When he oversteps a limit and is pulled back, he often reacts with anger and frustration, possibly with a temper tantrum or sudden rage. . . . At this age, he just doesn’t have much control over his emotional impulses, so his anger and frustration tend to erupt suddenly. . . . It’s his only way of dealing with the difficult realities of life. He may even act out in ways that unintentionally harm himself or others. It’s all part of being two.
American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child
Everyone gets angry. Political leaders are hardly exempt from this emotion. Presidents ranging from Andrew Jackson to Harry Truman to Bill Clinton were known to blow a gasket from time to time. Still, an important distinction between an adult and a toddler is the causality, frequency, and severity of those outbursts. Mature adults possess the capacity to regulate their emotions. Mature leaders are expected to cope with setbacks without losing emotional control, particularly in front of people who might tattle to others about bad behavior. Political leaders are presumed to possess the necessary metacognition to know not to make key decisions when filled with rage.
Donald Trump is not one of those leaders.
As the examples provided in this chapter demonstrate, the Toddler in Chief’s dark moods are frequent. Indeed, this trait had become so widely reported that by 2018 the New York Times’ Marc Leibovich noted, “The Trump-mood-story genre has, by now, acquired its own conventions. Print articles inevitably rely on several interviews with ‘sources close to the president’ who spoke ‘on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their candor discussing the president.’ . . . Trump is commonly described as ‘bristling’ over unflattering assessments. . . . The stories typically begin with an anecdote, often featuring the president’s being upset or defensive about something.”1
There are two ways to interpret Trump’s fits of presidential pique. First, this could be a hallmark of Trump’s populist style of leadership. Second, it could be that Trump demonstrates all the psychological markers of a toddler, and toddlers are less emotionally regulated and therefore more prone to fits of temper. Regardless of the reason, the effects are dangerous.
Populists do not possess a monopoly on anger in politics, but most populist politicians project anger as part of their leadership style.2 They are adept at exploiting the (often justified) resentment that voters possess toward the elites in charge before their own rise to power. The effect is reciprocal: evoking anger among citizens is a surefire way to get individuals to trust institutions less.3 No wonder that during one of the 2016 GOP primary debates, Trump said, “I will gladly accept the mantle of anger.”4
Of course, there are downsides to exploiting anger in politics. The post-2008 wave of populist anger reverses a centuries-long Western effort to contain that emotion in world politics.5 Recent scholarship on emotions in politics suggest that sustained levels of anger carry severe risks. Anger was valorized in societies with strong honor cultures and warrior castes, biologically conditioning citizens toward that feeling. As the political scientist Neta Crawford notes, “Threats that evoke anger (if they are associated with perceived insults) tend to decrease the perception of a threat and simultaneously heighten risk-taking behaviors on the part of those who feel angry.”6
The dangers of angry rhetoric can be heightened through misperception and mistranslation. Conventional leaders are prepped to stay within the lanes of “accepted” diplomatic discourse. This permits them to avoid accidentally triggering a crisis as well as enabling them to employ shifts in rhetoric to send a clear foreign policy signal. In contrast, angry populists scorn diplomatic language as exercises in sophistry and hypocrisy. Angry populists with easy access to social media will use undiplomatic language frequently. They will say things like “fire and fury” and “enemy of the people” designed to appeal to their base, increasing the likelihood that outside observers misconstrue their words. Angry tirades from leaders like Trump have been mistranslated abroad—and usually in a direction that paints the leader as more bellicose than intended.7 Populist leaders will be reluctant to correct such misperceptions, because that would require them to engage in the nuanced diplomatic discourse they have previously derided. When Trump has been forced to walk back his diplomatic faux pas—such as his misbegotten Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin—he has done so in such a ham-handed way that he amplifies his original misstep.
Displays of righteous indignation might play well with a populist leader’s domestic base. Some even argue that developing the reputation for having a temper can be a good bargaining strategy. Negotiators who represent angry leaders can try a variation of the good cop–bad cop strategy, warning interlocutors to make concessions now, otherwise they cannot guarantee what their frustrated leader will do. Former French ambassador to the United States Gérard Araud got at this when he advised his superiors on how to respond to Trump’s public insults: “Do nothing because he will always outbid you. Because he can’t accept appearing to lose. You have restraint on your side, and he has no restraint on his side, so you lose. It is escalation dominance.”8
In actuality, the international effect of angry outbursts is to narrow the zone of possible cooperation between countries. If a leader unleashes an angry tirade against another country, that is sure to gain considerable public attention in both nations. This automatically raises the “audience costs” for both leaders. The larger the audience that is paying attention to any dispute, the greater the political costs a leader can suffer by backing down in that dispute.9 Displays of temper make it harder for the populist to compromise, but it will also make it more politically difficult for the object of the tirade to make any concessions. Angry provocations therefore make negotiations more costly and conflict escalation more likely.10 Trump’s inability to secure significant concessions on trade agreements and arms control treaties reflect this dynamic.
