The Power of Trump's Positive Thinking - POLITICO Magazine

6/2/2019 The Power of Trump’s Positive Thinking - POLITICO Magazine
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TRUMPOLOGY
The Power of Trump’s Positive Thinking

The president always has believed he could will himself to success. But has he crossed
I D Ooptimism
the line between N O T A Cand
CEP T
delusion? I ACCEPT
By MICHAEL KRUSE | October 13, 2017
Show Purposes
D
onald Trump is a self-help apostle. He always has tried to create his own Powered by
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 last month even though he
and Republicans didn’t then and still don’t.
“We get an A-plus,” he said last week of his and his administration’s response to the
devastating recent hurricanes as others doled out withering reviews.
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“I’ve had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month
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period, that’s ever served,” he said this week in an interview with Forbes, contradicting
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objective metrics and repeating his frequent and dubious assertion of unprecedented
success throughout the first year of his first term as president.
The reality is that Trump is in a rut. His legislative agenda is floundering. His approval
ratings are historically low. He’s raging privately while engaging in noisy, internecine
squabbles. He’s increasingly isolated. 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 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 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 lodestar for

Trump over the course of his decades of triumphs as well as the 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
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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.
I DO NOT ACCEPT I ACCEPT
“I don’t even think it’s an argument,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me recently.
“It’s a fact.” The power of positive thinking? “He weaponized it.”
But now, in the political realm, where the Purposes

Show space between spin and truth is parsed
constantly—and with consequences—it is Trump’s very success that has opened him up
Powered by
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?
Science, it turns out, has something to say about this.
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
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Peale 
Accept
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. “If you
are simple enough to buy a self-help book, you may be congenitally programmed to fail,”
Tom Tiede wrote in 2001 in his own book, Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue,
Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are
Sapping Our Nation’s Soul. “Positive thinking” has garnered such social currency that it
also has become 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.
How can Trump say the things that he does?
Read the research.
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In 1988, in a seminal paper within the subject area, psychologists from UCLA and
Southern Methodist University wrote that “considerable research evidence suggests that
overly positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and
unrealistic optimism are characteristic of normal human thought.” They added that
“positive illusions may be especially useful when an individual receives negative
Show Purposes
feedback or is otherwise threatened.” They warned, though, of inherent risks and
limitations: “For example, a falsely positive sense of accomplishment may lead people to Powered by
pursue careers and interests for which they are ill-suited.”
Two years ago, English researchers published an update. People with “unrealistic
optimism,” they wrote, “believe that they are more virtuous, more talented and more
compassionate than others, and less prone to error.” They “believe that they can control
events that are not under their control.” They “believe that they are less likely to
experience future negative outcomes.” They “have overly flattering conceptions of
themselves that are also resistant to negative feedback.” Sometimes, they said, all of that
can help people like this perform well. “In conditions of uncertainty and risk,” the
researchers explained, “some instances of optimism lead people to make Accept

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better 
decisions by helping avoid more costly mistakes and contribute to survival and
flourishing.” Even so, it’s true only to a point. “Excessive optimism,” they concluded,
“can become problematic and lead to poor strategic planning, disillusionment and
disappointment, and risky behaviors.”
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.
“If there is, I don’t know it,” said retired professor Neil Weinstein, who wrote a paper in
1982 when he was at Rutgers University titled “Egocentrism as a Source of Unrealistic
Optimism.”
“The world isn’t that predictable,” he said.
Donald Trump, after all, is the president.

