Trump, Trump, Trump: Are We Making Too Much of Him?

Donald Trump’s incredible ability to draw our attention has resulted in an unprecedented number of papers on him submitted to this Psychohistorical and Psychobiographical Studies of Trump Special Issue. The office he holds compounds his media magnetism. This gives him enormous power over our country and the world. Six colleagues honored me by writing their papers as commentaries for “The Implications of Trump’s Narcissistic Need for Conflict on His Presidency Symposium.” These papers and the issues raised by them will be my primary focus, although I will also draw upon some of the other submissions, the unfolding events of the Trump presidency, and additional thoughts I have.

The insights of C. Fred Alford, the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Professor of Government, always deepen my knowledge of any subject he writes about. His emphasis on the ego ideal as both a counterpart of and substitute for the lost narcissism is especially insightful. First of all, in a journal in which we attempt to not highlight psychoanalytic theory, it is still good when we’re reminded of its importance. More significantly, it helps us to understand why people are drawn to a narcissistic candidate for president, even one who lowers the status of our national leader as a presidential ego ideal. My impulse is to quibble when Alford implies that I have been “psychoanalyzing people at a distance, even though we all do it.” As the recipient of intense and lengthy psychoanalytic training, I insist that analysis requires a willing subject lying on a couch for an extended period of time. While there are always people like

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Trump around, Alford rightfully stresses the circumstances in which we collectively make these people our leaders.

It is my contention that Trump could get elected on a vague program of making “[Crippled] America Great Again,” because of nostalgia for a time when America dominated the world after WWII. The reality is that for all our problems, America is great, and not crippled, despite the balance of power system constitutionally built into our government, sometimes making for a level of national political deadlock. Yet much of our population sees us as declining. In the post-World War II era, we sought to rebuild our enemies in our capitalistic democratic image and succeeded. Furthermore, our mastery of mass communications and creation of the Internet brought the world much closer together and created a large number of economic customers and competitors, while electronically bringing the dangers and fears of the world to our attention.

We have come to gain awareness of dangers beyond our own shores so we now fear not simply what is happening in our own localities and nation, but also around the world. It is shocking for many white Christian Americans that by mid-century we may have a non-white majority, which includes numerous non-Christians—even many millions of Muslims! As illustrated by 9/11, the U.S. is no longer protected by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. What Trump and so many of his frustrated voters see as our crippled loss of greatness, to me, represents an unintended consequence of our success. There is no question that Professor Alford is correct in pointing out that the results of the 2016 election represent a lowering of our standards nationally and personally. Most Trump voters were sick of feeling like they were expected to be politically correct and live up to high and sometimes incomprehensible ideals and standards. Many, I suspect, also felt guilty about not living up to these ideals.

The British psychohistorian, Nick Duffell, whose books are mostly on how political leaders are being scarred by their British public school (that is, private school) education, might have noted in his commentary that Trump was sent to a military high school. This seems to have influenced the President in choosing an unprecedented number of defense and national security leaders in uniform. This worries me because people who were trained for war see it as a much more viable option than those who were trained to avoid war. Our new Secretary of Defense, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, saying that you should “have a plan to kill everybody you meet,” is

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not reassuring. Duffell shares my fear that Trump, when frustrated by the difficulties of making domestic changes in our nation’s capital, will pick fights around the world as a way of showing he is strong. I like Duffell’s discussion of what he sees as the four major roles of psychohistorians, approaches which enable us to see what other analysts so often miss. However, his emphasis on America’s failure to disown a genocidal history regarding Native Americans is overblown when he says that the Australian and Canadian governments have made reparative efforts while the U.S. has not. Our empowering efforts, mostly through the laws enabling Indians to have more say in their own affairs, show some inclination along the lines of what our northern neighbors and the Australians have done.

Duffell is quite right that our difficulties are currently based not only in having a narcissistically-inclined individual as president, but also in our collective selves that have given leaders like George W. Bush a free pass to start two wars, one of which destabilized the already shaky Middle East. He finishes his essay on an optimistic note, based on a grassroots popular movement for worldwide systemic change.

Kenneth Rasmussen is a California historian and psychotherapist who provides useful insights into Trump’s inchoate ideology and appeal to people who wish to feel pride, rather than shame, as Americans. He sees Trump’s rise as a result of collective trauma experienced by Americans. Our Finnish colleague Juhani Ihanus focuses on Trump’s splitting tendencies, as well as his extremely short attention span. He is quite correct in everything he says, but I wonder what underlies Trump’s boredom and impatience when he had to discuss his childhood for The Art of The Deal (1987). I’ve been hoping to find more data so that I can understand more about the pain that underlies these feelings, using empathy for the young Trump as an important instrument of insight.

