Trump Studies

In the 1960s, there was Beatlemania; since June 2015, we have had “Trumpmania.” Few if any American political figures have so dominated media attention as has this New York real estate tycoon. In the Age of Trump, there should be Trump Studies. This would be an interdisciplinary endeavor that would need to include contributions from at least history, political science, sociology, economics, media studies, psychoanalysis, and psychology. The aim is to understand the Trump phenomenon in all its manifestations. As with any subject matter, we need to ascertain all the topics needed to have a comprehensive overview of the task at hand. These essential topics include: explaining what in American culture and history can help us understand how Trump was elected; discussing the how, why, and consequences of Trump making untrue statements; how his domestic and foreign priorities and ideology can be placed in historical perspective; what in his childhood and business career have shaped how he acts as president; and showing how his actions as Commander in Chief reflect these past patterns. Much of what follows is familiar. There may be additional subject areas that others think are necessary as well.

Trumpmania is based on the popular appeal of Donald John Trump. At his rallies this New Yorker elicited enormous enthusiastic support from millions of his fellow Americans. The political pundits and pollsters consistently underestimated the extent of this

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support. The varied motivations of Trump voters must be carefully examined. The foundation of Trump’s support was in whites without a college degree, which he won by bigger margins in exit polls than any candidate since 1980. The same exit polls also showed him getting four percent more of white college graduates’ votes than did Hillary Clinton. In addition, in exit polls Trump did better with women than did McCain or Romney. As with any successful candidate, he had significant support from diverse groups.

One of the reasons for examining Trump relates to his ability to get so much media attention. He has shown a remarkable talent to draw the attention of the mass media. As Trump remarked during the campaign, the cable news networks broadcast his rallies live and far more often than those of his rivals. The reasons for that, he said, is because he increases their ratings. What is it in what Trump does that has so captivated so many people, and has so dominated news coverage? I cannot think of a more major concern in Trump Studies than explaining his ability to rivet so many in the nation and media so often and for so long.

Comprehensive biographical examinations of Donald Trump’s family background, childhood, and business career are essential. The historian of the family finds a three-generation pattern of energetic male ambition, practical skills, and using any and all means to achieve success (Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations Who Built an Empire, 2000, 456-7). Donald Trump said of his personality: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different” (Michael D’Antonio, The Truth About Trump, 2016, 53). Examining the nature of his character as a child of six and its continuity to the present is a central component of Trump Studies. Also, needed here is an analysis of how his parents and schoolteachers responded to his rambunctious childhood behavior, which eventually led to Donald being sent to military high school.

He grew up in a wealthy family as one of five children; family dynamics are important to Trump Studies. Donald is the second son, and his older brother would ultimately become a negative example. The President attributes his refusal to smoke and drink to his older brother’s role as a cautionary tale. Their father both encouraged and disciplined his children, but eventually chose Donald as his successor and told him regularly that he is a king. His father strongly encouraged Donald’s tendency to exhibit narcissistic traits.

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Donald Trump has spent over 40 years as a businessman and over 30 as a celebrity. He followed in his father’s footsteps, and whereas Fred Trump was a self-made real estate magnate in Brooklyn and Queens, Donald desired to make his mark in Manhattan. A self-described small loan of a million dollars from his father helped him get started and other loans rescued him when his casinos were about to go under.

As an ambitious, wealthy young man in Manhattan real estate, Donald had some remarkable accomplishments at an early age. He was able to get the real estate rights to the railroad yards of the defunct New York Central at two West Side sites in Manhattan. With his father’s assistance, but also with his own ingenuity, Donald was able to partner in the rights to remodel the decrepit Commodore Hotel at Grand Central Station. This was his first major construction project and he next went on to build Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

After building his Fifth Avenue headquarters, Donald started expanding his horizons and investments, buying the Eastern Airlines Shuttle, a New Jersey football team in a league competing with the NFL, and casinos in Atlantic City. All of these enterprises would ultimately fail, in large part due to Trump’s mistakes. A number of these businesses went bankrupt, and Trump was on the verge of economic ruin. He was able to maneuver himself out of trouble by selling stock in a company he called Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, Inc. He used the revenue from the sale of stock and his control of the business to pay off all of his debts. Eventually, this publicly-traded enterprise failed, but it had served its purpose for Donald.

