THE MIND OF DONALD TRUMP
Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency.
The Atlantic | June 2016 issue
IN 2006, DONALD TRUMP made plans to purchase the
Menie Estate, near Aberdeen, Scotland, aiming to convert the dunes and
grassland into a luxury golf resort. He and the estate’s owner, Tom Griffin,
sat down to discuss the transaction at the Cock & Bull restaurant. Griffin
recalls that Trump was a hard-nosed negotiator, reluctant to give in on even
the tiniest details. But, as Michael D’Antonio writes in his recent biography
of Trump, Never Enough,
Griffin’s most vivid recollection of the evening pertains to the theatrics. It
was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor
playing a part on the London stage.
“It was Donald Trump playing
Donald Trump,” Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it.
The same feeling perplexed Mark
Singer in the late 1990s when he was working on a profile of Trump for The New Yorker. Singer wondered
what went through his mind when he was not playing the public role of Donald
Trump. What are you thinking about, Singer asked him, when you are shaving in
front of the mirror in the morning? Trump, Singer writes, appeared baffled.
Hoping to uncover the man behind the actor’s mask, Singer tried a different
tack:
“O.K., I guess I’m asking, do you consider
yourself ideal company?”
“You really want to know what I
consider ideal company?,” Trump replied. “A total piece of ass.”
I might have phrased Singer’s
question this way: Who are
you, Mr. Trump, when you are alone? Singer
never got an answer, leaving him to conclude that the real-estate mogul who
would become a reality-TV star and, after that, a leading candidate for
president of the United States had managed to achieve something remarkable: “an
existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”
Is Singer’s assessment too harsh? Perhaps it is, in at least one
sense. As brainy social animals, human beings evolved to be consummate actors
whose survival and ability to reproduce depend on the quality of our
performances. We enter the world prepared to perform roles and manage the
impressions of others, with the ultimate evolutionary aim [??] of getting along and
getting ahead in the social groups that define who we are.
More than even Ronald Reagan, Trump seems
supremely cognizant of the fact that he is always acting. He moves through life
like a man who knows he is always being observed. If all human beings are, by
their very nature, social actors, then Donald Trump seems to be more
so—superhuman, in this one primal sense.
Many questions have arisen about Trump during
this campaign season—about his platform, his knowledge of issues, his
inflammatory language, his level of comfort with political violence. This
article touches on some of that. But its central aim is to create a
psychological portrait of the man. Who is he, really? How does his mind work?
How might he go about making decisions in office, were he to become president?
And what does all that suggest about the sort of president he’d be?
 |
| Mark Peterson / Redux |
In creating this portrait, I
will draw from well-validated concepts in the fields of personality,
developmental, and social psychology. Ever since Sigmund Freud analyzed the life
and art of Leonardo da Vinci, in 1910, scholars have applied psychological
lenses to the lives of famous people. Many early efforts relied upon untested,
nonscientific ideas. In recent years, however, psychologists have increasingly
used the tools and concepts of psychological science to shed light on notable
lives, as I did in a 2011 book on George W. Bush. A large and rapidly growing
body of research shows that people’s temperament, their characteristic
motivations and goals, and their internal conceptions of themselves are
powerful predictors of what they will feel, think, and do in the future, and
powerful aids in explaining why. In the realm of politics, psychologists have
recently demonstrated how fundamental features of human personality—such as extroversion
and narcissism—shaped the distinctive leadership styles of past U. S.
presidents, and the decisions they made. While a range of factors, such as
world events and political realities, determine what political leaders can and
will do in office, foundational tendencies in human personality, which differ
dramatically from one leader to the next, are among them.
Trump’s personality is certainly extreme by any
standard, and particularly rare for a presidential candidate; many people who
encounter the man—in negotiations or in interviews or on a debate stage or
watching that debate on television—seem to find him flummoxing. In this essay,
I will seek to uncover the key dispositions, cognitive styles, motivations, and
self-conceptions that together comprise his unique psychological makeup. Trump
declined to be interviewed for this story, but his life history has been well
documented in his own books and speeches, in biographical sources, and in the
press. My aim is to develop a dispassionate and analytical perspective on
Trump, drawing upon some of the most important ideas and research findings in
psychological science today.
i. his disposition
Fifty
years of empirical research in personality psychology have
resulted in a scientific consensus regarding the most basic dimensions of human
variability. There are countless ways to differentiate one person from the
next, but psychological scientists have settled on a relatively simple
taxonomy, known widely as the Big Five:
Extroversion: gregariousness, social
dominance, enthusiasm, reward-seeking behavior
Neuroticism: anxiety, emotional instability,
depressive tendencies, negative emotions
Conscientiousness: industriousness,
discipline, rule abidance, organization
Agreeableness: warmth, care for others,
altruism, compassion, modesty
Most people score near the middle on any given
dimension, but some score toward one pole or the other. Research decisively shows that higher scores on extroversion are associated with greater happiness
and broader social connections, higher
scores on conscientiousness predict
greater success in school and at work, and higher
scores on agreeableness are
associated with deeper relationships. By contrast, higher scores on neuroticism are always bad, having proved to be a risk factor for unhappiness,
dysfunctional relationships, and mental-health problems. From adolescence
through midlife, many people tend to become more conscientious and agreeable,
and less neurotic, but these changes are typically slight: The Big Five
personality traits are pretty stable across a person’s lifetime.
The psychologists Steven J.
