The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

by Bandy X. Lee

  Like so much about Trump, who knows whether that story is true? What’s clear is that he has spent his life seeking to dominate others, whatever that requires and whatever collateral damage it creates along the way. In The Art of the Deal, he speaks with street-fighting relish about competing in the world of New York real estate: They are “some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world. I happen to love to go up against these guys, and I love to beat them.” I never sensed from Trump any guilt or contrition about anything he’d done, and he certainly never shared any misgivings publicly. From his perspective, he operated in a jungle full of predators who were forever out to get him, and he did what he must to survive.

  Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value—nor even necessarily recognize—the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification, or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong. Trump simply didn’t traffic in emotions or interest in others. The life he lived was all transactional, all the time. Having never expanded his emotional, intellectual, or moral universe, he has his story down, and he’s sticking to it.

  A key part of that story is that facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, he instinctively doubles down—even when what he has just said is demonstrably false. I saw that countless times, whether it was as trivial as exaggerating the number of floors at Trump Tower or as consequential as telling me that his casinos were performing well when they were actually going bankrupt. In the same way, Trump would see no contradiction at all in changing his story about why he fired Comey and thereby undermining the statements of his aides, or in any other lie he tells. His aim is never accuracy; it’s domination.

  The Trump I got to know had no deep ideological beliefs, nor any passionate feeling about anything but his immediate self-interest. He derives his sense of significance from conquests and accomplishments. “Can you believe it, Tony?” he would often say at the start of late-night conversations with me, going on to describe some new example of his brilliance. But the reassurance he got from even his biggest achievements was always ephemeral and unreliable—and that appears to include being elected president. Any addiction has a predictable pattern: the addict keeps chasing the high by upping the ante in an increasingly futile attempt to re-create the desired state. On the face of it, Trump has more opportunities now to feel significant and accomplished than almost any other human being on the planet. But that’s like saying a heroin addict has his problem licked once he has free and continuous access to the drug. Trump also now has a far bigger and more public stage on which to fail and to feel unworthy.

  From the very first time I interviewed him in his office in Trump Tower in 1985, the image I had of Trump was that of a black hole. Whatever goes in quickly disappears without a trace. Nothing sustains. It’s forever uncertain when someone or something will throw Trump off his precarious perch—when his sense of equilibrium will be threatened and he’ll feel an overwhelming compulsion to restore it. Beneath his bluff exterior, I always sensed a hurt, incredibly vulnerable little boy who just wanted to be loved.

  What Trump craves most deeply is the adulation he has found so fleeting. This goes a long way toward explaining his need for control and why he simply couldn’t abide Comey, who reportedly refused to accede to Trump’s demand for loyalty and whose continuing investigation into Russian interference in the election campaign last year threatens to bring down his presidency. Trump’s need for unquestioning praise and flattery also helps to explain his hostility to democracy and to a free press—both of which thrive on open dissent.

  As we have seen countless times during the campaign and since the election, Trump can devolve into survival mode on a moment’s notice. Look no further than the thousands of tweets he has written attacking his perceived enemies over the past year. In neurochemical terms, when he feels threatened or thwarted, Trump moves into a fight-or-flight state. His amygdala is triggered, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activates, and his prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that makes us capable of rationality and reflection—shuts down. He reacts rather than reflects, and damn the consequences. This is what makes his access to the nuclear codes so dangerous and frightening.

  Over the past week, in the face of criticism from nearly every quarter, Trump’s distrust has almost palpably mushroomed. No importuning by his advisers stands a chance of constraining him when he is this deeply triggered. The more he feels at the mercy of forces he cannot control—and he is surely feeling that now—the more resentful, desperate, and impulsive he becomes.

  Even 30 years later, I vividly remember the ominous feeling when Trump got angry about some perceived slight. Everyone around him knew that you were best off keeping your distance at those times, or, if that wasn’t possible, that you should resist disagreeing with him in any way.

  In the hundreds of Trump’s phone calls I listened in on with his consent, and the dozens of meetings I attended with him, I can never remember anyone disagreeing with him about anything. The same climate of fear and paranoia appears to have taken root in his White House.

  The most recent time I spoke to Trump—and the first such occasion in nearly three decades—was July 14, 2016, shortly before The New Yorker published an article by Jane Mayer about my experience writing The Art of the Deal. Trump was just about to win the Republican nomination for president. I was driving in my car when my cell phone rang. It was Trump. He had just gotten off a call with a fact-checker for The New Yorker, and he didn’t mince words.

  “I just want to tell you that I think you’re very disloyal,” he started in. Then he berated and threatened me for a few minutes. I pushed back, gently but firmly. And then, suddenly, as abruptly as he began the call, he ended it. “Have a nice life,” he said, and hung up.

  Tony Schwartz is the author of several books, including The Art of the Deal, which he coauthored with Mr. Trump. He also wrote The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time (with Jim Loehr) and The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He is also CEO and founder of The Energy Project, a consulting firm that helps individuals and organizations solve intractable problems and add more value in the world by widening their worldview.

