The hope that Donald Trump might become more presidential as his
inauguration approached has proven misguided. The 45th president of the
United States has shown that his own public image is his first
priority.
By
Markus Feldenkirchen,
Thomas Hüetlin,
Nils Minkmar and
Gordon Repinski
To understand how the future president of the United States thinks
and acts, a look back at how he treated one of his former employees can
be helpful. The woman in question didn't become known because of
complaints regarding Donald Trump's behavior. Rather, he himself boasted
about his own treatment of her in one of his many books.
Trump hired the woman in the 1980s. "I decided to make her into
somebody," he writes in "Think Big and Kick Ass," a book in which he
seeks to share the secret of his success with the world. He gave her a
great job, Trump writes, and "she bought a beautiful home."
In the early 1990s, when his company ran into financial
difficulties, Trump asked the woman to request help from a friend of
hers who held an important position at a bank. The woman, though, didn't
feel comfortable doing so and Trump fired her immediately.
Later, she founded her own company, but it went broke. "I was
really happy when I found that out," Trump writes in his book. Although
he had done so much for her, he writes, "she had turned on me."
In Trump's world, even just the appearance of disloyalty is an
unforgivable sin. He encourages his readers to react in such cases with
brutal vengeance. Ultimately, the woman lost her home and her husband
left her, Trump relates. "I was glad." In subsequent years, he continued
speaking poorly of her, he writes. "Now I go out of my way to make her
life miserable."
At the end of the chapter called "Revenge," Trump advises his
readers to constantly seek to take revenge. "Always make a list of
people who hurt you. Then sit back and wait for the appropriate time to
get revenge. When they least expect it, go after them with a vengeance.
Go for their jugular."
This hardcore Darwinism helped Trump, who sees life as "a series of
battles ending in victory or defeat," become a rich man on the often
fierce real-estate market.
Trump, who will be inaugurated on Friday as the 45th president of the
United States, appears to be relying on the same formula for success in
his new job -- despite all of the predictable effects that might have
for his country and the world. Just last week, it was obvious on several
occasions that Trump has no intention whatsoever of adjusting his
behavior to correspond to the dignity of the office he has been elected
to fill. He seems to continue believing exclusively in his own maxim:
"Think Big and Kick Ass."
Last Wednesday, Trump once again took to Twitter to aggressively go
after those who had dared to voice critique, or whose behavior he
disapproved of. He later did the same during a press conference.
After it was leaked that U.S. intelligence had informed Trump that
Russia held potentially compromising information about him, including an
alleged golden shower with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, he hit
back hard. What the intelligence community had done, he wrote on
Twitter, was "very unfair" and a "total political witch hunt!" He then
wrote: "Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news
to 'leak' into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi
Germany?"
Insufficient Dignity
For months, many have been talking about Trump's
lack of maturity and his insufficient dignity
for one of the most powerful and honorable political offices in the
world. And yet his press conference on Wednesday left even party allies
stunned.
He showed himself to be a man with more faith in Russian President
Vladimir Putin than in the findings of America's own intelligence
agencies. A man who reacts aggressively to all forms of critique. A man
who sought to intimidate CNN reporter Jim Acosta and refused to answer
the reporter's questions because he doesn't approve of the broadcaster's
coverage.
It was an appearance that lacked everything that one has come to
expect from U.S. presidents: self-control, diplomacy, reserve and
restraint. He spent much of the press conference praising himself and
his team and there wasn't a moment of irony or self-doubt. Even in the
U.S., where referring to one's own strengths is much more common than it
is elsewhere, such a degree of conceit is unusual.
For many, victory is paired with humility. Trump, by contrast,
hasn't passed up a single opportunity since Nov. 8 to boast about his
"big" election victory and he continues to cast insults at his defeated
opponent Hillary Clinton. Those who thought that Trump's almost
conciliatory Christmas address meant that the president-elect was
changing his tune were quickly disabused of that notion.
On the weekend before last, actress Meryl Streep used her speech at
the Golden Globes to criticize Trump for his mocking of a physically
disabled
New York Times reporter during the campaign. The
incident was Trump's revenge against the reporter, who had exposed one
of the GOP nominee's lies. Trump was quick to strike back at Streep. He
claimed that he was not making fun of the reporter's disabilities, even
though videos make it clear that that is exactly what he was doing. He
then took to Twitter to call Streep "one of the most over-rated
actresses in Hollywood" and "a Hillary flunky." It was yet another
tweet-storm showing how far removed Trump is from reality.
His reactions have become totally predictable, no matter whether he
is responding to a perceived slight from an employee, a reporter, an
actress or the intelligence community. There is no nuance in his
retribution; it is always excessive.
