Young Man Trump: Or the Portrait of a President as a Young Man

Effective presidencies are all alike; ineffective presidencies are ineffective in their own ways. Recounting and explaining why the Trump presidency is ineffective has become a cottage industry.  Two recent books, John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened and Mary Trump’s  Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man  are the latest of a collection of expose books on Donald Trump that describe a dysfunctional presidency and why. While Bolton describes the ways the Trump presidency is ineffective dysfunctional, Mary Trump offers the reader a psychological portrait of a president as a young person, locating the roots of a troubled presidency in a troubled upbringing where the worst of Donald Trump’s behavior which is presently reinforced by his staff was originally imprinted upon him by his family, and especially his complicated relationship with his father

            Biographies of effective presidents tell the same story.  James MacGregor Burns, perhaps the best scholar on presidents ever tells in Leadership that the mark of all great leaders is a set of skills that include selflessness, an ethical vision, and an understanding of needs and beliefs of their followers.  Simply put:  Leaders put themselves second, the people they serve first, and they exercise power guided by principle.  Others, such as Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power, locate the core of presidential authority in the power to persuade, with a cluster of similar factors determining effectiveness and greatness in a presidency.  Stephen Skowronek echoes  much of what Burns and Neustadt argue, while also emphasizing historical context  as key to what makes for a great president.  The lessons of history tell us what matters in determining what are the attributes and traits of an effective presidency.

            Yet while effective presidencies share common traits, as Leo Tolstoy nicely stated in Anna Karenina’s opening line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Among the worst presidents, James Buchannan, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon there was a unique Hamlet like fatal flaw that doomed them, with the source of their problems located in their personalities and characters.  Erik Erickson’s Young Man Luther was the first in a line of powerful psychobiographies that located adult behavior and struggles in family upbringing  and lessons learned as adolescents.  James David Barber’s Presidential Character applies psychobiography to the study of upbringing to explain presidential behavior.  All presidents have the same constitutional powers, yet some perform better than others and we can locate in family upbringing the source of  why some do what they do and whether they learn the skills needed to be good leaders.

            This is potentially why Mary Trump’s book is so interesting.  She is the president’s niece but she is also a Ph.D. in psychology.   Her book is part psychoanalysis, biography, and yes even self-revelatory.  There is no question she has issues with her uncle and she is part of the larger dysfunctional family she describes in her book.  Her uncle is not her patient and therefore American Psychological Association ethics rules preclude her from offering a diagnosis of him and, even if she did, it would be colored by the conflicts of interest of being related to him.  Yet nonetheless her book offers a psychological and biographical context for understanding the Trump presidency.

            John Bolton is  not the first to tell us that Donald Trump is a self-absorbed narcissist. Trump does not read his intelligence briefings, he makes hasty emotional judgments, ignores advice, and simply is lazy and disinclined to accept advice, criticism, or lean anything about what his job entails.  Had he any work ethic his presidency would have lived up to what his supporters wished and his distractors feared.    Bolton’s book offers no new accounts of the problems within the Trump presidency.

            Mary Trump tells us why.  Reading her book,  we learn two major points.  One,  as quoted numerous times in this essay, Leo Tolstoy’s comment about unhappy families is true—they are unhappy in unique ways. The Trump family into which Donald was born was  unhappy and dysfunctional.  It was a family with an overbearing father Fred who coddled Donald.  It was Donald who learned quickly how to play off people’s weaknesses, how to self-promote and self-indulge, and  lie to achieve what he wanted.  His family reinforced this.  As did first the New York City social and financial circles.  Then  the national media, then the cult he created with the Apprentice.  The message of her book is that father son and sibling rivalries  of Donald Trump’s youth produced the person he is today.  Trump is narcissistic and insecure because of his family.  Had Mary Trump been a Freudian, she could have located Donald’s neurosis in some masculine  competition and insecurity regarding penis size, as evidenced by his famous 2016 debate statement  about his private parts and his need to conquer women.    Stormy Daniels’ calling Donald Trump “tiny” was the comment that most got the president’s goat in the last four years.

