TRUMP TRUTH: Why President Trump Upsets People So Much

TRUMP TRUTH

As the trusted counselor to leaders, entrepreneurs and artists (and many others), I help people accept stark truths about their lives, their businesses and the lives of others. These truths and insights may call upon them to act boldly, often in spite of their own anxiety and despite the fact that others will experience pain.

Here’s an example:  A senior vice president of a major corporation whose mother deserted her as a young girl and left her to be cared for by her alcoholic father had convinced herself that her dad was her savior — even a saint. After all, what did she have to believe in, once her mother was gone? Even if her father was abusive to her, she denied his shortcomings and what she suffered because of them.

Grappling with the fact that both her parents let her down in major ways would have been too much to bear at 9 or 10 years old. It would have turned her childhood into pure panic. But, as an adult, she found herself dismissing disloyalty in men, repeatedly (in the bedroom and the boardroom).  Ending that pattern required her doing the arithmetic and seeing her father for the flawed and untrustworthy person he was.
 
I use the word arithmetic intentionally, by the way. In some ways, seeing one’s life clearly requires an almost arithmetic assessment of it. If one’s father was no father, that’s how things add up — period. Pretending otherwise invites all manner of misinterpretation and self-sabotage, in many realms, all through life.

President Trump has been (and is still) practicing the political version of this arithmetic: psychological truth and healing. It is what it is.

When Trump tells the citizens of the United States that people who are in our country illegally and commit crimes must leave, he is the same as the therapist who tells a patient, “If your boyfriend is hitting you, you need to make him leave your apartment.” The breakup might result in sadness and anger, but that is no reason not to act.

When Trump says trade deals with the United States can’t be to the detriment of the U.S. economy, he is the corporate psychologist who tells a pair of business partners, “If one of you is trying to steal from the other, this isn’t a partnership, it’s a scam. That would make one of you a thief and the other a chump. And you both had better aspire to being more than that.”

When Trump tells our citizens that the borders of the United States need to be enforced vigorously, with a wall to defend the more porous of them, he is no different from the therapist who tells the owners of a house that is repeatedly robbed that they not only need to get an alarm system, but they also need to wonder why they don’t already have one. Because if they don’t value themselves enough to defend their property, that’s a much bigger problem than the robberies themselves.

When Trump says that China needs to be dealt with forcefully and that the Chinese have too much influence inside our government, he isn’t sounding the alarm to be alarmist.  He’s telling God’s honest truth.

When Trump says he will end the gender reassignment of children because there is exactly zero evidence anywhere in the scientific literature that human beings can be born into the wrong bodies, he is just stating facts.  Sorry if you’re offended.  Science is still science for Donald J. Trump.

It all adds up to what people do to prevent being victimized. It’s all arithmetic.

When Trump tells our citizens that companies that leave our country and American workers behind — and then sell their goods back into the United States — need to pay a price for their bad faith, he is no different from the sports psychologist who tells a team that its departing quarterback, who takes the team’s playbook with him mid-season, shouldn’t be able to walk back onto the field in another uniform, to a hero’s welcome. There’s got to be a price to pay for that betrayal, whether they once liked the guy or not. Otherwise, the team can start feeling like losers who deserve to be abandoned. And that can mean a really bad season, or even many bad seasons.

When Trump tells our citizens that states can’t choose to ignore federal laws and expect to receive financial support from the federal government, he is no different from the psychologist who tells the board of directors of a parent company that they need to stop funding subsidiaries that show utter contempt for corporate policies and procedures. Yes, it might be a tough stance that causes conflict, but what is the alternative? Anarchy that ends up eroding the credibility of the board and the very foundation of the corporation?

It all adds up to what a company (or a country) is willing to do for cohesion and survival. It’s all arithmetic.

Healing or governing via psychological truth is not always pretty. Some of my clients’ most self-empowering decisions and actions set the stage for phenomenal periods of growth, but they also caused the most initial angst. But the alternative — self-doubt and self-destruction — was worse.

President Trump knows this truth, governed with it and, despite all the tough emotions it is bound to bring up along the way, can ultimately heal America (again) with it.