The Perils of Perverted Positive Thinking

​ In his book, “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump acknowledged his admiration for Dr. Normal Vincent Peale, the pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan from 1932 to 1984. Trump’s father, Fred Trump, had long been a devotee of Dr. Peale and regularly attended his Sunday services, taking young Donald with him. Peale was perhaps best known for his 1952 best-selling book entitled “The Power of Positive Thinking” and Fred Trump kept a copy of that book in his home although there is no evidence that young Donald actually read it. Dr. Peale went on to write 40 other books. He even had his own television program and influenced the thinking of millions of Americans preaching the gospel that one should think positively about themselves and try to visualize their success.

  Dr. Peale’s emphasis on thinking positively was intended to cleanse the mind of negative thoughts and allow God (the source of all energy) to help each person to achieve his/her goals. Enraptured by Dr. Peale’s inspiring message, young Donald steadfastly believed that by visualizing his goals he would indeed succeed in everything that he did. His acceptance of the power of positive thinking was reinforced by his father’s belief that the world is divided into “winners” and “losers” and Donald was determined to be among the “winners.” The result was that visions of success not only filled his mind, but were constantly repeated so others would know that he was a “winner.”

  While Trump was growing up there was another theme that swept across our nation to help explain how America’s work ethic and strong emphasis on self reliance had led it to become the planet’s most successful nation. It was “God helps those who help themselves.” This was not an original thought. According to Wikipedia, it was a proverbial saying embodied in numerous religious teachings dating back thousands of years and later popularized in this country by Benjamin Franklin. This too made a strong impression on young Donald. In fact, Matt Lewis, writing for The Daily Beast, has suggested that whereas “Norman Vincent Peale believed that all things were possible through Jesus Christ, Donald J. Trump believes all things are possible through Donald J. Trump.”

  Trump’s tendencies to create his own reality was demonstrated even before he became president.  In his 2016 presidential campaign he bragged that under his leadership the nation “would win so much” that Americans would “get tired of winning.” Immediately after his inaugural address he claimed that the crowd stretching down the national mall was the largest to ever attend a presidential inauguration. When that assertion was belied by The New York Times’ publication of side-by-side photographs of the mall during Trump’s and Obama’s inaugurations, he simply had his Press Secretary repeat his boast. Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor in his administration, characterized this and other patently false Trump assertions as merely his “Alternative Reality.”

  Trump’s successes while serving as president, however, were both modest and few in number. Perhaps his most important achievement was the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 which significantly reduced income taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals. This legislation was enacted with Trump’s promise that it would supercharge the nation’s economy raising its annual rate of growth to 4%. While a success in the sense that it enabled its primary beneficiaries to increase their shares of the nation’s wealth, its impact on the nation’s economy was essentially imperceptible. More importantly, it diverted resources away from the federal government, further deferring badly needed infrastructure improvements that would help assure the nation’s future economic growth.

  At the conclusion of Trump’s term, his administration published a press release boasting about the strength of the nation’s economy while he was in office. Unfortunately, economic growth during the first three years of his term was no greater than during the last three years of the Obama administration. More importantly, the figures cited in that press release only covered the three years preceding the onset of the Covid pandemic which were more than erased during the final year of the Trump administration.

  Although Trump did not cause the pandemic, he certainly mishandled it as a result of his unwillingness to recognize the dangers posed by the coronavirus. Specifically, he reassured Americans that the virus would simply disappear as fast as it had appeared. Even after he reluctantly acknowledged that the pandemic could cause as many as 100,000 U.S. deaths, he began to pressure the states to relax their efforts to combat the spread of the virus out of fear that those efforts would cripple the nation’s economy which he viewed as the key to his re-election. In contrast to the U.S. where Covid deaths per 100,000 far exceeded those in any other developed nation, the leaders of other developed nations were easily re-elected – a stark demonstration of the peril of positive thinking.

  During Trump’s administration there were other notable examples of his predilection for positive thinking that led to disappointing results. Both Iran and North Korea had long been considered by the U.S. Department of State to pose a threat to world stability; and both had nuclear ambitions elevating that danger. To Donald Trump, they each posed an irresistible challenge to demonstrate his exceptionalism.