Rubenzer and Thomas R. Faschingbauer, in conjunction with about 120 historians
and other experts, have rated all the former U.S. presidents, going back to
George Washington, on all five of the trait dimensions. George W. Bush comes
out as especially high on extroversion and low on openness to experience—a
highly enthusiastic and outgoing social actor who tends to be incurious and
intellectually rigid. Barack Obama is relatively introverted, at least for a
politician, and almost preternaturally low on neuroticism—emotionally calm and
dispassionate, perhaps to a fault.
Across his lifetime, Donald Trump has exhibited a
trait profile that you would not expect of a U.S. president: sky-high
extroversion combined with off-the-chart low agreeableness. This is my own
judgment, of course, but I believe that a great majority of people who observe
Trump would agree. There is nothing especially subtle about trait attributions.
We are not talking here about deep, unconscious processes or clinical
diagnoses. As social actors, our performances are out there for everyone to see.
Like George W. Bush and Bill
Clinton (and Teddy Roosevelt, who tops the presidential extroversion list),
Trump plays his role in an outgoing, exuberant, and socially dominant manner.
He is a dynamo—driven, restless, unable to keep still. He gets by with very
little sleep. In his 1987 book, The
Art of the Deal, Trump described his days as stuffed with meetings and
phone calls. Some 30 years later, he is still constantly interacting with other
people—at rallies, in interviews, on social media. Presidential candidates on
the campaign trail are studies in perpetual motion. But nobody else seems to
embrace the campaign with the gusto of Trump. And no other candidate seems to
have so much fun. A sampling of his tweets at the time of this writing:
3:13
a.m., April 12: “WOW, great new poll—New York! Thank you for your support!”
4:22
a.m., April 9: “Bernie Sanders says that Hillary Clinton is unqualified to be
president. Based on her decision making ability, I can go along with that!”
5:03
a.m., April 8: “So great to be in New York. Catching up on many things
(remember, I am still running a major business while I campaign), and loving
it!”
12:25 p.m., April 5: “Wow, @Politico is in
total disarray with almost everyone quitting. Good news—bad, dishonest
journalists!”
A cardinal feature of high
extroversion is relentless reward-seeking. Prompted by the activity of dopamine
circuits in the brain, highly extroverted actors are driven to pursue positive
emotional experiences, whether they come in the form of social approval, fame,
or wealth. Indeed, it is the pursuit itself, more so even than the actual
attainment of the goal, that extroverts find so gratifying. When Barbara
Walters asked Trump in 1987 whether he would like to be appointed president of the United States, rather
than having to run for the job, Trump said no: “It’s the hunt that I believe I
love.”
Trump’s agreeableness seems even more extreme
than his extroversion, but in the opposite direction. Arguably the most highly
valued human trait the world over, agreeableness pertains to the extent to
which a person appears to be caring, loving, affectionate, polite, and kind. Trump
loves his family, for sure. He is reported to be a generous and fair-minded
boss. There is even a famous story about his meeting with a boy who was dying
of cancer. A fan of The Apprentice, the young boy simply wanted Trump to tell him,
“You’re fired!” Trump could not bring himself to do it, but instead wrote the
boy a check for several thousand dollars and told him, “Go and have the time of
your life.” But like extroversion and the other Big Five traits, agreeableness
is about an overall style of relating to others and to the world, and these
noteworthy exceptions run against the broad social reputation Trump has
garnered as a remarkably disagreeable person, based upon a lifetime of widely
observed interactions. People low in agreeableness are described as callous,
rude, arrogant, and lacking in empathy. If Donald Trump does not score low on
this personality dimension, then probably nobody does.
Researchers rank Richard Nixon
as the nation’s most disagreeable president. But he was sweetness and light
compared with the man who once sent The New York Times’ Gail Collins a
copy of her own column with her photo circled and the words “The Face of a
Dog!” scrawled on it. Complaining in Never
Enough about “some nasty
shit” that Cher, the singer and actress, once said about him, Trump bragged: “I
knocked the shit out of her” on Twitter, “and she never said a thing about me
after that.” At campaign rallies, Trump has encouraged his supporters to rough
up protesters. “Get ’em out of here!” he yells. “I’d like to punch him in the
face.” From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his
opponents “disgusting” and writes them off as “losers.” By the standards of
reality TV, Trump’s disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political
candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.
Trump’s tendencies toward social ambition and
aggressiveness were evident very early in his life, as we will see later. (By
his own account, he once punched his second-grade music teacher, giving him a
black eye.) According to Barbara Res, who in the early 1980s served as vice
president in charge of construction of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the emotional
core around which Donald Trump’s personality constellates is anger: “As far as
the anger is concerned, that’s real for sure. He’s not faking it,” she told The Daily Beast in February. “The fact that he gets mad, that’s his
personality.” Indeed, anger may be the operative emotion behind Trump’s high
extroversion as well as his low agreeableness. Anger can fuel malice, but it
can also motivate social dominance, stoking a desire to win the adoration of
others. Combined with a considerable gift for humor (which may also be
aggressive), anger lies at the heart of Trump’s charisma. And anger permeates
his political rhetoric.
Imagine
Donald Trump in the
White House. What kind of decision maker might he be?
