The President-elect as Master Persuader

From Scott Adams' blog:

...If Trump didn’t win because of his persuasion skills, which other Republican candidate can you imagine beating Clinton? 

You might be thinking that Clinton’s email problems and the Comey announcements made her an unusually weak candidate, and that means any sane Republican could have beaten her. 

But you’d be wrong. The reason that the emails, the Comey decisions, and Wikileaks were so effective is that Trump had been labelling Clinton “Crooked Hillary” for months. That created the confirmation bias trap that made everything Clinton ever did sound suspicious. None of the other candidates would have crafted such a perfect persuasion trap.

I also have a hard time imagining any other candidate going after Bill Clinton so hard that it took him out of the game. Was Jeb going to do that?

If you believe Trump’s skill for persuasion wasn’t the key variable in his win, you have to imagine some other candidate beating Clinton with the same set of policies as Trump. Personally, I can’t imagine it.

If you think Trump is the next Hitler, or a clown who got lucky with his populist message, you have to ask yourself why the stock market and the dollar are both up following the election. The smartest money-managers in the world have already abandoned their old movies and jumped over to movies they see as more useful for making money, apparently.

If you think Trump is the next Hitler, you have to ask yourself why every major world power has already said they think they can work with him, no problem.

If you think Trump is a lucky incompetent who inherited money from his father, you have to explain why he has succeeded in real estate, reality TV, and now politics. Can incompetent people win that bigly in three different arenas while everyone is watching?

If you think Trump has anti-semite advisors, you have to wonder why his son-in-law Jared Kushner hasn’t noticed any of that and is working hard for Trump.

If you think Trump is a racist, you have to wonder how he learned to act so well that he could be in this picture looking as non-racist as a person can look...