We value your
***
privacy
He was born into
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Peale’s cheery, by
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the effects of his innately awkward, dour disposition. Emboldened, Fred Trump banked
hundreds of millions of dollars building single-family houses and then immense
apartment buildings
I D O N OinT New
A C CYork’s
E P T outer boroughs. PealeI appealed
A C C E P Tto the elder Trump,
too, because both men embraced conservative, right-wing, us-versus-them politics—an
important but often forgotten portion of Peale’s M.O.
A generation down, Peale appealed to Donald Trump because Trump idolized his father,
Show Purposes
and because what Fred Trump 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 Powered by
receptive to the teachings of Peale. Born in 1946, Donald Trump’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
continue browsing, you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy Accept
of 
Positive Thinking, his defining work and wild 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 was far from universally popular. One psychiatrist dubbed The Power of Positive
Thinking “saccharine terrorism.” And during the 1952 presidential campaign, the
Democratic nominee made his feelings plain. “Speaking as a Christian,” the brainy Adlai
Stevenson said at a Baptist convention in Texas, “I would like to say that I find the
Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling.” But Peale permanently altered
the way many Americans worship. His was a precursor to the prosperity gospel
espoused today by, say, the toothy Joel Osteen. “By repeatedly equating business
acumen with piety, uncertainty with religious doubt, and personal and cultural failure
with godlessness, Peale and his admirers helped to redefine religious Americans as
socially superior winners,” Northwestern University English professor Christopher Lane
wrote in his 2016 book, Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of
American Religious Life.We value your privacy
What Peale peddled was “a certain positive, feel-good religiosity that demands nothing
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Invented Christian America. “It’s a self-help gospel … the name-it-and-claim-it gospel.”
And for Donald Trump, the attraction to Peale did not diminish with time. Even as more
I D O N O Tderided
traditional theologians A C C E PPeale
T I A holy
as more huckster than C C E man
P T and intellectuals
mocked him as a lightweight, Trump in his 30s remained a staunch Peale adherent.
Peale, then nearly 80 years old, officiated Trump’s wedding in 1977. In 1983, shortly
after the opening of Trump Tower, Trump credited Peale for instilling in him a can-do
Show Purposes
ethos. “The mind can overcome any obstacle,” he told the New York Times. “I never
Powered by
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.”
That year, Jack O’Donnell saw it firsthand. He started work for Trump as a marketing
executive at one of his casinos in Atlantic City.
“This is the best place in the world to work, and I’m the best guy in the world to work
for,” Trump told O’Donnell in their first meeting, according to O’Donnell’s

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1991 book,
Accept
Trumped! The onslaught of Peale-preached superlatives kept coming. “I’m America’s

most successful businessman,” Trump said. “I’m a winner. I’ve always been a winner.”
O’Donnell, though, soon was worried about the pitfalls of such optimism. By 1988, a
manic, temperamental Trump was overwhelmed, in O’Donnell’s estimation, by the
world that he had created for himself. He had piled up accomplishments, acquisitions
and debts. It was too much. “He was at the point where image superseded reality,”
O’Donnell would write in his book. “In the same way that he believed a man could retain
his hair by willing not to go bald, he thought he could redress the operational
shortcoming of a multimillion-dollar company and make it successful by stating and
restating that it was.”
It caught up with him.
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 the mother of his first three
children—Trump’s credibility and viability as a businessman were in jeopardy. Drawing
on Peale, Trump was unswayed, leaning extra-heavy on the principal tenet of the power
of positive thinking—think
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Journal. Trump, all but dead? “Hotter than ever,” he told New York magazine.
“I would have been looking for the nearest building to jump off of, and he just remained
upbeat all of Ithe
D Otime,”
N O TSteve
A C CBollenbach,
EPT the lender-mandated
I A C Cfinancial
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helped Trump avoid personal bankruptcy and lasting business humiliation, once told
biographer Tim O’Brien. “I never suspected that he lost a moment’s sleep.”
Trump tapped into Peale, he would say. “I refused to give in to the negative
Show Purposes
circumstances,” he said in a 2009 interview with Psychology Today that is littered with
the particular language of Peale. “I never lost faith in myself. … Being tenacious is partPowered by
of my personality. … Defeat is not in my vocabulary.” He mentioned Peale and his most

famous book. He was, Trump said, “a firm believer in the power of being positive.”
“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 To
name-branded condo projects stalled and killed by the Great Recession, Trump kept
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proclaiming success. “I’ve done an incredible job,” he said in 2013.

It was time to run for president.
“Norman Vincent Peale, the great Norman Vincent Peale, was my pastor,” Trump told
the audience at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, in July of 2015, barely
more than a month into his run. “The power of positive thinking,” he said. He said this
in between having consultant and pollster Frank Luntz ask him the same question twice:
“Have you ever asked God for forgiveness?” His answer: “I’m not sure I have.” For
Trump, thanks to Peale, that’s not primarily what religion was for.
“Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself,” Peale had written—and last
year around this time, in the roiling wake of the tape of Trump bragging about his ability
to grope women with impunity, with pundits saying he would lose and lose badly, and
with more and more women accusing him of sexual harassment and members of his
own party and even the man who would become his chief of staff suggesting he should
drop out, Trump did not do what almost anybody else would have done. Everybody else?
There’s literally not another politician in history who was facing what he was facing and

