The purpose of this book is to provide a more accurate analysis and understanding of an unusual and unprecedented president, Donald J. Trump, his real psychology, and his extremely controversial presidency.
When he first announced his candidacy, I thought he had little, if any chance of winning the nomination and said so in an interview. 1 However, as Trump’s campaign took hold and he stumbled and lurched past one candidate and then another, I began to realize that not only might he have a chance, but that he was a truly unique candidate who seemed to be tapping into some very deep and powerful political currents that only he of all the candidates seemed to see and understand.
As a psychoanalyst who studies presidential leadership and a political scientist who specializes in the presidency, how could I not be interested? I was. Actually, I was much more than interested. I was genuinely curious and puzzled.
How could a presidential candidate with no political background—a bombastic, brazen, and incredibly confident man who violated every rule of political decorum and breached every assumption of how to win a presidential campaign, prevail? It was clear that people across the country responded to Trump as if they had found an oasis in a large desert of political contrivance, dishonesty, and ineffectiveness. In some respects, they had.
Others felt quite differently. Mr. Trump’s surprising and wholly unexpected election to the presidency resulted in a vitriolic emotional and political reaction among his detractors that has not subsided. Indeed, it is remarkable both for the level of its intensity and its longevity.
I am well aware of those currents both personally and professionally. However, throughout this research, a deep interest and genuine puzzlement as to how Trump’s nomination, general election campaign, and presidency would play out helped me to maintain a general state of emotional and political calm even as anti-Trump vitriol has exploded across almost all aspects of public debate about this unprecedented presidency, and Trump engaged in his latest provocation to establishment assumptions and power centers assumptions.
Standing apart from the emotional maelstrom, and obscured by the president’s own theatrics and his opponents’ excesses, one can notice that President Trump has built a substantial presidential record. It has, of course, been substantially effected but surprisingly not yet been wholly interrupted by the traumatic impact of the Coronavirus both domestically and abroad and the ferocious opposition he has faced since before he entered office. Whether, against enormous political and historical odds, including an unprecedent modern world-wide pandemic, and the traumatic impact of the tragic death of George Floyd and the peaceful demonstrations and riots that followed, it is possible for Mr. Trump to accomplish his presidential purposes, ambitions that I analyze in this book as the Politics of American Restoration is one basic question this analysis attempts to answer.
A second major question underlying this book is about Mr. Trump himself, and his leadership style. What real capacities and deficiencies does Mr. Trump actually bring to his presidential leadership? Enormous numbers of observations about his very real deficits abound. Yet, many of them are harsh, speculative, and devoid of evidence beyond critics’ confident assertions. Fair minded, substantive, comprehensive, and accurate analyses of Mr. Trump and his presidency are extremely rare, and therefore much needed.
This book’s third and final underlying question is this: Trump’s Politics of American Restoration is an effort to become a “reconstructive” president in Stephen Skowronek’s terms. That restoration is premised on Trump’s effort to engage and reform (as he sees it) eight pillars of establishment assumptions, thinking, and policy: the courts; economic growth and opportunity (including jobs and energy development); de-regulation; health care; immigration; foreign policy; trade; and lifting the fear of discussing many political debate topics (aka “political correctness”). All of these areas contain a great many discrete policies within them. He is, at the same time, trying to change and reform several major institutions, both domestically (eg., FBI, CDC, DOJ) and abroad (eg., WTO , WHO, NATO). It would be difficult for any president, much less a president in Trump’s political circumstances, to successfully accomplish these monumentally ambitious set of goals. Trump must answer the questions, and so must we: How do long—term entrenched policy narratives change, and is it possible for Trump to successfully do so?
Those three large questions frame this book. This is where a dual background with training both in psychology and psychoanalysis and being a political scientist whose field is the presidency is helpful. The clinical and psychoanalytic psychology that I’m trained in and has been the basis of my three other books 2 on sitting presidents and my other analysis that provides a model for the psychological assessment of presidential candidates 3 all seek a framework to establish core psychological patterns of the presidents they analyze and trace their development through their life-histories.
Finally, a word about the adjective “Real” in the book’s title preceding its primary focus—the Psychology of the Trump Presidency. That word is meant to convey a comparison between the reductionist and highly partisan psychological and political caricatures that permeate what is presented as Trump analysis and an effort to consider and weigh a wide array of information in forming provisional theories of Trump’s psychology and presidential leadership. Those are then checked again against additional unfolding data and their capacity to effectively explain and understand Mr. Trump and his presidency. This is nothing more or less than basic social science research procedure, even as my basic theoretical framework owes much to Freud and his innovative legatees like Horney, Erikson, Kohut, and my two mentors, colleagues, and friends in Political Science, Harold D. Lasswell and Alexander L. George .