            The other major point we learn about Donald Trump is inspired by a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Rich Boy where he said “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”    To which the critic Mary Colum said yes, they are different, “they have more money.”  Mary Trump’s book describes a family of privilege.  Donald, or rather his father Fred, buys his way into schools by hiring exam takers.  He buys his way out of the draft with questionable bone spurs. His father buys chips to buoy Donald’s sinking casinos.  Trump uses money—rarely his own—to buy access, image, and anything else he wants.  Combine a dysfunctional family with economic privilege and what do you get?  As Mary Trump stated in a recent interview, the dysfunctionalism of the Trump presidency is an  outgrowth of the same in the Trump family.   

What Bolton and others describe in the White House is  explained by  Mary Trump’s book.  Donald Trump is James Joyce’s  Stephen Dedalus  or J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield gone malignant  and elected to the presidency.

 

The Lessons of the Health Care Repeal Failure: It Sucks being an Adult

Scores of lessons are to be had from the failure of Trump and the Republicans to repeal the
Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare).  One of the most important is that governance is hard, or that it really does suck when you are in charge and have to be an adult.  This is the alternative reality that both Trump and the Republicans live in, and it is not clear they have learned anything from their mistakes...and it is also not clear that the Democrats have either.
Obamacare is flawed and it needs to be fixed.  It failed to do much when it came to the overall cost curve facing health care in the US (as a percentage of the GDP) and it created premium problems for those who made too much to qualify for subsidies but who were not employed or rich enough to afford to buy their own insurance.  Many of these individuals were Trump supporters–the individuals left behind by the changes in the American economy over the last generation and which neither political party helped.
However, the Republican goal in repealing Obamacare was never about fixing it.  The same was truth with Trump.  If there was one defining or uniting goal of the Republicans in the 50+ times they voted to repeal the ACA when they knew Obama would veto it, it was that they wanted to obliterate the president’s signature accomplishment simply to deny him a political success.  The same is true for Trump.  It was never about the flaws in the ACA, having a better plan, or even something as noble or principled as ideological belief in free markets and less government, it was simply to play politics, mobilize a hostile Republican base, and simply negate Obama’s legacy.  In Trump’s first six months as president, the few accomplishments he has had have all been aimed at erasing the Obama legacy.  Cancelling the Trans Pacific Partnership, railing against the Iran Nuclear Deal, banning transgender from the military, and arguing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not extend to sexual orientation, all had that singular focus.  There was no alternative theory, policy agenda, or grand plan regarding what to do.  The narrative was entirely negative.  All this works, perhaps, when in opposition, but not as a prescription for governance.
Many will point to the divisions between moderate and conservatives within the Republican Party as the reason why the ACA repeal failed.  There is some truth to that.  But in general, the GOP and Trump lack a governing agenda and vision for what they wish to accomplish.  In addition, there is a lack of leadership from Trump down to McConnell and Ryan.   Real leadership, as presidential  historian James MacGregor Burns defines it, is authority guided by principle.  Neither Trump nor  GOP leadership  displays that.  This leadership is about respecting the Constitution, its procedures and rules, it is about understanding checks and balances and separation of powers.  None of this is understood, especially by Trump.  He still thinks he is a CEO and not the president.  His first six months in office  demonstrate a startling ignorance of what it means to govern and there is no indication that he has learned any lessons from his failures.  He thinks, as in the case of a tweet saying transgender are barred from the military–that such pronouncements are governance and binding as law or policy.
The failure to repeal the ACA is a crisis of leadership in many ways.  It was Trump who never had a vision for what he wanted thinking that the art of the deal was s imply threatening and blustering others around.   He never understood how to negotiate.  Moreover, when push came to shove, his misogynist statements about women and saying prisoners of war were not real heroes perhaps came back to hurt him when Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain voted no.  They had good reasons to oppose the ACA repeal bills, but how much was payback we shall never know.  But for the other Republicans who voted against the repeal, they were among the few adults in the Party who saw the consequences of what the bill would do.  However, for the 49 Senate Republicans who voted for repeal, they still failed to appreciate or care about how what they did would hurt not just Americans in general, but their own constituents.
The infighting in the Trump presidency is further proof of a lack of leadership.  Lacking leadership, everyone is going in their own direction and for their own interests.  No one seems to have loyalty to anyone, and that includes Trump.  The lesson if at all Trump learns from his failures is that others are to blame and that the Apprentice solution–“You’re fired”–is the solution.  Alea  iacta est–the die is cast on this administration and there is no sense that things will get any better.  No one seems to be growing up, taking responsibility, acting like an adult because, frankly, that sucks for this administration.
But the Democrats should not be so gleeful.  They seem in the Trump and GOP failures a 2018 success, but that approach of thinking Republican ineptness as the road to power is what cost them their leadership.  Faintly the Democrats realize that, trotting out a meaningless promise of a “Better Deal,” a narrative devoid of real substance and policy.  Democrats yet again seem to think that being “Republican Lite” is their salvation, instead of their problem.
The lessons of the ACA repeal failure demonstrate that it is hard being in charge.  Governance and leadership ask people to be adults who care about others, who care about the country, and who are capable of looking beyond simple personal self-interest and partisan advantage.  Right now, it is not clear that there are many elected officials in Washington who gets that.

