When your three-year-old is faced with specific learning challenges, you’ll find her reasoning still rather one-sided. She can’t yet see an issue from two angles, nor can she solve problems that require her to look at more than one factor at the same time.
American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child
Trump’s 2016 campaign staff developed an unofficial diagnosis, “defiance disorder,” to describe Trump’s inclination to ignore the collective advice of his advisors and double down on whatever counterproductive gambit he had settled on. As Fox News’ Howard Kurtz noted in his book on Trump and his advisors, “Whenever Trump went off script, the coverage was often universally negative. Most politicians would backtrack, admit error, or change the subject. Trump invariably dug in his heels.”1 Similarly, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, the print journalist who knows Trump the best, tweeted in June 2017 about Trump’s oppositional behavior: “Trump doesn’t want to be controlled. In [the] campaign, [he] would often do opposite of what he was advised to do, simply because it was opposite.”2
Oppositional behavior is also a common toddler trait.3 As one book of parenting advice notes, “Toddlers tend to hear strongly worded commands as something to DO. If you yell, ‘Stop running around the pool!’ what is likely to register with your toddler is: ‘Run around the pool!”4 Putting it more bluntly, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah said, “This whole thing with Trump leads me to a question: have you ever argued with a toddler? . . . Toddlers will say the most outlandish shit and the more you argue with them, the more they become entrenched in their views.”5
Trump’s oppositional behavior could be related to his deep reluctance to take responsibility for mistakes. Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio explained to the Washington Post that the 45th President has possessed this trait since he was a small child. In grade school, he would continue to act out even if teachers complained about his behavior: “He has always—always—been terrified of having been found to be responsible for something, and the pursuit of alternative explanations has been intense at every step of his life. There had to be a conspiracy at work, some criminality, some hidden hand.”6
It could also be related to Trump’s implicit theory of power. According to Bob Woodward, White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter “observed that anytime anybody challenged Trump—in a policy debate, in court, in the public square—his natural instinct seemed to be that if he was not exerting strength, he was failing.”7 This belief forces Trump to stand firm even when he is factually wrong or has made a catastrophic error in political judgment. For Trump, doubling down on a wrong decision can also be a display of power. To some, the fact that he can persist in a poor decision for a sustained period is evidence of his power and will.
One could make a case that among Trump’s toddler traits, oppositional behavior might be the most useful for exercising political leadership. A common trope in the political psychology literature is about the dangers of “groupthink” among policymaking elites.8 Groupthink occurs when policymakers form an unspoken consensus about a policy problem, causing them to stifle their own objections and ostracize officials who do dissent. This can lead political leaders to agree to policy recommendations that have not been fully vetted. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy resisted his advisors’ consensus recommendation to launch an airstrike on Cuba, thereby successfully defusing a crisis that could have resulted in the exchange of nuclear weapons. One can argue that some of the biggest US policy miscues of the past half-century—Vietnam and Iraq—were made under conditions of groupthink.
Indeed, one of the few core themes of Trump’s 2016 campaign was his desire to disrupt the consensus of elite policymakers. In his most significant foreign policy speech during the campaign, Trump argued, “It’s time to shake the rust off America’s foreign policy. It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold.” He went on to state that his foreign policy advisors would not be “those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.”9 An oppositional thinker can shatter a failed policy consensus. Only Trump would have met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un without any preconditions or called off an airstrike on Iran that his entire national security team supported.
