The Further Adventures of Episodic Man

While an abortive apparent second assassination attempt on Trump, along with Vance and Trump’s admitted lies regarding the immigrant community in Springfield, OH may have dominated the recent media narrative, in the immediate aftermath of the Trump/Harris presidential debate the focus was on Trump’s thrashing by Vice President Kamala Harris. Two items in particular stood out: clear evidence of Trump’s cognitive decline, and Harris’s ability to draw Trump into defending his stature, prowess, the size of his crowds, and other comparisons related to stature and winning.

In his debate postmortem the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Carrington Clarke highlights Harris “needl[ing]” Trump about his “crowd numbers and the size of his inheritance. She said military leaders had called him a ‘disgrace’ and world leaders were laughing at him.” Trump took the bait, squandering time he could have used promoting his candidacy to the 67 million debate viewers to respond instead to Harris’s size-related barbs.

About the rallies, after stating without evidence that Harris and Walz “bus in” their attendees, Trump crowed “... We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics…,” then sequeing to the unsubstantiated claim that immigrants in Springfield, OH were eating residents’ pets.

Harris brought up Trump’s inherited financial status in a discussion of the economy and values, and in particular home ownership, saying “not everybody got handed $400 million on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times….” Trump denied that he received $400 million from his family, claiming that he received “... a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and I built it into many, many billions of dollars.” (In 2018 the NY Times estimated the current value of funds Trump received from the family business at more than $400 million.)

Harris reported that foreign leaders “are laughing at Donald Trump,” that military leaders, some of whom had worked with Trump said he was a “disgrace,” and that former senior members of his administration found him unfit for office. “I fired them,” Trump responded, in something of a non sequitur. And apparently failing to appreciate the difference between a “strong man” and a “strongman,” Trump noted that Hungary’s Viktor Orban had said that the world needs “Trump back as president.”

Clarke observes that, after eight years the Democrats appear to have “Trump’s measure, at least in terms of how to debate him. Get him on the defensive. Needle him and he’ll become distracted and lash out.” He cites Trump’s Art of the Deal, (ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz), in which Trump discussed his combative instincts. A section of Chapter 2, “The Elements of the Deal,” is titled “Fight Back.”

Much as it pays to emphasize the positive, there are times when the only choice is confrontation. I’m very easy to get along with. I’m good to people who are good to me. But when people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude all my life has been to fight back very hard.

In the later chapter “Wynn-Fall - The Battle for Hilton” that chronicles Trump’s purchase of the Hilton company’s Atlantic City, NJ property, he contrasts his imagined behavior to that of Barron Hilton, head of the Hilton company at the time, whose decision to sell the property rather than resist regulatory and financial pressures Trump contrasted to his own behavior:

I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky.

Northwestern University’s Dan P. McAdams, a leading researcher in the field of “narrative psychology,” wrote an article for The Atlantic in June 2016 titled “The Mind of Donald Trump,” in which he locates Trump’s personality in the widely used “Big Five” taxonomy:

• Extroversion: gregariousness, social dominance, enthusiasm, reward-seeking behavior
• Neuroticism: anxiety, emotional instability, depressive tendencies, negative emotions
• Conscientiousness: industriousness, discipline, rule abidance, organization
• Agreeableness: warmth, care for others, altruism, compassion, modesty
• Openness: curiosity, unconventionality, imagination, receptivity to new ideas

As one might expect, “...[m]ost people score near the middle on any given dimension, but some score toward one pole or another.”

Research decisively shows that higher scores on extroversion are associated with greater happiness and broader social connections, higher scores on conscientiousness predict greater success in school and at work, and higher scores on agreeableness are associated with deeper relationships. By contrast, higher scores on neuroticism are always bad, having proved to be a risk factor for unhappiness, dysfunctional relationships, and mental-health problems.

An individual’s Big Five traits score is “pretty stable across a person’s lifetime,” McAdams writes.

In December 2000 Steven J. Rubenzer, Thomas R. Faschingbauer, and others published an assessment of US presidents on the five personality traits. The study was published as a book in 2004, including analyses of 30 former presidents.

While he was not included in Rubenzer and Faschingbauer’s study, McAdams own assessment of Trump on the Big Five traits finds “profile that you would not expect of a U.S. president: sky-high extroversion combined with off-the-chart low agreeableness.” “As social actors our performances are out there for everyone to see,” McAdams notes.

