Trump is playing a different game. He is not addressing your sense of reason. He is talking to your energy, your emotions, and even your biases. By that filter (the Master Persuader filter), Iowa might be important as an energy booster for the campaign.
Trump likes energy. And as he has said, winning Iowa might set him up to run the table. So he probably wants to win Iowa, just to keep dominating headlines. Plus, it could be an early kill shot for the primary season if it causes Republican voters to capitulate – assuming many don’t know Iowa is electorally unimportant – and accept Trump as the eventual nominee.
My prediction under the Master Persuader filter is that Trump will try to win Iowa with a linguistic kill shot that is being engineered as I write this. But I won’t go so far as to predict he wins Iowa. I’d give that a 50% chance.
But I do predict Trump will A-B test a new line of attack on Clinton. If it works, he wins Iowa. If not, all he loses is Iowa. So this situation is when a person with a business background would test a new approach.
You’ll recognize Trump’s test balloon against Clinton when you see it. It will be the one that speaks to Iowa’s socially conservative base.
Bonus Thought 1: One of the skills a hypnotist has to master is reading people’s inner thoughts based on their body language. That’s a common skill for people in the business world too, but hypnotists go deeper than looking at crossed arms and furrowed brows. We learn to look for subtle changes in breathing patterns, tiny changes in muscle tone, variations in skin color (blushing or not), word choice, pupil dilation, and more. I assume law enforcement people look for similar tells when doing interrogations.
As regular readers know, I’m a trained hypnotist. And to me, Hillary Clinton looks as if she is hiding a major health issue. If you read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, you know that so-called “experts” can sometimes instantly make decisions before they know why. In my case, I am going to make an “expert” hypnotist prediction about Hillary Clinton without knowing exactly which clues I am picking up, or whether I am hallucinating them.
Prediction: I’ll put the odds at 75% that we learn of an important Clinton health issue before the general election. That estimate is based on my own track record of guessing things about people without the benefit of knowing why. I think Trump is picking up the same vibe. He has already questioned Clinton’s “stamina.”
