WHY I ENDORSED CLINTON (FOR MY SAFETY) UNTIL I DIDN’T

Over the course of the presidential campaign I endorsed three candidates. If you’re living in the second dimension, you might think I look like a flip-flopper with no core convictions. You have to go to the third dimension to understand why my multiple endorsements worked out the way I intended. But first I’ll need to give you some context about my own political history so you know where I’m coming from.

I don’t vote. Doing so would destroy whatever objectivity I might have. Once you join a side—for anything—it kicks your confirmation bias into overdrive. Suddenly (and it does happen fast) you start to see everything your side does as wise, while anything happening on the other side looks like stupidity and bad intentions. I minimize that particular confirmation-bias trap by not joining a political side and by not voting.

I have voted in the past. My first vote as a young man was for Jimmy Carter. In time, I came to see that vote as further evidence that the thing I call my common sense is an illusion. (Carter was a good role model but not one of our most effective presidents. He served one term.) As I got older, and more aware of my mental limitations, I came to understand that my vote adds nothing to the quality of the outcome. As far as I can tell, no one else adds intelligence to the election outcome either, but most voters think they do. And that illusion is necessary to support the government. It gives the voters a sense of empowerment and buy-in. That creates national stability. The democracy illusion is probably one of the most beneficial hallucinations humankind has ever concocted. If you think democracy works, and you act as if it works, it does work.

I think of democracy as more of a mental condition than a political system. Democracy works because we think it works, and we want it to work. But if you removed the public hallucination that an average ignorant voter has the ability to forecast the future, the whole thing would fall apart.

The democracy illusion is so robust that we can simultaneously know it is absurd while living our lives as if it were not. We all know that the vast majority of our fellow citizens are too underinformed and simpleminded to make good voting decisions. And yet there is widespread acceptance of the majority-vote system. As long as citizens buy into the illusions that they have superpredictive powers and that their votes add intelligence to the system, they will support the democratic voting process that is the foundation of the republic.

If people were rational, they would realize they don’t have the psychic powers required to distinguish between a great candidate for president and a bad one. We’re terrible at predicting the future. And voters certainly don’t understand the more complicated questions about health care, budgets, and international treaties, to name a few. But if we accepted the limitations of our own predictive abilities, we wouldn’t vote, and we wouldn’t feel as much allegiance to the country, so the whole system would fall apart.

By the way, the Pledge of Allegiance in the United States, and the tradition of singing the national anthem before big events, are examples of government-grade mind control. Those traditions have no other purpose. By the time a child is twelve years old, the state has already trained the kid to sacrifice his or her life for the flag if called to do so.

This is why I don’t speak the actual words to either the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem. I just move my lips while thinking, Blah, blah, blah. It’s probably too late to erase my early-life brainwashing, but I see no need to reinforce it. And at this point in my life, I believe (irrationally) that I am a patriot to the bone, so I don’t need more brainwashing to be a good citizen.

To be super clear, I am completely in favor of my government brainwashing its citizens, including me. The alternative would involve eventual conquest by a nation that did a better job of brainwashing its citizens.

When I was younger, I believed I could predict who would do a great job as president. But when I compare all my past expectations of new presidents with their actual performance, it is clear that I didn’t have any predictive powers. Neither do you. But you might think you do. That’s where we differ. If you have not studied persuasion in any detail, you probably hold a higher opinion of your so-called common sense than trained persuaders do.

More disclosure about my voting: I supported Bill Clinton in both of his elections, and I preferred Al Gore over George W. Bush. I can’t remember if I bothered to vote in any of those elections. But I haven’t voted in any election since.

When Gore narrowly lost to Bush, I was mildly disappointed. But I also thought Bush would be a perfectly good president who wouldn’t get the country into any big trouble. Clearly I can’t predict who will do a good job as president. Neither can anyone else. But most of us think we can.

To round out my political confessions, I’m super liberal on social matters. If something makes you happy, and it doesn’t hurt anyone else, I want you to do a lot of it. On other issues I’m a “whatever works best” kind of guy. And I usually recognize that I don’t know what works best on any complicated global issue.

