Trump has eerie parallels to Dogbert, who consistently gets ahead at everyone else’s expense. In the ’90s, Dogbert published a fake-news-filled tabloid dedicated to denouncing enemies and promoting lies about himself. He also advised an audience to eliminate guilt by blaming all problems on “invisible people named Juan and Cindy,” adding, “All you have to do is find them and kill them.” In more recent panels, Dogbert appears as a negotiation expert who charges Dilbert’s boss $1 million for five minutes of his time, then tells him, “We’re out of time, unless you want to renegotiate.” Adams allowed that the two have one similarity. “They’re both kind of megalomaniacal,” he said.
I’d thought the point of those strips was to laugh at Dogbert’s cruelty—not celebrate it. But Adams seemed elated by the triumph of a Dogbertesque president. “I’m probably feeling more optimistic for the country than I ever have,” he said by phone, when we spoke on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, amid reports of Russian meddling in the election and a chaotic transition. “I know that’s surprising, but the stock market is up, consumer sentiment is up. … It’s an impressive new management style that, as far as I can tell, is working.”
In a February post, Adams admitted that Trump’s first month might look to some like “incompetence” or “chaos,” but he noted that others would say the president was simply “draining the swamp and learning on the job.” Much of the world was feeling less sanguine. Less than 100 days into his administration, one view of Trump is that he’s the ultimate, dystopian version of a Dilbert joke gone horribly wrong: an unqualified, bigoted, greedy, dangerous, and blustering boss promoted to the world’s most powerful job. But Adams would say such people are just living in a different reality—a different “movie,” as he put it, the last time we spoke.