I am aware that this stance, and the formulations and evidence developed herein as a result of it, will be controversial. It is hoped however, that this research strategy followed and the evidence produced and documented will provide a fair, accurate, and theoretical useful analysis of a controversial man and presidency.
My further hope is that this book will help deepen the way Trump is thought about and, as a result, we will be better able to understand this unique president and presidency.
Notes
1.
Ben Smith. 2015. “I Asked a Psychoanalyst to Explain Donald Trump,” BuzzFeed, December 3.
2.
Stanley Renshon. 1996 [1998]. High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition. New York: New York University Press [Routledge Press]; Stanley Renshon. 2004. In His Father’s Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush. Palgrave Macmillan; Stanley Renshon. 2012. Barack Obama and the Politics of Redemption. New York: Routledge Press.
3.
Stanley Renshon. 1996. The Psychological Assessment of Presidential Candidates. New York: New York University Press.
Epigraph
“I am large; I contain multitudes.”
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Acknowledgments
I owe a debt of appreciation to those who have given their time and offered their views on the ideas contained in this book—agreeing with the author or not. Offered, with few exceptions, in the spirit of friendship, collegiality, and scholarship they have provided valuable observations to consider, and the book and I have substantially benefited as a result.
For very helpful conversations about portions of this book, I would like to thank: Colin Dueck, Richard C. Friedman, Fred I. Greenstein, Charles Lipson, Peter Lowenberg, Sue Matorin, Henry Nau, Harry Paul, Peter Suedfeld, and Alan I. Teger.
A special word of appreciation is due to my dear friends and social science colleagues Professors Robert Badden and Thomas Halper. Their acute editorial eye and extremely helpful observations were very valuable for my thinking and analysis.
At the beginning of this project I taught my Graduate Center seminar on the Modern Presidency. As has been the case with my other books, I benefited from the opportunity to begin to develop my thoughts on Mr. Trump and his presidency in the context of an able group of CUNY graduate students.
I would like to express my appreciation to Michelle Chen, North American Editor for US Politics, Public Policy, and Political Theory for very informative and effective help at many points in the publication process.
Rebecca Roberts, my go-to point of contact for all things having to do with production matters in all their diverse ramifications, has been an incredibly reliable source of information and help. This book and its author owe a great deal to her efforts.
Christine Ranft had the important job of editing this book. Her excellent eye, terrific skills, and easiness to work with are much appreciated. Shukkanthy Siva provided excellent guidance through the galley review process.
Palgrave Macmillan takes its scholarly vetting seriously, and I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided detailed commentary on my eighty-page book proposal. As expected, the reviewers did not necessarily agree with each other or with me on the ideas that form the basis of this analysis, but the analysis was strengthened by taking their observations seriously, even when I didn’t agree with them.
I would also like to thank Michael A. Genovese and Todd Belt—editors for The Evolving American Presidency series at Palgrave Macmillan who also read the proposal and drafts of the book chapters. Additional thanks are due to the two external anonymous reviewers for their willingness to provide detailed commentary on drafts of each chapter of the book.
Through a strange quirk of fate, the proposal for this book reached the desk of Beth Farrow, UK Commissioning Editor for Psychology and Neuroscience. She read the proposal, was interested in it, and we talked—after which the proposal made a transatlantic trip to the desk of Michelle Chen—Palgrave Macmillan editor for North American Politics and Political Theory.
My wife Judith has supportively and lovingly been by my side as I researched and wrote this book, as she has been through our forty-three years of marriage.
Praise for The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency
“Fascinating. Having interviewed six American presidents and known some of them very well, traveling with them for months on end and visiting with them alone for hours and days at a time, it is stunning to me to see how Stanley Renshon can capture so much from their public lives.”
—Doug Wead, Presidential Historian and New York Times bestselling author of Inside Trump’s White House (2019)
“Trump’s leadership and the Trump phenomenon have needed serious, noncartoon-like analysis from a scholar who understands both the country and the personality of America’s unusual 45th president. Dr. Renshon provided it, in readable, illuminating fashion.”
—Holman W. Jenkins Jr., Columnist, The Wall Street Journal
“Stanley Renshon offers a systematic and pungent challenge to the wide range of critics of Donald Trump, the man and the President. He and the framework he offers see capabilities where others see close to madness, as Trump offers his own reconstruction of the American presidency designed toward the restoration of the nation to greatness. This is a most provocative book for the 2020 election year.”