John Jacob Hartman’s paper took me back 40 years to the early days of the International Psychohistorical Association, when I learned an enormous amount about groups from his insightful presentations and writings. When we humans are in groups, we give up a great deal of our individuality and operate as Wilfred R. Bion pointed out in his brilliantly insightful studies, such as “Experiences in Groups” (1961). I found Professor Hartman’s Bion-based ideas on group behavior to be correct every time I utilized them in my classes. Subsequently, I realized that they predictably worked because I was failing in my essential role as leader by not

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providing structure, thus raising the anxiety level of the students. Students, like all people in groups, need leaders who provide them with a safe environment and nurture them. I fear Trump in part because his disruptive personality and narcissistic needs may make him incapable of providing a safe environment for our national group.

Professor William Meyers presents a scholarly exploration of my analysis and expands on it. He specifically covers Trump as “untruthful,” somewhat “delusional,” “of being chosen, a special person to whom rules do not apply […] with a messianic idea,” who has “a sense of impunity” and “grandiosity,” with “strong destructive, even sadistic needs,” “impulsiveness,” “conflict-seeking,” “demonstrating anti-intellectualism,” “an inability to truly care about others,” and “characteristics of a megalomaniac.” As a serious social scientist, he wants to know if “many current assertions about the personality of Donald Trump are correct and accurate,” and which “are inaccurate and mistaken.” He points out that the danger, as with Hitler, is that we may be on our way to coming up with every possible psychiatric syndrome to describe a president who is extraordinarily unpopular with clinicians, professors, and intellectuals in general. In keeping with the search for truth, are we truly living in “terrible times” or is it that we are afraid that we are in for terrible times because of our president’s lack of governing experience, our dislike of his personality and values, our fears as to what he will do, and an element of sour grapes because our preferred candidate was defeated? Shouldn’t Trump be seen as more of an attention-seeking, blustering celebrity businessman who is out of his depth in the presidency? Aren’t we paying too much attention to Trump’s tweets in the middle of the night, which reflect his primary process inclinations, not the realities of politics?

During his first 100 days, despite his tweets, he has been much more measured and inclined to reverse his extreme statements regarding increasing the number of nuclear powers, being anti-NATO, anti-UN, critical of the Federal Reserve chair, criticizing the Export-Import Bank, and so forth. In his seventh decade, does Trump have the energy or the political skill to go against his conservative Republican allies to endanger our democracy? Despite his authoritarian inclinations, at worst he is likely to be seen in the end as an American Silvio Berlusconi, who is now viewed more as a bombastic Italian clown rather than as a Mussolini or Hitler. Even if he has the instincts or inclinations of the two fascist leaders,

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our democracy is not as fragile as was that of Italy in the aftermath of World War I and Germany in the Great Depression. As an historian, I can vouch for America having survived some pretty bad presidents, although I can never completely forget that they lived before the nuclear era.

My inclination is to say to my respected colleague, Juhani Ihanus, that yes, Trump will not be reading these papers even in bullet points, but we need to see past our own impulse toward contempt for the non-intellectual, since the American electorate seldom elects an intellectual as president.

Neil Wilson’s brief paper is thought provoking. Since terms like narcissism, paranoia, and psychopathic are commonplace these days in discussions of Donald J. Trump, Wilson, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, thinks these terms should be used by psychiatrists and psychologists, despite the Goldwater Rule prohibiting it without the subject’s cooperation. Wilson’s solution is to declare that he abides by the Goldwater Rule—the unofficial name of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) Section 7.3 ethics rule—and will not diagnose Trump, but rather refers only to his character traits. Regrettably, his distinction does not hold up since the rule forbids “commenting on individuals’ mental state without examining them personally and being authorized by the person to make such comments.” Actually, the Goldwater Rule only applies to psychiatrists who are members of the APA, so he is not bound to follow it. I am glad that Wilson and so many psychologically-trained colleagues are willing to help educate the public about the personalities of their leaders.

At our last Psychohistory Forum meeting, Irene Javors of Yeshiva University pointed out that in academic and political circles in this area, it is becoming politically incorrect to speak positively about Trump and that this represents a danger to free speech; I thoroughly agree. Our fellow Americans voted for Trump for many different reasons. Most who voted for Trump did so because he was the Republican on the ballot and they didn’t like Clinton. Some were just tired of having a Democratic president. During the campaign, a doctor friend of mine mentioned that he just didn’t feel comfortable publicly acknowledging his support for the Republican because he feared being mocked in the intellectual community. Although he is inclined to vote Democratic, he felt that the Affordable Care Act that Clinton was committed to had severely hurt medical practice. One need not go to red states to find both fervent

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and ambivalent supporters of our President. During the campaign, I heard the postal clerk, with whom I’ve had friendly relations for at least 23 years, commenting that “If Trump doesn’t win, you will see me on the top of the George Washington Bridge, jumping!” To me he always appeared to be a hard-working, frustrated man who felt stuck in what he considers to be a dead end job. While he feels incapable of changing his job, he could project his hopes for change on the presidency. In class this morning, there was so much anti-Trump sentiment expressed, without a word of challenge, that one would never guess that less than five months ago, the majority of the students I polled voted for him. We need to be careful not to denigrate those who don’t share our political judgments and preferences.

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