Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter

by Scott Adams

bigly. I knew that candidate Trump’s persuasion skills were about to annihilate the public’s ability to understand what they were seeing, because their observations wouldn’t fit their mental model of living in a rational world. The public was about to transition from believing—with total certainty—“the clown can’t win” to “Hello, President Trump.” And in order to make that transition, they would have to rewrite every movie playing in their heads.

But unlike most of the world, I recognized his campaign promises as more persuasion than policy. I never took his policy positions too seriously except in a directional sense. And directionally, Trump wanted the same things the public wanted: strong national security, prosperity, affordable

Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it.

A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts. Trump

For example, if you are familiar with my Dilbert comic strip, you might know that Dilbert has no last name. His boss has no name at all. You don’t know the name of Dilbert’s company or what industry it is in. You also don’t know its location. All of that omission is intentional. It is a trick I learned from hypnosis class. I leave out any details that would cause readers to feel they are different from the characters in the comic.

The people who said he was not a true conservative were trying to use word-thinking to eliminate Trump from consideration as the Republican candidate.

You might have seen a viral video on Jimmy Kimmel Live of street interviews in which a prankster presented Trump’s policy positions as Hillary Clinton’s policies and asked her supporters if they agreed with those positions.3 Lots of people said they did. I’ll take it one step further by saying Trump would have won the election even if he and Clinton had switched positions and erased our memories of their old opinions.

PERSUASION TIP 17 People prefer certainty over uncertainty, even when the certainty is wrong.

Visual memory overwhelms any other kind of memory, and vision is the most persuasive of your senses.

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 its 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 remove the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.