—Robert Y. Shapiro, Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, USA
“This is a wide-ranging work that brings together several strands of political science, including party polarization, regime cycles, presidential character, and psycho-biography. Renshon shatters the often unreflective conventional wisdom surrounding this president, acknowledging his weaknesses while also taking seriously his political goals and the foundations of his popular support. Instead of one-dimensional caricatures of Trump and his followers, Renshon provides a rich intermix of character study, historical context, and political critique. In the end, Trump’s rise is closely tied to the failures of the political class and its assumptions and orthodoxies, with Trump representing a concerted attempt to bring about the ‘Politics of American Restoration.’ This book is essential reading for anyone desiring a more nuanced understanding of the Trump presidency and of the president himself.”
—David Crockett, Professor of Political Science, Trinity University, USA
“This highly instructive and engaging new book presents an empirically grounded psychological assessment of Donald Trump’s presidential leadership and governance. The argument that Trump seeks to achieve the politics of American restoration is developed with evidence-based analysis, which systematically discusses the leadership qualities needed to attain this goal as well as the challenges they pose. The careful research and clear writing make an enduring contribution to understanding the American presidency and American politics in the twenty-first century.”
—Meena Bose, Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs, Hofstra University, USA
“Donald John Trump may be the most anti-establishment, disruptive and perplexing president since Andrew Jackson. His critics pounce on his utterances and at rallies his supporters celebrate his actions and statements. In this book, Stanley Renshon critically reviews what has been written about his first term and provides a thought-provoking, compelling and fresh analysis of the man, his rhetoric, and policies. It is indeed a fascinating reading. For those readers who like to highlight sentences in provocative books, you will find much to underline and quote.”
—Wilbur C. Rich, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Wellesley College, USA
“In psychoanalyst Stanley Renshon’s insightful new study of Donald Trump, he carefully sifts the evidence for clues as to whether the president will be a ‘fading flash’ or a successful reconstructive president. His persuasive nonpartisan conclusion: it would be unwise to place a large bet against President Trump.”
—Bruce Buchanan, Professor Emeritus of Government, University of Texas at Austin, USA
The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency: An Overview
This psychological analysis of Mr. Trump and his presidency unfolds conceptually rather than in strictly historical order. It does not begin by focusing on the president’s childhood and following his history and development into his presidency. Rather this book, like my three other psychologically framed analyses of a sitting president, develops a theoretical framework drawn from both Psychology and Political Science, to frame four interconnected questions: (1) what are the core psychological elements that define this president; (2) how did they develop over the course of his life; (3) what implications do they have for his presidential ambitions and leadership style; and (4) how do the country’s expectations and its political circumstances shape how successful the president’s leadership efforts will be?
With President Trump, as has been the case for my other presidential analyses, I have spent considerable time, beginning with the Republican Party primary battle, assembling and evaluating the evidence necessary to develop a set of psychological and political patterns for this unique American president. This analysis covers his life and development before the presidency, his presidential leadership, and what they mean both for his presidential purposes and the country.
My research began in earnest with the first Republican presidential debate on August 7, 2015. As a result of those efforts, I can write with some confidence, with the evidence to back that statement up, that there is much more to President Trump than meets the eye, and certainly more than the many and repeated caricatures of him.
The book is divided into five Parts and their associated chapters as it unfolds.
Part I: Preliminaries: The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency sets out the basic foundation of the analysis that follows, both setting the stage for it, and beginning to set out some of its basic elements and considerations.
Chapter 1: “Building a Theory of Donald Trump and His Presidency” addresses the issues of what it takes, theoretically and evidentiarily, to develop a viable theory of the psychology of the Trump presidency. This book addresses the literature on presidents, presidential leadership, political time, and the motivations of Trump voters to name a few areas. However, the real literature for this book is derived from Trump himself—the man, his development, his thinking, and his actions. Is it possible to find patterns in Trump’s kaleidoscopic presidency? Is it possible to do so while he is still in office—analyzing the essential dual nature of his presidency, discerning and analyzing the “real” Trump presidency beyond the many caricatures and setting out Trump’s ultimate presidential ambitions—The Politics of American Restoration? We argue that it is and explain why.
Chapter 2: “In the Eye of the Hurricane: Strategies for Analyzing the Trump Presidency” discusses the issues associated with psychological analyses of a president “at a distance.” It takes up the issues of narratives as major explanatory vehicles, including conspiracy theories, and how they differ from real efforts at theory building based on considering and weighing a range of evidence. The nature and range of that evidence, including “events data,” is considered, as well as how they differ from the more ordinary varieties of anti-Trump analysis. Is making use of more comprehensive consideration of information tantamount to “defending Trump”? That is not its purpose. The chapter ends by laying out the book’s strategy of analysis.