Trump has often come out ahead of his partners and contractors. This was first evident in how he underpaid the city of New York at the former Commodore Hotel, as the city was supposed to be paid a certain amount of the profits, but he manipulated the books to severely underpay his public partner. Trump has also refused to pay or underpaid contractors who had deals with him on many of his construction projects.

A new direction in Trump’s fortunes followed his recruitment to be the host of the NBC television program The Apprentice (2004-2015). He realized that he had a brand name and sold the use of his name to other companies. For instance, a number of high rise buildings have gone up on the old New York Central yards on

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Manhattan’s West Side that have had the name Trump Place stamped on them for all to see. However, Donald Trump does not own these buildings; he has just leased out the name. While many profitable American businesses are huge corporations with organizational structures and specialized sub-divisions with scores of professional managers, that is not so for the Trump Organization. It is a family-run business. As such, Trump does not report to a board of directors; he is accustomed to being in charge.

When Trump took over a new business outside of the construction world, he did not take the time to learn the intricacy of the enterprise. One of the major managers of his Atlantic City casinos, John O’Donnell, was stunned that Trump was not interested in the details of running the company (Trumped!, 1991). Trump justifies his ignorance in the following way: after a business leader offered to send the presidential candidate a 100-page report on China, Trump told him to either make it three pages or present it orally. He commented that “I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability” (Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, Trump Revealed, 2016, 347).

Trump has carried many of his patterns as a business tycoon into the White House. While other Commanders in Chief read detailed daily intelligence reports, Trump wants them to be kept brief. In fact, Trump has eschewed the usual daily intelligence briefings, stating in an interview that “You know, I’m like a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day” (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-briefings-232479).

In the 2016 campaign, he presented few detailed policy position papers, and at his rallies he gave few thought-out plans, but was heavy on slogans. Given these practices, many questioned whether he would be competent in office. During the first major legislative fight of his presidency over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, he was uninterested in policy, and his ignorance hurt him. He was quoted as saying, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated” (http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/trump-health-care-complicated/). “He didn’t care or particularly know about health care,” a key anonymous GOP congressional aide said, then added, “If you are going to be a great negotiator, you have to know about the subject matter.” Freedom Caucus sources said that Trump, when asked about policy issues with the bill, said, “Forget about the little shit” (Jim Acosta, Dana Bash,

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Deena Zaru, CNN, 3/27/2017). This overconfidence in himself means he does not feel the need to sufficiently prepare, which hurt him at crucial times in his business career, and may be harmful to him as Commander in Chief. To understand President Trump, we need to know about the practices of businessman Trump in terms of his boldness, many successes, resilience, ingenuity in bouncing back from failures, questionable business practices, and regularly finding new opportunities for his enterprises.

Because Trump’s personality is so dynamic, his ideological and policy leanings often take a back seat to his incendiary comments. Many of his priorities are becoming evident now that he is Commander in Chief. Any consideration of him must connect his policies to his personality.

As president, Trump appears to be establishing another Gilded Age, where money rules and government restrictions on business are on the wane. He favors tax laws that have been the staple of Republicans since Ronald Reagan, which include lowering taxes on the wealthy, the promise of prosperity, and ignoring the dramatically increased deficits that inevitably follow. During the 2016 campaign, Trump went even farther than his GOP predecessors by declaring that he would abolish the national debt in eight years.

The last three Republican presidents have seen the deficits go out of control, all have experienced recession, each has promised that there would be enormous growth given their tax proposals, yet both Presidents Bush saw sub-par growth levels. The highest recent growth level was under Bill Clinton, with no recessions beginning when he was in office and deficits transformed into surpluses while raising taxes on the well-to-do. Despite how Trump campaigned as an outsider, in office he is a traditional Republican when it comes to taxes and fiscal policy.