  TRUMP’S TRUST DEFICIT IS THE CORE PROBLEM

  GAIL SHEEHY, PH.D.

  The narcissism and paranoia are issues, but the biggest concern is that Donald Trump trusts no one. This will be his downfall—or maybe ours.

  In a world spinning radically out of control, can we trust President Trump to rely on his famous “instincts” as he alienates U.S. allies and plays brinksmanship with our enemies? Writing from the perspective of his first one hundred days, and from a year and a half of reporting on the president-elect, I can’t help worrying how much closer the day of reckoning has to come on charges of collusion with Russia before he needs a war to provide the ultimate distraction?

  The fundamental bedrock of human development is the formation of a capacity to trust, absorbed by children between birth and eighteen months. Donald Trump has boasted of his total lack of trust: “People are too trusting. I’m a very untrusting guy” (1990). “Hire the best people, and don’t trust them” (2007). “The world is a vicious and brutal place. Even your friends are out to get you: they want your job, your money, your wife” (2007).

  His biographers have recorded his worldview as saturated with a sense of danger and his need to project total toughness. As we know, his father trained him to be a “killer,” the only alternative to being a “loser.” Trump has never forgotten the primary lesson he learned from his father and at the military school to which he was sent to be toughened up still further. In Trump’s own words, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”

  In the biography Never Enough, Trump describes to Michael D’Antonio his father’s “d
ragging him” around tough neighborhoods in Brooklyn when he collected the rents for the apartments he owned. Fred Trump always told the boy to stand to one side of the door. Donald asked why. “Because sometimes they shoot right through the door,” his father told him.

  Today, this man lives mostly alone in the White House, without a wife or any friends in whom to confide, which he would never do anyway, because that would require admitting vulnerability.

  Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defense chief under Clinton, stated on Fox Business channel in February 2017, “The coin of the realm for any president is trust—trust of the American people in the credibility of that president.” In the nearly two years that Donald Trump has been in our face almost daily, he has sown mistrust in all his Republican rivals, alienated much of the conservative Republican bloc he needs in the House for legislative success, ignored congressional Democrats, and viciously insulted Democratic leaders, calling them liars, clowns, stupid, and incompetent, and condemning Barack Obama as “sick” and Hillary Clinton as “the devil.” When he represents the American people abroad, his belligerent behavior and disrespect for leaders of our closest allies rips apart the comity and peace-keeping pledges built over decades. Yet, he never hesitates to congratulate despots, such as Turkey’s Erdogan, Egypt’s General Sisi, and, most lavishly of all, Russia’s Putin.

  As president, Trump is systematically shredding trust in the institutions he now commands. Having discredited the entire seventeen-agency intelligence community as acting like Nazis, he also dismissed the judiciary because of one judge’s Hispanic background and another’s opposition to his travel [née Muslim] ban. Even his Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, said it was “disheartening” and “demoralizing” to hear Trump disparage the judiciary. Not content to smear the media on a daily basis, Trump borrowed a phrase used by Lenin and Stalin to brand the American media as an “enemy of the people.”

  By his own words, Trump operates on the assumption that everyone is out to get him. The nonmedical definition of paranoia is the tendency toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others. For a man who proclaims his distrust of everyone, it is not surprising that Trump drew closest to him two legendary conspiracy theorists: Stephen Bannon and Gen. Michael Flynn.

  And even after he was forced to fire his choice for top national security adviser after Flynn blatantly lied, Trump’s White House desperately stonewalled congressional investigators to keep them from getting their hands on documents that could prove Flynn’s paid collusion with Russia on Trump’s behalf. The closer that case comes to a criminal referral to the Justice Department, the closer Trump’s survival instincts will propel him to a wag-the-dog war.

  A leader who does not trust his subordinates cannot inspire trust. Though Trump boasts of fierce personal loyalty, he himself is loyal only until he isn’t. Among his anxious aides, only Jared Kushner, it seems, may be safe, deputized as Trump’s de facto secretary of state. Where Trump succeeds in inspiring trust is by giving his subordinates the license to lie. In fact, this virus of licentiousness has spread from the White House to congressional Republicans, to wit the stunt that exposed Rep. Devin Nunes as unfit to lead the House Intelligence Committee probe into Trump operatives’ possible collusion with Russia. As the chaos of the White House rolled with a crisis-a-day fever into the month of May, a hide-and-seek commander in chief began sending out his most trusted national security advisers to defend him (Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Gen. H. R. McMaster, and the muted secretary of state, Rex Tillerson) and then cut the legs out from under them with his own blurted half-truths.

  We hear repeatedly that Trump as a manager likes chaos. I asked a deputy White House counsel under Obama, a decorated former officer in Iraq and former White House counsel to President Obama, how such a management style impacts trust. “Trump explicitly or implicitly manages the situation so it’s never possible for his advisers to know where they stand,” he said. “It’s the opposite of what you want in a high-functioning organization.” Trump’s anxious aides must know just how easy it is to fail his loyalty test, or to be the fall guy if a scapegoat is needed. While publicly they may defend him, it is clear to reporters that White House staffers are leaking information constantly. The leaks can only exacerbate Trump’s mistrust, perpetuating a vicious circle.

