My last post was – perhaps forgivably – emotional in tone. Since writing it, I’ve been thinking about the Newsnight interview. As someone who wants to promote scientific rationalism, I feel the need to provide a more considered response. Is the interview with Tony Schwartz important? I think it is. I think we can take it that he has had an opportunity of observing Donald Trump while working closely with him, and this can effectively give us an inner eye to the way Trump thinks and operates.
There are two questions here. First, is what Schwartz said reliable? And if it is, to what extent does it matter?
Can we take everything Schwartz says at face value? In a word, no. Having written Trump’s autobiography he has done well out of Trump, and therefore his testimony cannot be sour grapes, but he could have a political agenda, he said he was supporting Clinton, and we do not know whether he has chosen this path because might have always have been Democrat, or because his experiences of working with Trump have led to him opposing him.
We need to question what he is saying and see whether it fits with what we already understand from interviews we know Trump has given. So what does Schwartz say? Some of his claims are that Trump:
- has an incredibly short attention span.
- gets irritated with questions.
- is a bully.
- regards truth as secondary to what he believes.
- has no conscience and he is a classic sociopath.
- lacks normal social graces.
The idea that he has a short attention span rings true. When he was asked about his alleged sexual misconduct during the Presidential debate he began to answer, then said he was going to crush ISIS. As if he was unable to keep his mind on the question he was being asked.
He certainly gets irritated with questions. “Such a nasty woman”. The way he hovered behind Hillary Clinton during the debates strongly suggests a bullying nature. Trump is on record as having claimed Obama was not born in the US, and that global warming is a hoax (Global warming is real – we have thermometers we can tell). This suggests that he is more interested in what he believes to be true, than what the evidence says, again this seems to lend credence to what Schwartz is saying. So I think provisionally at least we can take cognisance of what he is saying.
So does it matter? I have a deep personal antipathy towards bullying under any circumstances, but some would argue that if Trump, in his position as President, was to bully his staff, for example, that would not matter so much, if in the process of doing so he was achieving what millions of voters had asked him to do. Bullying however relies on the powerlessness of its victims. If Trump tries to bully world leaders it might rebound on him in a way he, and the world, might not expect. If he fails in the charm department and does not engage in appropriate social graces this might not be a problem except that it is part of the President’s role to build relationships with other leaders. One can only hope that world leaders dealing with him will use professionalism and restraint where necessary.
His failure to respect truth is, for me, a much greater problem. Any nutcase can believe that: the Americans faked the moon landings, the universe was created in six days about six thousand years ago, the world is flat, and heavy things fall upwards. (Ok not even nutcases believe that a dropped coin will fall up and land on the moon because this would defy the laws of physics but so does the flat earth myth, the creationism nonsense and the global-warming-is-a-hoax hoax, and they are all just as ridiculous.) There is no problem about a nutcase believing what they want, unless the nutcase gets a job as the most powerful person on earth. If US policy gets its “truth” from dodgy extreme-right websites, and redneck shock-jocks we all need to be deeply worried.
The most worrying problem though is Trump’s alleged sociopathy. There is another word for sociopathy, it is psychopathy, and it is far more common than people think. As I understand the situation, sociopathy means that people with the condition have an inability to empathise with other people. Sufferers are self-absorbed and do not understand the feelings of others. Neurologically it is represented by missing, damaged or undeveloped nerve pathways in the brain. Contrary to what many people might think. Very, very few psychopaths are serial killers. According to what I’ve read, a serial killer might rationalise the fact that what they’ve done was wrong, and will tell you that it was wrong. The problem is that they won’t feel that it was wrong. I recently heard about a study someone has done about sociopathy in industry, and as I remember, it seems that the condition is much more common in high-flying executives, than in the general population. Such people have no conscience about pushing their way to the top. One of the interesting conclusions of the study was that when they measured the effectiveness of sociopaths as managers they found that they were far less efficient at their jobs than their peers without the condition. I am not a psychiatrist nor, as far as I’m aware is Schwartz. This blog is dedicated to a scientific understanding of the world. Trump has not been diagnosed with sociopathy and we are not in a position to know whether he has, or hasn’t got the condition but a worry obviously remains.
In a meeting about defence strategy, Trump was alleged to repeatedly ask why, if we have nuclear weapons, we don’t use them. If he is a sociopath he might very well not know why we shouldn’t.
Peter D Fisher 