Given all of that, it is no surprise that I started out by endorsing neither Clinton nor Trump for the election of 2016. I enjoyed Trump’s personality and his persuasion talents, but my political preferences didn’t align with either candidate’s stated policies. I was blissfully independent. But that didn’t last.

My blogging and tweeting about Trump’s persuasion powers made me a Trump supporter by default. I couldn’t hide my admiration for his skill set and his entertainment value. And that admiration was enough to activate the bullies and Internet trolls on Clinton’s side to come after me. And come after me they did.

The world learned during the election that Clinton’s side was spending $1 million on online operatives (more commonly referred to as trolls) to attack Trump supporters on social media. David Brock, a major Clinton supporter, created an organization called Correct the Record to act as the rabid attack dogs of social media.¹

The Clinton trolls filled my Twitter feed with personal and professional insults. They tweeted embarrassing fake news stories about me. They wrote to newspapers and asked them to discontinue carrying Dilbert. They threatened my reputation and my livelihood in a variety of ways. That stuff didn’t bother me. I’m a professional. I know how to deal with critics.

But things got darker. Much darker.

Clinton supporters were doing a good job of branding Trump as Hitler. They did such a good job that perhaps a quarter of the country imagined Trump getting elected and authorizing concentration camps for illegal immigrants on day one. This is the sort of dangerous branding that can get a candidate killed. After all, if you had a chance to kill Hitler and save millions of lives, wouldn’t you have a moral obligation to do it?

That’s how bad it got. The Hitler accusations evolved from hyperbole to legitimate fear. People were literally afraid of Trump turning full Hitler on inauguration day. It was a dangerous time to be Trump, with that hanging over him. But Trump had Secret Service protection, and apparently they do a great job.

I did not have Secret Service protection. And before long, the Clinton trolls were branding me as Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. The accusations were repeated often enough to start getting sticky. In my opinion (the only opinion that mattered in this case) it was a dangerous situation. People believed Trump was as bad as Hitler, and by extension that marked his alleged propaganda chief (me) for death as well.

I mean all of this literally. If you have been brainwashed to believe Hitler is coming to power, and you have a chance to kill Goebbels, you have moral authority to do it. If I believed I could kill a top Nazi and slow down Hitler’s rise, I would do it in a heartbeat. I assumed other people might feel the same way. It was a dangerous situation for me, and dangerous to any friends and family who might be around me. I decided I needed to do something to reduce the risk.

So I announced my decision to endorse Hillary Clinton, while making it clear I was only doing it for my personal safety. People laughed. They assumed I was joking. But I stuck to my endorsement, mentioning it often, and always appending “for my safety” to the end as an explanation.

I wasn’t joking. I was quite serious about trying to lower my risk.

The number of people on Twitter accusing me of being Goebbels slowed to a trickle almost immediately. In the second dimension, that outcome makes no sense. Both sides knew I wasn’t serious about being on Clinton’s team in the normal way endorsements work. But it didn’t matter. People care that you’re on their team more than they care why. My stated reason (personal safety) was completely rational, and I backed it with examples of Trump supporters being attacked in my part of the world.

Backing Clinton “for my personal safety” became a running joke on Twitter. My followers enjoyed it, and the trolls were just confused by it. The trolls never left me alone, but they backed off a lot. The endorsement worked exactly as planned. It was solid persuasion.

Here is the blog post announcing my Clinton endorsement.

Posted June 5, 2016

I’ve decided to come off the sidelines and endorse a candidate for president of the United States.

I’ll start by reminding readers that my politics don’t align with any of the candidates. My interest in the race has been limited to Trump’s extraordinary persuasion skills. But lately Hillary Clinton has moved into the persuasion game—and away from boring facts and policies—with great success. Let’s talk about that.

This past week we saw Clinton pair the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you tremble in fear.

That is good persuasion if you can pull it off, because fear is a strong motivator. It is also a sharp pivot from Clinton’s prior approach of talking about her mastery of policy details, her experience, and her gender. Trump took her so-called woman card and turned it into a liability. So Clinton wisely pivoted. Her new scare tactics are solid-gold persuasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see Clinton’s numbers versus Trump improve in June, at least temporarily, until Trump finds a countermove.

