The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale (1930-1993) influenced President Trump greatly during the president's youth. The president's family attended a church helmed by Peale. Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking espoused a worldview exercised by the president's father, Fred. Peale's Trump family spiritual advisor status has led to serious consequences in 2020.
Always identifying benefits but never acknowledging costs may work as long as one is a mega-millionaire and dad's money can cure all errors in judgement. Even then, however, problems can arise. Bankruptcies, for example, might be expected with so much focus on upsides rather than downsides. Then friction and lawsuits as sales pitches to others edit out all vestiges of the negative. Reality-based projections get buried under a veneer of positivity. Personal relationships get screened according to who provides the biggest doses of positivity and sycophantism. All interactions become components of an ego-boosting echo chamber.
In many of my hundred blog entries since the start of the pandemic, I've said that the inability to handle cognitive dissonance has been a severe problem for both the president and his supporters. Their refusal to actively recognize disconfirmation of their beliefs or to seek out such disconfirmation has brought us to our current widespread cultural irrationality. Millions of Americans accept irrationality in themselves and others as preferable to a change in attitudes or beliefs. Vice President Mike Pence, head of the Coronavirus Task Force, refuses to follow his task force's quarantining recommendations. President Trump holds large, mostly maskless rallies, risking the creation of more super spreader events. As logical reasons to support the GOP's Covid-19 response erode away, millions of Trump supporters retreat to conspiratorial nonsense so as to preserve their irrational world views.
Journalists as Enemies
Trump not only expects those in his orbit to adhere to his constant positivity requirements, he expects the world in general to do the same. Those who do not subscribe to his unyielding blind positivity are labeled as "losers." Journalists' need for objective facts puts them directly in opposition to Trump's priorities and view of the world. Trump and journalists are, in fact, obvious and natural enemies.
President Trump's inability to tolerate criticism was no historical secret. In a 1990 CNN interview featuring Trump being asked about the tortured state of his casino finances, the president-to-be said, "The news media gets away with murder."
The reporter, Charles Feldman, asked, "What was inaccurate so far?"
Trump responded, "I thought your demeanor was inaccurate. I thought that questions you were posing to people in my organization were inaccurate and false and unfair."
To which Feldman of course replied, "Questions by definition can't be inaccurate."
Fast forward 30 years. We had the semi-famous truncated 60 Minutes interview with, or versus, Lesley Stahl. And yesterday Trump said that reporting on the pandemic should be an "election law violation" because it's anti-Trump.
Despite being a Trump fan in 1990, I recognized patently ludicrous stuff when I heard it. Ludicrous and outrageous was his stock in trade. Unfortunately, he's still ludicrous while holding the office of president in 2020. This expectation that everyone should share Trump's positivity regarding himself and his ideas has been a staple of Trump's personal mythos for 50 years.
The Kushner Reveal
This "power of positive thinking," which is not much more than simple magical thinking, appears to be highly contagious. Yesterday, Jared Kushner said, "One thing we've seen in a lot of the black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about. But he can't want them to be more successful than they want to be successful." That's quite a reveal of the Jared Kushner philosophical mindset.
Wanting to be successful, evidently, is supposed to make it so. If only we lived in such a magical world. A world where anyone who infringes on our positivity could be described as an enemy. A world where our friends label our enemies as cannibalistic pedophiles because, well, they are the worst kind. The positive folks on one side; sheer raw evil on the other. And if you've failed, it's probably because you didn't want to be successful enough.
Positivity, alas, is no substitute for policy. In the middle of a historic pandemic, magical thinking sans science kills. Against Covid-19, the power of positive thinking has not and will save the day.
Bob Dietz
October 27, 2020
