The president is a reflection of our worst instincts. Even before I agreed to write The Art of the Deal for Donald Trump three decades ago, I sensed his extreme self-absorption and utter lack of conscience. I wrote the book anyway for the money.
To do so, I set aside my concerns about the kind of man he was, and more importantly, the kind of man I wanted to be.
I never imagined that writing a book for a buffoonish real estate developer could eventually help get him elected president of the United States. The fact that it did is a source of shame and regret I will always carry.
But working with Trump also prompted a reckoning with the Trump in me — the least appealing aspects of myself that I tended to deny and disown, rationalize, minimize, and project onto others, as Trump does every day.
Trump and I grew up wounded in similar ways. We each had a parent who was harsh and fiercely demanding — my mother, and his father — and one who was mostly absent — my father, and his mother. We both longed for approval from our harsher parent and went to extraordinary lengths to build identities separate from them. Each of us sought in the external world the acceptance, love, and security that were so unavailable at home. Both of us mistakenly assumed that more money, power, and praise would make us feel safer, more secure, and more in control of our lives.
The reality is that we all struggle with feelings of fear, insecurity, and inadequacy. They’re an ineluctable part of being human, and they’ve been exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis. To feel worthy — deserving, valuable, lovable — is arguably our most fundamental human need, after food, oxygen, and shelter. The tragedy is not simply the pain we suffer from the experience that we’re not good enough, but also our deep aversion to facing these feelings squarely.
It doesn’t help that we live in a culture that values what we do far more than it does who we are and accords little importance to our inner lives—the emotions, mindset, biases, beliefs, and assumptions that so profoundly shape the way we show up in the world but which few of us are encouraged to notice.
As we grow up, each of us develops a worldview — a story about who we are, what we believe, and what makes us feel safe. Most of us spend the rest of our lives sticking to our story. We see what we can tolerate seeing and disregard the rest. The vast majority of our everyday behaviors are automatic and habitual, rather than intentional and self-selected, and too often they’re reactive and defensive. Even as adults, our early experiences of vulnerability can be retriggered instantly whenever our safety and worthiness feel under threat.
Both my story and Trump’s were grounded in the conviction that the world is a dangerous place, and that staying safe requires being vigilant, aggressive, and full of certitude. Like Trump, I believed that if I wasn’t strong and dominant, I was weak and vulnerable. If I wasn’t 100% right, I was 100% wrong. If I wasn’t all good, I was all bad. It was win or lose, and there wasn’t much in between.
Trump’s response to his feelings of inadequacy was to tout his failures as successes or blame them on others. The saving grace for me was that I felt my own shortcomings and dissatisfaction acutely, and I believed that only I could change the trajectory of my life.
We can’t change what we don’t notice. One of the most liberating experiences in my life was the recognition that the worst things that people have said about me, and for which I’ve castigated myself, were not only true, they were even truer than I had been able to see and acknowledge. But they weren’t all that was true.
In my own life, I’ve progressed from despising my own weakness and limitations, which made me feel so vulnerable and inadequate, to feeling genuine compassion for the young part of me that can still feel that way. I also feel a greater sense of responsibility for how I behave as an adult in any given moment.
Like Trump, I believed that if I wasn’t strong and dominant, I was weak and vulnerable. If I wasn’t 100% right, I was 100% wrong.
Three questions have animated my journey: “Why am I the way I am?” “Who can I become?” and “What stands in my way?” Wrestling with these questions over the years led to three more, which I ask myself whenever I feel triggered, attacked, or find myself defaulting to certainty: “What am I not seeing?” “What else could be true here?” and “What is my responsibility in this?”
Self-awareness by itself is not sufficient. “We are what we repeatedly do,” the philosopher Will Durant explained. Becoming the best version of ourselves requires not just self-inquiry, but also deliberate and disciplined practice to break free of old mindsets and build new habits.
Instead, Trump has role-modeled and normalized our most primitive instincts — hatred, greed, deceit, defensiveness, denial, and blame. He’s had an insidious impact on our collective psyche and our nervous systems. As Trump has devolved in office, he has dragged us backward with him.
Fifty years ago, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin wrote a prescient article in Science titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin’s thesis was that individuals acting in their rational self-interest will use whatever resources are available to them, blithely ignoring the fact that any finite resource eventually runs out, which is disastrous for everyone, including themselves.
To illustrate, Hardin used the metaphor of an open pasture — “the commons,” as he called it — to which herdsmen bring their cattle to feed. In order to maximize their income and improve their lives, the herdsmen seek to feed as many cattle as possible. But over time, the effects of overgrazing take a progressive toll on the commons, eventually rendering it unusable for all herdsmen.
“Therein is the tragedy,” Hardin explained. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his self-interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”
The defining challenge for each of us is how much we are willing to invest to serve the greater good, even if it requires personal sacrifice.
This is a painful truth with which too many of us have avoided a true reckoning. Like so many people I know, I have continued to live my life as if the Earth’s resources are infinite when they plainly are not. Until recently, I failed to take account of how much my economic, educational, and racial privilege have protected and advantaged me and limited my ability to fully appreciate the level of injustice that millions of people face every day.
How do each of us grow beyond the narrow and self-preserving default to “me” and embrace a bigger commitment to “we?” Why, for example, do the wealthiest Americans horde millions and even billions of dollars that neither they nor their heirs can ever spend? The defining challenge for each of us is how much we are willing to invest to serve the greater good, even if it requires personal sacrifice.
I share Mary Trump’s view that Trump, her uncle, has turned our country into “a macro version of [his] malignantly dysfunctional family.” But the truth can set us free. We can acknowledge our shortcomings and missteps, our anger, sadness, grief, and vulnerability, and we can emerge stronger for it. The only question is how much truth we can tolerate.