January 15, 2026

COLEMAN HUGHES: Scott Adams Made Me a Better Thinker.

At a time when America’s elites (myself very much included) were struggling to understand Trump’s appeal, Adams strode onto the scene as a kind of “Trump whisperer.” Drawing on his longtime study of the art of persuasion, Adams took what he’d learned and applied it to Trump, arguing that statements which often looked lunatic at first glance were in fact evidence of elite persuasion skills.

I don’t think I bought Adams’s thesis at the time, but when I heard yesterday’s tragic news that Adams had died after a battle with metastatic prostate cancer, it occurred to me that whatever my disagreements with him, Scott Adams influenced the way I think—for the better.

Here’s how Adams’s thesis worked in practice: During Trump’s first presidential run, Adams considered his promise to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it an absolute masterstroke of persuasion—precisely because it was so overly simplistic and technically inaccurate. Fact-checking outlets destroyed Trump’s idea on the basis of all of the financial and technical details—pointing out, for instance, that a solid wall didn’t make sense for many kinds of terrain—and for legacy media, the wall became Exhibit A in proving that Trump was both a racist and a total moron. But for Adams, the avalanche of criticism Trump provoked was a feature, not a bug. Here is how Adams framed it in his 2017 book, Win Bigly:

In order to pull off this type of weapons-grade persuasion, he had to be willing to endure brutal criticism about how dumb he was to think he could secure the border with a solid wall. To make those criticisms go away, all Trump needed to do was clarify that the “wall” was actually a variety of different border solutions, depending on cost and terrain, every time he mentioned it. Easy as pie. But the Master Persuader didn’t want the critics to be silenced. He wanted them to make border control the biggest issue in the campaign just by talking nonstop about how Trump’s “wall” was impractical. As long as people were talking about the wall, Trump was the most important person in the conversation. The Master Persuader moves energy and attention to where it helps him most.

And during Trump’s first presidential campaign, he discerned that voters wanted radical change to immigration policy.

No wonder numerous DNC house organs attacked Adams in their obits:

Flashback to when Rush Limbaugh passed away in 2021: Just Why Are Post, NY Times Obits Nicer to Terrorists Than Conservatives?

Posted at 8:36 am by Ed Driscoll