It is very difficult to predict
the actions a president will take. When the dust settled after the 2000
election, did anybody foresee that George W. Bush would someday launch a
preemptive invasion of Iraq? If so, I haven’t read about it. Bush probably
would never have gone after Saddam Hussein if 9/11 had not happened. But world
events invariably hijack a presidency. Obama inherited a devastating recession,
and after the 2010 midterm elections, he struggled with a recalcitrant
Republican Congress. What kinds of decisions might he have made had these events
not occurred? We will never know.
 |
| Mark Peterson / Redux |
Still, dispositional
personality traits may provide clues to a president’s decision-making style. Research suggests that
extroverts tend to take high-stakes risks and that people with low levels of
openness rarely question their deepest convictions. Entering office with high
levels of extroversion and very low openness, Bush was predisposed to make bold
decisions aimed at achieving big rewards, and to make them with the assurance
that he could not be wrong. As I argued in my psychological biography of Bush,
the game-changing decision to invade Iraq was the kind of decision he was likely to make.
As world events transpired to open up an opportunity for the invasion, Bush
found additional psychological affirmation both in his lifelong desire—pursued
again and again before he ever became president—to defend his beloved father
from enemies (think: Saddam Hussein) and in his own life story, wherein the
hero liberates himself from oppressive forces (think: sin, alcohol) to restore
peace and freedom.
Like Bush, a
President Trump might try to swing for the fences in an effort to deliver big
payoffs—to make America great again, as his campaign slogan says. As a
real-estate developer, he has certainly taken big risks, although he has become
a more conservative businessman following setbacks in the 1990s. As a result of
the risks he has taken, Trump can (and does) point to luxurious urban towers,
lavish golf courses, and a personal fortune that is, by some estimates, in the
billions, all of which clearly bring him big psychic rewards. Risky decisions
have also resulted in four Chapter 11 business bankruptcies involving some of
his casinos and resorts. Because he is not burdened with Bush’s low level of
openness (psychologists have rated Bush at the bottom of the list on this
trait), Trump may be a more flexible and pragmatic decision maker, more like
Bill Clinton than Bush: He may look longer and harder than Bush did before he
leaps. And because he is viewed as markedly less ideological than most
presidential candidates (political observers note that on some issues he seems
conservative, on others liberal, and on still others nonclassifiable), Trump may
be able to switch positions easily, leaving room to maneuver in negotiations
with Congress and foreign leaders. But on balance, he’s unlikely to shy away
from risky decisions that, should they work out, could burnish his legacy and
provide him an emotional payoff.
The real psychological wild card, however, is Trump’s
agreeableness—or lack thereof. There has probably never been a U.S. president
as consistently and overtly disagreeable on the public stage as Donald Trump
is. If Nixon comes closest, we might predict that Trump’s style of decision
making would look like the hard-nosed realpolitik that Nixon and his secretary
of state, Henry Kissinger, displayed in international affairs during the early
1970s, along with its bare-knuckled domestic analog. That may not be all bad,
depending on one’s perspective. Not readily swayed by warm sentiments or
humanitarian impulses, decision makers who, like Nixon, are dispositionally low
on agreeableness might hold certain advantages when it comes to balancing
competing interests or bargaining with adversaries, such as China in Nixon’s
time. In international affairs, Nixon was tough, pragmatic, and coolly
rational. Trump seems capable of a similar toughness and strategic pragmatism,
although the cool rationality does not always seem to fit, probably because
Trump’s disagreeableness appears so strongly motivated by anger.
In domestic politics, Nixon was widely recognized
to be cunning, callous, cynical, and Machiavellian, even by the standards of
American politicians. Empathy was not his strong suit. This sounds a lot like
Donald Trump, too—except you have to add the ebullient extroversion, the
relentless showmanship, and the larger-than-life celebrity. Nixon could never
fill a room the way Trump can.
Research shows that people low in agreeableness
are typically viewed as untrustworthy. Dishonesty and deceit brought down Nixon
and damaged the institution of the presidency. It is generally believed today
that all politicians lie, or at least dissemble, but Trump appears extreme in
this regard. Assessing the truthfulness of the 2016 candidates’ campaign
statements, PolitiFact recently calculated that only 2 percent of the claims
made by Trump are true, 7 percent are mostly true, 15 percent are half true, 15
percent are mostly false, 42 percent are false, and 18 percent are “pants on
fire.” Adding up the last three numbers (from mostly false to flagrantly so),
Trump scores 75 percent. The corresponding figures for Ted Cruz, John Kasich,
Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, respectively, are 66, 32, 31, and 29
percent.
In sum, Donald Trump’s basic
personality traits suggest a presidency that could be highly combustible. One
possible yield is an energetic, activist president who has a less than cordial
relationship with the truth. He could be a daring and ruthlessly aggressive
decision maker who desperately desires to create the strongest, tallest,
shiniest, and most awesome result—and who never thinks twice about the
collateral damage he will leave behind. Tough. Bellicose. Threatening.
Explosive.
In the
presidential contest of
1824, Andrew Jackson won the most electoral votes, edging out John Quincy
Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford. Because Jackson did not have a
majority, however, the election was decided in the House of Representatives,
where Adams prevailed. Adams subsequently chose Clay as his secretary of state.
