Introduction
In assessing Donald Trump as a president, it is common enough to
evaluate his character in psychodynamic terms, for example, to highlight his
apparent narcissism, grandiosity or impulsiveness. There is nothing wrong per
se with this point of departure. But in doing so we deprive ourselves of
learning about the specific features of his executive functioning that shed
light on how he makes decisions, how his thinking shapes his sense of options,
how his relatedness with others influences his role-taking, and how he projects
his character to create such a wide appeal. We could call these features some
aspects of his leadership style as
opposed to his psychodynamic character. This approach gets us out of the box of
seeing Trump as sui-generis, one result of demonizing him. It helps us see
Trump in the context of the larger question of how executives of major
institutions take up their roles according to their talents, interests and
styles of thought. As a writer and thinker interested in the dynamics of
leadership, these questions interest me greatly. Thus, my point of departure
for this post is to delve into the dynamics of executive decision making, using
the very public record that Trump as president provides us. In this sense the post is about executive functioning with Trump as the example. The reader can
judge whether this frame of reference deepens our understanding of the leadership
process in general, while also providing insight into how Trump leads.
Abstraction
In his book
on the Trump Administration, Fear, Bob
Woodward describes the difficulty Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic advisor,
had in convincing him that the meaning he ascribed to the U.S. trade deficit
was too narrow. The deficit, as Cohn argued, did not represent bad deals, but
in fact conferred decisive advantages. For example, low prices on imported
manufactured goods freed up spending on consumer and business services, and the
latter, not manufacturing jobs, were the major sources of job growth in the
economy. In addition, Trump’s focus on particular trade deals, for example with
Mexico and South Korea, precluded considering their larger role in United
States’ geopolitical positioning. When Trump threatened to withdraw from the
bilateral trade deal with South Korea and demanded that it pay more for the
stationing of U.S. troops on the peninsula, Cohn fretted that Trump did not
consider the essential role that South Korea played in ensuring U.S. security. The
U.S. troop presence enabled it to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven
seconds, giving the U.S. time to shoot it down. “Cohn could not believe that
President Trump would risk losing vital intelligence assets crucial to U.S.
national security. This all stemmed from Trump’s fury that the United States
had an $18 billion annual trade deficit with South Korea and was spending $3.5
billion a year to keep U.S. troops there.” More broadly, the U.S. dollar is the
world’s reserve currency providing U.S. consumers with great benefits. Any country with a trade surplus with the U.S. is in effect saving on behalf of
U.S. consumers. The country accumulates dollars, which are in effect loans
without term limits, while the American consumer accumulate goods and services.
The failure to consider trade policy “in the round,” to see beyond
the immediate transaction to the embedded relationships that surround a trading
relationship, represents a failure of abstraction.
We might presume that this failure to think abstractly is a signal of impaired
cognition. For example, much has been
made of Trump’s probable cognitive decline when comparing his current verbal fluency
and sentence construction to the way he spoke 30 years ago.
But a 1987 video
interview with the TV personality Larry King reveals both great verbal
fluency alongside the same preoccupation with bilateral trade deficits, only
then with Japan rather than China or Mexico. Instead, this valency for concrete
thinking represents a personality characteristic. Its correlate is thinking
practically and in down-to-earth terms, with an accompanying disinterest in the
arts or sciences and a preference for routine over novelty. Such a practical
mindset is useful in sales, and in doing deals that do not require considering
too many stakeholders and multiple issues. This skill, when finely honed, could
very well lead to success in any number of commercial undertakings, buying and selling
real estate among them. Psychologists who study the “big 5”
personality characteristics describe this
practical mindedness as the obverse of what they term “openness to experience,”
which privileges novelty and abstraction. I think we can say that Trump, with
his penchant for buying and selling, for direct dealing with people rather than
issues- think of his personal diplomacy with Kim Jong-un of North Korea-- and
his wish to come home quickly and sleep in his own bed, fits these characteristics
to a tee. There is nothing psychopathological about this stance. God knows the
world needs practical people. They turn the wheels of the marketplace. The only
question is the fit between such a person and the work he is called upon to
do.
