4.2 Charismatic Sociopath

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters,” bragged Donald Trump. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel had no trouble finding Trump supporters that loyal. And yes, they even said that if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, they would absolutely still vote for him. And what if he punched the Pope in the face? “I’m a Catholic. Punch away,” said a loyal supporter. That’s the power of Trump’s charisma — a character trait most Democrats can’t even imagine he could possess.

This lack of imagination has cost us. If we can’t understand his charisma, how can we defeat it? According to Andrés Miguel Rondón, a Venezuelan who lived through the rise of Hugo Chávez, the opposition’s misunderstanding of the connection between Chávez and his base was what kept him in power. Trump relies on strongman charisma just as Chávez did. His followers see themselves as unfairly under attack and look up to him as their protector.

Many attacks on Trump simply leave his base ever more convinced of their need for a strongman. That gets them out to vote. 

What’s Charisma?

FDR was highly charismatic, as are Barack and Michelle Obama. That raises a fundamental question: How can Michelle and the Donald both be charismatic when they have almost nothing in common? Is the concept meaningless? The answer is simple: They have something huge in common. They both form a tight emotional bond with their supporters. What’s charismatic to some is repugnant to others. 

The strength of your charisma is measured both by how many people find you appealing and how appealing they think you are. It’s not just about the leader’s personal magic; the followers’ tastes are just as important. Here’s a definition that takes that into account:

A leader is charismatic if a large number of followers find the leader attractive in a way that creates a strong emotional attachment to the leader.

Charm and warmth come to mind first as characteristics of charisma. But those matter more for celebrities than for politicians. Trump lacks those, but he does appear to have self-confidence, another key to charisma. He puts on quite a show. We could quibble about whether it’s real, but all that matters for charisma is his appearance to his followers. To them, he appears both self-confident and competent — after all, he’s a billionaire so he must know what he’s doing. Those are both key qualities for a charismatic strongman.

But his followers must also identify with him. How can they identify with such an arrogant billionaire? His trick, a standard one, is to reflect their interests and their opinions. He tries things out and watches closely to see what they like. Eventually, he found the lines that drew the biggest applause, such as: “I’ll build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it.” His followers trained him to say whatever they wanted to hear, and he was open to taking any position or attitude they wanted. 

He also promises to be their champion — their strongman — and they long for that. His vulgarity helps prove he is one of them, and not part of the establishment, despite his apparent enormous wealth. And besides, he really does despise the establishment, which shuns him for his crudeness.

To sum up, the key to his charisma is playing the role that his base wants him to play — a self-confident, powerful strongman who considers their needs legitimate and wants to defend them. And they don’t just want this; they feel they desperately need it because they’ve been losing the culture war since the late 1960s.

The more we attack Trump and his base, the stronger his charisma becomes. Instead of attacking, whenever it’s a situation that is not too damaging, we should give him enough rope and let him hang himself. And when the situation is dire, we should focus on fixing the situation while making his responsibility clear, not on attacking Trump and his base. 

Shouting “Fuck you” from a fancy stage in front of a fancy audience, far from damaging him, is exactly what strengthens him. Trump knows that and constantly suckers us into playing the role he needs us to play — his unhinged enemy. 

His base knows this so well that they have a term for our weakness: “Trump derangement syndrome.” Google it if you care to read one of the half-million web pages that mention it.

Mueller and Maddow

The Russian investigation shows how we lose. Night after night for two years, MSNBC and its commentators presented circumstantial evidence that Trump had secretly colluded with Russia, and they seemed sure that Mueller would prove it. And maybe Trump had colluded. But the MSNBC commentators did not consider how it would strengthen Trump’s base if their speculations about Mueller proved wrong.

Mueller’s report so unhinged Rachel Maddow when she saw it that she blurted out Trump’s main talking point before Trump did: “He [Mueller] decided to take it upon himself to declare definitively, ‘Yeah, you know, I looked at all that stuff, and I can tell you there is no crime there, it’s fine.’” Mueller said no such thing. 

In fact, Mueller had declared, “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” And just for emphasis, he wrote that into the report three times. But Maddow lost it and channeled Trump rather than Mueller.

MSNBC should have used the opposite strategy. We should look like we are not attacking him and appear to give him the benefit of the doubt. Then — and you can depend on this — it just happens to turn out that he is more duplicitous than we “thought” (or pretended to think). 

The impact of Mueller’s report on Trump’s base would have been the opposite. His conclusions — Trump might have obstructed justice, might have committed a crime, and the Russians helped him — would have brought discouraging realism to his base. The problem is that we say what we want to hear, not what helps us win. That’s especially true of radicals.

A Charismatic Sociopath?

There’s been some debate over whether Trump is a narcissist or a sociopath. Well, of course, he’s narcissistic. He vastly overrates himself and sees others as unimportant. But he’s also a sociopath. What’s most commonly misunderstood is his sociopathic behavior. So let’s focus on that.

I’d be the first to tell you that a conscience may be the most important human trait. But if all you care about it is “winning” — if you’re Donald Trump — you’re better off without one. And that’s basically the definition of a sociopath.

Understanding sociopaths should be simple, but for us “normies” it’s extremely difficult. Their way of thinking just doesn’t seem possible. Perhaps the best way is to imagine playing a game — anything from poker to football to Monopoly. Games let us leave our conscience behind. If you’re playing poker, lying (bluffing) is not only okay, it’s expected. You would be considered a fool if you told the truth — Trump’s view precisely. In football, being sneaky is okay. In Monopoly, we attempt to drive our opponents into bankruptcy and couldn’t care less.

A sociopath sees life as a game. End of story. Without a conscience, they just play to win, any way they can. And they feel absolutely fine about it — no matter what it takes. It’s fine to lie, and it’s fine to break the law. Just don’t get caught. If you can get away with it, you’re stupid not to.

Roughly speaking, about 1%, or three million Americans, really do think like this most of the time. I’ve seen three instances of this up close. Two of these people had good careers and led useful, even helpful, lives while causing a lot of unnecessary hurt. The third chose an extremely different strategy and ended up with a 15-year-minimum prison sentence, although he had appeared normal enough to a friend of mine that she rented her basement apartment to him. 

That demonstrates a key point. Just like normies (us), sociopaths choose many different careers, from caregivers to criminals to political leaders, so they can be very hard to spot. But one of the easiest clues to spot is this: Do they lie and not seem to care at all when they get caught as long as they suffer no consequences? Trump passes that test every day.

I don’t know what Trump understands and what he doesn’t. But the only thing he cares about — and he has said this himself — is winning. So the only argument that he’ll pay attention to is one that concerns his popularity. Arguing that saving Obamacare would save a million lives will cut no ice with him. Arguing that ending Obamacare would be unpopular with his base just might work.

It’s surprising how many people don’t understand this. European trade ministers brought binders of data to the G7 trade negotiations to convince Trump not to start a trade war.

What were they thinking?!

Update: Quote from John Bolton

CNN, June 21, Zakaria — John Bolton, in his new book, The Room Where It Happened, has come to the same conclusion after personally observing dozens of Trump’s policy decisions. His conclusion matches the sociopath diagnosis.

I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.