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Scott Adams, Trump Card

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English: This photo depicts Donald Trump's sta...
Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I agree with Scott Adams, who’s probably perpetually peeved that most people know him only as the creator of Dilbert — his accomplishments range far beyond that — on one thing: Donald Trump will win the 2016 presidential election in a landslide.

Adams predicted that outcome more than a year ago, at a time when I was still having a good laugh over the silly idea of Trump getting within a thousand miles of the Republican nomination. My friend Thane Eichenauer kept urging me to pay more attention to what Adams had to say, but I kept ignoring both of them until, oh, right about now.

Scott Adams’s General Theory of the Inevitability of Trump differs substantially from my own simplistic hypothesis, so much so that the former deserves a grandiose title and the latter doesn’t. Adams believes that  Trump has masterfully scripted himself into the lead role in a presidential campaign produced as a three-act movie. I just think that Americans despise Hillary Clinton even more than they loathe Donald Trump.

But hey, why can’t it be both?

Here’s what pulls me, kicking and screaming, toward Adams’s way of thinking about the race:

In 1997, according to Wikipedia (which references a San Jose, California Mercury News piece accessible only via Archive.org’s Wayback Machine and consisting of video files that either aren’t there or that my computer doesn’t like), Adams conducted an unusual and telling experiment at the invitation of Logitech CEO Pierluigi Zappacosta.

Disguised as rock star management consultant “Ray Mebert,” Adams expertly guided an eager group of Logitech managers through the process of revising their group’s mission statement into something “so impossibly complicated that it has no real content whatsoever.”

That sounds remarkably like what Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party over the course of the last year or so, doesn’t it? I mean, c’mon … building a wall and making Mexico pay for it? Someone’s obviously been tapping directly into the mind of Dilbert‘s megalomaniac companion, Dogbert.

I have to wonder if, somewhere deep down in the Trump campaign’s FEC reports, an inquiring mind might find multiple records of disbursements to one Ray Mebert for campaign consulting? OK, no, I don’t really wonder about that. I checked. Adams must have picked a different pseudonym for this particular escapade. I bet he still has the wig and fake mustache from his Logitech outing, though.

Well played, Mr. Adams, well played.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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