Decision Making
A concrete thinker can overcome some of the limitations associated
with complex decisions in two ways; by reference to instinctive feelings, which
are emotionally toned cognitive schema, and by the way he or she uses others to
work through problems. There is little doubt that Trump is an extrovert. He
loves being the center of attention, draws energy from crowds of supporters, and
exercises dominance-- a drive central to his character-- through his continuous
and public brawls with opponents. His extraversion means that he also thinks through others, though without relying
on a systematic process in which, for example, people write issues papers,
debate the pros and cons as he listens, and come to a consensus, or present him
with options. Trump simply cannot abide such a policy process. Instead, he
prefers spontaneous conversations with people who compete for his attention. Through
a process of trial and error thinking, he comes to his own decisions. The
latter are shaped by his personal connection with those who want to influence
him, and by the emotionally toned schemas that shape his world view, for
example “deficits are bad,” or “foreign wars waste blood and treasure.” What
counts in this process are his likes and dislikes for his advisers, and by the
feelings that a particular course of action triggers within him. In this he
combines extraversion with what the Rorschach test describes as an extratensive
decision making style, relying on emotions as they are triggered by
relationships, rather than inwardly working through his own ideas.
His decision to not bomb an Iranian missile site in response to their downing of an unmanned U.S. drone certainly had some of these features. While the details of his decision making are not entirely clear, he relied less on memos and meetings and according to the New York Times “trusted his instincts over institutions while defying the counsel of a roomful of his appointed advisers.” The Thursday of the day the drone was shot down, John Bolton, a senior foreign policy advisor, assembled a group to consider possible military responses. They met with Trump in the late morning to consider options. Trump however did not abide by this formal process, but instead sought the counsel of both Senator Lindsay Graham and Tucker Carlson, the Fox-news newscaster. The former argued for the bombing while the latter, in an argument that proved decisive, argued that Trump had stood as a candidate against wasteful and un-winnable wars in the Middle-East. Should hostilities break out, Carlson argued, he would risk his re-election. Nonetheless, by Friday at 7 pm Trump gave the go-ahead for a missile strike to begin between 9 and 10 pm that evening. Yet, as the Times reports, lawyers, who estimated that 150 people might be killed in a strike, circumvented the acting Defense Secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of (military) Staff and reached Trump through White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone. Based on their estimates, Trump scrubbed the missile strike. Most likely, Trump felt that a strike which killed 150 people seemed disproportionate to the trigger event, the downing of an unmanned drone. This disproportion raised the prospects of a widening conflict and Tucker’s counsel, that he ran against wars in the Middle-East, proved decisive.
Two features of this decision process are of interest here, the subversion of a formal decision-making process and Trump’s last-minute change of mind. The two are connected. As a trial and error thinker who feels his way through a situation by relating with others, Trump seeks and invites ongoing influence until he can find his own emotional center for a decision. This looks impulsive but it is not. Rather it is a method for securing the information that is sufficient and requisite to trigger an instinct, or a schema that has high emotional salience, for example, that foreign wars are a dead end for the country and for him. It’s the latter, the emotional salience, that is decisive for a decision. This is also why a succession of chiefs of staff have been unable to regulate his subordinates’ access to the oval office. Trump needs the serendipity of unplanned encounters.
There is little doubt that this decision-making style both thrives on and can create chaos. It also assures that Trump remains at the center of any important decision. But it can also lead to any number of aborted decision processes and create a sense of fruitlessness among his subordinates. Consider the following. As Woodward reports, in April of 2017, Trump wanted an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, announcing, “I want it on my desk by Friday.” His chief of staff, Rob Porter, was appalled, knowing full well that a withdrawal violated the rules requiring a 180-day notice while Congress would have to approve a renegotiated treaty. Several influential advisers weighed in to deter Trump. H.R. McMaster, Secretary of Defense, said it would rattle allies, Homeland Security Chief, John Kelly, thought its result would be catastrophic, and Sonny Perdue, Agricultural Secretary, noted that NAFTA had been a big boon to U.S. agricultural interests, adding that people who made their living from the farm economy had voted for him. Trump decided to “amp up the rhetoric but not actually send the 180-day notice.” But then Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s top trade advisors, “Slipped into the Oval Office for an ad hoc unscheduled meeting with the president complaining that Trump had done little on trade except for withdrawing from Obama’s carefully constructed Trans Pacific Partnership.” Trump changed his mind and demanded that Porter draft the 180-day notification of withdrawal. Porter complied. But worried that this would create a foreign relations crisis, he sought Gary Cohn’s help. At a fortuitous moment Cohn, assuming that Trump would forget his order if there were no document in front of him to remind him of it, simply removed it from Trump’s desk. The order to withdraw was forgotten though Trump did ultimately renegotiate aspects of NAFTA with Canada and Mexico. The cost to Trump of this seemingly minor kerfuffle is that his own subordinates would likely feel contempt for his inconstancy and seeming lack of focus. We might call this decision-making style impulsive, but since no decision was in fact taken, it is better characterized as the outcome of distraction. The latter in turn is engendered when Trump experiences no emotional drive to actually decide something, as he did in the decision to strike, or not, Iran with missiles.
