Dilbert cartoonist and author Scott Adams said that President Trump lost his vote due to his poor handling of the white supremacy question during the first debate.
Adams was one of the first people to publicly predict a Trump victory in the 2016 election. In his book “Win Bigly,” Adams, a trained hypnotist, later explained that the reason he put the president’s odds of winning that race at 100 percent was because he recognized early on that Trump is a master persuader.
“The president lost my vote last night,” Adams said on his Sept. 30 “Coffee with Scott Adams” Periscope, before explaining that there was only one thing the president needed to do to win: “Disavow white supremacy.”
Adams, anticipating blow back from his mostly pro-Trump followers, acknowledged that Trump technically did that by saying “sure” when asked by the debate moderator if he would disavow white supremacist hate groups. But Adams said that the way Trump answered the question was not strong enough to put the issue to rest, and he understood why it left people with a bad impression.
“His performance was below the level that could earn my vote,” Adams said. “I can’t vote for somebody who can’t say in full-throated way that he condemns white supremacy while he’s running for the f***ing presidency, okay? I’m off the ship.”
But that doesn’t mean Adams is now a Biden supporter. “I’m not going to vote for Biden, that would be crazy – [Trump] just doesn’t earn my vote at the moment,” Adams said. He also said that he thought a Biden presidency would be “a disaster” and that “Biden did not earn my vote.”
Adams sharply criticized the president for going so aggressively hard on offense during the debate that he failed to properly defend himself against false accusations that Trump supposedly called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people” at a press conference in 2017.
“He never defended himself against the accusation that he called the neo-Nazis fine people,” Adams said, pointing out that all Trump did during the debate was to say, “Read the rest of the statement.”
Adams, who has repeatedly attempted to debunk the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax, said he expected the president to say to Biden, “You based your entire campaign on that lie, I just encourage everyone to look at the transcript, and you’ll see that the part that they cut out is the part where I clarified that I’m condemning those groups.”
“It is so obvious what you should say in this situation, and then he just didn’t,” Adams said. “He botched it.”
In the full transcript from the 2017 press conference where Trump said there were some “very fine people” protesting, Trump specifically clarified that, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
Read the full transcript on Politifact to see for yourself.
Former Vice President Biden has made Trump’s “very fine people” comment a centerpiece of his campaign, and Biden even said when he announced his campaign that it is what motivated him to run.
In August, Biden also tweeted that: “Three years ago today, white supremacists descended on Charlottesville with torches in hand and hate in their hearts. Our president said they were ‘very fine people.’”
Adams said he felt like he was thrown under the bus by the president. “I’ve spent a tremendous amount of my personal capital explaining to the world that the ‘fine people hoax’ was a hoax,” Adams said.
“He lost my vote. Can he get it back? Yeah – all he’d have to do is fix that. I mean how hard is it to fix it? Well apparently it’s pretty f***ing hard for him because he’s taken three years since Charlottesville and he hasn’t f***ing fixed it yet. Easiest f***ing thing he could ever fix.”
Adams said that Tuesday night’s performance was Trump’s worst debate, and that the “Slaughter Meter” by which Adams predicts the likelihood of a Trump victory fell to 50 percent, calling the race now a toss-up.
UPDATE: Adams supports Trump again
Well, it didn’t take long for Adams to switch back to voting for Trump.
On his Oct. 2 Periscope and podcast (“Real Coffee with Scott Adams” episode 1142) Adams explained that he knew that he would get a lot of attention by saying that he would not vote for Trump. But rather than get embraced by Democrats for making the switch, “they shit on me, in buckets,” Adams said. And so for that reason, “They switched me back to vote for Trump.”
“The number one reason for voting for Trump, is to not let those people have power,” Adams said.
Adams said that rather than appreciate his willingness to switch his vote (over the President’s failure to strongly condemn white supremacy during the first presidential debate), Democrats would not forgive him for the “past crimes” of supporting Trump.
“The Democrats, within one day, forced me back to be a Trump supporter, because I can’t be on the team that penalizes good behavior,” Adams said.
Then on Oct. 7, following the vice presidential debate, Adams wrote on Twitter: “Congratulations to @VP Pence on the debate win. Crisply done.”
RELATED: Mansplaining the vice presidential debate
Adams said he approved of the way Vice President Mike Pence pushed back when Sen. Kamala Harris repeated the Charlottesville “fine people” line during the debate. A fact check of Harris by the BBC said that, “President Trump said in the same press conference that he wasn’t referring to neo-Nazis or white nationalists.”
Speaking of debunked hoaxes, Harris opened the vice presidential debate with a lie when she said that President Trump called the coronavirus a hoax. The Associated Press and CNN both debunked that claim, as did New York Times.
But lots of celebrities are repeating it anyway.
RELATED: Celebrities are dunking on Trump for calling the Coronavirus a hoax. He never did that
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore even pushed a wild conspiracy theory that Trump might have faked having the coronavirus.
RELATED: Michael Moore: Trump might be lying about having Covid
Join the Discussion