The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to trigger a race war in the United States. And I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario, because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him. And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms. (I’m called an “apologist” on Twitter, or sometimes just “Joseph Goebbels.”)

If Clinton successfully pairs Trump with Hitler in your mind—as she is doing—and loses anyway, about a quarter of the country will think it is morally justified to assassinate its own leader. I too would feel that way if an actual Hitler came to power in this country. I would join the resistance and try to remove the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.

So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as me, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me—and here I am being 100 percent serious—that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.

As I have often said, I have no psychic powers and I don’t know which candidate would be the best president. But I do know which outcome is most likely to get me killed by my fellow citizens. So for safety reasons, I’m on team Clinton.

My prediction remains that Trump will win in a landslide based on his superior persuasion skills. But don’t blame me for anything President Trump does in office; I endorse Clinton.

The rest of you are on your own. Good luck.

THEN I ENDORSED TRUMP

My Clinton endorsement served me well until late September of 2016, when Clinton announced plans for increasing estate taxes on the rich to what I consider confiscation levels. This was personal. I started life with almost nothing and worked seven days a week for decades to build the wealth I have now. I wasn’t in the mood to let the government decide what happens to my money when I die. Below is the blog post in which I explained my switch to endorse Trump.

Keep in mind that endorsing Trump reattracted all the risk I had successfully avoided by endorsing Clinton. But the estate tax plan made me too angry to care. I earned my money through hard work, and I already paid taxes on it. This was personal.

This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.

Here’s how I blogged it at the time.

Posted September 25, 2016

As most of you know, I had been endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, for my personal safety, because I live in California. It isn’t safe to be a Trump supporter where I live. And it’s bad for business too. But recently I switched my endorsement to Trump, and I owe you an explanation. So here it goes.

1. Things I Don’t Know: There are many things I don’t know. For example, I don’t know the best way to defeat ISIS. Neither do you. I don’t know the best way to negotiate trade policies. Neither do you. I don’t know the best tax policy to lift all boats. Neither do you. My opinion on abortion is that men should follow the lead of women on that topic because doing so produces the most credible laws. So on most political topics, I don’t know enough to make a decision. Neither do you, but you probably think you do.

Given the uncertainty about each candidate—at least in my own mind—I have been saying I am not smart enough to know who would be the best president. That neutrality changed when Clinton proposed raising estate taxes. I understand that issue and I view it as robbery by government.

I’ll say more about that, plus some other issues I do understand, below.

2. Confiscation of Property: Clinton proposed a new top Estate Tax of 65 percent on people with a net worth over $500 million. Her Web site goes to great length to obscure the actual policy details, including the fact that taxes would increase on lower-value estates as well. See the total lack of transparency here [link omitted for book], where the text simply refers to going back to 2009 rates. It is clear that the intent of the page is to mislead, not inform.

So don’t fall for the claim that Clinton has plenty of policy details on her Web site. She does, but it is organized to mislead, not to inform. That’s far worse than having no details.

The bottom line is that under Clinton’s plan, estate taxes would be higher for anyone with estates over $5 million(ish). I call this a confiscation tax because income taxes have already been paid on this money. In my case, a dollar I earn today will be taxed at about 50 percent by various government entities, collectively. With Clinton’s plan, my remaining 50 cents will be taxed again at 50 percent when I die. So the government would take 75 percent of my earnings from now on.

Yes, I can do clever things with trusts to avoid estate taxes. But that is just welfare for lawyers. If the impact of the estate tax is nothing but higher fees for my attorney and hassle for me, that isn’t good news either.

You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children. Fairness isn’t an objective quality of the universe. I oppose the estate tax because I was born to modest means and worked seven days a week for most of my life to be in my current position. (I’m working today, Sunday, as per usual.) And I don’t want to give 75 percent of my earnings to the government. (Would you?)

