Scott Adams, the author and comic-strip creator who predicted President Trump’s electoral success, says legal threats by Democrats have forced him into a high-risk, high-reward frame of mind.

The man behind “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter” says a willingness to shut down the government and other decisions by Mr. Trump can be traced back to vows of “unlimited legal pain” by politicians and pundits.

Mr. Adams told his nearly 300,000 Twitter followers on Friday that the commander in chief is behaving in a completely rational way for a man facing endless legal proceedings by House Democrats.

“Take president Trump,” Mr. Adams said. “If he had been an average president doing an average job, what would be his instinct to be if there were enough people saying, ‘hey, you’re doing a good job.’ Let’s say he had a solid 47 percent approval rating. Would he be as risk-taking as he is when everything is going to hell? Let me put it another way. The president’s critics have unleashed the weapon of mass destruction. In other words, the legal challenges are so extraordinary and so bad that they’ve pushed him into a situation where he has nothing to lose.”

The creator of “Dilbert” added that Democrats and critical pundits have created a “baseline level of legal challenges and noise” that requires more extreme if Mr. Trump wants to rise above it all.

“They have forced the president to do bigger things that he would have otherwise been inclined to do,” he said. “[Democrats] have already said we’re going to unleash unlimited legal pain. What would you do if you were in that job? If you put me in the presidency, I would put away my list of ordinary tasks. I would say to myself, ‘here are all the ordinary boring things I was planning to do. Okay, there’s my ordinary list. Now let me take out the list of things that will set your hair on fire. Let me take out the list of things that nobody would even dare to do. Boom, b—. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Mr. Adams said it would be a “waste of time” for Mr. Trump to continue with his a more mundane set of tasks because he has been “politically pushed into a high-risk, high-reward frame of mind.”

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