The origin of Trump's 'mental powers'

The technique is as follows: imagine your life as you would like it to be. A perfect couple, steel muscles, respect everywhere. Now fix this image in your mind with daily exercises: write your wishes on a piece of paper, every morning, many times. For years if necessary. Follow these steps and you will end up achieving the mentality necessary to succeed. A conviction so strong that it will sprout, it can not be otherwise, success.

This is called "The Power of Positive Thinking," the title of one of the pioneering self-help books in the United States, published in 1952. Its author, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, argued that, to be successful, the most important thing is Wishing it with all your strength. "Stamp in your mind an image of yourself succeeding," Peale said. "Affirm it, visualize it, create it, and it will come true".

Peale's book was a great success and had many followers. Among them, a young Chinese-American actor skilled in martial arts named Bruce Lee. In January 1969, Lee wrote a letter to himself (1). He said: "I, Bruce Lee, will be the first highly paid Eastern superstar in the United States." As he predicted, in 1970 he was already famous. In 1973, a legend.

There were those who learned alongside Norman Vincent Peale. Real estate entrepreneur Fred Trump was one of his most loyal parishioners. Every Sunday, Trump and his family went to the Peale church in Manhattan to bathe in the Reverend's philosophy. "Peale's simple and cheerful advice allowed [Donald] Trump's father to alleviate his anxieties," writes Michael Kruse in Politico. The relationship became so close that Peale married the two daughters of the tycoon, and his young son: the current president of the United States.

_{Thomas Musolino wearing a mask of President Trump during a campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. (Reuters)}

Trump's devotion to "positive thinking" gained strength in the next generation. When Donald Trump, at only 35 years old, opened his first big project, the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, he gave Peale a loan. "The mind can overcome any obstacle," the then-builder told The New York Times. "I never think about the negative."

This very American doctrine is not exclusive to Donald Trump. Crowds of personalities fly it in their films, books and songs, and in the stories "from beggar to millionaire". There are clinics that claim the possibility of healing with the power of thought and organized cults around this principle. But perhaps Trump has become "the living example of that way of thinking," as his biographer, Gwenda Blair, told El Confidencial. The fact that he is president today is proof. If all the academics, journalists, sociologists, politicians, and statisticians who predicted their defeat at least a hundred times lost their jobs, universities and newsrooms in the United States would be emptied at once.

It can be said that the president has taken the power of positive thinking to a higher level. Donald Trump does not limit himself to projecting an image of himself, but he arrogates the right to include the entire reality in this mental image. For him, the world is a blank sheet. A mass that mold according to your interests at every moment. And he is not content with fixing this image in his mind; he wants to fix it, too, in the minds of others.

During the election campaign, he painted the US as a crime hole where bands of illegal immigrants slaughtered girls with honors; of corrupt politicians and honest workers whom Washington had abandoned. A weak country that everyone laughed at and took advantage of. That the empirical data said otherwise had no importance. You had to present yourself as a savior, mobilize voters, and that's how Trump broke all the records of falsehoods issued by a politician. And he got the presidency.

He even covered his back in case the unthinkable happened: losing the elections. The weeks before the elections, Trump denounced an imminent electoral fraud and asked his followers to be vigilant. I had no proof of anything, on the other hand, impossible to do, given the enormous decentralization of the electoral districts. When a presenter asked him if he would accept the result, Trump responded: "I will see it at the time".

Since last year, his overwhelming marketing campaign uses the presidential pulpit. The scarce assistance to his investiture in Washington, according to thousands of testimonies, photographs, videos, satellite images, became "the largest audience ever witnessed an investiture. Point, "according to his then spokesman, Sean Spicer. With Trump, the US has the cabinet "with the highest IQ, by far" and "the best economy in history", while the immigration police liberate cities from the Salvadoran gangs. According to Politifact, 70% of what he says is false. More than any other politician, present or past, Democrat or Republican. In his first ten months in office, Donald Trump said almost six times as many falsehoods as his predecessor Barack Obama in eight years.

Many followers believe what he says; others not so much, but they value this optimism "à la Trump" as a way to encourage the United States to conquer new frontiers. It is the positive thinking applied to a country. According to the cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and perhaps the only one who predicted Trump's victory from the beginning, the president is "morally flexible," and thanks to that, in part, he is "the most persuasive man you'll see in your life. ", Someone capable of" opening a hole in the fabric of reality ". Lying often, then, would not be so serious if it is done to achieve a greater purpose.

_{President Donald Trump after a campaign event in Great Falls, Montana, on July 5, 2018. (Reuters)}

So, for this model to work, two details have to be removed: the moral and the sense of reality. Trump's religion is himself and the country he dreams of. And the rest, ethics, traditions, statistics and laws of physics are there to be used or pushed aside. And also the other mental images that compete with Trump's. "Remember," he told his followers in July, referring to the media: "What you are seeing and reading is not what is happening."

So far, assuming your bets go well. There will be polemics, disbelief, lies, offended people; but, in the end, he will rise victorious over the mediocre who underestimated him, like when he beat Hillary Clinton and twisted an arm to the Republican Party. But what if it fails? And if reality imposes itself on your wishes, and in your blindness to not admit it, does it generate a catastrophe of biblical proportions?

This concern can be summarized in two words: Atlantic City. The great builder, the invincible negotiator, raised bets on April 5, 1990. That day, with his red tie of power and in front of thousands of people, Donald Trump rubbed a lamp. The genius replied: "Your dreams are orders". Music and lasers filled the Atlantic City sky. The Trump Taj Mahal casino, the "eighth wonder of the world", with its 1,250 rooms and 3,000 slot machines, was inaugurated. It had cost six times more than expected and had been financed with junk bonds at an interest rate of 14%. A year later, the Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy.

Those who accompanied him in the debacle could not understand Trump's optimism. "I told him I was doomed from the beginning," said W. Bucky Howard, named president of the casino shortly after its opening. "I told him I was going to fail. The Taj was not sufficiently financed. " Steve Bollenbach, responsible for bringing the financial ruin to port, confessed that, if he were Trump, he would have committed suicide. "I would have been looking for the nearest building from which to jump, and he remained optimistic all the time (...). I never suspected that [Trump] would lose sleep for a moment. "

In spite of squandering his fortune, having to ask his octogenarian father for money and spending four years of litigation litigation, Donald Trump never abandoned, let it be known, the unshakeable faith in himself. "I refuse to give up in the face of negative circumstances," he declared years after the bankruptcies. To this day Trump continues to mention Peale as his reference. "He was my pastor," he recalled in 2015, when he was already a candidate for the White House.

Trump's attitude arouses the same suspicion that inspired Peale's work in his day. Psychiatrists like R. C. Murphy accused him of inducing people to "self-hypnosis", of pushing self-deception, narcissism and a dangerous divorce with reality. A deformation of the Protestant current that links the salvation of the soul to the accumulation of individual goods and successes. According to Julie Norem, professor of psychology at Wellesley College, "the biggest problem with the positive thinking version of Norman V. Peale is that you can not know when you have crossed the line: since you have accepted that philosophy, you are already ruling out any negative thinking "

Trump himself said on his Twitter account: "Practice positive thinking," he recommended to his followers in 2014. "That will keep you focused while discarding anything that is unnecessary, negative or harmful." As for example four consecutive bankruptcies. Or the consequences of a possible bad step in the oval office.