3. Party or Wake: It seems to me that Trump supporters are planning for the world’s biggest party on election night, whereas Clinton supporters seem to be preparing for a funeral. I want to be invited to the event that doesn’t involve crying and moving to Canada. (This issue isn’t my biggest reason.)

4. Clinton’s Health: To my untrained eyes and ears, Hillary Clinton doesn’t look sufficiently healthy—mentally or otherwise—to be leading the country. If you disagree, take a look at the now-famous “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead” video clip. [Note: This was the viral video clip in which a drunken-looking Clinton asked in a deranged voice, “Why aren’t I fifty points ahead?”] Likewise, Bill Clinton seems to be in bad shape too, and Hillary wouldn’t be much use to the country if she has to take care of a dying husband on the side.

5. Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders such as I see this as something called pacing and leading. Trump “paces” the public—meaning he matches them in their emotional state. He does that with his extreme responses on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest badass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump looks scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. That’s how I see him.

So when Clinton supporters ask me how I could support a “fascist,” the answer is that he isn’t one. Clinton’s team, with the help of Godzilla, have effectively persuaded the public to see Trump as scary. The persuasion works because Trump’s “pacing” system is not obvious to the public. They see his “first offers” as evidence of evil. They are not. They are technique.

And being chummy with Putin is more likely to keep us safe, whether you find that distasteful or not. Clinton wants to insult Putin into doing what we want. That approach seems dangerous as hell to me.

6. Persuasion: Economies are driven by psychology. If you expect things to go well tomorrow, you invest today, which causes things to go well tomorrow, as long as others are doing the same. The best kind of president for managing the psychology of citizens—and therefore the economy—is a trained persuader. You can call that persuader a con man, a snake oil salesman, a carnival barker, or full of shit. It’s all persuasion. And Trump simply does it better than I have ever seen anyone do it.

The battle with ISIS is also a persuasion problem. The entire purpose of military action against ISIS is to persuade them to stop, not to kill every single one of them. We need military-grade persuasion to get at the root of the problem. Trump understands persuasion, so he is likely to put more emphasis in that area.

Most of the job of president is persuasion. Presidents don’t need to understand policy minutiae. They need to listen to experts and then help sell the best expert solutions to the public. Trump sells better than anyone you have ever seen, even if you haven’t personally bought into him yet. You can’t deny his persuasion talents that have gotten him this far.

In summary, I don’t understand the policy details and implications of the bulk of either Trump’s or Clinton’s proposed ideas. Neither do you. But I do understand persuasion. I also understand when the government is planning to confiscate the majority of my assets. And I can also distinguish between a deeply unhealthy person and a healthy person, even though I have no medical training. (So can you.)

As you might expect, Trump supporters were happy to see me endorse their candidate. I was all in. I was on the Trump team now, for better or worse.

It didn’t take long for worse to happen. And you can’t get much worse than what happened next.

WHY I BRIEFLY ENDORSED GARY JOHNSON

On October 7, 2016, the Washington Post broke the story of a lewd private conversation between Trump and Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, caught on a hot microphone. It was devastating.

Persuasion-wise, this had everything. It had audio. It had video. It had sex. It had shock. It was relevant. And it was powerful. As soon as I heard the audio clip, I realized it was a bad idea to associate my brand with Trump. When the scandal broke, Trump was instantly toxic, bordering on radioactive. As women came forward with claims of unwanted advances, I decided to put some distance between Trump’s problems and my blogging.

I had already tainted my reputation quite a bit by endorsing Trump. I had trashed my income at the same time, as my speaking career went from thriving to zero. I thought I knew what I was getting into. But I didn’t see the so-called Pussygate scandal coming, with its full audio and visual persuasion. This stain wasn’t going to wear off. It looked like the end for Trump. The Persuasion Filter can’t predict scandals that come out of nowhere.

I decided to put some distance between my brand and Trump’s. And so I endorsed third-party candidate Gary Johnson for president. The reason I offered was that Gary Johnson is the kind of candidate who touches only himself. Here’s how I explained it at the time.

