Bill welcomes Dilbert creator and "How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big" author Scott Adams to discuss Trump's powers of persuasion and branding in this clip from May 27, 2016.
I’ve decided to come off the sidelines and endorse a candidate for President of the United States.
I’ll start by reminding readers that my politics don’t align with any of the candidates. My interest in the race has been limited to Trump’s extraordinary persuasion skills. But lately Hillary Clinton has moved into the persuasion game – and away from boring facts and policies – with great success. Let’s talk about that.
This past week we saw Clinton pair the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you tremble in fear.
That is good persuasion if you can pull it off because fear is a strong motivator. It is also a sharp pivot from Clinton’s prior approach of talking about her mastery of policy details, her experience, and her gender. Trump took her so-called “woman card” and turned it into a liability. So Clinton wisely pivoted. Her new scare tactics are solid-gold persuasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see Clinton’s numbers versus Trump improve in June, at least temporarily, until Trump finds a counter-move.
The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to trigger a race war in the United States. And I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him. And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms. (I’m called an “apologist” on Twitter, or sometimes just Joseph Goebbels).
If Clinton successfully pairs Trump with Hitler in your mind – as she is doing – and loses anyway, about a quarter of the country will think it is morally justified to assassinate their own leader. I too would feel that way if an actual Hitler came to power in this country. I would join the resistance and try to take out the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.
So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
As I have often said, I have no psychic powers and I don’t know which candidate would be the best president. But I do know which outcome is most likely to get me killed by my fellow citizens. So for safety reason, I’m on team Clinton.
My prediction remains that Trump will win in a landslide based on his superior persuasion skills. But don’t blame me for anything President Trump does in office because I endorse Clinton.
Vince Foster was my brother. Donald Trump should be ashamed.
Vincent Foster (left) and his wife, Lisa, with then-governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton in 1988. Associated Press/Arkansas Democrat Gazette. (Arkansas Democrat Gazette via Associated Press)
By Sheila Foster Anthony May 26, 2016
The writer served on the Federal Trade Commission from 1997 to 2003.
It is beyond contempt that a politician would use a family tragedy to further his candidacy, but such is the character of Donald Trump displayed in his recent comments to The Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-escalates-attack-on-bill-clinton/2016/05/23/ed109acc-2100-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html ]. In this interview, Trump cynically, crassly and recklessly insinuated that my brother, Vincent W. Foster Jr., may have been murdered because “he had intimate knowledge of what was going on” and that Hillary Clinton may have somehow played a role in Vince’s death.
How wrong. How irresponsible. How cruel.
“There are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder,” Trump said in response to a question about Vince’s death.
Trump was canny enough to hedge — he’s not the one raising questions, he said, but others have. He noted that Vince “knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.” The circumstances of Vince’s death, he observed, were “very fishy” and the theories about possible foul play “very serious.”
This is scurrilous enough coming from right-wing political operatives who have peddled conspiracy theories about Vince’s death for more than two decades. How could this be coming from the presumptive Republican nominee for president?
I know this to be true because Vince lived with me when he came to Washington to serve as deputy counsel to the president. This is a grueling job in any administration, especially so at the start, and in the case of the Clinton White House, the counsel’s office — and Vince — were consumed with problems, including over the firing of employees in the White House travel office [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/stories/wwtr950227.htm ].
Vince and I were very close siblings — I was the older, by four years and two months — and there was not much we didn’t share with one another. After about three months, his family rented out their Little Rock home and Vince moved with them to a small Georgetown house.
Vince called me [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/stories/wwtr940701.htm ] at my office in the Justice Department a few days before he died. He told me he was battling depression and knew he needed help. But he was worried that such an admission would adversely affect his top-level security clearance and prevent him from doing his job.
I told him I would try to find a psychiatrist who could help him and protect his privacy. After a few phone calls, I gave him three names. That list was found in his wallet with his body at Fort Marcy Park in McLean. I did not see a suicide coming, yet when I was told that Vince was dead I knew that he had killed himself. Never for a minute have I doubted that was what happened.
I think Vince felt he was a failure, this brilliant man who had so many talents, had achieved so many honors and was so well-respected [ http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-24/news/mn-16379_1_white-house-aides ] by his peers. He must have felt that he couldn’t stay in his job at the White House, and he couldn’t go back to Little Rock. He was so ill, he couldn’t see a way out.
A few months after Vince’s death, I began to see alarming reports in the news articles distributed throughout the Justice Department each day. These clips, which began appearing in newspapers across the country, were similar, as though written by a single source.
This was the beginning of the countless conspiracy theories spun by those who claimed that the Clintons had Vince murdered because he knew something about Whitewater, the real estate transaction that became the subject of the Fiske and Starr investigations. Repeat something enough times and in enough venues, I guess, and people begin to question their own good sense.
These outrageous suggestions have caused our family untold pain because this issue went on for so long and these reports were so painful to read. For years, our family had to wage a court fight to prevent release of photographs of Vince’s dead body. My heartbroken mother was plagued by harassing phone calls from a reporter.
Through all this time I have not spoken publicly about this matter, out of an effort to maintain our family’s privacy. I am now, because The Post sought my reaction. I have donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign but have not had contact with anyone at the campaign about my decision to go public.
For Trump to raise these theories again for political advantage is wrong. I cannot let such craven behavior pass without a response.
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