Trump's America--A Not So Shining City on the Hill

Barely two weeks into the Trump presidency and the United States is already less great and weaker
than it was before he took office.  The reason for that is Trump’s failure to grasp the essence of leadership and the unique role that the United States has a moral exemplar among nations of the world.
MBA and other graduate programs are littered with leadership classes.  A ton of ink has been spilled seeking to describe the essence of leadership, especially for the presidency.  But James MacGregor Burns’ 1978 Leadership is still the single best book that joins these topics.  In it Burns distinguishes between two types of leadership–transactional and transformational.  Transactional  is the quid pro quo of cutting deals, the ordinary game of bargaining, but real leadership is transformational.  A transformational leader literally transforms institutions or the world, forging new ways to look and organize the world.  Presidents such as George Washington, Abraham  Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan were transformative.
But to be a transformative leader sometime special is required–moral authority. Transforming leadership happens when "one or more persons engage with each other in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality."  Burns once stated succinctly that real transformative leadership is authority guided by moral principle. Authoritarians exert mere power or brute force, but real leadership has a moral dimension capable of transforming and moving people in ways that mere transactional bargaining cannot.
For the most successful of US presidents, the concept of moral leadership is enhanced by the country’s special status in the world.  Maybe it goes back to the concept of American exceptionalism rooted in Puritan John Winthrop’s 1630 speech “A Model of Christian Charity” he gave on the ship Arbella before it docked in Massachusetts colony where he described this new place as a “shining city upon the hill.”  For many coming to America we were as Abraham Lincoln as others declared, the “last great hope” on Earth to found a just and ethical country. Part of what makes the United States great is it moral leadership–the defender of human rights, democracy, and its willing to play fair for the right causes and reasons.  This country’s strength was not simply the hard power of bombs and bullets, but as Paul Kennedy said, it also included our soft power of moral leadership and authority in the world that makes it possible to criticize dictators and despots.  The power to persuade includes a moral position.
None of this is something that Trump understands.  First his concept of leadership is narrow and transactional.  Trump’s entire Art of the Deal is an ode to quid pro quo bargaining in its thinnest sense.  Good negotiators tell you that real bargaining is not zero sum, it leaves both sides feeling good because both are winners.  The Art of the Deal is about how Trump took advantage of others for selfish or personal reasons, not to enhance the position of both sides.  But even if the Art of the Deal was more, it still describes a world of transactions and not transformation.  Trump’s concept of leadership is woefully thin and confined to this narrow notion of quid pro quo.  It is about the US getting better one-on-one deals with other countries that puts American first.  It is hardly a form of leadership that rebuilds or builds structures and institutions in ways to help the country.
But Trump also misunderstands the importance of American exceptionalism and the gravity it exercises in the world.  America’s real authority–which includes its soft power–rests upon its moral status in the world.  If we respect individual rights at home, support freedom of the press, and  obey rule of law, it makes it easier to criticize authoritarians and regimes around the world that fail to do that.  Trump simply does not understand that.  Eschewing respect for the press, his Muslim travel ban, or in his recent prayer breakfast speech declaring only “citizens can practice their beliefs without fear of hostility or a fear of violence,” Trump undermines not only domestically the values that are important to American democracy but he vastly weakens the moral position of the United States and his presidency in the world.