Extroverts, McAdams continues, “are driven to pursue positive emotional experiences, whether they come in the form of social approval, fame, or wealth. Indeed, it is the pursuit itself, more so even than the actual attainment of the goal, that extroverts find so gratifying.” This aligns with Trump’s comment in a 1987 interview with Barbara Walters that he’d rather run for office than be appointed. “It’s the hunt that I believe I love,” he said.

Rubenzer and Faschingbauer’s study awarded Richard Nixon the lowest “agreeableness” score of the 30 presidents measured, but McAdams declares him “sweetness and light compared with [Trump] who once sent The New York Times’ Gail Collins a copy of her own column with her photo circled and the words ‘The Face of a Dog!’ scrawled on it.” McAdams highlights Trump’s boasting and encouragement of physical violence, including bragging that he “knocked the shit out of” Cher, and urging attendees at his rallies to engage in physical violence with protesters.

McAdams suggests that “anger may be the operative emotion behind Trump’s high extroversion as well as his low agreeableness.” Evidence of angry outbursts extend back to his childhood. For example, by his own account he once punched his second-grade music teacher in the eye.

Section III of McAdams’ Atlantic portrait, focusing on motivation, reviews the role of narcissism in Trump’s psychic makeup – something WriteToLeft has previously explored in detail.

But it’s in Section IV, examining Trump’s motivation, that McAdams' profile links up with Clarke’s observations of the presidential debate, and Harris’s rhetorical jujitsu. McAdams references a 1981 People magazine interview in which Trump is quoted as saying:

Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.

This, McAdams suggests, identifies Trump with the pattern of behavior psychologist Carl Jung labeled the warrior archetype. In his signature work on male psychology, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, Jungian analyst Robert L. Moore details typical psychological patterns found in male children, and how they evolve (or not) as the child becomes a man.

Among the several archetypes that appear in the psyche of a boy, Moore declares the Hero to be “the archetype that characterizes the best in the adolescent stage of development.” It is the Hero archetype that can develop into the Warrior. What Moore terms “the evolutionary adaptation” served by the behavioral attributes that have been summarized as The Hero are things like establishing the young man’s independence from the shelter of mother and family, and to “begin to assert himself and define himself” as an individual.

Moore schematizes archetypes in triangular or pyramidical structures, with the integrated archetype at the peak, and two incomplete (pathological, or in Jungian parlance “Shadow”) manifestations in each corner of the base. For The Hero, one corner is The Coward. The Coward may walk away from a fight, claiming it is more “manly” not to engage. He “will easily acquiesce to pressure from others; he will feel invaded and run-over like a doormat.” But if and when he reaches the limit of his tolerance for being pushed around, the other pole of the archetypal triad “erupts,” and what Moore terms The Grandstander Bully bursts on the scene.

Of the Grandstander Bully Moore writes:

The boy (or man) under the power of the Bully intends to impress others. His strategies are designed to proclaim his superiority and his right to dominate those around him. He claims center stage as his birthright. If ever his claims to special status are challenged, watch the ensuing rageful displays! He will assault those who question what they “smell” as his inflation with vicious verbal and often physical abuse. These attacks against others are aimed at staving off recognition of his underlying cowardice and deep insecurity.

As noted above, in Moore’s schema of boy-to-man development, the Warrior is the archetype that emerges from the boyhood Hero. Moore acknowledges the contemporary discomfort with the Warrior archetype, which he attributes to the prevalence of warfare and violence, although strenuous efforts to “cut off masculine aggressiveness” may in the end “fall under the power of this archetype.”

What Moore calls the Warrior archetype “in his fullness,” is what is embodied, for example, in the do or way of life of a samurai. The key attribute is aggressiveness, which, in a positive context, resists defensiveness and stagnation, and moves the Warrior forward in life. But it is tempered with “mindfulness,” which cultivates the clarity of thinking needed to develop strategy and tactics. In this process the Warrior archetype needs the influence of other archetypes: the King to guide decisions in a creative direction, protective of the “realm;” the Lover, to modify the Warrior instincts with cultural aspects: art, philosophy, poetry. “When, however, the Warrior is operating on his own, unrelated to these other archetypes” Moore writes, “the results … can be disastrous.” In the absence of the moderating influence of other archetypes (behavior patterns), a person embodying the Warrior will have trouble relating to other people, including partners (potential or actual), family, etc. Among the challenges for the Warrior, Moore writes, “[w]omen are not for relating to, for being intimate with.”