(Mis)understanding
Institutions
One significant limitation of Trump’s concreteness when combined
with his extraversion is that he really does not understand institutions,
particularly the way in which people take up issues influenced by their
institutional roles, rather than by their own personal preferences and
proclivities. He does not appear to understand how a role, which is an
institutional manifestation, shapes the consciousness of the role holder. His
world view is far too personalistic, a view that has been reinforced for
decades as the owner of a family business where roles and people are frequently
one and the same. For example, his continued outrage at Jeff Sessions, his Attorney
General, for recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation into
Russian meddling in the presidential campaign, was based on the idea that Sessions
should be loyal to him rather than to the obligations inherent in his role.
Sessions, a great and early Trump supporter admitted, after earlier denying it
to a Senate committee, that he had in fact met with the Russian ambassador
during the campaign. He announced that consequently he would not oversee any
investigation into the issue of Russian meddling. He based his stance on a Department
of Justice regulation which said that no employee of the department, “may participate
in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political
relationship with any person or organization substantially involved in the
conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution, or who would
be directly affected by the outcome." We cannot know for sure what
combination of factors ultimately led Sessions to recuse himself. Possibly,
having denied that he had had contacts with the Russians he felt embarrassed in
front of his once Senate colleagues. But it also seems that he found the
fortitude to anger his boss greatly by reference to his role as a department
employee. Trump simply could not understand this, insisting that Sessions’
personal loyalty to him should govern his conduct.
Indeed, Trump’s
failure to understand institutions triggered the entire Mueller probe into the
conduct of his campaign. To recall, Trump fired the head of the FBI, James
Comey, most likely because Comey according to his own account would “not let go”
of potential charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor. Steve Bannon, a central Trump advisor at the time, and
a man of considerable political acuity, told Trump that you cannot, “fire the
FBI” without triggering major political fallout. He proved right. Moreover, Bannon’s
reference to “firing the FBI” rather than “firing Comey” reflected his
understanding that the FBI with its mission, resources, ties to people in Congress,
and other divisions of the Justice Department could and would defend its
prerogatives. Indeed, at one point, when under the directorship of J. Edgar
Hoover, the FBI was close to being an independent branch of government by virtue
of the secrets it had amassed as an investigative bureau.
When Rod
Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General under Sessions, became an acting
Attorney General after Sessions recused himself, he had already established
himself as an institutionalist through his own critique of James Comey's
behavior just before election day in November, 2016. In a scathing letter, Rosenstein wrote that James
Comey was wrong to have taken it upon himself to announce that the investigation into
Hillary Clinton’s emails, “should be closed without persecution.” Rosenstein
argued that only the Attorney General, not the FBI director, was authorized to
make such a pronouncement. As he wrote, “The FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal
prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department.” In addition, Rosenstein held Comey to task for announcing, at the close of the investigation, that Clinton had been
“extremely careless,” a derogatory comment which Rosenstein believed exceeded Comey’s
authorization. As he wrote, “Derogatory information sometimes is disclosed in
the course of criminal investigations and prosecutions, but we never release it
gratuitously. The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media
as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example
of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”
In other words, Rosenstein was supremely tuned to the
dynamics of institutional authorization, and it was within this frame of reference
that he appointed Robert Mueller, a former FBI director with an outstanding
reputation for probity, impartiality and for always acting within role, to head
the probe into the Trump-campaign’s ties to Russia. I interpret this sequence
of events as evidence that Trump’s careless attempts to replace institutions
with personal ties engendered countervailing responses by any number of
individuals who believed in and defended the sanctity of institutions as a
framework for assuring reliable and legitimate governance. Trump’s personalism
really undermined him.