Jackson’s supporters were infuriated by what they described as a “corrupt
bargain” between Adams and Clay. The Washington establishment had defied the
will of the people, they believed. Jackson rode the wave of public resentment
to victory four years later, marking a dramatic turning point in American
politics. A beloved hero of western farmers and frontiersmen, Jackson was the
first nonaristocrat to become president. He was the first president to invite
everyday folk to the inaugural reception. To the horror of the political elite,
throngs tracked mud through the White House and broke dishes and decorative
objects. Washington insiders reviled Jackson. They saw him as intemperate,
vulgar, and stupid. Opponents called him a jackass—the origin of the donkey
symbol for the Democratic Party. In a conversation with Daniel Webster in 1824,
Thomas Jefferson described Jackson as “one of the most unfit men I know of” to
become president of the United States, “a dangerous man” who cannot speak in a
civilized manner because he “choke[s] with rage,” a man whose “passions are
terrible.” Jefferson feared that the slightest insult from a foreign leader
could impel Jackson to declare war. Even Jackson’s friends and admiring
colleagues feared his volcanic temper. Jackson fought at least 14 duels in his
life, leaving him with bullet fragments lodged throughout his body. On the last
day of his presidency, he admitted to only two regrets: that he was never able
to shoot Henry Clay or hang John C. Calhoun.
The similarities between Andrew
Jackson and Donald Trump do not end with their aggressive temperaments and
their respective positions as Washington outsiders. The similarities extend to
the dynamic created between these dominant social actors and their adoring
audiences—or, to be fairer to Jackson, what Jackson’s political opponents
consistently feared that dynamic to be. They named Jackson
“King Mob” for what they perceived as his demagoguery. Jackson was an angry
populist, they believed—a wild-haired mountain man who channeled the crude
sensibilities of the masses. More than 100 years before social scientists would
invent the concept of the authoritarian personality to explain the people who
are drawn to autocratic leaders, Jackson’s detractors feared what a popular
strongman might do when encouraged by an angry mob.
During and after World War II, psychologists
conceived of the authoritarian personality as a pattern of attitudes and values
revolving around adherence to society’s traditional norms, submission to
authorities who personify or reinforce those norms, and antipathy—to the point
of hatred and aggression—toward those who either challenge in-group norms or
lie outside their orbit. Among white Americans, high scores on measures of
authoritarianism today tend to be associated with prejudice against a wide
range of “out-groups,” including homosexuals, African Americans, immigrants,
and Muslims. Authoritarianism is also associated with suspiciousness of the
humanities and the arts, and with cognitive rigidity, militaristic sentiments,
and Christian fundamentalism.
When individuals with
authoritarian proclivities fear that their way of life is being threatened,
they may turn to strong leaders who promise to keep them safe—leaders like
Donald Trump. In a national poll conducted recently by the political scientist
Matthew MacWilliams, high levels of authoritarianism emerged as the single
strongest predictor of expressing political support for Donald Trump. Trump’s
promise to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep illegal immigrants out
and his railing against Muslims and other outsiders have presumably fed that
dynamic.
As the social psychologist
Jesse Graham has noted, Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion, which
analogizes out-groups to parasites, poisons, and other impurities. In this
regard, it is perhaps no psychological accident that Trump displays a phobia of
germs, and seems repulsed by bodily fluids, especially women’s. He famously remarked
that Megyn Kelly of Fox News had “blood coming out of her wherever,” and he
repeatedly characterized Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic
debate as “disgusting.” Disgust is a primal response to impurity. On a daily
basis, Trump seems to experience more disgust, or at least to say he does, than
most people do.
The authoritarian mandate is to ensure the
security, purity, and goodness of the in-group—to keep the good stuff in and
the bad stuff out. In the 1820s, white settlers in Georgia and other frontier
areas lived in constant fear of American Indian tribes. They resented the
federal government for not keeping them safe from what they perceived to be a
mortal threat and a corrupting contagion. Responding to these fears, President
Jackson pushed hard for the passage of the Indian Removal Act, which eventually
led to the forced relocation of 45,000 American Indians. At least 4,000
Cherokees died on the Trail of Tears, which ran from Georgia to the Oklahoma
territory.
An American strand of
authoritarianism may help explain why the thrice-married, foul-mouthed Donald
Trump should prove to be so attractive to white Christian evangelicals. As
Jerry Falwell Jr. told The New
York Times in February, “All
the social issues—traditional family values, abortion—are moot if isis blows up some of our cities or if the
borders are not fortified.” Rank-and-file evangelicals “are trying to save the country,” Falwell said. Being
“saved” has a special resonance among evangelicals—saved from sin and damnation,
of course, but also saved from the threats and impurities of a corrupt and
dangerous world.
When my research associates and
I once asked politically conservative Christians scoring high on
authoritarianism to imagine what their life (and their world) might have been
like had they never found religious faith, many described utter chaos—families
torn apart, rampant infidelity and hate, cities on fire, the inner rings of
hell. By contrast, equally devout politically liberal Christians who scored low
on authoritarianism described a barren world depleted of all resources, joyless
and bleak, like the arid surface of the moon. For authoritarian Christians, a
strong faith—like a strong leader—saves them from chaos and tamps down fears
and conflicts. Donald Trump is a savior, even if he preens and swears, and
waffles on the issue of abortion.
In December, on the campaign trail in Raleigh,
North Carolina, Trump stoked fears in his audience by repeatedly saying that
“something bad is happening” and “something really dangerous is going on.” He
was asked by a 12-year-old girl from Virginia, “I’m scared—what are you going
to do to protect this country?”
Trump responded: “You know
what, darling? You’re not going to be scared anymore. They’re going to be scared.”
ii. his mental habits
In The Art of the
Deal, Trump counsels executives, CEOs, and
other deal makers to “think big,” “use your leverage,” and always “fight back.”
When you go into a negotiation, you must begin from a position of unassailable
strength. You must project bigness. “I aim very high, and then I just keep
pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after,” he writes.
