Donald Trump and the Law of Attraction

Norman Vincent Peale, get-rich-quick scammer and author of The Power of Positive Thinking, was pastor to Donald Trump when Trump was a young man. Trump held the connection until Peale’s death in 1993 and often spoke warmly of him.

Peale & Trump in 1993. (Sorry for blanking the face, but this is my blog. You can still tell it’s him.) Source

Peale’s philosophy is part of a wider tradition that started in mid 1800s in the US, and perhaps best known today from the 2006 feature-length advertisement, The Secret, and known as the Law of Attraction. It is a form of Christianity obsessed with miracle-working. (It is also at the heart of much alternative medicine — Louise Hay’s cancer quackery lies squarely in this tradition too.)

This has been given some coverage in the media, as affecting his positive thinking, his egotism, and his lying,  but I argue here that Peale’s influence is profound, and may be at least one key to understanding a great deal of Trump’s behavior; especially behavior that is often otherwise inexplicable.

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According to some of Peale’s (and Trump’s) Christian critics, Peale

reduced Christianity to a checklist of behaviors that, if followed, would guarantee pragmatic benefits. As he proudly stated, “We have made the mistake of thinking that Christianity is a creed to be recited. On the contrary, it is a power to be tapped”. It was a faith in the effects of faith.

It is indeed as much a program for behavior as it is a philosophy: habits of thought that are to be internalized and acted out until they become second nature to the practitioner. It is unclear whether or not Trump has indeed internalized this program and is acting out a kind of atrophied version of it. But his behavior — including those aspects that commentators find most baffling — is exactly what would be expected from a practitioner.

Trump’s declaration that John McCain is not a war hero “because he got caught” not only shocked but above all baffled nearly everyone. But it would be entirely unsurprising for a practitioner of positive thinking or the law of attraction. (They might not put it as harshly as Trump, but it follows logically that McCain, no doubt by indulging in fearful thoughts, manifested getting captured — there is nothing admirable in that. They would also think he manifested his cancer now too.)

This is what Esther Hicks, an initial creator of The Secret, said recently of Trump, seemingly unaware that Trump was already in this game when she was still selling Amway to her fellow Mormons:

Have you ever listened to Donald Trump talk? Do you ever hear him say “I hope it works out”? What do you hear him say? This is a juggernaut. This is a massively wonderful idea…. This is the best building that’s ever been built… I hire the best people and I get the best results and things always go well for me.” In other words he does not allow himself to talk about what went wrong or may not go right. He’s trained his vibration, and because he’s trained his vibration, things work out well for him, relative to the vibrations that he’s trained… Anybody who has succeeded at anything came to a place of expecting success. So the question is, how do I expect success in a venue where I have never had any experience? …Or how do I expect success when I haven’t been trained in that particular arena? And we say, You train yourself into expecting it… And you only intent is to take an emotional journey that feels really good. And before you know it… you start getting ideas; you start feeling inspiration that’s such perfect timing that when you make those phone calls things line right up. The universe organizes circumstances and events to accommodate you, but you’ve got to line up the energy first, or nothing happens in action that will please you.

Positive thinking is not merely an attitude that leads to success; it is believed to be an actual force that is set in motion by thought. Thought itself is a power that forces certain events to occur.

A central idea to this is the notion that “we create our own reality“: that by setting ourselves inside a bubble of our own positivity, we create a reality for ourselves that consists exclusively of success and happiness.

As one Law of Attraction teacher (apparently a “former high school psychology teacher”) says in an article titled Donald Trump: Law of Attraction Master:

we each get to create our own realities regardless of what anyone else is doing

This teacher, however, says she is not interested in politics, because:

I don’t see my government or my politicians as having any control over me anymore, so how they choose to conduct themselves doesn’t really matter to me.

The teacher continues:

I think we can all learn a thing or two about deliberate creation from Donald Trump.

This bubble must be maintained, however by the positive power of affirmations. Again, Trump’s demand that his staff provide him twice daily with a folder of ‘positive’ media coverage, including shots of him looking powerful, is exactly in accordance with Peale’s teachings. (These days they would call it a vision board.)

As one critic of Peale writes,

The mastery Peale speaks of is not the mastery of skills or tasks, but the mastery of fleeing and avoiding one’s own “negative” thoughts.

Trump’s relations to policy advisors often appears bizarre, yet is also exactly what one would expect from a practitioner of Peale’s teachings. If you believe you can create your own reality, then why bother with experts? You can manifest everything you want just as you visualize it. Don’t listen to doubters and critics with their complicated thoughts and weighty fears. Just do it. You know more about ISIS than the generals, believe me.

