By virtually all measures, Donald Trump’s presidency is a disaster, lurching from self-inflicted crisis to self-inflicted disaster.
His inauguration day crowds were dwarfed by massive protests the next day. He’s delivered on none of his signature promises. Investigators are snooping around his administration and his businesses, and talk of impeachment is in the air. The White House is in perpetual chaos, with demoralized staffers leaking embarrassing details to the press almost hourly — when they’re not literally hiding in the bushes to escape questions from the press. Every day brings new evidence that Trump has no idea what he’s doing.
Today, after more than a week of relentless bad news, his historically terrible popularity rating has fallen close to its all time low. Even his wife refuses to hold hands with him.
But to Dilbert-cartoonist-turned-dillweed-pundit Scott Adams, everything bad is good for Trump, whom he sees as playing a masterful game of 4th-dimensional chess that most of us are too dumb to understand. Whenever Trump pulls some new boner, Adams is there to tell us, like Pee Wee Herman after his famous bike fail, that Trump “meant to do that.”
It’s been a while since we last checked in on Spinnin’ Scott, so I thought I’d grace you all with some of the highlights of his Trump-related Twittering over the last month or so.
In late April, Adams suggested that Trump’s opponents were running out of steam, or at least air:
I tell you how the air is coming out of the anti-Trump balloon: https://t.co/8L4Y4Vg8Jl #POTUS #Trump pic.twitter.com/vL0IwrBtTT
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 18, 2017
He informed us that the world was coming to see all of politics through a Trumpian lens:
Watch in awe as the entire world starts to see things through a "deal-making" frame. We're already seeing it. https://t.co/yUyORCfTMF
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 29, 2017
He groused a little about the French election with a Tweet one can only assume was deliberately designed to break irony meters around the globe:
France had a chance to elect a Trump-like candidate, but instead chose a rich, white businessman with no government experience. #Macron
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 8, 2017
He declared that the widespread belief that Trump has no fucking idea what he’s doing is actually … good for Trump, a step in the right direction, perception-wise.
Trump's brand migration from Hitler to incompetent is complete. After a few more wins, look for, "Effective, but I don't like it." https://t.co/kqhJxqjcBG
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 10, 2017
Clearly Adams doesn’t realize that Trump’s “brand migration” hasn’t actually gone “from Hitler to incompetent” but from “Hitler to incompetent Hitler.”
He’s also apparently unaware that in a democracy, a politician’s popularity actually counts for quite a lot, given that our leaders are chosen through literal popularity contests known as “elections.”
Anti-Trumpers are clinging to the "low approval" criticism of Trump, unaware that it measures their cognition, not his performance. #POTUS
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 12, 2017
He repeatedly tried to hypnotize Americans into forgetting the name “Comey” entirely.
Comey who? I already forgot that ancient controversy. https://t.co/nAfHSEwpom
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 16, 2017
Comey got his forever-name today. In a month, all you will remember of this leak is #NutJob.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 19, 2017
Then he tried to convince us that Trump’s short attention span is a good thing because his advisors are so terrible:
How can we voters tell the difference between a POTUS with a "short attention span" and advisors who aren't worth a long listen?
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 20, 2017
I can’t say I dispute Adams’ contention that Trump’s advisors suck, but, dude, WHO PICKED THESE ADVISORS? (Hint: His name rhymes with Bonald Glump.)
Currently, Adams is trying to push his rather unique take on Trump’s cringeworthy world tour:
I'd hate to be a White House leaker watching President Trump power-up overseas. He's coming back stronger. Your shit is done. #POTUS
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 22, 2017
Apparently one ‘”powers up” abroad as a president by:
- Curtsying to Saudi royalty
- Forgetting that Israel is in the Middle East
- Grasping a giant glowing orb from the Home Shopping Network’s Illuminati Collection
But, hey, maybe the real story of the world tour is how much everyone LOVES Ivanka!
While you were distracted by President Trump, this might be the start of the most important story in the world: @IvankaTrump https://t.co/chUkTJjgEV
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 22, 2017
Keep spinning, Scott! Just keep spinning.
I had to stare at that French election tweet for a long time. It made me legitimately wonder if Adams has been playing with Poe’s Law and his whole downhill slide has been one long trolling session or piece of performance art or what have you. Surely nobody is that clueless?
Then I realized that that is highly improbable, but still… damn.
His devotion to Loserboy is touching, but hooWEE is his projection ever hurting my eyes. FOCUS, Scott!
Kivutar, I’m pretty sure that French election tweet was meant as a joke; I guess he’s trying to mock Trump-haters who were relieved Macron won, by suggesting that he has more in common with Trump than they want to admit. I guess. It really really doesn’t work.
Scott Adams writes a comic strip for a living, so I assumed he understood what words mean. Sadly I see I was mistaken in that assumption.
I remember back when I thought Dilbert was funny. It’s hard to enjoy a comic strip when you realize the writer might be the pointy haired boss.
“And it’s just- and there HAS to come a point, where Republicans and Democrats, where we see a piece of footage and we just agree on what the fuck reality is! And the fact is, you can’t show footage of a Land Rover running over a cat and then say the cat was trying to kill itself. I’m gonna need at least three days to find the note that he left.”
That chunky quote is from a Lewis Black special, back during the Bush years. I think about it a lot these days. Been super relevant lately.