  North Korea had been ruthlessly ruled by three generations of dictators and had been in a state of cold war with South Korea since the cessation of hostilities on the Korean peninsula in the mid-1950s. Although North Korea was a poor country, its current ruler, Kim Jung Un, had devoted much of his nation’s limited resources to the development of nuclear weapons, a matter of great concern to all of its neighboring countries. Since the end of the Korean war the U.S. had not maintained diplomatic relations with North Korea in the hope of cutting it off from other developed nations and thereby coercing it to change its ways. This strategy, while impeding North Korea’s economic growth, unfortunately had no impact on the way North Korea conducted its internal and external affairs.

  Trump viewed North Korea as an opportunity to do what a half a dozen U.S. administrations had been unable to accomplish; namely, to cause North Korea to set aside its nuclear ambitions. Rather than start discussions with North Korea at a low diplomatic level and work up if those discussions proved promising, Trump chose to commence his efforts with a mano-a-mano meeting with Kim Jung Un, confident that he could return North Korea into the earth’s family of nations. He had three such face-to-face meeting with Kim Jung Un and exchanged letters which Trump characterized as “love letters.” These exchanges, however, resulted in no progress in retarding North Korea’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons or the means for delivering them. Quite to the contrary, North Korea continued to develop nuclear weapons and to test its missile delivery systems, sending ballistic missiles over Japan and much of the Pacific. While Trump’s recognition of North Korea had no positive impact on North Korea’s behavior, it did damage U.S. relationships with South Korea and Japan. More importantly,Trump’s efforts to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions gave it a level of recognition which it had not previously enjoyed, a lesson which did not escape Iran.

  Like North Korea, during the Obama presidency Iran was on the cusp of accumulating enough fissionable materials to create one or more nuclear weapons. For years Iran had been subject to a host of international sanctions which had done little to curb its nuclear ambitions, much less the havoc it had been creating throughout the middle east. This prompted the Obama administration to try to alter Iran’s detrimental behavior through negotiations. This effort culminated in the adoption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (or JCPOA) in which Iran agreed with the U.S. and the four other members of the U.N. Security Council to reduce its stock of fissionable materials and to delay further nuclear development for eight years. Upon becoming president, however, Trump declared the JCPOA to be a “disaster” and unilaterally caused the U.S. to withdraw from it. To deter Iran from resuming its efforts to become a nuclear power, he re-imposed the economic sanctions relaxed under the JCPOA. These steps only succeeded in rekindling hostility between the U.S. and Iran which resumed its efforts to create and amass fissionable materials. As a result, Iran is now only a few months away from having sufficient fissionable material to create a nuclear weapon which is essentially the position it was in before signing the JCPOA.

  With unbridled faith in his own ability to achieve foreign policy successes, Trump also tried his hand at taming China’s unfair trade practices. Beginning in 1971, restrictions on trade with China had been relaxed by President Nixon. This allowed China to quickly grow into a manufacturing powerhouse with many products formerly produced in the U.S. being produced in China. Much of China’s success was due to its own unfair trade practices which included import restrictions on American goods and thefts of U.S. technology. President Obama had sought to coerce China to reform its trade practices by entering into the Trans Pacific Partnership (or TPP) with eleven other pacific rim nations that did business with China. Underlying this pact was the belief that together these nations would be able to apply sufficient economic pressure on China to achieve that result.

  While running for president in 2016, Trump characterized the TPP as another “disaster”, and upon becoming President he quickly withdrew the U.S. from that pact. Rather than employ the collective bargaining power of the twelve TPP member nations, Trump (apparently envisioning himself as the slayer of dragons) decided to have the U.S. take on China alone. His chosen means for slaying the Chinese dragon was a trade war. Over the course of the next two years the U.S. and China escalated tariffs on each other’s products. Like two exhausted prize-fighters they ultimately decided to cease their destructive efforts which had caused Americans to pay higher prices for goods manufactured in China and American farmers to suffer billions of dollars in lost sales to China. Although this trade war was intended to repatriate manufacturing jobs lost to China, there was no noticeable increase in manufacturing jobs in this country during Trump’s term in office.

  Despite these notable failures, it would be a grave mistake to simply ignore Trump’s faith in the power of positive thinking. In the wake of the 2020 election, even before the results of the election had been announced, he began asserting that he had won the popular vote by a wide margin but, through a variety of fraudulent means, the official vote counts indicated that Biden was the victor.  Over the course of the next three months he continuously repeated that allegation eventually causing over 70% of Republican voters (roughly 25 million individuals) to believe his “Big Lie.” He accomplished this amazing feat even though his assertions of voter fraud had been debunked by (a) multiple hand and machine recounts of the ballots cast, (b) the report of his own Department of Justice which had investigated multiple allegations of voter fraud, (c) the assessment of his own agency in charge of voting security (CISA), which had pronounced the 2020 election as the most secure election in the nation’s history and (d) the decisions of 60 courts that had rejected a wide variety of voter fraud allegations made by his own campaign representatives.

