Why Trump can’t change, no matter what the consequences are
Personal growth is about seeing more. The president is too self-absorbed for that.
Tony Schwartz Washington Post
In April 2016, on the verge of
securing the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump announced that his “campaign is evolving
and transitioning, and so am I.” At a rally around the same time, he told supporters that “at some point, I’m
going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored,” but “I just
don’t know that I wanted to do it quite yet.”
When Trump was elected, some critics
held out hope that he would grow in office, as other presidents have. No one
believes that’s possible anymore. After Mick Mulvaney took over as Trump’s
third chief of staff last December, he let it be known that his approach would
be to “let Trump be Trump.” Mulvaney was simply succumbing to reality. As Trump
himself has said, he is essentially the same person today that he was at age 7.
He has his story, and he’s sticking to it.
Growth and development are about
seeing more. The wider, deeper and longer our perspective, the more variables
we can consider — and the more capable we become. Likewise, the more
responsibility we take for our behaviors, and the less we blame others for our
shortcomings, the more power we have to influence our destiny.
None of this is possible for Trump.
I got to know Trump three decades
ago when he hired me to write “The Art of the Deal.”
Although the book became a bestseller, working with him was deeply dispiriting, given his almost complete
self-absorption, the shortness of his attention span and the fact that he lied
as a matter of course, without apparent guilt.
After that, I tried to steer my life
in a direction as far from Trump as possible, and the next book I wrote was
titled “What Really Matters: Searching
for Wisdom in America,” an exploration of people who had
found success and satisfaction in ways vastly different than Trump’s focus on
wealth, power and fame. In 2003, I founded the Energy
Project to help leaders and their employees pursue healthier,
happier, more productive and more meaningful lives. We’ve helped organizations ranging
from Google and Pfizer to Save the Children and the Los Angeles Police
Department.
As part of our work, we
encourage clients to ask themselves two key questions in every challenging
situation: “What am I not seeing here?” and “What’s my responsibility in this?”
These questions emerged from studying developmental psychology. Jean Piaget’s
theory of cognitive development describes four increasingly complex stages of
thinking that we move through in childhood. As we grow up and become less self-centered,
our perspective gets progressively bigger and more complex. Thinkers such
as Robert Kegan, William Torbert and Susanne Cook-Greuter
have described the potential for further growth as adults. Cook-Greuter’s framework, for example, refers
to “nine stages of increasing embrace,” characterized both by deeper and deeper
self-awareness and the capacity to take into account a wider world.
Those theories teach us that
humility enables learning and growth — but Trump confuses humility with
humiliation and defaults instead to hubris and grandiosity. “I alone can fix
it,” he told us when he was nominated for president. On multiple
occasions since, describing virtually any subject, he has begun with
“Nobody knows more about ____ than I do.”
In reality, Trump’s worldview
remains remarkably narrow, shallow and short-term. It’s narrow because he is so
singularly self-absorbed, which has been true throughout his life. In
the 18 months I worked with him, I can’t remember a single time Trump asked me
a question about myself. I never saw him engage for more than a cursory couple
of minutes with any of his three young children.
Trump’s knowledge and understanding
remain shallow because he resists reflection and introspection and
struggles mightily to focus. When I set out to interview him for “The Art of
the Deal” in 1986, he was unable to keep his attention on any subject for more
than a few minutes. “I don’t like talking about the past,” he would tell me.
“It’s over.” After a dozen interview attempts, I finally gave up and
settled instead for piecing the book together by sitting in Trump’s office
listening in on his constant stream of brief phone calls.
His need for instant gratification
prevents him from considering the longer-term consequences of his actions.
Instead, he simply reacts in the moment. This helps to explain why he moves
into overdrive whenever he feels attacked. On Wednesday alone, as the
furor around him grew, Trump tweeted furiously, more than 20 times in
all. “Nancy Pelosi needs help fast!” he declared in one post, after the House
speaker walked out of a meeting with Trump that Democrats described as a
presidential meltdown. “Pray for her, she is a very sick person!”
The negative qualities we ascribe to
others are often those we find it most intolerable to see in ourselves.
Throughout his adult life, Trump has viewed the world as a dark, dangerous
place teeming with enemies out to get him. In the face of potential
impeachment, this fear has escalated exponentially. The threat he imagines is
no longer just to his fragile sense of self but, realistically, to his future
as president. Any capacity Trump ever had to think clearly or calmly has
evaporated. Instead, he’s devolved into anger, blame, aggression and sadistic
attacks.
When people enter this “fight or
flight” state, the amygdala — the lower part of our brain known colloquially as
“fear central” — takes over from our prefrontal cortex. This wasn’t much
of an issue when I worked with Trump because he was riding high. Now, like a
drowning man, all that matters to him is survival, no matter how much
collateral damage his behaviors cause.
The only wall Trump has built is
around himself, to keep his own insecurity and vulnerability at bay. Ironically,
his defense consistently produces precisely what it’s meant to protect against.
That is just what happened when the Wall Street Journal broke the story of
his attempt to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate
Hunter Biden. In an impulsive attempt to defend himself, Trump released
the transcript of
their conversation, which substantiated the very point he was seeking to undercut
and led to the current impeachment inquiry in Congress.
The same thing happened when Trump
suddenly decided to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. After even his most loyal
Republican supporters condemned the action, he reacted with anger, singling out Sen. Lindsey
Graham, one of his most vociferous defenders. Once it
became clear that the withdrawal was a terrible mistake, Trump reacted by
writing a crude, bullying letter to
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, threatening to destroy Turkey’s
economy.
Trump’s behavior is an extreme
version of what we observe every day in our work at the Energy Project. Facing
threats to their businesses and uncertainty about the future, leaders
instinctively double down on what’s worked best for them in the past. The problem
is that any strength overused eventually becomes a liability: Confidence turns
into arrogance. Courage becomes recklessness. Certainty congeals into rigidity.
Authority moves toward authoritarianism. Feeling attacked and aggrieved, Trump
becomes more Trumpian.
The prerequisite to growth is the
capacity to self-regulate, which frays under stress. As an antidote, we
encourage our clients to practice something we call the “Golden Rule of
Triggers”: Whatever you’re compelled to do, don’t. Compulsion means we’re no
longer in control of how we respond, which is so often the case for Trump. But
it is possible to better manage our triggers. Even a brief period of deep breathing, for example, can clear
the bloodstream of the stress hormone cortisol and return control to the
prefrontal cortex.
To grow, we need an inner observer —
the ability to stand back from our emotions rather than simply acting them out.
Trump is a prisoner of his poor self-control, his inability to observe himself
and his limited perspective. Refusing to accept blame or admit uncertainty is a
habit he developed early in life to protect himself from a brutal father, whose
withering criticism he had watched drive his older brother, Fred Jr., to
alcoholism and an early death. In Trump’s mind, if he is not seen as
all good, then he is all bad. If he’s not viewed as 100 percent right, then he
is 100 percent wrong.
Growth is possible only when we can
see ourselves not as right or wrong, good or bad, strong or weak, but
as all of who we are. We won’t change Trump, and he won’t change himself,
but we can grow ourselves. The more we see and acknowledge — our best, our
worst and all the shades in between — the less we feel compelled to defend our
own value, and the more value we can add in the world.
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