Trump's behavior can often be reduced to a simple question: Was
somebody nice to me or not? It usually doesn't get much more complex
than that. As such, the key to understanding the new U.S. president lies
less in his political pledges or in the hopes of his followers and more
in the make-up of his personality.
'Like a Six-Year-Old Boy'
Pulitzer Prize winning American investigative journalist David Cay
Johnston, who wrote a biography of Donald Trump, says that he is a
12-year-old trapped in the body of a 70-year-old. In all of the
discussions he held with Trump, says another of the president-elect's
biographers, Michael D'Antonio, he came across as a young boy. "Like a
six-year-old boy who comes home from the playground and can hardly wait
to announce that he shot the decisive goal," D'Antonio said in an
interview.
Johnston and D'Antonio spent hundreds of hours trying to understand
this man. And their assessments were only exceeded by Trump himself.
"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now,
I'm basically the same," Trump told D'Antonio in 2014. "The temperament
is not that different."
Trump displays the classic worldview and behavioral patterns of
people who suffer from narcissism. Even as psychologists are generally
unwilling to offer diagnoses of people they have not met in person, many
have made an exception when it comes to Trump, in part because he
exhibits so many of the symptoms.
Howard Gardner, a professor of developmental psychology at Harvard
University, described the incoming president several years ago as
"remarkably narcissistic." Clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis
attributes to Trump a "textbook narcissistic personality disorder." His
colleague George Simon even uses videos of Trump to illustrate the
disorder in seminars.
Experts say that the classic behaviors associated with narcissism
include: an outsized need for attention, recognition and admiration; the
inability to feel empathy; constant self-absorption; and grotesquely
exaggerated self-praise. For narcissists, the world around them is only
interesting insofar as it reflects themselves. Those suffering from the
disorder are so hypersensitive to criticism that everyone who withholds
admiration is seen as an enemy.
Extreme narcissists, research results show, are so addicted to
attention and admiration that they frequently tell lies. And they are so
convinced of their own merit that they are incapable of feeling regret:
In their eyes, the admission of error is not a sign of greatness,
rather it detracts from their grandiosity.
'Abject Rejection of Reflection'
Self-reflection -- the critical questioning of one's own behavior
-- is something that Trump sees as potentially damaging. "I don't like
to analyze myself because I might not like what I see," he said in a
2014 interview with D'Antonio. The biographer, who conducted numerous
interviews with Trump and members of his family, says that this is the
most salient characteristic of the entire clan. D'Antonio says Trump
"refuses to reflect on what he's done" and that he exhibits an "abject
rejection of reflection."
This finding goes a long way toward explaining Trump's reactions,
announcements and threats. It is likewise hardly surprising that he
hasn't changed his approach just because he has now been elected
president. He is simply unable to.
When Trump spent weeks rejecting intelligence evaluations
indicating that Russia's hacking and release of internal emails from the
Democratic National Committee was an attempt to aid his candidacy, that
too was the voice of an aggrieved narcissist. Trump was afraid that the
shine of his election victory might be tarnished.
One can assume that he is fully aware of the dangers represented to
his country by professional hacking and interference from foreign
powers. But in such moments, he seems unable to focus on the larger,
more relevant problem at hand. He only sees himself and the potential
devaluation of his Election Day triumph -- with the consequence that he
placed more trust in Russian President Vladimir Putin and Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange than he did in America's own intelligence
services.
'Be Paranoid'
The fact that Hillary Clinton received almost 3 million more votes than
he did is also seen by Trump as a deep affront -- to the point that in
November he tweeted that he "also won the popular vote if you deduct the
millions of people who voted illegally."
There is not a shred of evidence for this absurd claim. Nor did Trump
seem to care that such an accusation is akin to questioning the legality
of the election and could erode the popular faith in democracy.
Something greater was at stake: His own reputation.
A president who is unable to subordinate his own emotions to the
larger issues at stake is doubtlessly a problem. Just as problematic is a
commander in chief who is unable to differentiate the important from
the unimportant. His Twitter eruption from five weeks before the
election, when he began tweeting non-stop at 3.20 a.m., has since become
legendary. It wasn't the situation in Syria that was bothering him, nor
was he concerned about the final stages of the campaign. Rather, he
wanted revenge -- against a beauty queen from 1996 who had the gumption
to support Hillary Clinton. He said she was "disgusting" and that, after
winning the pageant, had "gained a massive amount of weight."
Nobody, of course, likes to hear unflattering things about
themselves. But civilization, Enlightenment, honor or perhaps mere
tactical considerations have created a buffer between impulse and
reaction in most people. Trump, though, is different. He represents a
return to more archaic times.