Part II: Donald Trump’s Presidential Leadership and Governing Style sets out the basic foundation and operating style of the Trump presidency.
Chapter 3: “The Paradoxical Foundations of the Trump Presidency: Causes and Consequences” begins with the role of the presidency in American political life and how that has developed. We then turn to an analysis of the 2016 presidential election from the perspective of two major opposing views, both of whom saw the election in starkly dire terms. In reality, that election brought to the fore a set of simmering political crises that had been brewing for decades, including the abortive rise of the “Tea Party” in 2008. That movement centered on profound issues of trust. We link those with Trump’s election victory and his presidential ambitions, understood as the Politics of American Restoration. We close with a consideration of Trump’s leadership style and demeanor, their relationship to presidential “guardrails,” and the rise of vehement, determined, and irreconcilable opposition to the Trump Presidency.
Chapter 4: “Donald Trump’s Fight Club Presidency” examines Mr. Trump’s combativeness. That is an important element in his psychology and performs important functions in his presidential leadership and governing style. We examine its early origins in Trump’s family life, its motivations and consequences including Trump’s search for recognition and respect, and its surprising impact on Trump’s sense of freedom and creativity. We also analyze Trump’s first real adult political fight, centered around accusations about housing discrimination, as a template for his business and political career. We conclude with an analysis of Trump’s fight club strategy for realizing his goal of the Politics of American Restoration, its utility and its limits, and how it is related to Trump’s needed on the job training on how to be an effective president.
Chapter 5: “Leadership Style, Presidential Success, and Political Time” takes up the issue of Trump’s presidential style and demeanor arguing that there are really two Trump presidencies. One is the bombastic tabloid presidency whose latest provocations and opposition to his presidency play out across American political media and institutional venues. That presidency receives the majority of sensational headlines and commentary. Yet there is another, equally, if not ultimately more important Trump presidency consisting of the deeply serious administration efforts to put into place Trump’s signature presidential ambitions. We examine why Trump survives his ferocious opposition in spite of his own missteps, and examine several metrics of presidential “success.” We assess Trump’s slow but gathering momentum towards his Restoration goals, and ask if he will remain stuck in political time as a “Disjunctive” president or have a chance to become a “Reconstructive” one.
Part III: Psychiatry in the White House: Trump’s Narcissism and “Fitness” for Office directly addresses two key political psychology questions about Mr. Trump and his presidency: What exactly, is the real psychology of this president? And, is he psychologically and political “fit” to be president?
Chapter 6: “President Trump’s Narcissism Reconsidered” focuses on several key Trump psychological traits, all related to the dominant narrative and related memes of Trump’s narcissism and its political consequences. We again take up issues concerned with psychological assessment in relation to diagnosis and the so-called Goldwater Rule. We argue that simplistically assigning a name to a behavior without an understanding of the term used or familiarity with, or making use of, the evidence needed to support claims associated with it is a recipe for poor evaluation and analysis. For those do so with some professional psychological training, it also reflects a lapse of professional ethics and personal integrity.
The chapter analyzes Trump’s impatience, impulsiveness, and narcissism, and examines alternative patterns of understanding these elements in the context of Trump’s psychology and leadership style. The chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of Trump’s motivation to seek the presidency, including several that have never before been examined.
Chapter 7: “On President Trump’s Psychological and Political Fitness for Office” directly takes up that central question. We examine the concept of psychological and political “unfitness,” noting the diverse ways Trump critics have used it. We then examine efforts to bypass the Goldwater Rule prohibitions by focusing on Trump’s supposed “dangerousness” rather than his “mental illness.” In terms of conceptual reliability and validity that is no improvement. Analyzing the fiasco that gave rise to the Goldwater Rule makes clear the ethical and conceptual dangers of unanchored psychological characterizations and accusations. They are not made less so when Trump’s supposed dangerousness crosses the line from his psychology to accusations that he is politically unfit because he has subverted the “Guardrails of Democracy.”
Chapter 8: “The Unexpected Trump” takes the examination of Trump’s real psychology into new territory. One of the drawbacks of the anti-Trump narratives about his psychology is their confirmation bias; only the worst will do. Their narrow focus on Trump’s psychological and political pathologies make him the presidential equivalent of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, 1 which is he not. In this chapter we analyze evidence concerning Mr. Trump that some will consider heretical, perhaps even politically blasphemous. These include his compassion, his charitable giving, his being there for others in their times of need, his vision and creativity in business and politics, his basic operational metric in life, business, and the presidency—Think Big, and his very surprising and unexpected capacity for reflectiveness.