The Democrat’s
Misunderstanding
The Democrats' failure to understand this personalism led them
to vastly overestimate the meaning of the Trump-campaign’s various contacts
with Russians in the run up to the presidential election. It is no surprise that
personalism would lead to an under-organized campaign in which various officials
sought personal advantage from their positions. For example, Paul Manafort, who was
Trump’s presidential campaign chair from June to August of 2016, saw his role
as a vehicle for securing his business prospects in the Ukraine. He had
extensive ties with pro-Russian politicians in that country, helping one, Victor
Yanukovych win the presidency. He made a great deal of money as a political
advisor to the pro-Russian political party, The
Party of Regions. But by 2015 he owed at least $17 million to “interests
favorable to Putin and Yanukovych.” Manafort also had close ties to Konstantin
V. Kilimnik. The latter’s political role and
positioning are somewhat murky. He worked closely with Manafort while living in
Kiev, and appeared to be running Manafort’s office there. The Mueller report
proposes Kilimnik had ties to Russian intelligence.
Manafort showed Kilimnik some of the
Trump-campaign’s internal polling data. Why would he do this? One reasonable
hypothesis was that he was trying to spread the word of his new found influence
in the Trump-campaign to win relief from his debts, particularly to Oleg
Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close to ties to Vladimir Putin.
As the Mueller report notes, on April 11, 2016, Manafort asked Kilimnik If he “had shown
“our friends” the media coverage of his new role” in the Presidential campaign.
Kilimnik responded, “absolutely, every article,” leading Manafort to ask, “How do we
use (this coverage) to get whole,” in other words to reduce or eliminate his
indebtedness. He then added, “Has Deripaska (the billionaire) seen?,” to which Kilimnik
responded, “Yes, I have been sending everything to Victor (Deripaska’s deputy),
who has been forwarding the coverage directly to OVD (Deripaska). Indeed,
Richard Gates, Manafort’s deputy, told the Mueller investigative team that if
Trump had won the presidency Manafort intended to stay outside the administration
but monetize his relationship to it.
It is apparent as well that George Papadopoulus, who figured
prominently in the Mueller investigation exaggerated his standing, knowledge
and connections. He had been hired by the campaign after the media criticized
it for lacking experts in foreign affairs. Noting that Trump was interested in his
relationships to Russians- most likely because of his ongoing negotiation to
build a Trump Tower in Moscow- Papadopoulus did what he could on his own authority
to build some connections to them. When Joseph Misfud, a Maltese academic,
introduced him to Olga Polanskayi, he told Papadopoulus she was Vladimir
Putin’s niece when in fact she worked for a Russian wine import company, did
not speak English and according to her brother
had absolutely no interests in politics. “It’s totally ridiculous,” he said. “She’s not interested in
politics. She can barely tell the difference between Lenin and Stalin.” Polanskayi met Papadopoulus while
applying for an internship with Misfud. Papadopoulus believed that Misfud himself
had extensive connections with Russians, but Misfud later claimed that he is
simply an academic and does not even speak Russian. The Mueller report says
that Misfud told Papadopoulus that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, an
obvious fabrication and the same lie that Natalia
Veselnitskaya used to get a
meeting with Donald Trump Junior and Jared Kushner in the Trump Tower, in the
June before the election.
How
to make sense of this hall of mirrors? If you have a conspiratorial mind set,
you will try to square the circle of all this contradictory information with
reference to further hidden facts or motives. But I vote for Occam’s razor here
and say that these are all examples of low-level officials and individuals
hustling for advantage, trading on supposed secrets and hoping that one last encounter
will actually yield some information of value that enables them to make good on
their pretensions and improve their positioning. This is garden variety
venality and one result of a loosely organized campaign in which the central
figure, Donald Trump, could only lead through the exercise of personal force,
and not through plans and ideas. This is a far cry from the Nixon of Watergate,
the exemplar of presidential conspiracy, whose understanding of institutions
set in motion his attempt to undermine them. If Nixon was a thief in the night
exercising deceit, then Trump was a bull in the china shop, creating havoc. Karl
Marx famously said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as
farce. I vote for the farce.
