President Donald Trump paid tribute to Scott Adams, the racist creator of the newspaper cartoon strip “Dilbert,” on Tuesday following the cartoonist’s death. Adams died of prostate cancer at 68.
“Sadly, the Great Influencer, Scott Adams, has passed away. He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so,” Trump wrote on a Truth Social post that included a picture of the pair inside the White House Oval Office.
“He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease. My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners. He will be truly missed. God bless you Scott!”
Despite Trump’s praise of Adams, his longtime satirical cartoon strip went down in infamy and shame after hundreds of newspapers across the country dropped his cartoon after he went on a racist tirade against Black Americans.
While speaking on YouTube in 2023, Adams appeared to embrace segregation and expressed his contempt for Black Americans after a poll from a conservative firm determined that 53% of Black people agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be White.”
An outraged Adams said on his streaming show, “If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people – according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll – that’s a hate group.”
Adams added, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f–k away … because there is no fixing this.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the phrase “it’s OK to be white” is a hate slogan that emerged from the message board 4chan in 2017. It was part of a trolling campaign and has a “long history” in the white supremacist movement.
Adams defended his remarks, explaining that he was only “advising people to avoid hate” and suggested that the cancellation of his cartoon was indicative of free speech in America being under assault.
Prior to the 2023 controversy, Adams had blamed his “being white” for the cancellation of his “Dilbert” primetime series on UPN. According to Politico, he argued that the network wanted to target a Black audience. He also argued that he lost two other corporate jobs because of his race.
Though his “Dilbert” cartoon strip was traditionally a satire on white-color office culture, Adams’ views on race in America began to seep into his art.
One particular strip depicted a boss replacing traditional performance reviews with a “wokeness” score. Another featured a Black employee who protested that his boss had recommended him for a job for which he was not qualified, but eventually changed his tune when he realized the new job would pay him more money.
White male grievance has been a major feature of the Trump administration since returning to office last year. Most recently, President Trump griped that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in public spaces at a time when Black Americans suffered from Jim Crow segregation laws, has resulted in white people being “very badly treated.”
He added, “So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.”