didn’t not only stop running the race in question but recede from public life altogether.
But that’s not what Trump did. Trump did what he’s always done. He doubled down on
Peale 101.
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“We’re going to win,” he told Sean Hannity three weeks before the election.
“We’re going to win the great state of Michigan,” he said at a boisterous rally at 1 a.m. in
Grand Rapids on Election Day, “and we are going to win back the White House.”
***
Trump does not often share theShow spotlight, but it seems likely, based on his
Purposes
decades of testimonials, that he might give Peale at least some credit for the astonishing,
Powered by
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.
“There are really strong benefits in terms of undertaking activities that are difficult and
for which the true odds would be daunting if you paid attention to them,” Jonathon
Brown told me. He was the SMU psychologist who was one-half of the research team
behind the 1988 paper on “illusion” and “well-being.” He’s now at the University
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of 
Washington. He gave examples of starting a business or getting married. Other
researchers I talked to brought up health outcomes. In situations of, for instance, dire
cancer diagnoses, the prospect of survivability can get a boost from optimism that’s
statistically unjustified.
“Positive thinking can motivate an individual,” Wellesley College psychology professor

Julie Norem said. Also: “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.’ And that’s a
huge advantage in life.”
Then there’s the but.
“For most people,” said Norem, who specializes in optimism, pessimism and personality
psychology, “there’s a point at which, if that’s all they bring to the table, it breaks down.”
The question is where that point is for Trump. He is so clearly not most people. In the
words of Mitch Horowitz: “He is a kind of Frankenstein monster of the philosophy” of
positive thought.
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Short-term. ITrump’s
D O N Oversion
T A C C of
E Phis
T own reality, some insist,
I A ultimately
C C E P T will crash against
something more real. “In the end, I think reality is like gravity. It exerts its own force,”
said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a
consistent conservative critic of Trump. “The power of positive thinking can only carry
you so far.” Show Purposes
Powered by
He offered an example. “I could use the power of positive thinking and convince myself
that I’m going to be the starting center for the Golden State Warriors,” Wehner said,
“but it’s not going to happen.”
To carry this metaphor a small step forward, though, Trump is actually currently the
starting center for the Golden State Warriors. (He’s definitely not Stephen Curry.)
Wehner granted that. “And his supporters,” he said, “probably think he’s scoring 25
points and a game and averaging 11 rebounds.”
This, though, is just it: Nobody, ever, has had more success convincing himself, and
others, that he is a success even when he is not—and thus turning that stated
sentiment
Accept
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. What, exactly, is
“unrealistic” about Trump’s optimism? “It’s gotten him this far,” said Blair, the
biographer. “He has a lot of reason to believe that something like the power of gravity
doesn’t apply to him.”
The science here 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.
“The degree of positive thinking that we talk about in the paper bears no resemblance to
what President Trump is exhibiting on a daily basis, which would be an extreme form of
what we talked about,” said Brown from the University of Washington. “What we were
really looking at was sort of … should you know what you are really like? Is a person best
served by knowing what they are really like? And I think the answer to that is no. You’re

better served believing you are a little bit better than you are—but not wildly …”
Brown cited the opening salvo of the Trump administration: the fight over the size of the
turnout
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psychologist would say that’s adaptive.”
“There is a lot toOlike

I D N Oin
T the
A Cidea
C E Pof
T power of positive thinking,”
I A C CEd
E PDiener,
T one of the
country’s leading researchers of happiness, told me, “but of course it must be grounded
in a degree of realism.”
And where’s that dividing line?

Show Purposes
The dividing line, Diener said, “is when the delusions become dysfunctional.” Powered by
And where is that?
“Where the distortions become strong enough that they make one act irrationally,
impulsively,” he said.
“The biggest problem with the Norman Vincent Peale version of positive thinking,” said
Wellesley’s Norem, “is that you can’t know when you’ve crossed the line—because if
you’re accepting that as a philosophy, you’re already defining out of the picture any
negative thoughts. 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,Accept
and anything
negative that impinges on it is evil, bad and forbidden.”
He won’t see the line if and when it arrives.
As for the rest of us?
“I mean, if we’re all blown up, in a nuclear war,” Norem said, “then that’s going to be a
pretty clear line.”

Show Purposes
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