The problem of
ideas
Analysts have commented on the high level of turnover in the Trump
administration. The Brookings institute reports
that 61% of Trump’s A-team of administrators have voluntarily resigned or
resigned under pressure, while more cabinet officials have resigned in Trump’s
first three years than did in Reagan’s, Clinton's, the two Bushes' and
Obama’s first four years.
One explanation is Trump’s general disagreeableness and his
penchant for turning hot and cold toward others. But another and more systemic
explanation is linked to the role that basic ideas play in linking executives to
the chief and to each other. In this way of thinking the chief executive
creates a coalition of other executives, each with a particular power base, who
together can implement the chief’s plans and strategies. The ties among coalition
members and the chief are paradoxically impersonal, but their objectivity, based
on a few core ideas, enables each executive to find his or her role in moving
an institution forward. The chief, who might under certain circumstances be
wary of a subordinate who has an independent power base, tolerates it if the subordinate
can mobilize her base to implement the chief’s ideas. Absent ideas, the normal vicissitudes
of relatedness that weaken the personal connections between people, mismatches
of character, personal disappointments, competition for status, and backbiting,
will lead to resignations or firings. It is peculiar that in much of the literature
on leadership, writers reference all sorts of personality characteristics and
behaviors while neglecting the basic role that a few good ideas play in
executive success. The Chinese idea of the "New Silk Road" is one example of such a good big idea at a national scale. It resonates with the Chinese mercantilist temperament, it has wide scope, it references an historical memory, it depends on the coordination of many Chinese institutions, and it has many and different manifestations on the ground.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, the president of the U.S. during
the Great Depression, was the quintessential president in marrying ideas to an
entourage of highly talented executives. His “four freedoms” promise (freedom
of speech, of worship, and from want and fear), was instantiated in a wide
range of programs lead by such luminaries, as Francis Perkins, the Secretary of
Labor, Thurman Arnold, the Assistant Attorney General, Hugh Johnson, the head
of the National Recovery Administration, Harry Hopkins, the Secretary of
Commerce and Lewis W. Douglas, the Budget Director. At the same time, Roosevelt
kept himself at the center of all final decision-making by often authorizing duplicate
initiatives for launching programs and advancing legislation. This kept all of
his talented subordinates on their toes and slightly off balance, ensuring that
no single executive could develop a power base in a manner inconsistent with
Roosevelt’s overall goals.
One central dilemma of the Trump administration is the paucity of
ideas to guide it. Trump was poorly prepared for governing and his matter-of-fact
intelligence, means that he comes into the presidency without ideas for how to
govern or lead a legislative process. He surely touched a deep nerve with his
slogan, “Make American Great Again,
showing an emotional attunement to the people who love him. The slogan spoke to
people’s felt anger at being labeled racist, sexist and backwards, the
“deplorables” in Hillary Clinton's unfortunate appellation. He proposed that
their self-respect and patriotism had a rightful place in the sun. But the link
between these feelings and legislating and governing is a weak one. As we have
seen, if “Make America Great Again”
means recovering the smokestack economy by reversing trade deficits, it is a
losing proposition. Any serious program for economic rejuvenation would surely
address the central problems of workforce education and physical
infrastructure. Indeed, Trump had a taste for the latter, he offered it as an
idea, but has shown no interest in making it priority. Moreover, he has proved
incapable of building a political coalition to address the asylum crisis at the
southern border. A partisan could blame the Democrats for this failure. But
surely it falls on the president to ultimately resolve, through creative political
means, what may at first appear to be an intractable problem. That is what we
voters “hired” him to do. And to acknowledge the pun, his focus on building a (concrete) wall to stem the flow of asylum seekers at the southern border, is another example of his concrete thinking. He envisions a physical barrier rather than an institutional policy.
To be sure, he has successfully executed ideas he inherited from
the centrist Republican platform, namely lowering taxes and deregulating
industry, and from his evangelical base, appointing conservative federal judges.
