Trump’s Personal Catastrophic Failure of Presidential Leadership: Why?

 

The Trump Presidency will end on January 20, 2021. However, it died, morally and politically, on January 5 as a result of a series of personal presidential leadership blunders of historic dimensions.

 

A riotous spasm of resentment took place in Washington on that date. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters had come to town primarily to protest what many felt was a stolen election. President Trump made a clearly equivocal address to the marchers in which he said both, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” and also “Make no mistake, this election stolen from you, from me and from the country.” 

 

Even as Trump was talking, a sizeable group had split off from the main marcher assembly and began their physical assault on the Capitol building. They overran an inexcusably light Capital Police Guard presence. They breached restraining barriers, entered the Senate and began a riot that temporarily shut down the official counting of electoral votes confirming Joe Biden as the next president.  

 

Senators were evacuated under armed guard. Senate offices and the Senate floor itself were occupied. Five people died, including one unarmed protester shot by a Capital policeman and a capital policeman who collapsed and later died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. It was a shocking crescendo to Trump’s determined two month effort to reverse an election result he couldn’t and didn’t accept by casting doubt on its legitimacy.

 

Trump’s political judgment and leadership skills failed him in the aftermath of his election loss to Joe Biden and culminated in two key events on January 6. In the first, Trump said that Vice-president Mike Pence had it within his power to deny Mr. Biden election certification, and urged him to do so. Had that happened, it would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives and led to a possible Trump victory. However, it would have thrown the country into a major constitutional and political crisis from which it would not have easily recovered.

 

The second major failure of Trump’s Judgment and leadership skills occurred in his address to the crowd of his supporters. Even as a riot was taking place in the Senate chambers and Trump was urging calm, he could not keep from raising again the same stolen election issues that had helped fuel, but were not the only cause, of the marcher’s resentment and anger in the first place. 

 

Trump has been impeached a second time in the House for incitement of insurrection in connection with that speech. Whether Trump’s equivocal message to the marchers qualified for this second impeachment will be debated. What is now clear in retrospect however, is that a number of those who came to Washington for the march had been planning on violence for some time. Trump’s talk had little to do with their rioting; they were already planning it before they arrived.    

 

However, Trump knew that a large number of courts had considered, some fairly fully, his and his supporters’ allegations of fraud. They had not found sufficient evidence to move forward. However, instead of moderating his talk to the marchers by just voicing a determination to see these issues legally through, he gave the impression that if only the crowd could, by marching towards Congress and letting their voices be heard, pressure Mr. Pence or Congress to do the “right thing”, he would win. In his own words: “All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

 

In so saying, Trump placed a mountain of his own hopes and those of his supporters, on a very thin reed with likely catastrophic constitutional and political consequences. In so doing, he also set up his supporters at the march and across the country, for a wholly expectable disappointment. Trump traduced their support in the service of his own inability to accept a loss he didn’t think possible or warranted and for which there could be no other explanation, in his mind, than fraud.

 

The question is why did Trump’s judgment and political skill collapse. 

 

Trump had managed to withstand withering 24/7 attacks and efforts at sabotaging his presidency from all quarters, inside and outside his administration and from almost every major American cultural and political institution, even before he entered office. Yet he still made substantial progress on the policies, agree with them or not, that animated his presidency. A number of Trump’s judgments made during his presidency were certainly questionable, but they were also frequently understandable and, unlike his post-election judgments, were not overtly and obviously catastrophically self-sabotaging. 

 

For Trump critics, the answer is clear. Trump is a narcissist, who only cares about himself and was willing to countenance untested and highly debatable constitutional means to stay in power. This all-purpose narcissistic narrative point for every Trump criticism fails to take into account any other evidence. For example, from early into and throughout his presidency, Trump wanted to do a good job for the country and be recognized for doing it if he were successful:

“I am awed by the job, as anybody would be, but I honestly, Tom [Friedman], I feel so comfortable and you know it would be, to me, a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two years and say — and have a lot of the folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job.’ And I don’t mean just a conservative job, ’cause I’m not talking conservative. I mean just, we’ve done a good job.”

 

It doesn’t take into account his wanting to protect the country from China’s one-sided trade policies, getting Europeans to help pay from their own defense, trying to bring new accords to old conflicts in the Middle East, and a number of other Trump policy initiatives.

 

No, narcissism-- that all- purpose answer for Trump critics doesn’t work. What then does? One clue is found in Trump’s life-long experience of being told no--by his father on his move to Manhattan, by others when he wanted to develop Manhattan real-estate, when he lost and then regained a fortune, when he made a successful career out of branding and being a T.V celebrity, and finally politically, as president. Trump’s life-long-experience of always having overcome adversity through prodigious effort led him to do the same when he lost the election.

 

Trump truly believed that he won the election. That conviction was most likely fueled by his belief that Biden was not as formidable a candidate as Hillary Clinton on many grounds. After the election, Trump was faced with a dramatic choice: accept the result or fight on. 

 

Based on a life-time of experience he fought on. However, while doing so, he became increasingly disconnected from the smart shrewd judgments that had gained him the presidency and the leadership skills that had allowed him to make progress under very adverse circumstances.

 

The great social psychologist Kurt Lewin once noted that the same heat that melts the butter, fries the egg.

