Make It Super Short: Trump’s Restless Attention

Numerous commentators have pinpointed Donald J. Trump’s dubious personality characteristics and conflicts and even proposed diagnostic categories that seem to imply his grave incapabilities for the presidency. From a psychoanalytically-oriented point of view, Paul H. Elovitz compiles several biographical details about Trump’s childhood, youth, family relationships, disruptive tendencies, defense mechanisms, and grandiosity verging on perilous national and international political scenarios. Psychohistorically, we could also add that Trump’s public self-presentation as a wonderful “fixer” has a background in his acknowledged “bad-boy-self” identification that is rooted in the early threat and realization of parental rejection resulting in his exile to military school.

The strong splitting tendencies have made it possible for Trump to externalize the evil, bend the truth, and replace the ethics of (Obama)care with the right of the ruling powers. On the one hand, while Trump felt humiliated by Barack Obama, he craves revenge and the destruction of his predecessor’s achievement. On the other hand, the accusations against Hillary Clinton are directed against disturbing “terrifying mother” images. Repeatedly, Trump needs compensatory acts in different contexts, and is even inclined

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to chase and get ruminatively stuck in trifles to prove that, in the end, he is always right.

A special feature of Trump’s self-presentation and self-belief is his unashamed admission of his “bad” traits that he claims to have turned into innovative and successful narcissism. Traditional good character and moral certitude, as well as cultural and environmental values, can be sacrificed to economic assets. His father’s heritage (to become a “king,” a “winner,” and a “killer”) is a crucial part of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal family values tied to risk-taking, sensation seeking, and prowess in combat. This kind of heroism gets adoration from Trump’s followers and even from other members of a community seeking protection from external enemies. The amalgamation of the military hero image and idealized masculinity (also meant for female soldiers) is a missionary feature of American culture that Trump stresses in his speeches, such as when he demanded that “we have to start winning wars again” (February 27, 2017).

Focusing on Trump’s intrapsychic and intersubjective conflicts is important in analyzing Trump’s narcissistic and “alpha” personality, but it is not enough when trying to get a hold of the elusive phenomena surrounding the un-presidential President. An issue concerning Trump’s cognitive processing has been hinted at by stating that he seems to have a “short attention span.” He is said to prefer Fox media and their easily digestible sound bites. In an interview, Trump admitted that he likes to have his briefings short, ideally super short, as one-page summaries. “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page” (Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, “Reality Bites: Trump’s Wake-up Call,” Axios, January 18, 2017). Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s work The Art of the Deal (1987), has mentioned that Trump could concentrate only very briefly during the interviews for the book. When Schwartz asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail, Trump became impatient and bored, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom” and remembered almost nothing. Schwartz also doubted that Trump has ever read a whole book during his adult life (Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” The New Yorker, July 25, 2016). The same doubt arose in the interview by Allen and VandeHei; when asked about books on his desk, Trump showed one, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (2004) by John Ferling, and to the interviewers’

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 question about whether they should read it he answered, “I wouldn’t.” As much as Trump detests “wrong” media, he firmly presents his media history through self-aggrandizement and a victim role: “In the history of politics, there’s nobody that has been treated worse by the press than I have” (ibid.).

The examples of Trump’s short attention span can be expanded to include a “hyper-attentive” cognitive style that has emerged in the flow of information; linking; networking; scanning for opportunities, contacts, and media celebrity; as well as restless tweeting. “Hyper-attention” is not limited to Trump but affects global web-surfing audiences. N. Katherine Hayles has compared deep attention and hyper-attention. The former “is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods […] preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times” (“Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Profession, 13, 2007, 187). The latter refers to “switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (187).

Neuroscientists have started to study what kind of brain changes accompany such neural addiction to constant networking. It may be that the humanistic belief in the superiority of deep attention and the disciplined focus on the traditional integrative and coherent narrative must be reevaluated. In the global data and communication flow, while we need others’ attention and instant gratification, we cruise among the fragments of anti-narratives and post-factual story pieces. We still try to navigate our drifting selves onto multimedia platforms that leave our identities, motivations, fantasies, and desires unfinished. A shrinking group of voters sees Trump as a skillful captain of this fantasy cruise.

Trump is reported to sleep only some four to five hours and to be awake early. Such an alert state may become distressful and be part of hypomanic symptoms. Anyhow, Trump is probably not interested in “psychobabble” and can manifest an alarming lack of introspection and an overgrowth of a public “persona,” one that is impatiently ordering the U.S. to finally win wars—or to be a lousy loser. What we can be almost sure of is that Trump will not read these symposium papers, not even if somebody bullets them on one page.

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