Posted October 9, 2016

I don’t know how to write this post without unintentionally disrespecting the real victims of abuse in any form. I apologize in advance if it comes off that way. But it’s part of the national conversation now, and unavoidable. The best I can do is focus on how voters perceive the situation. I don’t have an opinion about who did what to whom because I wasn’t in the room any of those times. That said . . .

We fine citizens of the United States find ourselves playing some sort of sex-abuse poker in which we have to assign value to various alleged sex crimes to see which alleged rapist/groper/enabler combination we want to inhabit the White House and represent our national brand. Let’s call that situation “not ideal.”

My view is that if either Clinton or Trump can be judged by the weight of the allegations against them, both are 100 percent unfit for the office. I think Trump supporters think it’s worth the hit to our national brand just to get some specific improvements in the country.

Clinton supporters have been telling me for a few days that any visible support for Trump makes you a supporter of sex abuse. From a persuasion standpoint, that actually makes sense. If people see it that way, that’s the reality you have to deal with. I choose to not be part of that reality, so I moved my endorsement to Gary Johnson.

I encourage all Clinton supporters to do the same, and for the same reason. I don’t know if any of the allegations against the Clintons are true, but since we are judging one another on associations, you don’t want to be seen as supporting sex abuse by putting an alleged duo of abusers (the perp and the cleanup crew) into office. I think you will agree that it doesn’t matter if any of the allegations are true, because the stink from a mountain of allegations—many that seem credible to observers—is bad for the national brand too. To even consider putting the Clintons back in the White House is an insult to women and every survivor of abuse.

To be fair, Gary Johnson is a pothead who didn’t know what Aleppo was. [Note: A reporter asked Johnson about Aleppo, a hot spot in the Syrian conflict, and Johnson didn’t recognize the name of the city.] I call that relatable. A President Gary Johnson administration might bring with it some operational risks, and policy risks, but at least he won’t slime you by association and turn you into some sort of cheerleader for sex abuse in the way you would if you voted for the Clintons or Trump.

If you take allegations of sex abuse seriously—and you should—vote Johnson. To vote for Clinton or Trump is to be seen by others as an enabler of sexual abuse. I don’t think that’s what anyone had in mind by breaking the glass ceiling. Don’t let it happen to you.

At this point in our story, with only a few weeks before the election, I had lost confidence in my prediction of a Trump win. It seemed that my future would involve losing whatever credibility I had and becoming a laughingstock for years. If history can be our guide, I knew it would take ten minutes for some stranger to update my Wikipedia page so the world would forever know just how wrong I had been, with dates and details and links to unflattering articles about me that would be written by the winning pundits.

Things didn’t look good for me. Things looked worse for Trump.

Any person with a normal sense of embarrassment would have reversed his prediction to match the pollsters and the experts. That person would have disavowed Trump in a public way. There was still time to salvage some scraps of dignity.

That’s not how I played it.

WHY I RE-ENDORSED TRUMP IN THE END

“We got cocky and became arrogant and we also became bullies.”

—Actress Zoe Saldana, one week before President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017

I live in northern California, a short drive from Berkeley. It’s a liberal place. Trump didn’t even bother to campaign in California beyond the minimum. In normal years it is uncomfortable to be a Republican supporter of any type living in northern California. But this was no normal year.

Clinton’s team did a great job of framing Trump as a dangerous and unstable Hitler-in-the-making. As I noted before, that provided moral cover for her supporters to threaten and physically assault Trump supporters in public.

I’ll pause here to stipulate that Trump supporters also caused some trouble. But we learned that much of what was reported as Trump supporters starting trouble turned out to be outright hoaxes, or fights instigated by paid Clinton operatives.

There was the undercover video by Project Veritas that featured Clinton operatives bragging about instigating violence at Trump rallies.²

There was the arson of what the media called a “historic black church” that was reported as a suspected hate crime perpetrated by Trump supporters. The real perpetrator turned out to be an African American member of the church.³

There was the Muslim woman who claimed she was accosted on a subway by three Trump supporters, but it turned out to be a lie.⁴

We don’t need to compare assault rates to know that some Clinton supporters and some Trump supporters crossed the line. Let’s agree to not make it a competition. Every large group includes some bad people.

