Scott Adams and Peggy Noonan on the Tweeter in Chief

Scott Adams counts as one of the most relentless and successful self-promoters working today. By trade he’s a cartoonist. He calls himself a hypnotist. And now he insists that he has developed a theory about persuasion—which used to be called rhetoric, though he does not seem to know it.

As I have written previously on this blog, being a cartoonist does not make you a competent theorist. Adams’s theories are really disguised self-promotion. We cannot fault him for making a living, but the rest is silliness.

Adams did predict the ascendance of Donald Trump and continues to give himself credit for his prescience. He thrilled to the way Trump seemed to be confirming the Adams genius, though one suspects that he will take credit for whatever happens.

If you agree with Adams that Trump is the master of the art of tweeting, you ought also pay a little lip service to the fact that Trump’s approval ratings are wallowing at around 38%. Given the nature of the Democratic opposition, it might be enough to get him re-elected, but it does not suggest a master communicator or even a master persuader. An even more significant majority has told pollsters that it would be happy if Trump stopped tweeting altogether.

Adams does not seem to know it, but the word “tweet” is an onomatopoeia that is most often associated with little birds. Little birds go tweet, tweet, tweet. Big birds do not. Lions roar; they do not tweet. Bears growl; they do not tweet.

Every time Trump tweets, all newscasters are obliged to say that Trump tweeted. The phrase, containing the word itself, makes him seem small and weak. Adams misses the point entirely. I suspect that he is not alone.

In an article from today’s Wall Street Journal Adams suggests that Trump is involved in the art of smack-tweeting. Does he have no sense of humor at all?

He writes, concerning one of Trump’s tweets:

Consider this one: “With Jemele Hill at the mike, it is no wonder ESPN ratings have ‘tanked,’ in fact, tanked so badly it is the talk of the industry!”

When Mr. Trump smack-tweets a notable public critic—Ms. Hill has called the president a “white supremacist”—it violates our expectations of his office. That’s what makes it both entertaining and memorable. He often injects into his tweets what memory expert Carmen Simon calls a “little bit of wrongness” to make it hard to look away. If the wrongness alarms you, consider that for years he has adroitly operated within a narrow range of useful wrongness on Twitter without going too far. That suggests technique. In the Twitter environment, strategic wrongness is jet fuel.

It is not just about violating the expectations of the office. Trump has taken on someone who is so far below him on the great socio-political pecking order that he has diminished himself. And he has diminished the presidency. A president should stand tall and proud. He should not stoop t the level of Jamele Hill. When he does so he gives people the impression that he does not know who he is or what his job is.

The great majority of American people consider this to be seriously disconcerting. Tweet, tweet, tweet.

As for Trump’s put-downs of his Republican opponents during the presidential primary campaign, Adams loved them because they seemed to prove that Adams was right. And yet, when it comes to passing legislation in Congress some Republican senators who were trashed by Trump have found it very easy to defy him.

Some do it out of personal pique. Some do it for the wrong reasons. But, when you are exercising leadership you need to develop relationships with the people you want to lead. As of now, Trump has had difficulty doing so.

Trump has been one of the most open and communicative presidents in recent history. He speaks to the press far more often than did many of his predecessors. And yet, he often misspeaks or distorts the facts… and this to a press that lives to attack him.

We might want to rationalize Trump’s failure to communicate well or clearly. We might want to understand that his grasp of facts and even of his job is weak, on a good day. If so, he does not need to have Dilbert’s puppetmaster telling him that he is a master persuader or a brilliant communicator. He would do best to stop tweeting and to find someone who can speak effectively for him. A constant pattern of miscommunication does not a great communicator make. Using your tweets to undercut your cabinet secretaries does not help either.

Don’t believe me? Ask someone who actually knows something about presidential communication, Peggy Noonan. Last Friday she wrote this:

He proceeds each day with the confidence of one who thinks his foundation firm when it’s not—it’s shaky. His job is to build support, win people over through persuasion, and score some legislative victories that will encourage a public sense that he is competent, even talented.

Many of Trump’s unforced errors involve tweeting. Some involve press conferences. Noonan continued:

He thwarts himself daily with his dramas. In the thwarting he does something unusual: He gives his own supporters no cover. They back him at some personal cost, in workplace conversations and at family gatherings. They are in a hard position. He leaves them exposed by indulging whatever desire seizes him—to lash out, to insult, to say bizarre things. If he acted in a peaceful and constructive way, he would give his people cover.

She continued:

This week Sen. John McCain famously gave a speech in Philadelphia slamming the administration’s foreign-policy philosophy as a “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.” Fair enough—the famous internationalist opposes Trumpian foreign-policy notions. There are many ways presidents can respond to such criticism—thoughtfully, with wit or an incisive rejoinder.

Mr. Trump went on Chris Plante’s radio show to tell Sen. McCain he’d better watch it. “People have to be careful because at some point I fight back,” he said. “I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.”

FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were pretty tough hombres, but they always managed to sound like presidents and not, say, John Gotti. Mr. McCain, suffering from cancer, evoked in his reply his experience as a prisoner of war: “I’ve faced far greater challenges than this.”

That, actually, is how presidents talk.

In truth, when his time came, John McCain did not know how presidents talk. He did not know how to conduct a presidential campaign himself. He seems to be voting out of spite to bring down the Trump agenda. And yet, Trump showed himself to be petulant, as one might see in the schoolyard. It is not the sign of a great communicator.

Noonan rejects the idea that it’s just the Trump style:

But the problem is not style. A gruff, awkward, inelegant style wedded to maturity and seriousness of purpose would be powerful in America. Mr. Trump’s problem has to do with something deeper—showing forbearance, patience, sympathy; revealing the human qualities people appreciate seeing in a political leader because they suggest a reliable inner stature.

Here you have it. Scott Adams toots his own horn, proclaiming to the world how smart he is. The truth is: he doth protest too much. If you have to use that level of self-aggrandizement, you are an empty rhetorician.

On the other side, Peggy Noonan’s analysis accounts for Trump’s sagging approval ratings and for the fact that most people, supporters and detractors, think that he is bringing himself down to the level of a Jamele Hill by his incessant tweets.

Tweet, tweet, tweet.