DONALD TRUMP: THE MIND MAGICIAN
GARY LACHMAN asks: did positive thinking put Donald Trump in the White House? Are the alt-right practising a form of chaos magic? And what did a cartoon frog have to do with it?
GARY LACHMAN asks: did positive thinking put Donald Trump in the White House? Are the alt-right practising a form of chaos magic? And what did a cartoon frog have to do with it?
When the world woke up to the fact that billionaire Donald J Trump had become the 45th president of the United States, having won the 8 November 2016 presidential election in a surprise upset, political pundits scrambled to make sense of how it could have happened. White middleclass dissatisfaction, Hillary Clinton’s bad reputation, and Russian interference were some of the reasons offered for what seemed a truly unexpected development. Yet while many shook their heads in disbelief, I suspect that at least one person was a little less surprised.
Throughout his campaign Trump had announced with numbing consistency that he was “a winner”. For those who know him, this was standard procedure. As more than one intimate has pointed out, winning is important for Trump. In fact, we can say that it is practically the only important thing for him. He admits as much in his self-help book, The Art of the Deal, which is designed to make its readers winners too. “I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win,” he writes. 1 Those who know Trump would agree with this. Some might even suggest that, on occasion, he wouldn’t be averse to stretching those legal bounds just a bit if that’s what it took to ensure victory.
We might think that such an attitude is appropriate and even effective in a business context – but surely politics is something else? Yet here too, Trump’s need to win, and his unswerving certainty that he will, seemed to do the trick. The positive selfimage he radiates seems to prime him for success, and the assurance that he will succeed seems a factor in bringing that success about. For one thing, it can carry many others along with him. “People may not always think big themselves,” he tells us, “but they can still get very excited by those who do.” Trump is one of those who do. From Trump Tower and his aborted plans to erect the tallest building in the world, to the Mother of All Bombs that he dropped
Through the power of the mind alone, we can‘make things happen’
on Afghanistan on 13 April 2017 (see
FT354:26), there’s no doubt that the Donald thinks big and excites lots of people. 3
What is the source of Trump’s triumphant self-confidence? Narcissism, megalomania, egomania, selfishness, immaturity, and other psychological and characterological flaws have been rolled out to account for Trump’s unshakable optimism and adamant self-belief. To be sure, these traits and others find their place in his psychological profile. But one other factor that has received less attention may have had more influence on shaping his winning personality than anything else. According to some reports, Trump’s at times ruthless belief in his own powers and abilities may lie in his interest in an obscure and somewhat ‘magical’ philosophy known as New Thought, Mental Science, or, as it is sometimes also called, ‘the power of positive thinking.’
Variants of this teaching abound, but the fundamental idea they all share is that thought is causative; that, through the power of the mind alone, we can ‘make things happen.’ If that isn’t magic I don’t know what is.
THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
Donald Trump’s introduction to positive thinking came from the man who popularised the phrase and, aptly enough, became a great success through it. The Reverend NormanVincent Peale (18981993), who wrote the 1952 bestselling hit
The Power of Positive Thinking, acted as a mentor to Trump. For many years, Trump attended Peale’s sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church on 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. He had begun listening to Peale while still a boy; both of his parents were followers and friends of Peale. According to Fred Trump, Donald’s father, there was “nobody else like Peale”. Trump later attended Peale’s sermons as an adult, and two of his weddings took place at the church. For Trump, Peale was a “great preacher and a great public speaker”, and his oratory was so uplifting that after one sermon Trump felt so inspired that he admitted that he could have “sat there for another hour”. 4 For someone not known for having a long attention span, this is endorsement indeed.
Trump’s admiration for Peale was returned. In 1983, to congratulate him on the opening of Trump Tower, Peale wrote to Trump, telling him he was “America’s greatest builder”. Peale was impressed by successful self-promoters and was charmed
by Trump after seeing him on television. Peale died in 1993, so he wouldn’t have known of Trump’s subsequent political success. But given that Peale, a staunch Republican, consoled Richard Nixon after he lost the 1960 US presidential election to John F Kennedy and again during the Watergate scandal, and that Ronald Regan was another friend and devotee, we can imagine how he would have felt. Trump’s election, one suspects, would have given new meaning to Peale’s calling him “America’s greatest builder”.
What did Trump hear at Peale’s sermons? Most likely something like this: “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement. Believe in yourself and release your inner powers. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding.” 5
It was this message of success that hit home for Trump and made him, as he said, Peale’s “greatest student”. 6 As Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family, remarked in a podcast, Trump’s obsession with winning has its roots in the advice he absorbed at Peale’s sermons. That winning was everything was drummed into him each Sunday. As Blair said: “Success above all. That’s a very NormanVincent Peale notion.”
Peale must have listened to his own advice. When The Power of Positive Thinking appeared it went to the top of the NewYork
Times bestseller list and stayed there for 98 weeks. It made Peale a wealthy man and is still a healthy seller in the self-help and self-improvement market today, finding thousands of new readers every year. Yet while Peale’s uplifting sermons were couched in an earnest, hearty, optimistic Christian rhetoric, the roots of positive thinking reach down into something that many Christians might not find that positive.