According to The Art of the Deal, Trump doesn’t plan or prepare at all. He simply walks into a meeting and ad libs. (Note that this book was not written by Trump, but is rather his ghostwriter’s interpretation of Trump’s behavior.) This might seem like a recipe for disaster — as indeed it is, as shown by Trump’s catastrophic business failures. But in the short-term, it is effectively identical to a very confident bluff. This is especially so if others in the room are not expecting anyone to be bluffing, and assume that everyone knows what stakes are and cares about the outcome.

This would leave a practitioner free to focus on simply maintaining dominance on an interpersonal level, without regard for strategy or what gets destroyed in the process. Such a practitioner is also free to come back tomorrow and assume he has a clean slate and nothing that he said yesterday is valid.

Such behavior is also likely to cause great chaos, and chaos suits this kind of actor perfectly. While everyone else is trying to stop everything from going up flames, our protagonist, with his assured belief in his ability to create his own reality can appear like he is the only with any control — unburdened as he is by concerns about long-term consequences. (Needless to say, trusting such an actor with access to and power over the vast resources of the most powerful state on earth is not likely to end well for anyone.)

Such behavior would have political commentators scratching their heads and trying to discern which political strategy the practitioner is using. They may, after eight or ten months throw up their hands and declare there is no strategy. But there is. He is trying to create his own reality.

If Trump did indeed internalize this philosophy, there is every chance it has so much become second nature to him, that he has forgotten the ideas behind it and it has devolved into a set of habitual behaviors.

They might deem the practitioner mentally unstable, but he isn’t. They may ascribe a narcissistic disorder or psychopathy to the practitioner, and they may well be right, as such a psychology is well suited to success in business. But the power of positive thinking very effectively simulates a psychopathic mentality, where empathy is obliterated by the idea that victims have themselves have caused all their own suffering, and shows of sympathy are merely a sop to lame social conventions.

Words are seen as creative powers in themselves. For Peale, this is the power of God, the power of the Word. Put to service in this manner, words become more like blank checks than indicators of a common reality. Lies cease being lies and turn into affirmations of creative intent. To the outside world — to non-believers — this looks very much like lying. Yet it isn’t quite, and the subtle non-verbal clues that usually accompany a lie are confusingly absent. For a comparison, compare Trump’s calm, assertive demeanor while lying, to his son’s quite terrified performance on Fox News. (For a clip of Trump lying, google “Donald Trump”.)

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Believing your own myth is not just a danger with this stuff; it becomes an attraction in itself. If you feel like you’re an expert, then you’re an expert. This is especially easy if you don’t really know what expertise looks like, and would have no way of processing expert advice even if you did hear it.

This is perfectly summed up a law of attraction teacher, and star of The Secret, James Arthur Ray. (Ray, convicted of three counts of negligent homicide for cooking his victims to death by confining them in a fake sweat lodge under false pretenses, is also a compulsive and semi-literate twitterer.)

James Arthur Ray: “If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it.”

With this mentality, a practitioner could easily wind up explaining that the person he consults with most on foreign policy is himself. “I have a very good brain.” Such an expert can be eminently qualified to simply open his mouth and see what comes out, declaring in assertive tones that, yes, he would have a deportation force to round up 11 million people; he would punish women who have an abortion; he would allow Saudi Arabia to have nuclear weapons; and yes, indeed he did fire the head of the FBI to stop the Russia investigation…. and so on.

Anyone who has ever met a dedicated fan of The Secret or the law of attraction, will have noticed this person does seem to live in a fantasy world or alternative reality. It is indeed a kind of cult, with believers avoiding the company of those who indulge in “negative” thoughts and emotions. Similarly, critics of Positive Thinking find these teachings instantly repellent and exclude themselves. Interaction gets swiftly polarized.

A similar dynamic appears with Trump’s followers. For them, what comes across from Trump is not a policy agenda or explicit promise of a better life. Rather, they get the feeling of winning. And they have indeed won, and will be getting drunk off it for the rest of their lives. The media keep waiting for “his base to crack”, but they won’t. Nor are they a “base” — which implies something will be built on top of it. What they are is followers, and though they would not perceive it so, they inhabit Trump’s alternative reality with him, and they love it in there. They are still winning, exactly as Trump promised, only much better. And they won’t be getting sick of all that winning any time soon.

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Posted by Yakaru