For Trump, the concept of “the
deal” represents what psychologists call a personal schema—a way of knowing the
world that permeates his thoughts. Cognitive-science research suggests that
people rely on personal schemata to process new social information efficiently
and effectively. By their very nature, however, schemata narrow a person’s
focus to a few well-worn approaches that may have worked in the past, but may
not necessarily bend to accommodate changing circumstances. A key to successful
decision making is knowing what your schemata are, so that you can change them
when you need to.
 |
| Trump, shown here at the opening of the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in 1990, is dispositionally inclined to high-risk, high-reward decisions, as are many extroverts. His personality is similar to George W. Bush’s in this respect. (Mike Derer / AP) |
In the negotiations for the
Menie Estate in Scotland, Trump wore Tom Griffin down by making one outlandish
demand after another and bargaining hard on even the most trivial issues of
disagreement. He never quit fighting. “Sometimes, part of making a deal is
denigrating your competition,” Trump writes. When local residents refused to
sell properties that Trump needed in order to finish the golf resort, he
ridiculed them on the Late
Show With David Letterman and
in newspapers, describing the locals as rubes who lived in “disgusting”
ramshackle hovels. As D’Antonio recounts in Never
Enough, Trump’s attacks incurred the enmity of millions in the British
Isles, inspired an award-winning documentary highly critical of Trump (You’ve
Been Trumped), and transformed a local farmer and part-time fisherman named
Michael Forbes into a national hero. After painting the words no golf course on his barn and telling Trump he could
“take his money and shove it up his arse,” Forbes received the 2012 Top Scot
honor at the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards. (That same year, Trump’s
golf course was completed nonetheless. He promised that its construction would
create 1,200 permanent jobs in the Aberdeen area, but to date, only about 200
have been documented.)
Trump’s recommendations for successful deal
making include less antagonistic strategies: “protect the downside” (anticipate
what can go wrong), “maximize your options,” “know your market,” “get the word
out,” and “have fun.” As president, Trump would negotiate better trade deals
with China, he says, guarantee a better health-care system by making deals with
pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, and force Mexico to agree to a deal
whereby it would pay for a border wall. On the campaign trail, he has often
said that he would simply pick up the phone and call people—say, a CEO wishing
to move his company to Mexico—in order to make propitious deals for the
American people.
Trump’s focus on personal
relationships and one-on-one negotiating pays respect to a venerable political
tradition. For example, a contributor to Lyndon B. Johnson’s success in pushing
through civil-rights legislation and other social programs in the 1960s was his
unparalleled expertise in cajoling lawmakers. Obama, by contrast, has been
accused of failing to put in the personal effort needed to forge close and
productive relationships with individual members of Congress.
Having said that, deal making
is an apt description for only some presidential activities, and the modern
presidency is too complex to rely mainly on personal relationships. Presidents
work within institutional frameworks that transcend the idiosyncratic
relationships between specific people, be they heads of state, Cabinet
secretaries, or members of Congress. The most-effective leaders are able to
maintain some measure of distance from the social and emotional fray of
everyday politics. Keeping the big picture in mind and balancing a myriad of
competing interests, they cannot afford to invest too heavily in any particular
relationship. For U.S. presidents, the political is not merely personal. It has
to be much more.
Trump has hinted at other means through which he
might address the kind of complex, long-standing problems that presidents face.
“Here’s the way I work,” he writes in Crippled America: How to Make America Great
Again, the campaign manifesto he published late last year. “I find the people who are the best in the world at what
needs to be done, then I hire them to do it, and then I let them do it … but I
always watch over them.” And Trump knows that he cannot do it alone:
Many of
our problems, caused by years of stupid decisions, or no decisions at all, have
grown into a huge mess. If I could wave a magic wand and fix them, I’d do it.
But there are a lot of different voices—and interests—that have to be
considered when working toward solutions. This involves getting people into a
room and negotiating compromises until everyone walks out of that room on the
same page.
Amid the polarized political
rhetoric of 2016, it is refreshing to hear a candidate invoke the concept of
compromise and acknowledge that different voices need to be heard. Still,
Trump’s image of a bunch of people in a room hashing things out connotes a
neater and more self-contained process than political reality affords. It is
possible that Trump could prove to be adept as the helmsman of an unwieldy
government whose operation involves much more than striking deals—but that
would require a set of schemata and skills that appear to lie outside his
accustomed way of solving problems.
iii.
his motivations
For
psychologists, it is
almost impossible to talk about Donald Trump without using the word narcissism. Asked to sum up
Trump’s personality for an article in Vanity
Fair, Howard Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard, responded, “Remarkably
narcissistic.” George Simon, a clinical psychologist who conducts seminars on
manipulative behavior, says Trump is “so classic that I’m archiving video clips
of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example” of narcissism.
“Otherwise I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a
dream come true.”
When I walk north on Michigan
Avenue in Chicago, where I live, I often stop to admire the sleek tower that
Trump built on the Chicago River. But why did he have to stencil his name in 20‑foot
letters across the front? As nearly everybody knows, Trump has attached his
name to pretty much everything he has ever touched—from casinos to steaks to a
so-called university that promised to teach students how to become rich.
Self-references pervade Trump’s speeches and conversations, too. When, in the
summer of 1999, he stood up to offer remarks at his father’s funeral, Trump
spoke mainly about himself. It was the toughest day of his own life, Trump began. He went on to talk
about Fred Trump’s greatest achievement: raising a brilliant and renowned son.