@David
It certainly broke my brain! I can’t even…
Go on…
Oooohhh. We must be in that universe where Adams’ belief in his own masterly understanding of politics is actually true.
Agreed ?
Also, a sinkhole opened in front of Mar a Lago.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/terripous/so-a-sinkhole-opened-up?utm_term=.ddXbaWV8o#.wjXJgOxkB
I’m sure if you peered down into it, you’d see some non-Euclidean geometry going on!
That’ll teach Trump to touch mysteriously glowing orbs surrounded by wizards.
@wwth
Reality is taking the piss so hard.
Yeah, the Trump-like candidate was Marine Le Pen.
The far right seems to give us women a pass (awww!) if we’re fascists (ewww!).
Remember how Sarah Palin ran for VP — and there wasn’t a murmur of disapproval from the right?
No one said that she should be home with her family?
No one said that she wasn’t qualified? (Snort, snort, snort.)
No one pointed out that in their evangelical Christian family, her husband was (supposedly) her boss — so that if McCain, an elderly man, couldn’t fulfill his duties and she became president, Todd could say to Sarah, Time to come home now?
The right wing: all about the pretty pictures and the good-feeling feels.
Re: Macron Tweet
What the fuck? Macron has “no government experience”? Then what would his stints as Deputy Secretary-General, then Minister, count as?
@Ariblester
I don’t know what words Scott Adams, literary wizard, would choose to explain Macron’s background.
But I’m sure these words would be magically twisty. In the end, Macron’s “experience” with the “French government” would turn out to be minimal. So minimal as to be not worth mentioning.
Like Stephen Colbert said, Trump’s not a wizard playing 4-Dimensional Chess, he’s playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.
@Robin Lionheart
I’ve heard “One-dimensional snakes and ladders”
I’ve always thought that finance minister was a pointlessly tokenistic job.
Blonald flump, chonald rump, gronald pump. He is playing pong but he has mistakenly picked up wrong controller and thinks he is winning.
Tweet seen quoted elsewhere, I don’t recall from whom:
WaPo: Trump shat himself.
White House: Trump didn’t actually shit himself at all.
Trump: I SHAT MYSELF ON PURPOSE.
Every. Fucking. Day.
Here’s the context on the Hungry Hungry Hippos remark from Colbert’s monologue:
“The question is, why did Trump do it? Now, while it looks like Trump fired James Comey to stop the Russia investigation, that is why.
I’m pretty confident, because one thing we’ve learned from the last two years of Donald Trump is that what it seems like he’s doing is exactly what he’s doing. There’s no grand strategy. He’s not some puppet master. He’s not some wizard playing three-dimensional chess. He’s playing Hungry Hungry Hippos. He’s just slapping till he gets all the marbles. Mine-mine-mine-mine-mine-mine-mine-mine-mine.
There’s nothing deeper going on. He’s a baby pool. You could not get your ankles wet in Donald Trump.”
He is playing sonic the hedgehog but he has not pressed the start button and is actually watching the demo.
Has anyone else seen this?
Short version: a filmmaker is called out for sexism in a review by a female film critic. The filmmaker complains to her editor (also a woman) and, when she decides not to respond, starts a campaign to try to get her and her publication shunned on social media.
The punchline? By his own admission, the filmmaker didn’t even read the review.
@Wetherby
Interesting read! I did a bit of sleuthing and the film review in question is for Porto, directed by Gabe Klinger.
If anyone wants to read the review itself you can find it here.
OK, so apparently Adams thinks Trump has re-branded himself as America’s pointy-haired boss and that’s part of some grand strategy because it makes him more acceptable (compared to the fascist brand) to the left.
I guess in this scheme Trump won the election by playing an alt-right superhero, no matter how much it’d make the left hate him. Now he’ll eventually transform into an ordinary corrupt big money politician, the kind that everybody dislikes but nobody truly hates. Adams probably thinks that’s what Trump truly is. But why then would he take this intermediary stage playing pointy-haired boss?
I think Trump truly is the pointy-haired boss, to a staggering degree of accuracy. He’s largely given up or failed the alt-right hero image, but he’s still teamed up with fascists, aside from big money crooks and random lickspittles. His popularity on the left certainly isn’t improving.
I guess being incompetent is a better image than evil, but “Effective” is the polar opposite. Saying that he is intentionally changing his image to incompetent as a midpoint to “effective, but I don’t like it” sounds like something a comedian would make up to ridicule people making stupid arguments. I want to think this is all part of some long winded joke mocking trump supporters, unfortunately actually believing that would require the same magnitude of pathetic rationalization that Scott Adams has achieved.
I think Trump supporters were trying to tackle a serious issue, but they did it in a very irrational, illogical way. When your front door refuses to open, do you pull out your key, or do you body slam it? Washington is corrupt, so they get someone who ignores the rules, (all of them). Income inequality is growing, and the ultra-rich have more power than ever, so they get a billionaire, but one who is DIFFERENT (well, different from how they imagine billionaires to be). Globalization is causing economic instability, so you need to most aggressive guy on the ticket (because REASONS).
trumpf: “I’m acting like a complete moron on purpose…”
ETA: Scott Adams, are you awake? I know “woke” is waaayyyy too much to ask of you, but are you even fucking AWAKE?????