  His failure to trust or to inspire trust is even more dangerous on a global scale. He sees alliances such as NATO as suspect (until he changes his mind); he sees trade agreements such as NAFTA as ripping off America (until he changes his mind three or four times in the same week). “This is because Trump’s worldview is that we live in a snake pit where everybody is out for themselves,” observes the former White House counsel. He and his co-conspiracy theorist adviser Bannon take everything that the left-behind white working class hates about globalization and they turn it into personalized enemies: Muslims, Mexicans, and refugees whom they believe are taking away their jobs. “Those people aren’t like us,” is the alt-right message; “they’re polluting our culture.”

  In the course of his first one hundred days, Trump appeared to be increasingly out of touch with the reality in which the majority of us live. His pathological propensity to lie is not the worst of it—his monomaniacal attachment to his lies is, such as the transparent one in his March 4 twitterstorm accusing President Obama of putting a tap on his phone. It raises the question: Is this president floating in his own alternate reality?

  When I attended Dr. Bandy Lee’s Yale town hall meeting to write about it for The Daily Beast, I cited insights delivered there by two of the authors in this book. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent former professor of psychiatry at Yale University and today at Columbia University, elaborated in a follow-up interview, “Trump creates his own extreme manipulation of reality. He insists that his spokesmen defend his false reality as normal. He then expects the rest of society to accept it—despite the lack of any evidence.” This leads to what Lifton calls “malignant normality”—in other words, the gradual acceptance by a public inundated with toxic untruths of those untruths until they pass for normal.

  Dr. James F. Gilligan is a psychiatrist and author who has studied the motivations behind violent behavior over his twenty-five years of work in the American prison systems. “If we psychiatrists who have experience in assessing dangerousness, if we give passive permission to our president to proceed in his delusions, we are shirking our responsibility,” Gilligan said. Today a senior clinical professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, Gilligan told Dr. Lee’s town hall attendees, “I don’t say Trump is Hitler or Mussolini, but he’s no more normal than Hitler.”

  We don’t have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had vastly more exposure to Donald Trump’s observable behavior, his writing and speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years. It is therefore up to us, the American public, to call him on it. And some of the most experienced hands in and around the White House are doing so.

  Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley believes that Donald Trump represents a very different subculture from any commander in chief. “He represents the New York building business—where you don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing,” says Brinkley. “In Trump’s world, he must win at all costs. It’s not about character or public service or looking out for your band of brothers.”

  The president to whom Trump is most often compared is Richard Nixon. John Dean, the famous White House counsel who testified against his fellow conservative Republican, compared Trump to that notably paranoid president. “Nixon was two personae—in public and with his top aides, he was trusted. But in private, his deeply paranoid and vengeful dark side came out.”

  Asked for the best example, Dean snapped, “He had zero empathy!” Just like Trump. “Nixon let twenty-two thousand more Americans die in Vietnam [after he sabotaged the 1968 Paris peace talks], plus
who knows how many Cambodians and Laotians and Vietnamese, all to ensure his election.” It took forty years before Nixon’s worst crime was revealed: treason. That was when then-presidential candidate Nixon was heard on tape (from recordings ordered by President Johnson) scuttling the Vietnam peace talks to derail the reelection campaign of the Democratic candidate. Nixon sent a message to the South Vietnamese negotiators that they should withdraw from the peace talks and wait for him to be elected, at which point he would give them a much better deal.

  Sound familiar? Fifty years later, Donald Trump’s go-between with Russian officials, General Flynn, hinted to Putin’s ambassador that Russia could get a much better deal if it didn’t retaliate against Obama’s sanctions and instead sat tight until Trump was elected. Also, Trump frequently tweeted about his eagerness to lift those sanctions—that is, until his fantasy bromance with Putin looked like it could arouse a federal investigation. Trump’s appetite for vengeance is also matched by Nixon’s with his long “Enemies List.” No two modern presidents have had a more serious case of “political hemophilia,” in the phrase of the latest Nixon biographer, John Farrell, by which he means: “Once wounded, these men never stop bleeding.”

  To the dismay of even conservative observers, Trump appears totally indifferent to the truth. Time magazine gave Trump an opportunity to clarify his refusal to correct his long string of falsehoods. What the March 23 interview produced instead was an astonishing revelation of his thinking: He states what he wants to be true. If his statement is proven false, he is unfazed, and confidently predicts that the facts will catch up with his belief: “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right.” Even when the top sleuth in the country, FBI director James Comey, condemned Trump as a fabulist, Trump ignored the public rebuke and bragged about his ability to persuade millions of his paranoid version of Obama as “sick” and surreptitiously spying on him.