If only they had known............

From the day that Trump announced his candidacy, his biggest persuasion challenge was that people literally couldn't imagine him as president. We can easily imagine boring old senators and governors sitting in the Oval Office. But it was tough to imagine this orange ball of provocation sitting in the Oval Office. And so I watched in awe as Trump methodically fixed his biggest problem by helping us imagine his presidency until we we could do it on our own. His best persuasion move on this front involved his appearance on the late-night television program Saturday Night Live. 
        I have enough experience appearing on TV and radio - having done it several hundred times - that I know some things that the general public wouldn't necessarily know. One thing I know is that a guest as important as a presidential candidate gets a hard veto over any skit they are in. And that means Trump approved the SNL skit that imagined him as president and working in the Oval Office. I have a distinct memory of Trump in the Oval Office on SNL, but I can't remember a single joke from the skit. Visual memory overwhelms any other kind of memory, and vision is the most persuasive of your senses.
       I assume the jokes on SNL that night were at Trump's expense. I assume the humor was edgy but not so bad that Trump would veto any of it. SNL allowed Trump to show his sense of humor, which is one of his strengths. But more important, it created a future "visual memory" of Trump in the Oval Office. If you saw that episode live, or on social media later, you suddenly had an easy way to imagine Trump as president. SNL did that for him. 

 -Scott Adams, Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don't Matter

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