Why President Trump reverses himself
Psychologist says president is rudderless leader who reacts in the moment
When I saw CNN’s Jake Tapper suddenly blurt out, “What the hell is going on?” in an online video the other day, I thought I’d better speak up.
Like millions of people, Tapper has become increasingly baffled by President Donald Trump’s odd behaviors: sucking up to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, then rewriting his own words the next day; scolding British Prime Minister Theresa May in an interview in The Sun, then denying that he ever did so in May’s presence hours later; lying, reversing himself, lying again, then lying about the lies.
Come up with your own list of peculiar and often contradictory Trump statements — about women, the Access Hollywood tape, immigrants, Charlottesville, gun rights, you name it. The bottom line, more and more, seems to be that exasperating question, “What the hell is going on?”
Late last year, 27 prominent mental health professionals contributed chapters to an unprecedented book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Their deep concern about Trump’s odd and sometimes belligerent behavior, they said, justified setting aside an important ethical standard that forbids mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures they’ve never evaluated. But diagnose they did — without a consensus, of course, because none of them, as far as I can tell, had ever even met Trump.
Is Trump really mentally deranged, maybe ready for the loony bin? If so, how could he have achieved so much over the course of his life? How could he have functioned so well in business, in media and now even in politics? How could he have raised such loyal and high-functioning offspring? How could he last even a day in the most stressful office in the most stressful building in the most stressful city in the world?
Trump is not mentally ill, and I doubt that he is even “living in his own reality,” as so many have claimed. He is, however, highly vulnerable to “sympathetic audience control.” It’s a concept that explains a lot — maybe even 90 percent of Trump’s baffling behavior.
All normal people are subject to “audience control” to one degree or another. That means they regulate what they say and do based on who’s around them. They are respectful in a church pew, a bit more daring in a classroom, and somewhat wild in the bleachers. Near a police officer, most people are cautious and deferential; near a best friend, they speak freely.
For Trump, audience control works in a special way: When he is in the presence of someone he dislikes or distrusts, he attacks and will continue to lash out for a while. When someone he perceives as a threat becomes deferential (Rocket Man, for example), Trump not only stops attacking, he also becomes highly vulnerable to influence.
In general, when Trump is around someone he perceives as supportive, or gets a phone call from a supportive billionaire, or hears a supportive commentator on Fox News, his thinking is influenced by what that person is saying. This is “sympathetic audience control.” The impact on Trump is so strong that it persists after the person is gone.
When Trump is in front of a large group of cheering people, his thinking is fully controlled by the crowd. The supportive audience completely dominates his thinking, causing him to repeat, over and over, things he believes the audience wants to hear.
We need to add just one more element to make sense of Trump’s roller coaster mind: Like my 92-year-old mom, he lives in a very small window of time, and no, I don’t mean he lives “in the moment” in that healthy, NewAge-y sort of way. I mean he has trouble looking backwards or forwards in time.
I doubt very much that he formulates and lives by long-term plans and strategies. He is much more like a rudderless sailboat blown about by the wind, with the direction largely determined moment-to-moment according to who’s got his attention and whether he views that person as friend or foe.
Sympathetic audience control and a small time window produce most of the odd cognitive glitches. Moment to moment, Trump either sees a foe and shoots, or he sees a friend and is influenced. In that kind of perceptual world, Trump inevitably shifts his views frequently and has no trouble denying what he said yesterday. All that’s real to him is what friends or foes are saying inside those small time windows. All else is fuzzy, and that’s why he can so easily tell so many lies. From his perspective, lying has no meaning. Only reacting has meaning. Trump reacts.
The small time window and sympathetic audience control also explain why Trump always seems to be creating foreign policy on the fly, why his meetings with world leaders rarely produce tangible results, why he can’t get congressional deals, and why he is almost certainly incapable of negotiating those famous bilateral agreements that were supposed to replace the multinational treaties he has swept aside.
If I’m right, and I’m pretty sure I am, Trump is capable of only minimal analytical or critical thinking. Perhaps more alarming, our president, the putative leader of the free world, doesn’t believe in anything and rarely, if ever, means anything he says. The impulsive tweets, the conservative court appointments, the unfunded tax cuts, the obsession with a wall, the swipes at immigrants — all are byproducts of sympathetic audience control operating in small time windows. There are no principles here, just gusts of wind.
And if I’m right, Trump will continue to function this way — blindly, erratically and reactively, without principle or direction — for the rest of his life.