This “detachment from human relationships” becomes “enormously hurtful and destructive to a man when he is caught in the Warrior’s bipolar Shadow.” Moore labels the two poles at the base of the Warrior pyramid unambiguously the Sadist and the Masochist.

Regarding the Sadist, Moore distinguishes two kinds of cruelty: cruelty without passion, and cruelty with passion. As an example of the first he cites a practice in training SS troops in which trainees first cared for growing puppies, feeding them, playing with them, tending to their ills. Then at an arbitrary point in time the men were ordered to kill the puppies without any expression of emotion. Moore notes that the technique must have been effective, as trainees who succeeded went on to staff the concentration camps, “torturing and murdering millions of human beings while still thinking of themselves as ‘good fellows’.”

Moore cites the vengeful and wrathful Old Testament God as a cultural example of cruelty with passion, for instance calling down the great flood, “killing off nearly every living thing.” This incarnation of the Warrior, says Moore, can be found in military combat and other stressful situations. It goes hand in hand with a hatred of the “weak,” which Moore sees as based in self-hatred of the bipolar Warrior’s other pole, the Masochist. Moreover, Moore suggests, the Sadistic Warrior’s cruelty is directly related to the “adolescent insecurity, violent emotionalism, and desperation” of the Hero (juvenile) archetype trying to separate from what he sees as “the overwhelming power of the feminine.”

The man under the influence of the Shadow Warrior’s bipolarity, unsure of his phallic power, is still battling against what he experiences as the inordinately powerful feminine, and against everything supposedly “soft” and relational.

The Masochist – “the passive pole of the Warrior’s shadow” – “projects Warrior energy on to others and causes a man to experience himself as powerless.” The Masochist can’t tolerate the discomfort needed to pursue “any worthwhile goal.”  A politician with these personality traits will avoid direct confrontation over issues or “public concerns.”

In mapping Trump’s behavior to the Warrior archetype, McAdams suggests that even Trump’s pursuit of money is less about the money itself than it is about winning. Whether making deals in Manhattan or battling ISIS militants, or conducting trade with the Chinese, Trump’s nuance-free position is “We have to beat them.” McAdams cites the work of University of Michigan psychologist David Winter who found that presidents who used a greater measure of aggressive language in their speeches were more likely than those who didn’t to lead the country into war. In that context, McAdams warns, Trump’s aggressive language could lead to armed conflict abroad, or “incite nationalistic anger among Trump’s supporters.” Writing in June 2016, McAdams’ words were certainly acted out by the Trumpian mob of January 6, 2021.

In the debate with Harris, Trump’s incarnation of the various aspects of the Warrior archetype and its adolescent precursors did not serve him well. As The Guardian’s Moira Donegan wrote, he “spent much of the night arguing on the turf his opponent chose for him.”

There was no bait she offered him that he didn’t take. He kept relitigating his past remarks, exploring grievances against former enemies living and dead, claiming to have been wronged by vast forces beyond public accounting, and indulging in references to elaborate conspiracies about his own righteousness and the nefariousness of his enemies.

Donegan notes that Harris attacked Trump “where it hurt: his manhood,” particularly in her comments about American military leaders calling him a “disgrace,” criticizing his affection for “strongmen” around the world as “childlike fandom.” A psychologist friend of Donegan’s labeled Harris’s systematic dismantling of Trump’s defenses as “symbolic castration.” Trump’s disjointed, ranting responses validated Harris’s characterizations of him as “thin-skinned and weak.”

Unable to resist his urges to defend his Warrior image of himself, Trump seemingly abandoned any through-line of coherent narrative that he or his handlers might have wanted him to communicate in the debate. The behavior resonated with another of McAdams’ characterizations of Trump’s personality as abnormal.

McAdams is associated with a three-level model of personality. The first parallels the Big Five set of personality traits discussed above; the second, “personal concerns,” includes items “contextualized in time or place,” such as skills, goals, etc.; the third, with which McAdams is particularly identified, is “narrative identity.”