Part IV: The Trump Presidency in Practice directly examines the basic elements of the Trump presidency as it has unfolded in both theory and practice.
Chapter 9: “Prelude to a Unique Presidency: Preparation, Expectations, and Judgment” begins with an examination of the relevance of Trump’s CEO experience to his presidency. His was not a typical business career and that unorthodox experience helped shape an equally unorthodox presidency. Trump’s success at building a business empire has proved instructive for building its political equivalent. There are similarities including Trump’s ambition, vision, courage, determination, flexibility, an astute sense of timing, and discipline. There are also lessons to be carried into this presidency about resilience and successfully coming back from almost catastrophic failure. However, whatever help the nature of his unusual career has been, it did not provide him with the basic political grounding and understanding that more traditional paths to the White House have provided its other occupants.
First Trump has to learn how to be a possibly successful president and move on from the many sobering surprises about the office that he found on assuming it. We conclude by examining the large range of Trump’s presidential interests, his presidential work patterns, and his approach to the core function of any presidency—his decision-making style and judgment.
Chapter 10: “Essentials of Leadership: The Core Sources of Trump’s Presidency” examines several basic elements Trump of presidency and leadership. They include: The nature of the president’s base supporters—real or imagined; including their supposed “racial resentment”; the powerful emotional connections of respect and standing linking Trump and his base supporters; TrumpThink—a magical mystery tour reflecting how Trump understands his world, full of unexpected associative detours, logical lane changing, and surprisingly clear reconnection to his original train of thought; TrumpTalk—often meandering, frequently exaggerated, regularly provocative, and honestly heartfelt if rarely fact-check level “correct”; Trump facts and tweets—the president’s serially imprecise relationship with “the Truth,” including “larger Truths”; and promise keeping as an essential truth.
Chapter 11: “Conservative American Nationalism: The Trump Doctrine in Theory and Practice” examines Trump’s foreign policy thinking and initiatives. The most fitting conceptual name for the Trump Doctrine is Conservative American Nationalism. It is a framework that we argue is composed of six essential elements: (1) An America First premise in Trump policies; (2) An emphasis on American National Identity as a cornerstone of America’s elemental and dual relationship with itself and the world; (3) Highly selective involvement, with a non-exclusive emphasis on its own terms and interests in defining America’s role in the world; (4) An emphasis on American strength in all its forms, resilience, and resolve; (5) The use of maximum repeated pressure along a continuum of points in pursuit of key goals; and (6) Maximum tactical and strategic flexibility. That doctrine is at least as much a reflection of Trump’s psychology as it is of his thinking and we explore its relationship with his impatience, emphasis on action, ambition, the use of force, and the future of the Trump Doctrine.
Part V: Political Transformation in the Balance takes up the varied possible futures of the Trump Presidency from fading flash to successful “Reconstruction” and Restoration.
Chapter 12: “The Future of the Trump Presidency” takes up two questions: Does the Trump presidency have a future and, if so, what kind? Much will depend on the 2020 election and whether Trump wins reelection, as well as the distribution of power in the House and Senate. In order to be successful, he will have to have deal with an unprecedent modern worldwide pandemic, but also the traumatic impact of the tragic death of George Floyd during a police encounter and the peaceful demonstrations and riots that followed.
Much will also depend on whether Trump can succeed in changing the dominant narratives with a focus on the eight policy pillars that define his Politics of American Restoration.
We examine how entrenched political paradigms and narratives change in less than dire circumstances and also how they change during catastrophic political or economic circumstances, like wars, economic depressions, and pandemics. Obviously, a very crucial element for Trump’s reelection is how effectively he responds to the unprecedented modern economic, social, and political catastrophe of the Coronavirus, and how the public judges those efforts.
We then ask how likely it is that Trump can accomplish his presidential purposes in a second term given a mix of possible election outcomes and the divided nature of American political life? In examining Trump’s post-election circumstances and possible strategies we ask: Is Trump a dunce, hedgehog, or a fox? We do know Trump is a man of many questions, a number of them rarely asked by past leaders. Yet, he is also a man who has reached some fairly basic political and policy conclusions that are not unprecedentedly novel, but rather have been mostly unspoken by establishment leaders and institutions, and even more rarely acted upon.
If Trump wins reelection, whatever the distribution of power in Congress, successfully realizing his Restoration ambitions will be equivalent to scaling Mt. Annapurna. It will take skill, experience, determination, courage, resilience, and a dedicated competence and effective group of support allies. Many imagine that climb. Few attempt it. Fewer succeed. The risks are high; the chances of success low; but it would be unwise to place a large bet against President Trump.
Note
Herbert Marcuse. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.