As Gwenda Blair writes in her three-generation biography of the Trump family, The Trumps, “the first-person
singular pronouns, the I and me and my, eclipsed the he and his. Where others
spoke of their memories of Fred Trump, [Donald] spoke of Fred Trump’s
endorsement.”
In the ancient Greek legend, the beautiful boy
Narcissus falls so completely in love with the reflection of himself in a pool
that he plunges into the water and drowns. The story provides the mythical
source for the modern concept of narcissism, which is conceived as excessive
self-love and the attendant qualities of grandiosity and a sense of
entitlement. Highly narcissistic people are always trying to draw attention to
themselves. Repeated and inordinate self-reference is a distinguishing feature
of their personality.
To consider the role of
narcissism in Donald Trump’s life is to go beyond the dispositional traits of
the social actor—beyond the high extroversion and low agreeableness, beyond his
personal schemata for decision making—to try to figure out what motivates the man. What does Donald Trump really want? What are his most valued
life goals?
Narcissus wanted, more than
anything else, to love himself. People with strong narcissistic needs want to
love themselves, and they desperately want others to love them too—or at least
admire them, see them as brilliant and powerful and beautiful, even just see
them, period. The fundamental life goal is to promote the greatness of the
self, for all to see. “I’m the king of Palm Beach,” Trump told the journalist
Timothy O’Brien for his 2005 book, TrumpNation.
Celebrities and rich people “all come over” to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s exclusive
Palm Beach estate. “They all eat, they all love me, they all kiss my ass. And
then they all leave and say, ‘Isn’t he horrible.’ But I’m the king.”
The renowned psychoanalytic theorist Heinz Kohut
argued that narcissism stems from a deficiency in early-life mirroring: The
parents fail to lovingly reflect back the young boy’s (or girl’s) own budding
grandiosity, leaving the child in desperate need of affirmation from others.
Accordingly, some experts insist that narcissistic motivations cover up an
underlying insecurity. But others argue that there is nothing necessarily
compensatory, or even immature, about certain forms of narcissism. Consistent
with this view, I can find no evidence in the biographical record to suggest
that Donald Trump experienced anything but a loving relationship with his
mother and father. Narcissistic people like Trump may seek glorification over
and over, but not necessarily because they suffered from negative family
dynamics as children. Rather, they simply cannot get enough. The parental
praise and strong encouragement that might reinforce a sense of security for
most boys and young men may instead have added rocket fuel to Donald Trump’s
hot ambitions.
Ever since grade school, Trump
has wanted to be No. 1. Attending New York Military Academy for high school, he
was relatively popular among his peers and with the faculty, but he did not
have any close confidants. As both a coach and an admiring classmate recall in The Trumps, Donald stood out
for being the most competitive young man in a very competitive environment. His
need to excel—to be the best athlete in school, for example, and to chart out
the most ambitious future career—may have crowded out intense friendships by
making it impossible for him to show the kind of weakness and vulnerability
that true intimacy typically requires.
Whereas you might
think that narcissism would be part of the job description for anybody aspiring
to become the chief executive of the United States, American presidents appear
to have varied widely on this psychological construct. In a 2013 Psychological
Science research article, behavioral scientists ranked U.S. presidents
on characteristics of what the authors called “grandiose narcissism.” Lyndon
Johnson scored the highest, followed closely by Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew
Jackson. Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Nixon, and Clinton were next.
Millard Fillmore ranked the lowest. Correlating these ranks with objective
indices of presidential performance, the researchers found that narcissism in
presidents is something of a double-edged sword. On the positive side,
grandiose narcissism is associated with initiating legislation, public
persuasiveness, agenda setting, and historians’ ratings of “greatness.” On the
negative side, it is also associated with unethical behavior and congressional
impeachment resolutions.
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| Mark Peterson / Redux |
In business, government,
sports, and many other arenas, people will put up with a great deal of
self-serving and obnoxious behavior on the part of narcissists as long as the
narcissists continually perform at high levels. Steve Jobs was, in my opinion,
every bit Trump’s equal when it comes to grandiose narcissism. He heaped abuse
on colleagues, subordinates, and friends; cried, at age 27, when he learned
that Time magazine had not chosen him to be Man
of the Year; and got upset when he received a congratulatory phone call,
following the iPad’s introduction in 2010, from President Obama’s chief of
staff, Rahm Emanuel, rather than the president himself. Unlike Trump, he
basically ignored his kids, to the point of refusing to acknowledge for some
time that one of them was his.
iv. his self-conception
The
president of the United States is more than a chief executive.
He (or she) is also a symbol, for the nation and for the world, of what it
means to be an American. Much of the president’s power to represent and to
inspire comes from narrative.
It is largely through the stories he tells or personifies, and through the
stories told about him, that a president exerts moral force and fashions a
nation-defining legacy.
Like all of us, presidents
create in their minds personal life stories—or what psychologists call
narrative identities—to explain how they came to be who they are. This process
is often unconscious, involving the selective reinterpretation of the past and
imagination of the future. A growing body of research in personality,
developmental, and social psychology demonstrates that a life story provides
adults with a sense of coherence, purpose, and continuity over time.
Presidents’ narratives about themselves can also color their view of national
identity, and influence their understanding of national priorities and
progress.