Trump’s ability to see outside the box and his psychological capacity to act on what he saw brought him the presidency and the successes he accomplishes. Fight back hard and keep pushing forward was a life -long learned recipe for success, and it worked—until circumstances changed and Trump’s paradigm for success didn’t.   

 

Trump ended his presidency as a victim of his own success.

 

 

 

 

           Shouldn't We Treat Every President Like a Real Person?: 

             Why psychoanalyses of politicians often miss the mark

 

One of the necessary but infrequently enlightening responsibilities of attempting to write a fair-minded, substantive analysis of a controversial president like Donald Trump is that one feels obligated to read and assess the enormous amount of what is presented as analysis but isn’t. It is tedious, frustrating work for one trained in the social sciences and psychoanalysis. There, validating theories with a range of carefully weighed evidence while considering and honestly investigating alternative explanations is at least the gold standard. Simply cherry-picking and interpreting facts to fit one’s beginning premises is the definition of confirmation bias and results in explanatory drivel.

The occasion of these observations is two recent entries in the long line of psychologically framed attacks on Mr. Trump that consist of putting this president on the analytic couch and politically assaulting him with Freud. The first article simply states as a fact: “Trump Is Losing His Mind.” It buttresses its identical starting premises and conclusions with highly speculative and misinformed assertions, presented as fact, from anonymously sourced news stories. 

As evidence, we are told, “The president is discussing martial law in the Oval Office.” Why? As a strategy to nullify the results of the election and stay in office. 

The anonymously sourced reporting of that story was that a White House meeting was held that included Sidney Powell, her client Lt. General Michael T. Flynn, two senior aides (White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows) and a number of other presidential aides filtering in and out of the meeting. The Times story contains no direct quotes. Rather, it links specific characterizations as being based on “one” or “two people,” “who were briefed on the meeting,” though not, importantly, physically present. 

The Times report is wholly taken up with Miss Powell’s suggestion that a special counsel be appointed to look into the election, a suggestion opposed by all of the president’s aides according to the anonymous sources “briefed on the meeting.” The martial law “discussion” is mentioned only once in the whole 1,300-word article. There, it is pointed out that Mr. Flynn in another interview had said, correctly it turns out, only that a president “could” declare martial law and that it “had happened.” The Times then reported, as if it were a fact, “At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea.” No attribution whatsoever was presented for this statement, not from the “one” or “two” sources “briefed on the meeting.” 

Before one concludes that Mr. Trump has lost his mind, as the article states, it is prudent to ask several questions. Did Mr. Trump actually ask that question? Is a question, if asked, the same as a discussion? Is there any indication that Mr. Trump expressed seriousness, or any interest, in following through on his reported but not verified question? Has Mr. Trump publicly encouraged Republicans to vote against accepting the elector’s vote in Congress, as some Democrats did in 2017 against Mr. Trump?  

These and similar questions are not asked, much less answered. It would seem imprudent therefore to use this unexamined anonymously sourced report as the basis for speculations about the president’s mental health.

The second article is slightly more modest, adding a question mark to the question: “Is Trump Cracking Under the Weight of Losing?” Before answering that question, it is again prudent to first ask: What do each of the following people have in common—Mary Trump, Bandy Lee, Barbara Rees, Tony Schwartz, Michael Cohen, Tim O’Brian, Wayne Barnett, Jack O’Donnell, and Dan Gable? Answer: They are almost all, with one exception, long-time anti-Trump activists that answer the articles’ title question with a resounding yes embedded in long quotations. That is a typical standard operating procedure for this author’s long list of anti-Trump psychological “analyses.”

The regret that one has in reading pieces like these, in addition to the frustration of having to repeatedly read the same baseless psychological speculations, is that they continue an unfortunate tradition of politicizing psychological analysis that began with Freud. He infamously, along with his former patient, William Bullitt wrote a universally panned psychoanalysis of President Woodrow Wilson.

Having apparently not learned their lesson, a substantial group of psychiatrists responded to a political tendentious set of questions designed to psychologically smear Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater published in the misnamed ˆFact Magazine. There the matter stood until all scholarly and political restraints were removed in the effort to do the same to Donald Trump.

The reason it’s worth the effort to clarify these issues is that the core of any president’s crucial national and international role is substantially self-defined. Its essence lies in making decisions, and these in turn rely on the choices he sees and/or prefers. Their foundation is his motivation and understanding, both a direct by-product of his adult character and identity. If we want to understand who a president really is, the skills and shortcomings he brings to that position, and the circumstances he confronts while in office, and what he wants or can do about them, there is no escaping a fair, clear examination and exploration of presidential psychology. 

This is not only knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It is knowledge for usefulness’s sake. If it is done right, it allows us all to have a better, more accurate, and therefore more realistic understanding of our country’s circumstances and the president’s. Expectations can then be adjusted. Demands can be moderated. And in so doing, commonalities can be sought rather than divisions exacerbated.  

A good first step going forward would be to treat Mr. Trump, and every president, as a real person, with a mixed package of abilities and limitations like the rest of us, rather than a psychological caricature and political piñata.

References

Warren Boronson.1964.  “What Psychiatrists Say about Goldwater,” FACT, 4:24-64.

Ralph Ginzburg. 1964. “Goldwater: The Man and the Myth,” FACT, 4:2