FAITH FORCE
Peale was steeped in the literature of New Thought and was an avid reader of such classic writers in the genre as Ernest Holmes, Charles Fillmore and Napoleon Hill, who flourished in the early part of the 20th century. Each told his readers that an ardent wish, sincerely held and visualised with intent, would, through the power of the mind alone, become a reality (Rhoda Byrne’s
The Secret repeated this message a few years back, to great success). Napoleon Hill even insisted that one could “think and grow rich” – a formula that seemed to work, as Hill’s book of that name became a huge bestseller. The power of thought, each of these writers believed, could overcome any obstacle. Peale absorbed this doctrine, repackaged it, and transmitted it to a new generation.
The phrase “new thought” itself reaches back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, leader of the 19th century American Transcendentalist school, which took as its guides the philosophy of German Idealism and the wisdom of East, in the form of the teachings of the Upanishads. It also had roots in the magical tradition of Hermeticism. All three affirm that mind has primacy over matter, that thought, not the physical world, is the fundamental reality. As the great sage Hermes Trismegistus discovers during his mystical revelation, recorded in the Corpus
Hermeticum, “within God everything lies in imagination.” This is an affirmation that runs throughout the history of New Thought.
Another famous American, the philosopher and psychologist William James, sang the praises of New Thought in his classic work The Varieties of Religious
Experience. James even applied ‘mind cure’
Trump’s obssession with winning has its roots in Peale’s sermons
techniques – as New Thought was then called – to himself in order to overcome a nervous disorder. He was so convinced of their effectiveness that he successfully lobbied against state legislation designed to curb the availability of these ideas.
Peale too made use of New Thought techniques, scrupulously following Ernest Holmes’s admonitions in Creative
Mind and Success in order to overcome a debilitating shyness and inferiority complex. That Peale went on to become a national radio, television, and newspaper personality suggests that Holmes did him good, and Peale wanted to pass on the benefit to others. As the historian of New Thought, Mitch Horowitz, points out, Peale “reprocessed mind-power teachings through scriptural language and lessons.” 7 Through tapping into the ‘universal vibration’ and becoming ‘in tune with the infinite’ – central objectives of New Thought, then and now – via the power of positive thinking, Peale assured his readers and parishioners that no sincerely desired wish would be denied them.
Peale’s method for realising wishes was what he called “prayer power”, a kind of ‘faith force’ that can be concentrated like a laser beam. It works through a threestep process, in which we “prayerize”, “picturize”, and “actualize” our aim. If we perform these steps with sufficient intent, the goal is practically assured.
To ‘prayerize’ means keeping our wish constantly in mind, “talking it over with God”, as Peale says, meditating on it night and day until we reach what he calls God’s “Presence”. I should point out that Peale cautions that our aims must be realisable, not impossible ones. We can want a promotion or pay rise, but not a weekend in Atlantis or eternal youth. We then ‘picturize’ our wish as vividly, intently and as often as possible, assuming that it has already come to pass, letting this conviction sink down into the unconscious. To ‘actualize’ means that we then wait for results, confident they will appear. “Go about your business on the assumption that what you have affirmed and visualized is true,” Peale tells us. “Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself.” 8
THE BIG I AM
Critics of Peale’s positive thinking, who saw it as occultism in Christian clothing, would have been confirmed in their suspicions if they knew how similar Peale’s approach was to that of another New Thought advocate, who also employed biblical rhetoric but whose magical proclivities were much more up front. Neville Goddard (1905-1972), author of the New Thought classics AtYour
Command, Your Faith isYour Fortune and others (published simply under the name of ‘Neville’), had a far racier background than the sober, clean-living Peale. Born to a British family in Barbados in 1905, he came to the mystic path after a career on the stage. An interest in spiritualism and the Rosicrucians turned into a true occult vocation when he met an Ethiopian rabbi named Abdullah, who told him he had been waiting for him for some time. Abdullah taught him Hebrew, scripture, numerology and metaphysics, and introduced him to the mystic power of “I AM”. This was the ability to reach a level of being so fundamental that it precluded any particular predicate. Neville equated it with the ground of all existence, the “I AM THAT I AM” of Exodus 3:14. This was the “unconditioned awareness of one’s being” that shared in the creative power of the Deity.
As did Peale, Neville taught that we could direct this power to the fulfilment of any wish, provided we followed his own three-step procedure. This involves first withdrawing attention from the outer world and, through deep relaxation, sinking into the primal reality, the “I AM”, that lies deep within us. This is the equivalent of Peale’s ‘prayerizing’ within God’s ‘Presence’. Next, we must generate an enthusiasm for our aim, an excitement that imbues our visualisation of it with life and clarity – Peale’s ‘picturizing’. And then we assume with perfect certainty that what we want to happen already has – for, as with Peale, it
has, and we are merely awaiting word of it. Neville illustrated the power of ‘I AM’ when he conjured a ticket to Barbados to visit his family for Christmas when he was practically penniless. Abdullah advised Neville that he create the feeling in himself that he was already there. Neville ‘picturized’ the warm sun, the ocean breeze, the sights and sounds of his family, and entered a state similar to that of a lucid dream, with everything in high definition clarity. After doing this for several days, just before the last ship sailed, Neville received a letter from a brother he hadn’t heard from in years. Enclosed was $50 and a steamship ticket for Barbados.
THE AMPHIBIAN SIGIL
Knowing that the current president of the United States follows a philosophy based on the mind’s power to create reality may give us pause for thought. After all, the greatest lesson NormanVincent Peale