Donald Trump is a self-help advocate. He always has tried to create his own reality by saying what he wants to be true. Where many see failure, Trump sees only success, and expresses it out loud, again and again.
“We have the votes” to pass a new health care bill, he said even though he and Republicans didn’t then and still don’t.
“We get an A-plus,” he said of his and his administration’s response to the devastating recent hurricanes as others doled out withering reviews.
“I’ve had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month period, that’s ever served,” he said , contradicting objective metrics and repeating his frequent and dubious assertion of unprecedented success throughout the first year of his first term as president.
Wow.
The reality is that Trump is in a rut. His legislative agenda is floundering, mired in the legislative swamp of Congress. His approval ratings are historically low. He’s raging privately while engaging in noisy, internecine squabbles publicly. He’s increasingly isolated from his party, even his own cabinet. And yet his fact-flouting declarations of positivity continue unabated. For Trump, though, these statements are not issues of right or wrong or true or false. They are something much more elemental. They are a direct result of the closest thing the stubborn, ideologically malleable celebrity businessman turned most powerful person on the planet has ever had to a devout religious faith. This is not his distant mother’s flinty Scottish Presbyterianism but Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking,” the utterly American belief in self above all else and the conviction that thoughts can be causative, that basic, repeated assertion can lead to actual achievement.
Trump and his father were Peale acolytes -- the minister officiated at at the first of Donald Trump's weddings -- and Peale’s overarching philosophy has been a guiding light for Trump over the course of his decades of triumphs as well as all manner of crises and chaos. “Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” Peale urged his millions of followers. “Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.” It was a mindset perfectly tailored for an ambitious builder determined to change the skyline of one of the globe’s great cities. Trump, who used this self-confidence to survive a series of seemingly fatal gaffes and controversies to win an election last fall that polls said he couldn’t and wouldn’t, in this respect has been a prize Peale pupil -- arguably the most successful Peale disciple ever.
He weaponized the power of positive thinking.
But now, in the political realm, where the space between spin and truth is parsed constantly -- and with consequences -- it is Trump’s very success that has opened him up to questions that simply didn’t matter as much when he was a television star, or opening golf courses, or licensing his last name to steaks, bottled water or far-flung condominium projects. Is Trump’s relentlessly optimistic insistence on his own version of reality an asset, a sign of admirable grit for a politician desperate to score some legislative victories? Or is it a sort of self-delusion that risks embarrassment, or worse, in the highest-stakes geopolitical arena?
Self-help is a multibillion-dollar business. Airport shelves groan under the weight of how-to and pick-me-up books churned out by writers who all are essentially Peale progeny. The industry is prevalent in American culture to the point that it has spawned its own sub-group of critics who dismiss it as silly at best and dangerous at worst. “Positive thinking” has garnered such social currency that it also has become nothing less than a subject of academic inquiry. And though it certainly was not conceived with this in mind, the science of self-help -- of happiness and well-being, of specific phenomena called “unrealistic optimism” and “positive illusions”-- is now in some respects the study of the way Trump thinks and what it could mean for the country and beyond.
While “...positive illusions may be especially useful when an individual receives negative feedback or is otherwise threatened,” a seminal pyschologist-authrored 1988 UCLA/Southern Methodist study, there were inherent risks and limitations to living in excessive positivity: “For example, a falsely positive sense of accomplishment may lead people to pursue careers and interests for which they are ill-suited.”
People with “unrealistic optimism,” they wrote, “believe that they are more virtuous, more talented and more compassionate than others, and less prone to error.” These folks believe that they can both control events that are really not under their control,” and by doing so that are less likely to experience future negative outcomes. When carried to extremes this manifests as overly flattering comnceptions about themselves that are resistant to negative feedback. Excessive optimism can become problematic and lead to poor strategic planning, disillusionment and disappointment, and risky behaviors.
Sound familiar?
Where precisely the benefits of “unrealistic optimism” and “positive illusions” end and the drawbacks and dangers begin is nearly impossible to identify, researchers told me. There are just too many variables. A person’s web of characteristics. That person’s wider environment. The complexity of a situation. There’s almost no way to know for sure when a line is crossed between helpful self-assurance and disastrous self-delusion.
The world as it is isn’t that predictable.
Donald Trump, after all, is the President.
1. The Flame
Norman Vincent Peale’s cheery, simple tips allowed Trump’s father Fred to alleviate his anxieties and mitigate the effects of his innately awkward, dour disposition. Emboldened, Trump the Elder banked hundreds of millions of dollars building single-family houses and then immense apartment buildings in New York’s outer boroughs. Both men were of a political feather, embraced conservative, right-wing, us-versus-them politics -- an important but often forgotten portion of Peale’s M.O.
A generation down, Donald Trump idolized his father, and because what Fred drilled into his most eager, most ambitious, most like-minded son -- be a killer; be a king; be a winner, not a loser -- is what made that son so receptive to the teachings Peale's bromides. Unlike most of the millions who bought into the Peale vision, Donald was already more than halfway socially and financially "there." The 45th president's childhood was spent in a house with white columns and nine bathrooms and a live-in maid and chauffeur in Jamaica Estates, Queens. Sometimes, when it rained or snowed, he did his paper route from the back of his father’s limousine.
