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| The Next US President ? |
In 2006 Donald Trump made plans to purchase the Menie
Estate, near Aberdeen, Scotland, aiming to convert the dunes and
grassland into a luxury golf resort.
He and the estate’s owner, Tom
Griffin, sat down to discuss the transaction at the Cock & Bull
restaurant. Griffin recalls that Trump was a hard-nosed negotiator,
reluctant to give in on even the tiniest details.
But, as Michael
D’Antonio writes in his recent biography of Trump,
Never Enough,
Griffin’s most vivid recollection of the evening pertains to the
theatrics. It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table
were an actor playing a part on the London stage.
“It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it.
The same feeling perplexed Mark Singer in the late 1990s when he was working on a profile of Trump for
The New Yorker.
Singer wondered what went through his mind when he was not playing the
public role of Donald Trump. What are you thinking about, Singer asked
him, when you are shaving in front of the mirror in the morning? Trump,
Singer writes, appeared baffled. Hoping to uncover the man behind the
actor’s mask, Singer tried a different tack: “O.K., I guess I’m asking, do you consider yourself ideal company?”
“You really want to know what I consider ideal company?,” Trump replied. “A total piece of ass.”
I might have phrased Singer’s question this way:
Who are you, Mr. Trump, when you are alone?
Singer never got an answer, leaving him to conclude that the
real-estate mogul who would become a reality-TV star and, after that, a
leading candidate for president of the United States had managed to
achieve something remarkable: “an existence unmolested by the rumbling
of a soul.”
Is Singer’s assessment too harsh? Perhaps it is, in at least one
sense. As brainy social animals, human beings evolved to be consummate
actors whose survival and ability to reproduce depend on the quality of
our performances. We enter the world prepared to perform roles and
manage the impressions of others, with the ultimate evolutionary aim of
getting along and getting ahead in the social groups that define who we
are.
More than even Ronald Reagan, Trump seems supremely cognizant
of the fact that he is always acting. He moves through life like a man
who knows he is always being observed. If all human beings are, by their
very nature, social actors, then Donald Trump seems to be more
so—superhuman, in this one primal sense.
Many questions have
arisen about Trump during this campaign season—about his platform, his
knowledge of issues, his inflammatory language, his level of comfort
with political violence. This article touches on some of that. But its
central aim is to create a psychological portrait of the man. Who is he,
really? How does his mind work? How might he go about making decisions
in office, were he to become president? And what does all that suggest
about the sort of president he’d be?
Trump’s personality is certainly extreme by any standard, and
particularly rare for a presidential candidate; many people who
encounter the man—in negotiations or in interviews or on a debate stage
or watching that debate on television—seem to find him flummoxing. In
this essay, I will seek to uncover the key dispositions, cognitive
styles, motivations, and self-conceptions that together comprise his
unique psychological makeup.
Trump declined to be interviewed for this
story, but his life history has been well documented in his own books
and speeches, in biographical sources, and in the press. My aim is to
develop a dispassionate and analytical perspective on Trump, drawing
upon some of the most important ideas and research findings in
psychological science today.
Read the full report : A Psychologist Analyzes Donald Trump’s Personality - The Atlan