In Dreams From My Father, Barack
Obama told his own redemptive life story, tracking a move from enslavement to
liberation. Obama, of course, did not directly experience the horrors of
slavery or the indignities of Jim Crow discrimination. But he imagined himself
as the heir to that legacy, the Joshua to the Moses of Martin Luther King Jr.
and other past advocates for human rights who had cleared a path for him. His
story was a progressive narrative of ascent that mirrored the nation’s march
toward equality and freedom—the long arc of history that bends toward justice,
as King described it. Obama had already identified himself as a protagonist in
this grand narrative by the time he married Michelle Robinson, at age 31.
What about Donald Trump? What
is the narrative he has constructed in his own mind about how he came to be the
person he is today? And can we find inspiration there for a compelling American
story?
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| Trump in 1987 with his father, Fred, his sister-in-law Blaine, and his brother Robert. When Trump was a child, his father encouraged him to be a “killer,” and sought to channel his aggression. (Robert Maass / Corbis) |
Our narrative identities typically begin with our earliest
memories of childhood. Rather than faithful reenactments of the past as it
actually was, these distant memories are more like mythic renderings of what we
imagine the world to have been. Bush’s earliest recollections were about
innocence, freedom, and good times growing up on the West Texas plains. For
Obama, there is a sense of wonder but also confusion about his place in the
world. Donald Trump grew up in a wealthy 1950s family with a mother who was
devoted to the children and a father who was devoted to work. Parked in front
of their mansion in Jamaica Estates, Queens, was a Cadillac for him and a
Rolls-Royce for her. All five Trump children—Donald was the fourth—enjoyed a
family environment in which their parents loved them and loved each other. And
yet the first chapter in Donald Trump’s story, as he tells it today, expresses
nothing like Bush’s gentle nostalgia or Obama’s curiosity. Instead, it is
saturated with a sense of danger and a need for toughness: The world cannot be
trusted.
Fred Trump made a fortune building, owning, and
managing apartment complexes in Queens and Brooklyn. On weekends, he would
occasionally take one or two of his children along to inspect buildings. “He
would drag me around with him while he collected small rents in tough sections
of Brooklyn,” Donald recalls in Crippled
America. “It’s not fun being a landlord. You have to be tough.” On one such
trip, Donald asked Fred why he always stood to the side of the tenant’s door
after ringing the bell. “Because sometimes they shoot right through the door,”
his father replied. While Fred’s response may have been an exaggeration, it
reflected his worldview. He trained his sons to be tough competitors, because
his own experience taught him that if you were not vigilant and fierce, you
would never survive in business. His lessons in toughness dovetailed with
Donald’s inborn aggressive temperament. “Growing up in Queens, I was a pretty
tough kid,” Trump writes. “I wanted to be the toughest kid in the
neighborhood.”
Fred applauded Donald’s toughness and encouraged
him to be a “killer,” but he was not too keen about the prospects of juvenile
delinquency. His decision to send his 13-year-old son off to military school,
so as to alloy aggression with discipline, followed Donald’s trip on the subway
into Manhattan, with a friend, to purchase switchblades. As Trump tells it
decades later, New York Military Academy was “a tough, tough place. There were
ex–drill sergeants all over the place.” The instructors “used to beat the shit
out of you; those guys were rough.”
Military school reinforced the strong work ethic
and sense of discipline Trump had learned from his father. And it taught him
how to deal with aggressive men, like his intimidating baseball coach, Theodore
Dobias:
What I did, basically, was to convey that I respected his
authority, but that he didn’t intimidate me. It was a delicate balance. Like so
many strong guys, Dobias had a tendency to go for the jugular if he smelled
weakness. On the other hand, if he sensed strength but you didn’t try to
undermine him, he treated you like a man.
Trump has never forgotten the lesson he learned
from his father and from his teachers at the academy: The world is a dangerous
place. You have to be ready to fight. The same lesson was reinforced in the
greatest tragedy that Trump has heretofore known—the death of his older brother
at age 43. Freddy Trump was never able to thrive in the competitive environment
that his father created. Described by Blair in The Trumps as “too much the sweet lightweight, a
mawkish but lovable loser,” Freddy failed to impress his father in the family
business and eventually became an airline pilot. Alcoholism contributed to his
early death. Donald, who doesn’t drink, loved his brother and grieved when he
died. “Freddy just wasn’t a killer,” he concluded.
In Trump’s own words from a 1981 People interview, the fundamental backdrop
for his life narrative is this: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and
life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” The protagonist of
this story is akin to what the great 20th-century scholar and psychoanalyst
Carl Jung identified in myth and folklore as the archetypal warrior. According
to Jung, the warrior’s greatest gifts are courage, discipline, and skill; his
central life task is to fight for what matters; his typical response to a
problem is to slay it or otherwise defeat it; his greatest fear is weakness or
impotence. The greatest risk for the warrior is that he incites gratuitous violence
in others, and brings it upon himself.
Trump loves boxing and football, and once owned
a professional football team. In the opening segment of The Apprentice, he welcomes the
television audience to a brutal Darwinian world:
New York. My city. Where the wheels of the global economy never
stop turning. A concrete metropolis of unparalleled strength and purpose that drives
the business world. Manhattan is a tough place. This island is the real jungle. If you’re
not careful, it can chew you up and spit you out. But if you work hard, you can
really hit it big, and I mean really big.
The story here is not so much about making
money. As Trump has written, “money was never a big motivation for me, except
as a way to keep score.” The story instead is about coming out on top.
