Opinion

 

Donald Trump is a master of hypnotism. How he used the power on America—and then himself

Among other things, Donald Trump’s a potent hypnotist. So reveals Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, the most brilliantly mordant cartoon since Charles Addams left the building. Adams is also an author and a social media influencer. And, as he frequently points out, a hypnotist.

Adams presciently predicted Trump’s 2016 victory. He told Reason over a year before that election, “A lot of the things that the media were reporting as sort of random insults and bluster and just Trump being Trump looked to me like a lot of deep technique that I recognized from the fields of hypnosis and persuasion.” Now, Bob Woodward’s new book reports that Jared Kushner recommends Adams’s Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter as key to understanding Trump. The subtitle says it all.

I am recognized by the world’s leading hypnosis professional association, the 14,000-plus-member National Guild of Hypnotists, as an elite, top-ranked, nonclinical hypnotist. Like Adams, in recognizing Trump’s serious hypnotic power early on I, too, tipped my hat to this businessman-turned-politician. 

But here’s my big reveal: Trump may be too gifted at hypnosis for his own good.

“Hypnosis” conjures visions of Svengali and The Manchurian Candidate. Dr. Eric Willmarth, past president of the Society of Psychological Hypnosis, once observed, “If you watch hypnosis on TV, the subject always ends up clucking like a chicken, being naked, or assassinating a President.” That’s just stage or Hollywood hypnosis. There was no Svengali. There was no Manchurian candidate.