Trump as a technique is insanely important. You can see that a lot of people don’t understand it as technique, and they are frightened to death." []

While Adams certainly acknowledges the widespread fear, he is convinced that a president of Trump’s ilk was what the nation needed — and that the American public will be able to rein him in, if needed. 

“The country needed to be broken before it was fixed. The government had just been ossified,” he says. “And I thought, at the very least, he was going to break it. So I did favor somebody as a destroyer — a destroyer of all the ways we used to think. And what’s different about the way I approach this is that I have very high confidence in Americans as a group to break stuff and fix it. It’s what we do best.”

Whether it's Caitlin Johnstone or Scott Adams pointing this out, our government has been (and still is) "out of control." Specifically, it is out of the control of the ordinary men and women whose government it is supposed to be. If that diagnosis is correct (and let's add Bernie Sanders to the Johnstone/Adams list of those advancing that diagnosis), we need to do something new and different as we seek to resuscitate our politics. 

Studying "Trump As A Technique" may be worthwhile, as we try to figure out (once again) how to ensure that a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" does not perish from this earth.

Image Credit:

http://dilbert.com