Trump propelled to the US presidency by power of positive thinking, by Daniel Finkelstein.
The second [great influence on Trump] was his lawyer. Trump met Roy Cohn in a nightclub and engaged him to fight a lawsuit accusing the Trumps of racial discrimination.
Cohn became much more. He had been aide to Joe McCarthy, the man whose antics inspired the famous rebuke to the senator by army counsel Joseph Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” And he had since become a lawyer for mafia bosses such as “Fat Tony” Salerno and Carmine “The Cigar” Galante.
Cohn became Trump’s shield but also his tutor. He taught the property developer how attack can be the best form of defence and how to use publicity as a weapon. He passed on his “take no prisoners” approach to his client.
The third great influence on Trump was his pastor Norman Vincent Peale, who in 1952 he published a book called The Power of Positive Thinking.
The first chapter of Peale’s bestseller, Believe in Yourself, begins like this: “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” …
Positive thinkers accompany this belief with another. You can make things happen by wanting them to happen. You can change things by believing strongly enough in change. …
As Trump put it in the early 1980s: “The mind can overcome any obstacle. I never think of the negative.” The business career, the politics and even the boasting (Trump overlooked the requirement to be humble) all bear the imprint of Peale and of the positive thinking movement. …
Trump now talks of how everyone will be so, so proud, of how things are going to be just beautiful and of how, for instance, Britain is a “very, very special place” for him. He puts things this way because positive thinkers believe the superlatives help make it happen.
Limitations on positive thinking exist; the difficulty is in knowing where they are.
Positive thinkers are simply wrong to argue that the mind can overcome any obstacle. We often have dreams without the power to make the dreams come true. It is nonsense to suggest otherwise. …
The casino business went bankrupt. All the positive thoughts in the world couldn’t save it. …
The idea that a positive-thinking chief executive type can dream America and the world out of its problems may be flawed but it is very seductive, quite apart from the political attractions of Trump’s nationalism.
And I suppose Trump’s positive thinking does have this to be said for it. He said: “I’m going to be president.” And now he is.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