The other possible explanation for Trump’s short temper is that he has the emotional maturity of a two-year-old. Plenty of officials who interacted with the Toddler in Chief have noticed this tendency. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe described a phone conversation with Trump after the President had fired James Comey. Trump was furious that McCabe had authorized an FBI plane to ferry Comey from California to Washington DC after he had been fired. As McCabe put it, “The ranting against Comey spiraled. I waited until he had talked himself out.” Similarly, GOP members of Congress often talk about the President’s public policy views as a function of his mood. As the examples in this chapter attest, it is striking how often Trump’s allies and supporters describe his temper as being out of control. As a populist, Trump is happy to exploit anger; as the Toddler in Chief, however, he is a slave to his own temper.
Opportunistic aides and advisors who know their leader is easily triggered will have an incentive to exploit that emotion. Members of any ruling clique who perceive that they are losing an internecine policy dispute could provoke the leader’s anger to short-circuit a decision-making process in which they would lose. This has been standard operating procedure during the Trump administration. According to the Daily Beast, “It was common practice for aides to slide into the Oval Office and distract and infuriate the president with pieces of negative news coverage.” Former staffer Omarosa Maningault Newman presented stories to Trump that “would often enrage the president, and resulted in [his] spending at least the rest of the day fuming.”11 White House staffers Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller also riled Trump up to sabotage any attempt to fashion compromises on trade or immigration policy.12 One senior White House official told Politico, “People would put articles on the president’s desk that were things he didn’t need to see, things that were meant to gin him up or get him mad at somebody.”13 While this tactic temporarily slowed during John Kelly’s tenure as White House Chief of Staff, it returned as Kelly’s influence ebbed.14
Trump does not stand out from other Presidents because he gets mad. What stands out is how often his temper emerges, and how frequently it has sabotaged his administration. Trump’s tantrums emerge more prominently during moments of severe political stress—the simultaneous publication of Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House and an anonymous New York Times op-ed from a high-ranking Trump official being the most obvious flashpoint. President Trump yelled at Chief of Staff John Kelly so viciously that according to the New York Times Kelly told his staff that “he had never been spoken to like that during 35 years of serving his country.”15 Trump screamed at Attorney General Jeff Sessions so loudly that Sessions later described it as “the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.”16 The President called up National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster once for the sole purpose of screaming at him.17 If all Trump’s meltdowns from the #ToddlerinChief thread had been included in this chapter, it would be double the length.
Trump’s temper tantrums have also led to poor decision-making and pathological staff strategies for coping with it. Anger leads to short-term, impulsive decision-making that might feel good in the moment but soon leads to disastrous consequences. Trump’s uncontrollable temper also ties into the issues of poor impulse control and lack of executive functioning that I discuss in chapter 3. Trump’s anger led him to fire FBI Director James Comey, triggering an independent investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that dominated headlines for two years. Trump’s fits so rattled his foreign policy team that his Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Secretary of Defense, and Chief of Staff all disparaged him in ways that made it into the media. An irate Trump took on-camera responsibility for the longest federal government shutdown in history, an action that eventually led to his backing down without getting any of his demands fulfilled by Congress. The President’s out-of-control temper has caused staffers to delay or shorten their own travel, as well as that of the President, in order to avoid setting him off.18 It has also contributed to a burn rate that is the highest in the history of White House staffs.19
Trump’s temper has limited government transparency. According to several senior Pentagon officials, the Defense Department halted televised briefings because they were worried President Trump would get angry if he saw something he disliked.20 Trump officials asked former White House Counsel Don McGahn to falsely state that he never believed the President obstructed justice, in the hopes that this would calm the President down.21 Most disturbingly, his temper is so bad that it has clearly warped the information that his staff provide to him on anything ranging from political analysis to national security intelligence. No President likes to hear bad news. In Trump’s case, his temper has deterred his subordinates from providing him with necessary information. Then, when he learns of it, he gets even more angry. McGahn told GOP Senate aides after he had stepped down that he “spent the last couple of years getting yelled at” by Trump.22 The result has been a persistent and dangerous doom loop of anger and ignorance.