There are considerable downsides to Trump’s strain of oppositional behavior, however. For one thing, it permits the President to develop and cement a misperception despite all evidence to the contrary. Beliefs about issues on which there is a range of disagreement are one thing; beliefs about facts not in evidence are another thing entirely. Trump’s oppositional thinking makes it particularly difficult to combat his predilection for conspiracy theories. Trump started his political career by erroneously claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He has articulated a variety of other crackpot theories during his political career. These include the notion that vaccines cause autism and other health issues, that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and that the Chinese had fabricated climate change to gain a competitive edge over the US economy.10
Throughout his presidency, Trump has articulated false beliefs and refused to acknowledge his errors. Trump has persisted in the claim that millions of votes were cast fraudulently in 2016. He has insisted to friends that it was not his voice on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.11 He told GOP fundraisers that he had not called Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple,” despite video evidence to the contrary.12 He has insisted that wind turbines cause cancer, and that regulations make highways too curvy.13 Trump has claimed to confidants that his actual poll numbers are 20 percent higher than what has been published. When these friends have pushed back on this notion, Trump has simply tuned them out.14 These are only the most obvious of the thousands of times Trump has made demonstrably false statements.15 One person close to Trump explained it simply: “Trump doesn’t deal in reality. He creates his own reality and he actually believes it.”16 Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci acknowledged that Trump “definitely has a reality distortion field around himself where he curves facts toward himself.”17
Trump’s insistence that he must be right despite all evidence to the contrary has had repercussions in how he has been staffed. It has profoundly affected his intelligence briefings. In one instance in January 2019, Trump canceled his daily intelligence briefing after top intelligence officials contradicted his statements on Iran in Congressional testimony.18 More frequently, Trump’s intelligence briefers have had to tread carefully when briefing him about issues on which his public pronouncements have been wrong.19 This problem has allowed distrust between Trump and the US intelligence community to fester.
A related problem is that the 45th President’s resistance to negative feedback raises the stakes for anyone required to deliver bad news. There were several reasons that Trump grew weary of H. R. McMaster as his National Security Advisor, but one of them was simple: McMaster was the person who had to deliver news that Trump didn’t want to hear on a regular basis.20 The Toddler in Chief felt a similar irritation with Mick Mulvaney once he became Acting White House Chief of Staff.21
Trump’s stubbornness, combined with his lack of knowledge, also complicated some of his interactions with interest groups. In one bizarre case, Trump met with the leaders of various veterans groups in the White House. While talking about their issues, one vet brought up the need for VA access for those suffering from Agent Orange poisoning. At that point, Trump asked if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie.” After realizing that Trump meant Apocalypse Now, they explained to the President that was confusing Agent Orange with napalm. Trump refused to accept that he was mistaken and kept insisting that he was right. This occupied so much of the meeting that Trump was unable to get to all the attendees in the room, annoying and confusing many of the participants.22
His oppositional behavior has also been responsible for many of his political own-goals. His insistence that “both sides” were responsible for the ugliness in Charlottesville in August 2017 turned into a weeks-long saga. His refusal to extend standard presidential courtesies after the passing of Senator John McCain, despite entreaties from everyone on his staff, generated days of negative press coverage. His refusal to apologize for his summer 2019 tweets telling four junior minority Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” led to a multiweek controversy. In each of these instances, Trump eventually made partial concessions to political reality, seething at the necessity of doing it.23
Perhaps Sharpiegate is the best example of how Trump’s refusal to admit error gets him into deeper trouble. His September 1, 2019 tweet claiming that Alabama was under threat of Hurricane Dorian long after meteorologists ruled out that possibility required an immediate correction from the National Weather Service. Over the next ten days, the president insisted that he had been right despite all evidence to the contrary. To bolster his case, he ordered his subordinates to muzzle government scientists and used a Sharpie to deface a hurricane map that he showed to the White House press corps. The result has been a flurry of congressional queries and at least two official investigations of political interference in scientific work.24
Staffers have also learned to exploit Trump’s defiance disorder to manipulate him into making decisions that they want. This has been apparent from the first week of Trump’s presidency, when President Trump approved a botched raid into Yemen that killed a member of SEAL Team 6 as well as multiple civilians. According to press reports, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford helped convince Trump to approve the raid by hinting that President Obama would have been too cautious to approve it.25
In isolation, Trump’s habit for oppositional behavior and oppositional thinking would not be his worst trait as President. Unfortunately, it exacerbates all his other toddler traits. Because of his knowledge deficits, Trump is far more likely to double down based on a paucity of information. His subsequent temper tantrums raise the costs for staffers trying to correct him. When the Toddler in Chief makes mistakes—and he makes them frequently—his oppositional mindset exacerbates their political and policy costs.