He has been aided by an era in which there is apparently a
widespread need for more rustic forms of speech and action, where discretion and moderation are derided as "
political correctness" and tactical thinking as a fundamental evil associated with the allegedly corrupt "establishment."
In a motivational speech Trump delivered 12 years ago in Denver, he
encouraged his audience to trust nobody. "Be paranoid," he said. This
constant fear of being stabbed in the back and Trump's need for
unconditional loyalty also informed his cabinet choices. His team of
designated ministers is primarily made up of people who were early and
vocal supporters of his campaign.
Electing Narcissists to Positions of Power
Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions was the first Senator to
endorse Trump during the primaries. The president-elect chose Ben Carson
as secretary of housing and urban development even though Carson
himself says he has little knowledge of the subject matter. His primary
qualification is the fact that he was the first of the Republican
candidates to have spoken favorably of Donald Trump. Michael Flynn, a
former army general, is to become national security advisor, in part
because of his early idolization of Trump. For the position of chief
White House strategist, Trump chose Stephen Bannon, head of the
ultra-right wing website Breitbart News, the only outlet that
consistently supported Trump during the campaign.
All of these nominations show the dangers of electing narcissists
to positions of power. Their need for loyalty coupled with their desire
to shine brighter than all others is not a good mixture when it comes to
assembling competent leadership teams. Often enough, the result is a
group of powerless acolytes.
Trump's temporary interest in naming Mitt Romney to head up the State
Department initially looked surprising amid the preference for
sycophants he had displayed up until that point. Romney had been vocal
and harsh in his critique of Trump during the campaign and it seemed out
of character for Trump to be considering tapping Romney for a senior
administration job anyway. But he invited Romney to several interviews,
staged by Trump as a kind of casting show, and the president-elect
provided frequent updates on how the process was going. Ultimately,
though, Trump chose Rex Tillerson over Romney -- making the publically
staged interviews suddenly seem like an elaborate act of revenge against
his prominent detractor.
The world is a dangerous place and you have to be ready for a
fight: This lesson is one that Fred Trump taught his son Donald early
on. An owner and manager of apartment buildings in New York, Fred
occasionally brought Donald along to collect rent payments in person on
the weekends. According to a vignette related in an
article in the
Atlantic last
June, Donald once asked his father why he stood to the side after
ringing the doorbell. "Because sometimes they shoot right through the
door," his father apparently replied.
For Trump, these excursions with his father taught him the
importance of being "tough," or, as his father would have it, a "killer"
who only accepts victory and for whom losing is a threat to survival.
The idea that the winner takes all and the loser gets nothing became
something of a maxim for Trump. In his book "Crippled America," Trump
writes that he felt even as a child that he needed to become "the
toughest kid in the neighborhood."
Trump's Admiration of Putin
This belief that life is a battle, that only victory matters and
that losers are to be ridiculed and abased, was solidified when Donald
was sent to military school as a 13-year-old. In this competitive
environment, he was seen as one of the most ruthless students. He had no
friends because having friends was a sign of weakness. It was more
important, he felt, to show strength, to intimidate those around him, to
show authority and to be a man.
One of his idols at the military school was baseball coach Theodore
Dobias. "Like so many strong guys, Dobias had a tendency to go for the
jugular if he smelled weakness," Trump would later write. But the coach
treated boys who showed strength like men.
Against this background, it isn't difficult to understand Trump's
admiration of Vladimir Putin. It may well be that Putin has long been in
possession of compromising material pertaining to Trump. But it is
important to remember that Putin was the first world leader who showed
regard for Trump and found words of praise for him.
"He's a very colorful man, talented without doubt," Putin said of
Trump at a time when many in the U.S. hadn't yet begun to take the GOP
candidate seriously. The Russian leader added that Trump was "the
absolute leader of the presidential race." Trump's reaction was
predictable: "When people call you brilliant, it's always good,
especially when the person heads up Russia."
Trump has also been quick to praise Putin's leadership, saying
admiringly: "At least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this
country." It's Putin's aura of strength and lack of compunction that
Trump so reveres. "I think he thinks of Putin as being a strong person,
and I think he thinks of himself as being a very strong person," Trump
confidant Newt Gingrich said of the president-elect in
an interview with SPIEGEL.
The biggest window into his soul is Trump's Twitter account. Fully
20.1 million people follow Trump on the social media site, but he only
follows 42 accounts, which is an adequate reflection of his worldview:
It's enough when only one person has a say.