For me personally, Trump supporters were not dangerous because they considered me to be on their side. And I saw no signs of them starting fights with people who were minding their own business. Clinton supporters were another story, and we knew by then that they could be violent. Some examples:

At a Trump rally in San Jose (a short drive from my home), Clinton supporters physically attacked Trump supporters leaving the rally.⁵

Trump supporters were attacked after a Richmond rally.⁶

A Trump supporter was attacked outside a Burlingame rally.⁷

On election day a female Trump supporter was attacked at a Florida polling station.⁸

The mainstream media appeared to be largely ignoring these attacks. But that might have been my own confirmation bias. It didn’t take too many similar-looking acts of violence to convince me that there was a pattern here, and a real danger that could get worse.

On Twitter—the Wild West of social media—the bullying from Clinton supporters was relentless. They insulted my appearance, my intelligence, my age, my sexual prowess, my relationships, my height, my baldness—you name it. If it was evil, someone said it to me that year. Probably more than once.

I have a hot button that makes me irrational when I see or experience bullying. I probably could have lived with the bullying and threats if I had been the only target. But Trump supporters all over the country were being assaulted. I heard dozens of stories from victims. I heard stories of people losing customers, losing jobs, being taunted and attacked in public, and having their cars and homes vandalized. This was not politics. This was bully behavior, simple and plain. And it flipped a bit in my brain that I couldn’t flip back.

Like many of you, I had some bully issues when I was a kid. I solved my bully problems through a prudent application of public violence, as was the custom in those days in small towns. Oddly enough, I didn’t go to jail. That was also the custom in those days. Attacking a bully in a public place wasn’t considered bad behavior. It was considered the solution to the problem. That upbringing is still in me.

Summary: I don’t like bullies.

Trump was in a huge hole with the Access Hollywood scandal, and it got worse with the parade of women who came forward to make claims against him. It seemed that the bullies were going to win. That situation was unbearable to me.

If any anti-Trumpers are reading this book, you are probably scoffing because you consider Trump the only bully in the story. That point of view is what I call word-thinking. But for our purposes here, I’ll simply say Trump wasn’t bullying me. And he wasn’t bullying any American citizens who were minding their own business. But he sure did go hard at any opponents who were foolish enough to get into the cage fight with him. I think it makes a difference whom you are bullying. I wasn’t alarmed when Trump went hard at professional critics. But when someone comes for me personally, or for other citizens, the small-town reflex in me takes over.

I already had a problem with Hillary Clinton trying to rob my estate after I died. Now I also wanted to destroy the entire Democratic Party and all of its “politically correct” Nazi-labeling bullies. I rarely use my persuasion skills at full strength. I only do so in the context of a fight, or for some greater good. This was both.

You need not remind me that Trump supporters on the Internet were also terrible bullies in many cases. But this is my story, and they weren’t coming after me. They were mostly coming after the Clinton bullies, who considered Trump supporters to have less value than other classes of people. I wasn’t comfortable with the bullying on either side. But I cared more about the bullies who were coming after me.

On October 25, 2016, I re-endorsed Donald Trump for president of the United States. He has his flaws. But he wasn’t bullying me and he wasn’t trying to rob my estate. By now my lucrative speaking career had dropped from one or two offers per week to zero. In twenty years, that had never happened. My Trump association had gutted a major part of my income and turned me into a pariah. By election day I had lost 75 percent of my so-called friends, several of whom turned out to be bullies too.

As a trained persuader, I prefer not to join any kind of tribe. Doing so triggers an automatic bias toward tribe opinion and blinds one to better thinking. It also marks you as an enemy to competing tribes. Candidate Trump probably got some political advantage by once being a Democrat, later a Republican, and only barely a conservative. He was clearly in the Republican tribe for political purposes, but in our minds he was more like an individual force of nature than a member of a tribe. Our collective impression of Trump’s independent thinking probably made it easier for some people to cross party lines and support him. If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe. Trump joined the Republican tribe to win the presidency. Now I was joining the Trump tribe.

For a war against Hillbullies.

I was all in.