4 ms·

Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) has written several books on persuasion and persuasive techniques. He analyzes Trump's communication style very positively.

dragonwriter 7y ago
Scott Adams isn't an expert on either persuasion generally or the domain in which Trump operates (writing a book doesn't make you an expert; ideally, being an expert would be related to having a book taken seriously, but being a celebrity can do that without any expertise.) Trump did a decent enough job at leveraging decades of Republican propaganda designed to create permanent unmet needs and resentments to support politicians permanently promising incremental steps in the direction of those needs, and cutting the legal out of the people making that offer by not nakedly offering the whole hog rather than incremental steps. But that's not a triumph of persuasion: the persuasion was done by decades of work by professional political propagandists; Trump was just meeting the already-radicalized Republican base where they'd been set up to be exploited.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  could you expand a bit? what are the unmet permanent needs
arrrg 7y ago
I mean, it obviously works. That doesn’t tell you anything about its ethical or moral content, though.
TwoBit 7y ago
Does he recommend lying so much? I'm not sure how to categorize Trump's lying. He just says whatever he wants, completely made up.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > I'm not sure how to categorize Trump's lying. He just says whatever he wants, completely made up. My charitable view of Trump's lying is this: He is one of the first high level public officials to take Scalia's opinion in Republican Party of Minnesota v White seriously > Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment. His speech is in essence poetry rather than prose; he focuses almost exclusively on evocative imagery and emotional impact and disregards facts as largely irrelevant to his audience. To my dismay, this is much more effective than I would like it to be.

dragonwriter 7y ago

Scott Adams isn't an expert on either persuasion generally or the domain in which Trump operates (writing a book doesn't make you an expert; ideally, being an expert would be related to having a book taken seriously, but being a celebrity can do that without any expertise.) Trump did a decent enough job at leveraging decades of Republican propaganda designed to create permanent unmet needs and resentments to support politicians permanently promising incremental steps in the direction of those needs, and cutting the legal out of the people making that offer by not nakedly offering the whole hog rather than incremental steps. But that's not a triumph of persuasion: the persuasion was done by decades of work by professional political propagandists; Trump was just meeting the already-radicalized Republican base where they'd been set up to be exploited.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
could you expand a bit? what are the unmet permanent needs

arrrg 7y ago

I mean, it obviously works. That doesn’t tell you anything about its ethical or moral content, though.

TwoBit 7y ago

Does he recommend lying so much? I'm not sure how to categorize Trump's lying. He just says whatever he wants, completely made up.

nordsieck 7y ago
> I'm not sure how to categorize Trump's lying. He just says whatever he wants, completely made up. My charitable view of Trump's lying is this: He is one of the first high level public officials to take Scalia's opinion in Republican Party of Minnesota v White seriously > Campaign promises are, by long democratic tradition, the least binding form of human commitment. His speech is in essence poetry rather than prose; he focuses almost exclusively on evocative imagery and emotional impact and disregards facts as largely irrelevant to his audience. To my dismay, this is much more effective than I would like it to be.