“Narrative identity is the internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense and meaning out of his or her life,” McAdams wrote in Chapter 5 of the Handbook of Identity Theory and Research. He describes the story as a “selective reconstruction” of the individual’s past, and a “narrative anticipation” of their imagined future. Narrative identities typically begin to emerge, McAdams writes, in late-adolescence/young adulthood, but the story continues to develop over the balance of the individual’s life.

In his 2016 article for The Atlantic McAdams hinted at something that a few years later he would expand into a full book: Trump’s narrative seemed “thematically underdeveloped,” especially compared to previous presidents or to his fellow candidates in the 2016 election. McAdams mentions briefly Marco Rubio’s story of his rise from modest economic means as the child of Cuban immigrants; Ted Cruz’s “Horatio Alger” story, grounded in a “conservative vision for America”; Hillary Clinton’s journey from “Goldwater girl” to secretary of state; Bernie Sanders’ personal history in progressive politics dating back to the 60s. Each of these candidates’ stories communicated to the electorate something about what they would be “fighting for.”

By contrast, in Trump’s story McAdams found “little more than narcissistic motivations and a complementary narrative about winning at any costs.” Two years later he embarked on a project to expand his observations concerning the lacunae in Trump’s personal narrative into a book (The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning published in 2020). In the book’s prologue McAdams quotes a handful of people who had attempted to describe Trump – reporters, authors, people who worked with or for Trump, and so on. “Everything about Mr. Trump is strange,” said Tony Senecal, Trump’s personal butler for 30 years. Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter for Trump’s The Art of the Deal observed in 2016 that “There is no private Trump,” and noted that Trump remembered “almost nothing from his childhood.” New Yorker staff writer Mark Singer, wrote a profile of Trump in 1997 that he turned into the book Trump and Me, published in 2016. In the book Singer reports trying to probe Trump’s sense of himself, in one instance asking Trump about his time to himself in the morning before leaving for the office.

…[Y]ou’re in the bathroom shaving, and you see yourself in the mirror. What are you thinking?

From Trump a look of incomprehension.

Me: I mean are you looking at yourself and thinking ‘Wow, I’m Donald Trump’

Trump remains puzzled.

Donald Trump, McAdams concludes “does not see himself as a person.” “With the exception of people suffering from serious mental illnesses,” McAdams writes, “nearly all human beings” are expected to create “internal life stories” that locate their lives in time – their “narrative identity.” But even after three years of research, McAdams concluded that “Trump has no narrative identity at all.” “... [H]e lives in the exuberantly combative moment, fighting like a boxer to win the round, fighting furiously as if it were the last round he will ever fight.” (See discussion of Warrior above.) It was this aspect of his personality, as well, that Kamala Harris was able to take advantage of in the presidential debate, challenging Trump’s image of himself in ways that he was internally compelled to respond to, despite the behavior working to his detriment in the larger context. As Harris herself alluded to, this behavior pattern is something that could easily be exploited by foreign leaders – especially, perhaps, someone like Vladimir Putin who is a trained counterintelligence officer.

In a disturbingly non-figurative way, Trump sees himself as a superhero. In an article for Europe’s Journal of Psychology, McAdams presents key findings reported in his book¹:

Trump talks about himself constantly, but never in narrative terms. Instead, he brags about achievements or proclaims his greatness. He attributes wonderful traits to himself—strength, courage, intelligence, power. He is a winner. He has never lost. He has never made a mistake. But for all his talk, Trump never delves beneath the surface; he rarely goes back in time; and he rarely projects very far into the future. He is not introspective; he is not retrospective; and he is not prospective. Unlike any president in modern times, he has virtually no sense of history, and he absolutely never talks about things like “posterity” or “legacy” or how “future generations” will look back upon the America of today….

Even if every sentence that comes out of his mouth is a falsehood, he is telling it the way it is right now, in the moment, what he believes he needs to say in order to win the moment. It is shameless. It is primal. Unexpurgated, unmediated, completely divorced from doubt or reason or the need to be consistent and truthful in the long run, Trump erupts with what currently captures his consciousness, the unfiltered expression of his wholehearted embrace of the moment. Like an impulsive, angry child. Or a wild beast.

He is the episodic man living (and fighting) for the moment.

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 ¹The following paragraphs have been slightly reordered from the original.