Scott Adams, creator of the satirical daily comic strip Dilbert, has been predicting for months that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would win the 2016 election in a landslide because he is a master at the art of persuasion.
But on Tuesday, he reversed that prediction and said Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is now “totally winning the persuasion battle.”
“The persuasion kill shot against Trump is the accusation that Trump is a crazy racist. When you combine crazy and racist, you have a lethal persuasion cocktail. And that’s what the Clinton side has done,” Adams wrote. “The folks on social media tested lots of accusations against Trump until they found traction with the ‘crazy racist’ theme in all its forms. And Clinton’s campaign team wisely amplified it.”
Adams said Trump has to fix this perception quickly if he is to have any hope of winning in the fall: “I now update my prediction of a Trump landslide to say that if he doesn’t give a speech on the topic of racism — to neutralize the crazy racist label — he loses. There is nothing he can do with policy tweaks, debate performances, advertising, interviews, or anything else that would remove the tarring he received from the Clinton side. But a persuasive speech could do it.”
It is a big reversal for Adams, who had previously argued that Trump was the master at framing issues, manipulating the news cycle and labeling opponents. He began making these arguments early in the GOP primary too, at a time when the other candidates, pundits and journalists were refusing to take Trump’s campaign seriously.
Adams has, for example, referred to Trump’s labeling of opponents like Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as “low-energy” and Texas Senator Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted” as “linguistic killshots” because they framed the public’s perception of those candidates.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner earlier this month, Adams predicted that Trump would do the same thing to Clinton that he did to his GOP rivals. “[B]y November it will feel as though he is running opposed. There will be so little left of her I am not sure that she will be a viable candidate,” Adams said. The cartoonist said in the interview that neither Clinton nor Trump reflects his own personal politics. He subsequently endorsed Clinton, saying that as a Californian, he feared for his safety if he didn’t.
In the three weeks since that interview, Trump has hit the rockiest patch of his campaign and now trails Clinton by double-digits in some head-to-head polls. The slump began with his attack on the judge in the fraud case against the Trump Education Initiative, the investor school Trump founded. Trump argued the American-born judge should recuse himself because he is “Mexican.” The attack brought a chorus of criticism, including from top Republicans.
Adams argued it was a major mistake because it played into the argument Trump’s critics were already making that he is racist. “[V]oters saw Trump’s accusations about the judge’s bias — a bias all humans have — as racist because they were primed to see things that way,” he said.
The cartoonist still thinks that the GOP candidate likely has a few tricks up his sleeve. “If you were Trump, and you didn’t want a stronger candidate to replace Clinton at the last minute, you would hold back your best attacks until she secures the nomination,” he said. “My guess is that Trump’s strongest attacks will start in late summer.”