Peale, known as “God’s salesman,” reached the peak of his influence in the heart of Trump’s childhood, preaching in the 1950s to millions of people on Sundays at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan as well as through a syndicated newspaper column, radio and television shows, his Guideposts magazine and a spate of books that were self-help trailblazers -- first and foremost, of course, ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’, his defining work and mega bestseller that came out in 1952. It offered chapters such as “Believe in Yourself,” “Expect the Best and Get It” and “I Don’t Believe in Defeat.” “Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought,” he wrote. “Actually,” Peale once said, “it is an affront to God when you have a low opinion of yourself.”
Peale's attraction to the boy who so wanted to emulate his father did not diminish with time. Even as more traditional theologians derided Peale as more huckster than holy man and intellectuals mocked him as a lightweight, Trump in his 30s remained a staunch Peale adherent.
In 1977, Peale, then nearly 80 years old, officiated Trump’s first wedding. In 1983, shortly after the opening of Trump Tower, Trump credited Peale for instilling in him a can-do ethos. “The mind can overcome any obstacle,” he told the New York Times. “I never think of the negative.” The feeling was mutual. In the Times, Peale called Trump “kindly and courteous” and commented on “a profound streak of honesty and humility” he thought Trump possessed. Trump at the time was newly ascendant, and the influence of Peale coursed through his aspirations and interactions. “If you’re going to be thinking anyway,” he wrote in 1987 in The Art of the Deal, “you might as well think big.”
The early 1990s were a low point in Trump’s life. As his casinos careened toward corporate bankruptcy and he suffocated under billions of dollars of debt -- not to mention the hyperpublic breakup of his marriage to Ivana, the mother of his first three children - -Trump’s credibility and viability as a businessman were in jeopardy. Drawing on Peale, Trump remained unswayed, leaning extra-heavilyy on the principal tenet of the power of positive thinking -- think it, say it, and say it and say it and say it, in an all-out effort to make it so. “It’s all going to work out,” he said to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. Trump, all but dead? “Hotter than ever,” he told New York magazine.
While most people would have been looking for the nearest building to jump off of, Trump just remained relentlessly upbeat all of the time. Aides and executives never suspected that he lost a moment’s sleep.
“Someone asked me if I thought I was a genius,” he wrote in 2009 in 'Think Like a Champion'. “I decided to say yes. Why not? Try it out. Tell yourself that you are a genius.” He practiced this tactic even as the scorecard of his business dealings recorded something other than genius. After three more corporate bankruptcies for his casinos, as well as a variety of other business failures, from Trump Mortgage to Trump University to name-branded condo projects stalled and killed by the Great Recession, Trump kept proclaiming success. “I’ve done an incredible job,” he said in 2013.
It was time to run for president.
2. Embers
Trump does not often share the spotlight, but it seems likely, based on his decades of testimonials, that he might afford Peale at least some credit for the astonishing, highly improbable arc of his life. Trump’s current job is in some ways a confirmation of Peale’s core principles. He visualized. It actualized.
From a scientific perspective, though, Trump is an incomplete experiment. For decades, researchers have attempted to quantify the range of outcomes of positive thinking, looking for objective ways to correlate internal belief and external reality.
Positive thinking can indeed result in motivation. Furthermore, other people at least initially often respond positively to it. If I present myself to you as somebody who’s upbeat and really confident … chances are pretty good that initially you’re going to believe me. You’re going to say, ‘Wow, that person’s really got it together. That person’s really going to go someplace because I feel he (or she) knows where they are going. That’s a huge advantage in life.
Then there’s the but.
However, For most people there comes a point at which, if that’s all they bring to the table, the entire façade breaks down.
The question is where that point is for Trump. He is so clearly not most people.
In fact, it can be argued that nobody, ever, has had more success convincing himself, and others, that he is a success even when he is evidently not -- and thus turning that stated sentiment into actual, tangible, considerable accomplishment. And if he could do that, it seems fair to ask whether gravity or accepted laws of politics apply to him at all. Does the power of gravity even apply to him? Are expectations so lowered that anything would be deemed a success?
Here science hits a ceiling. Researchers do their work in controlled settings to obtain empirical results. America under Trump, meanwhile, is far from a controlled setting. And if it’s difficult to determine the location of that line between self-assurance and self-delusion in the former, it’s impossible in the latter. Scientifically speaking, the Trump presidency is uncharted territory as every possible piece of fact or data that does not correspond with his worldview is dismissed as “fake news.” As advisor Kellyanne Conway articulated, the president has “alternative facts” at his disposal.
This mindset was obvious from day one of his presidency: the fight over the size of the turnout at his Inauguration. He somehow saw a crowd that was larger than it factually was, and said so. This, is neither self-confidence or self-assertion. It simply wasn’t within the normal range of human behaviour. The power of positive thinking needs to be grounded in some foundational degree of realism.
When do delusions become dysfunctional?
And where is that?
“Where the distortions become strong enough that they make one act irrationally, impulsively,” is the general consensus among psychologists.
The primary challenge in Norman Vincent Peale’s version of positive thinking, is that one can’t easily know when one’s crossed the line -- because if one's accepting that as a philosophy, any negative thoughts are being already excluded. And one of the ways in which Trump is so extreme is the extent to which he does that for himself. So he’s at the center of this positive world, and anything negative that impinges on it is evil, bad and forbidden.
Someone like him doesn’t see the line if and when it arrives.
And he just might drag the rest of us over it with him.