As president, Donald Trump promises, he would
make America great again. InCrippled America, he says that a first step
toward victory is building up the armed forces: “Everything begins with a
strong military. Everything.” The enemies facing the United States are more
terrifying than those the hero has confronted in Queens and Manhattan. “There
has never been a more dangerous time,” Trump says. Members of isis “are medieval
barbarians” who must be pursued “relentlessly wherever they are, without
stopping, until every one of them is dead.” Less frightening but no less
belligerent are our economic competitors, like the Chinese. They keep beating
us. We have to beat them.
Economic victory is one thing; starting and winning real wars is
quite another. In some ways, Trump appears to be less prone to military action
than certain other candidates. He has strongly criticized George W. Bush’s
decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and has cautioned against sending American
troops to Syria.
That said, I believe there is good reason to
fear Trump’s incendiary language regarding America’s enemies. David Winter, a
psychologist at the University of Michigan, analyzed U.S. presidential
inaugural addresses and found that those presidents who laced their speeches
with power-oriented, aggressive imagery were more likely than those who didn’t
to lead the country into war. The rhetoric that Trump uses to characterize both
his own life story and his attitudes toward America’s foes is certainly
aggressive. And, as noted, his extroversion and narcissism suggest a
willingness to take big risks—actions that history will remember. Tough talk
can sometimes prevent armed conflict, as when a potential adversary steps down
in fear. But belligerent language may also incite nationalistic anger among
Trump’s supporters, and provoke the rival nations at whom Trump takes aim.
Across the world’s cultures, warrior narratives have traditionally been about and for young
men. But Trump has kept this same kind of story going throughout his life. Even
now, as he approaches the age of 70, he is still the warrior. Going back to ancient
times, victorious young combatants enjoyed the spoils of war—material bounty,
beautiful women. Trump has always been a big winner there. His life story in
full tracks his strategic maneuvering in the 1970s, his spectacular victories
(the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Trump Tower) in the 1980s, his defeats in the early
1990s, his comeback later in that same decade, and the expansion of his brand
and celebrity ever since. Throughout it all, he has remained the ferocious
combatant who fights to win.
But what broader purpose does winning the battle
serve? What higher prize will victory secure? Here the story seems to go mute.
You can listen all day to footage of Donald Trump on the campaign trail, you
can read his books, you can watch his interviews—and you will rarely, if ever,
witness his stepping back from the fray, coming home from the battlefront, to
reflect upon the purpose of fighting to win—whether it is winning in his own
life, or winning for America.
Trump’s persona as a warrior may inspire some
Americans to believe that he will indeed be able to make America great again,
whatever that may mean. But his narrative seems thematically underdeveloped
compared with those lived and projected by previous presidents, and by his
competitors. Although his candidacy never caught fire, Marco Rubio told an
inspiring story of upward mobility in the context of immigration and ethnic
pluralism. Ted Cruz boasts his own Horatio Alger narrative, ideologically
grounded in a profoundly conservative vision for America. The story of Hillary
Clinton’s life journey, from Goldwater girl to secretary of state, speaks to
women’s progress—her election as president would be historic. Bernie Sanders
channels a narrative of progressive liberal politics that Democrats trace back
to the 1960s, reflected both in his biography and in his policy positions. To
be sure, all of these candidates are fighters who want to win, and all want to
make America great (again). But their life stories tell Americans what they may
be fighting for, and what winning might mean.
Victories have given Trump’s life clarity and purpose. And he must
relish the prospect of another big win, as the potential GOP nominee. But what
principles for governing can be drawn from a narrative such as his? What
guidance can such a story provide after the election, once the more nebulous
challenge of actually being the president of the United States begins?
Donald Trump’s story—of himself and of
America—tells us very little about what he might do as president, what
philosophy of governing he might follow, what agenda he might lay out for the
nation and the world, where he might direct his energy and anger. More
important, Donald Trump’s story tells him very little about these same things.
Nearly two centuries ago, President Andrew
Jackson displayed many of the same psychological characteristics we see in
Donald Trump—the extroversion and social dominance, the volatile temper, the
shades of narcissism, the populist authoritarian appeal. Jackson was, and
remains, a controversial figure in American history. Nonetheless, it appears
that Thomas Jefferson had it wrong when he characterized Jackson as completely
unfit to be president, a dangerous man who choked on his own rage. In fact,
Jackson’s considerable success in dramatically expanding the power of the
presidency lay partly in his ability to regulate his anger and use it
strategically to promote his agenda.
What’s more, Jackson personified a narrative
that inspired large parts of America and informed his presidential agenda. His
life story appealed to the common man because Jackson himself was a common
man—one who rose from abject poverty and privation to the most exalted
political position in the land. Amid the early rumblings of Southern secession,
Jackson mobilized Americans to believe in and work hard for the Union. The
populism that his detractors feared would lead to mob rule instead connected
common Americans to a higher calling—a sovereign unity of states committed to
democracy. The Frenchman Michel Chevalier, a witness to American life in the
1830s, wrote that the throngs of everyday people who admired Jackson and found
sustenance and substance for their own life story in his “belong to history,
they partake of the grand; they are the episodes of a wondrous epic which will
bequeath a lasting memory to posterity, that of the coming of democracy.”
Who, really, is Donald Trump? What’s behind the
actor’s mask? I can discern little more than narcissistic motivations and a
complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost. It is as if Trump
has invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially
dominant role that he has nothing left over to create a meaningful story for
his life, or for the nation. It
is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never
knowing why.
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