Trump writes only two types of tweets: those in which he praises
either himself or people who have been nice to him; and those in which
he attacks those who have not. There is very little room for
differentiation or nuance and there are few tweets that don't have
directly to do with his favorite subject: Trump. When he recently sent
out Christmas greetings to his followers, it didn't show his family
gathered together. Rather, it was a picture of just Donald Trump, alone
in front of a decorated tree. In Trump's Twitter world, his private life
is political. There is no separation.
On Jan. 6, two weeks before the inauguration, the newly elected
president tweeted about an issue that would seem to be just as important
to him as U.S. relations with China or the future of NATO: He tweeted
about "The Apprentice," the television show that lent Trump a
significant portion of his fame. Because Trump was running for
president, NBC had chosen Arnold Schwarzenegger to take over as the
show's host and he celebrated his premier on Jan. 6. Trump immediately
commented on the show's weak ratings and then provided his own
explanation: "the ratings machine, DJT" was missing. In the primaries,
as Trump himself noted, Schwarzenegger had supported the Republican
candidate John Kasich.
Great People with Fantastic Futures
When Trump channel surfs, it would seem that he only stops on shows
that he is in or which are discussing him. He often turns to Twitter to
comment live during talk shows, using the channel to blast his critics
as unsuccessful idiots working for a failing broadcaster. Supporters, by
contrast, are great people with fantastic futures.
If you follow him on Twitter, it quickly becomes clear that the
world of the man who has pledged to return America to greatness is
rather small. The only thing important to Trump is his dominance, or the
perfect illusion of his dominance. In order to maintain this illusion,
Trump must also display his dominance over facts that might sully this
perfect image. That's why he claims via Twitter that he has never
insulted anybody even though there are videos proving the contrary. In
his world, there is no common ground where facts are rooted. There are
only competing subjective interpretations -- and it's a competition that
he always wins.
Lies for him are a means to an end -- and they are poison for the
public discourse. When arguments can no longer be assessed and claims
can no longer be verified, democracies can no longer arrive at a
consensus. It is akin to restructuring the country in accordance with
the Twitter model, in which one person speaks and everyone else watches
in horror. It becomes an uncritical, one-way street.
In Trump's image of himself as a warrior, as a "killer," there is
no room for uncertainty or doubt. The most important thing is to fight
the fight, and risk is part of that. During his professional life, Trump
has had to declare bankruptcy four times, yet he became a billionaire
nonetheless. In the campaign, he was mocked as a clown who didn't stand a
chance, but he is now going to be sworn in as president. In the eyes of
his voters, Trump's surprising triumph merely augments his aura of
invincibility -- and it can be expected that their awe will only further
exacerbate his narcissistic overestimation of himself. There have, in
any case, been no indications of humility or temperance in the weeks
since his election victory.
A Risk and an Opportunity
At the same time, Trump's aggression, his appetite for risk, his
passion for the hunt, is his greatest weakness. His global network of
companies and family members combined with his tendency to surround
himself with yes-men from whom he demands unconditional loyalty could
ultimately land him in trouble.
Either way, the U.S. and the rest of the world now has to find a
way to deal with this rather unorthodox leader. And there is little
experience to fall back on, at least not when it comes to leaders of
Western democracies. The analogy to Silvio Berlusconi is perhaps most
accurate, a man who was likewise considered an unlikely election victor
in mid-1990s Italy.
Like Trump, Berlusconi was a successful businessman, had a
significant media presence and displayed signs of narcissism. He tried
to run the state like a company and had little use for democratic values
like freedom of the press or judicial independence.
It took quite some time before Berlusconi ran into trouble due to
his numerous iniquities, legal violations and attempts at corruption.
His ability to manipulate people and win them over, one shared by many
narcissists, ensured him a total of 10 years as Italy's prime minister.
What, then, is the correct approach to Donald Trump? His grotesque
self-absorption and his childish need to be loved present both a risk
and an opportunity. And behind his aggressive posturing is a weakness, a
vulnerability. As irrational as Trump's behavior might be at first
glance, it is often extremely predictable.
The most effective way to influence him is likely that of flattering
him, of giving him all of the respect that he yearns for. Vladimir Putin
isn't the only one who has understood this basic truth. It is a
strategy that Barack Obama has apparently followed as well. Following
Trump's election victory, the president quickly congratulated the winner
and then graciously received his successor in the White House. Obama
had hammered Trump on the campaign trail, but the president-elect had
only positive things to say about Obama in the immediate aftermath of
their November meeting.
Such overt graciousness likely makes it easier to talk and
negotiate with Donald Trump. That might sound a bit simplistic, but that
might very well be the best way to deal with the incoming president:
thinking simply.