  Trump even convinced an estimated 2,000 individuals to storm the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the Congress from certifying the results of the election. In short, he created a powerful alternative reality even though it had failed to alter the course of history as Trump had hoped. Even that failed effort which resulted in hundreds of criminal convictions (one of which carried an 18-year prison term) did not temper Trump’s belief that he could alter reality just by steadfastly refusing to accept it. Now he’s faced with another reality that could land him in prison for the balance of his life. Unlike most of the challenges he faced during his presidency, this one is solely the product of his belief that through steadfast positive thinking he could alter reality.

  At the conclusion of his presidency he ignored the requests of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the advice of his White House Counsel to turn over to NARA the records amassed during his presidency. Instead, he insisted that the documents belonged to him and that he was entitled to take them -- and take them he did to the Mar-a-Lago Club which he had declared to be primary residence.  A year later after numerous follow-up requests by NARA he relented and surrender 30 boxes of materials. However, it quickly became apparent that the records he had reluctantly surrendered were less than half of those he had commandeered when he departed the White House.

  As it had previously warned, NARA referred the matter to the Department of Justice which in May 2022 issued a subpoena for any and all presidential records remaining in Trump’s possession. That was followed up by a visit to Mar-a-Lago by DOJ and FBI employees who were presented with approximately 30 additional presidential documents and an affidavit signed by one of Trump’s attorneys attesting that these were all of the presidential documents that could be located after a diligent search of the premises. That production was also quickly determined to be incomplete and on August 8, 2022 a team of FBI and DOJ officials executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago recovering approximately 33 additional boxes of presidential records, over 100 of which bore classified marking and 18 of which were marked “top secret.”

  By that point it had become clear that Donald, the artful dodger, may have exceeded the power of positive thinking. Not only had he unlawfully retained documents in violations of the Presidential Records Act, but he had done so personally, willfully and with knowledge of the unlawful nature of his actions. Efforts to deny knowledge of the gravity of his actions as well as his ability to blame others for his transgressions would not be plausible. To make matters worse, the subsequent trial of E. Jean Carroll’s civil accusations against him demonstrated that no defense attorney would even chance letting him testify in his own defense for the simple reason that his penchant for “thinking positively” would cause him to lie under oath. His doing so would further add to his crimes and raise the level of sanctions that would be imposed when he would be sentenced.

  But wait. His problems have gotten worse. Now at least four of the attorneys who were hired to defend him in this matter have resigned and at least one of them has been compelled to testify against him in the grand jury proceeding. That proceeding has now led to a 37 count indictment which includes allegations of (1) retention of government records, (2) obstruction of justice and (3) violations of the Espionage Act. A conviction on these charges could lead to a jail sentence of up to 80 years. Although Trump had contended in a TV interview with Sean Hannity that he had the power to declassify all of the documents he had retained, a recording of one of his personal conversations at his New Jersey Golf Club includes a confession that he had not declassified the documents he had taken.

  Having no way to defend himself at trial, Trump is now again trying to create an alternate reality, claiming that he is the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by President Biden to weaponize the criminal justice system against him. On his social media network and at his political rallies he is asserting that the allegations in the indictment are false and are being brought by a corrupt FBI and Department of Justice. To be sure, he’s received positive feedback from those attending his rallies in Georgia and North Carolina and from numerous House Republicans. Still, it will be close to impossible for his attorneys to convince even a single juror to ignore the facts set forth in the indictment, virtually all of which will be supported by members of his own household or administration.

  At this point, the best that Trump can reasonably hope for is that (a) he can hold up the trial until after the election (an extremely long shot, at best), (b) he will be chosen to serve as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee (a real possibility) and (c) he will win the 2024 Presidential election (which, at the very least, will require Putin’s, if not divine, intervention). If he has not already done so, he probably should consider relocating himself (and the monies raised from his loyal supporters) toSaudi Arabia which does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S. The moral of Trump’s story seems to be that while "God helps those who help themselves, . . . God help those who get caught helping themselves."