But these are not his own ideas. Rather they are conveniences he leans on to
secure his presidency and re-election. I propose that this is the underlying
reason for the high turnover in his administration.
Trump as Twin
Freud famously proposed that people in groups are inked together by their shared identification
with the leader. This identification takes the form of “introjection” in which the
image of the leader comes to occupy a
place of privilege in the minds of followers. These are the conditions for
example when people may willingly forgo their good judgment and even moral
impulses because the image of the leader as the new “superego” object of the
mind, the new conscience, displaces earlier internal representations of
parents, teachers and mentors. For example, when people close to President
Richard Nixon conspired with him to cover up the dirty tricks of his re-election
campaign, what we now call the Watergate crisis, they were likely awed by the Office
of the President and thus the man who occupied it. As a result, they
subordinated to his impulses and needs rather than to their own. But
introjection need not only be destructive. When people introjected Martin
Luther King their moral sense was elevated, while some of its punitive
derivatives -the “thou shalt nots-” were eliminated. King as a parental figure
helped people find their moral selves based on an experience of an expanded
love encompassing the human community at its best. This faith in the loving
intentions of the other, was one basis for non-violent resistance in the Civil
Rights movement.
I don’t think it is quite right to say that Trump is this kind of
father figure. While he has charisma, he lacks gravitas. This is why people
around him in the White House and in the executive branch such as Jeff Sessions,
James Comey and Don McGahn, his personal
counselor, did not carry out those of his requests that smacked of obstructing
justice. For example, Trump asked the latter, to tell Rod Rosenstein, the
acting Attorney General, to fire Robert Mueller, the special investigator. McGahn
simply ignored him.
Instead, I think supporters experience a kind of “twin-ship” with Trump.
He is one of them, not above them, but freer, and more vital. When you watch
Trump at a rally of supporters he is spontaneous and completely unrehearsed. If
you wrote down what he said it will appear incoherent in many parts, but the
center of gravity is not the thoughts themselves but the emotional spontaneity,
and evident comfort and delight, with which they are delivered. The crowd
identifies with this freedom and with the sense of inclusion he creates for
those who love him. Just as twins do with another, Trump creates a vivid
“in-group” experience, free of constraining "parental" supervision, with Trump himself, as its most vital member. The risk of
this kind of in-group is the emotional insularity and self-referencing it
breeds. This is one reason Trump’s strong supporters can discount the evidence of
his significant limitations.
Freud describes the id as
the place in the mind where impulses hold sway, and were it not for the executive
functions of the ego and superego, the id would create unregulated conduct. There
is undoubtedly something “id like” in
Trump’s performances; his freedom to say outrageous things, to lie with alacrity
and without shame, to disparage an enemy’s intelligence or appearance, and to
pick fights with them in the spirit of a barroom brawler. This is partly why
the evidence of his infidelity and his womanizing were inconsequential. As my
colleague Eli Zaretsky argues, his behavior exemplifies his ability to act
unburdened by constraint. By twinning with Trump, his followers experience
vicariously his freedom. This is an important emotional basis for the coalition
of voters who elected him, his greatest source of strength as a political leader,
and the basis for the practice of his demagoguery.
Political
Correctness
But is there a specific content to his supporters’ attraction to
this lack of constraint? Or can it be chalked up to a general underlying wish
we all have, and sometimes make good on, to escape the strictures of social
convention and even the law, for example by cheating on our spouses or taxes. After
all, at any given moment, millions of people feel unfairly burdened. I think we
have to take Trump and his supporters at their word here, that they feel
burdened, disrespected and mistreated in particular by what is called political correctness (PC). From their
point of view PC represents a new kind of superego, an elite and punishing
authority system that is on the prowl throughout the culture. According to this
point of view, PC regulates speech, suspects patriotism, identifies new
victimizers who don’t feel powerful themselves, creates an expanding category
of victims with peremptory needs, considers competence suspect, favors equality
over merit, undermines the sexual relationship between men and women, and overextends
the definition of male predatory behavior. I cannot parse the truth value of
these claims in this blog post. But anyone who wants to understand the deep
emotional bonds Trump evokes among his base would be surely amiss if she did
not consider the wider impacts of what is called political correctness.
