Disinhibition: the engine of Trump's Success

 

I read a very important essay today - actually, I listened to it.  The writer was Ezra Klein, whose essays I have liked for a while.

This particular paragraph:

"You may have heard of the big five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We all fall somewhere on the spectrum of each of them. I’ve taken these tests, and I score close to as high as you can on conscientiousness and agreeableness, and if we’re really being honest here, I’m above average on neuroticism, too. I was talking to a research psychologist about this, and when I told him that, he told me, “That’s a good combination for being very productive and very anxious.”

I mentioned, though, that these traits are spectrums. Some of the newer personality frameworks name the other side of the spectrum, too. So to be low on neuroticism is to be high in emotional stability. To be low on extroversion is to be introverted. And to be low on conscientiousness is to be disinhibited. To be very low on conscientiousness is to be very high on disinhibition. And that is Donald Trump.

Yeah. It sure is.

"The history of pathologizing political leaders we do not like is not an admirable one. So I am not a psychiatrist, and I am saying something simpler and, I think, more neutral here: Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.

"And when I say that, I am describing both what is wrong with Donald Trump and what is right with him.

"Something I have learned as I’ve gotten older is that every person’s strengths are also their weaknesses. Disinhibition is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things others would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.

"It’s not that no one else in politics held these views before Donald Trump. But for the most part, it’s not how they spoke about them. That was the failure in the system that Trump exploited: the lie that just because politicians didn’t talk this way, voters didn’t feel this way. One of Trump’s verbal tics is to say, “Many people are saying.” But it’s the opposite. He’s saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He’s saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public.

"One argument Trump’s supporters make is: You don’t get Trump’s honesty without his outrageousness. You don’t get a leader who can break the mold by supporting a person who conforms to the mold. Here’s Kellyanne Conway at the 2024 Republican National Convention:

Kellyanne Conway: How often do we hear, “I want Trump’s policies without Trump’s personality”? Well, good luck with that. We don’t get those policies without that personality.

"She’s right. You certainly don’t get his politics without his personality. How many people must want to do what Trump has done? How many millionaires and billionaires and celebrities must have thought to themselves, “I’d be a good president. I’m smarter and more charismatic and better on a stage and wiser than these idiots up there”?

..."It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isn’t his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It’s the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.

It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw."

"Trump’s disinhibition is yoked to a malignancy at his core. I do believe he’s a narcissist. If Putin praises him, he will praise Putin. If John McCain mocks him, he will mock John McCain. Trump does not see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he’s feeling. He does not listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. Donald Trump doesn’t really learn. He once told a biographer, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”

I believe him totally when he says that. In 2018 he told The Washington Post, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” Imagine going through life truly believing that, truly acting like that. And then imagine that in so many ways, it has worked for you: It has made you rich and famous and powerful beyond your wildest dreams. What would that do to you? What does that do to a person with a mind like Donald Trump’s?

Here is the question Democrats have floundered in answering this year: If Donald Trump is so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren’t worse? There is this gap between the unfit, unsound, unworthy man Democrats describe and the memories that most Americans have of his presidency, at least before the pandemic. If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?

There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described, by those around him, in terms befitting an impetuous child."

This is only part of a very long essay, but it's the part that has me praying he loses the election.