A belief in positive thinking is key to the tycoon’s business success and explains the breadth of his appeal to voters
Donald Trump won the United States presidential election held on 8 November 2016.
There have been three great influences on the professional life of Donald J. Trump, president-elect of the United States of America.
The first was his father, Fred Trump, the man he followed into the property business. Fred was Donald’s bank, lending him money and guaranteeing his loans, his network, providing vital political contacts and a name that opened doors, and his spur. The desire to outdo his dad drove Trump to become a builder of Manhattan towers rather than suburban homes.
The second was his lawyer. Trump met Roy Cohn in a nightclub and engaged him to fight a lawsuit accusing the Trumps of racial discrimination. Cohn became much more. He had been Joe McCarthy’s aide, the man whose antics had inspired the famous rebuke to the Senator by army counsel Joseph Welch: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ And he had since become attorney for mafia bosses such as ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Carmine ‘The Cigar’ Galante.
Cohn became Trump’s shield but also his tutor. He taught the property developer how attack can be the best form of defence and how to use publicity as a weapon. He passed on his ‘take no prisoners’ approach to his client.
And then there was the third influence. Norman Vincent Peale, the pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, the man who officiated at the 1977 wedding of Donald and Ivana.
Most of the analysis of Mr Trump’s victory stresses the strong political appeal of his populist message, the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy or Mr Trump’s misdemeanours. And each of these is worthy of study. Yet it is important not to ignore another factor in his victory – his attraction as a candidate and a person. And to understand that, it’s worth learning a bit more about Peale.
Norman Vincent Peale was no ordinary pastor. He was an exceptional orator, a gifted community leader and, most important of all, a bestselling author. In 1952 he published a book called The Power of Positive Thinking, which sold millions of copies. It also launched the positive-thinking movement with its motivational speakers, its role in business morale conferences and its shelves of self-help books.
Positive thinking has become one of the most influential modern ideas, particularly in America. It is hugely popular and many find it deeply convincing. The first chapter of Peale’s bestseller is called ‘Believe in Yourself’ and begins like this: ‘Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.’
Positive thinkers accompany this belief with another. You can make things happen by wanting them to happen. You can change things by believing strongly enough in change. If change does not happen it just means that you didn’t believe it enough. Or in the words of Doug Cox, a motivational speaker and Trump favourite, hired to gee up the crowd at his birthday party: ‘We are never given a dream … without the power to make that dream come true.’
Peale is, along with Fred, the only person Donald Trump openly calls a mentor (since Cohn was disbarred shortly before dying of Aids-related illness after years spent opposing homosexuality, the president-elect is more sparing in his references to him). In his campaign book Crippled America, Trump writes that after hearing Peale speak, ‘I would literally leave that church feeling like I could listen to another three sermons.’
Peale, he said, ‘would install a very positive feeling about God that also made me feel positive about myself’. As Trump put it in the early 1980s: ‘The mind can overcome any obstacle. I never think of the negative.’ The business career, the politics and even the boasting (Trump overlooked the requirement to be humble) all bear the imprint of Peale and of the positive-thinking movement.
‘There is nobody like me. Nobody.’ Who on earth would say something like that? Let alone write it down in a campaign book. The answer is someone who believes that saying it makes it come true. Someone who thinks that you have to believe in yourself in order to be happy and successful.
Ditto: ‘I’m rich. I mean, I’m really rich. I’ve earned more money than even I thought I would – and I’ve had some pretty big dreams.’ Positive thinking teaches that you can believe yourself rich.
Mr Trump now talks of how everyone will be so, so proud, of how things are going to be just beautiful and of how, for instance, Britain is a ‘very, very special place’ for him. He puts things like this because positive thinkers believe that the superlatives help make it happen.
You can see this thinking in his policy platform too. He is just going to make things happen. He will get rid of illegal immigrants by deporting them and building a wall (he is good at construction); he will solve the healthcare problem by locking the experts in a room until they have a solution; he will create jobs; he will destroy Isis; he will get a better trade deal out of China; he will stop Iran building nuclear weapons.
There is very little on how he will do any of this. Mainly it is because there is nobody like me (nobody). With enough imagination, imagination becomes reality.
The trouble is that it doesn’t. Positive thinkers are simply wrong to argue that the mind can overcome any obstacle. We often have dreams without the power to make the dreams come true. It is utter nonsense to suggest otherwise.
In Trump Revealed, Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher tell the tale of their subject’s investment in casinos in Atlantic City. When critics questioned whether there was a market, he brushed them off. The critics weren’t thinking big enough. These would be ‘monster’ properties, he’d made a ‘fantastic deal’, he said. The casino business went bankrupt. All the positive thoughts in the world couldn’t save it.
Donald Trump started teasing people that he would run for president before 2000. And from the moment he did, he was a strong candidate. He was one of the top ten most admired Americans in Gallup polling and he led presidential polls when people were asked. He is a star. Almost a cartoon of success and dynamism. Why not the presidency? It’s just that few people believed either he or the voters were serious about it. It turned out they both were.
The idea that a positive-thinking chief executive type can dream America and the world out of its problems may be flawed but it is very seductive, quite apart from the political attractions of Trump’s nationalism.
And I suppose Trump’s positive thinking does have this to be said for it. He said: ‘I’m going to be president.’ And now he is.