Under Trump, it is possible that we are repeating the politics of the roaring 1920s. Republicans under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge did their best to roll back the beginnings of the regulatory state under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Coolidge’s words, “The business of America is business,” could just as well have been uttered by Donald J. Trump. Our current President is rolling back constraints on private enterprise. Is it surprising that a man who so avoids accountability would not want any federal regulators overseeing his actions and those with similar economic

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interests? Trump and his supporters ignore that in the last century the worst economic catastrophes the U.S. has endured have followed when Republicans have let business be business. Part of Trump Studies should be to show how the unrestrained economic, imperial self fits into his character and why neither the Republicans nor the current president have learned from the historical record. In the last four decades, whenever Republicans capture the White House, a similar scenario keeps repeating. The persistence of this widespread faith in the Republican Party needs psychohistorical study.

If it is easy to place Trump’s domestic priorities within Republican ideology, it is more difficult to do so in foreign policy. Central to his outlook is Trump’s attitude towards Vladimir Putin and Russia. President Trump initially took positions in relationship to NATO, Crimea, and other issues that seemed to coincide with Putin’s policy aims. Trump has not said a negative word about the leader of Russia. Is there any other major party presidential candidate since the end of World War II who has had any foreign affairs adviser or member of his campaign team that had extensive ties with the Soviet Union or Russia? Only Trump’s campaign manager and two of his foreign policy advisers had close ties to Russia. At the time of this writing, congressional investigations into the Russian hacking and the ties of Trump campaign officials are ongoing, with new revelations about Trump’s campaign advisers regularly appearing.

At the end of October 2016, candidate Trump proclaimed his 100-day plan. It included passage of ten legislative acts. As of the 100-day mark, none of these pledges have come to fruition, and most of them have never even been formally proposed to Congress. At the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump seemed to rely on Breitbart news phenomenon Steve Bannon, but after some defeats and extremely low poll numbers, Trump switched gears and now relies more heavily on family, as he has in his business career, in that his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have become most trusted advisers.

As have many other chief executives with low popularity ratings before him, Trump turned to foreign policy and attacked a Syrian air base. Afterwards, the dramatic fall in his poll numbers ceased. Also, initially he and Bannon made what appeared to be threats against Republicans who opposed his policies. After this got him nowhere, Trump in the latter part of his 100 days was more

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willing to back down after being militant. Commentators noticed that President Trump frequently reversed himself and took contradictory positions. This was nothing new. Over a 13-month period of the campaign concerning 20 issues, candidate Trump changed his positions 117 times (Timm, NBC News, 9/7/2016). Candidate Trump made the 100-day pledge, but as that day was approaching he called this a “ridiculous standard” (Trump tweet, April 21, 2017). Also, in his first 100 days, he made 488 false or misleading statements (Kessler, Washington Post, May 1, 2017). The psychology of Trump’s refusal to take responsibility for his failures and vacillations are a significant topic for Trump studies.

Another indispensable topic is Trump’s predilection for factually inaccurate statements, falsehoods, and “alternative facts.” Equally important is ascertaining the reasons his falsehoods did not disqualify him from the 2016 election. Why did 46% of those who voted cast their ballot for a president who does not seek to ascertain what is real and what is not?

As is well-known, Trump is willing to say quite derogatory and erroneous things about anyone who offends him. This includes saying Hillary Clinton is the devil and should be jailed, that Ted Cruz’ father had a part in President Kennedy’s assassination, and that Barack Obama is a sick man and a felon. Even when caught in the most egregious of false statements, Trump hardly ever admits that he was wrong. In often not acknowledging error, Trump follows the advice of his mentor, lawyer Roy Cohn.

Donald Trump is the oldest individual ever elected as president and the only Commander in Chief never to have held any government office. He is both richly experienced and a novice. Trump Studies has much to explain and a wealth of information. There may be other subject areas that I have omitted, which others will add. Still, it needs to be pointed out that psychohistory is indispensable to investigating Trump, Trumpmania, and their impact on America and the world.

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