The History of Donald Trump: From Master of Selective Attention to Warrior Leader

Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came
–Charlotte Keyes (1966), adapting a poem by Carl Sandburg (1936)

When I have witnessed ex-President Donald Trump criticizing mainstream media or defying election results, I think of William James (1842-1910). They do make an odd couple, but the celebrity politician has been making masterful use of that mental gatekeeper, selective attention, which the professor and founder of American psychology portrayed at the center of the human mind.

Trump seized American attention first in bold real estate deals and as a TV star, then with false charges that President Obama was not born in the US. These forecast his campaign style in 2016, with bold comments that became earworm chants, such as “Build the Wall!”

Trump has made selective use of James’s insights on the sentiments even in rational thought to engage emotions for the shaping of ideological commitments.

James portrayed mental attention shaping choices for mental starting points, with each person’s traditions, interests, or tastes motivating continued commitment. As a gatekeeping agent of selection, attention sorts through abundant experiences, amplifying some while setting others aside. A child at play, for example, can rivet our attention, while work worries temporarily fade.

In our time, a variety of media vividly enlarges on James’s observation that the “very intense, voluminous, or sudden” can readily capture our attention and crowd out other experiences—or lead to ignoring of facts and interpretations supporting contrasting views.

We live with social and technological amplifications of that mental amplifier, attention. And Trump has been very adept at orchestrating the amplifiers. In fact, his leadership was well suited to warfare, with a style ready to rally the troops, using what the late psychologist Lawrence Leshan has called the “mythic mode of thinking” for focusing attention on the enemy and raising expectations that the fight will bring glorious transformations.

While James did not anticipate or engage in Trump’s type of attention gathering, the 45^th President displayed the relativistic erosions of public standards that traditional conservatives have feared about James’s type of modernist critiques of absolute truth. With his questioning of widely accepted facts and challenges to norms, Trump readily brandished liberal modernist anti-absolutist thinking about the relativity of truth to use toward conservative ends.

Despite his battle cries, Trump’s tactics never persuaded majorities. He adopted a method refined by Karl Rove, the advisor to Texas Governor and then President George W. Bush. Unlike most previous political strategists who aimed for the political center to gain majorities, Rove sought 50% + 1 of the votes. In other words, appeal intensively to those already on your own side (the supportive “50%”) and portray the other side in the worst possible light. Victory comes with that just enough “+1,” and in the 2000 election, Bush won the presidency with a number almost as low in the Florida tallies.

Amplifying Rove’s approach, Trump fiercely rallied his supporters, even as this appeal readily turned off most voters. But he generally remained competitive because the intensity of his enthusiasts turned his campaigns into movements which rallied voters previously alienated from politics, and because the Electoral College enabled slim majorities in some states to make winning possible despite his overall minority appeal.

With claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, Trump relied on the intensity of his loyal minority for court challenges, attempts at public persuasion, and even support for the militant assault on Congress. Like a child coming close to hitting but taunting “I’m not touching; can’t get mad!” he has claimed that he is not responsible for the January 6 attack. However, in his inciting “Save America” speech to the cheering crowd shortly before the attack, he referred to “fighting” over twenty times. And the legal standard for incitement is not direct participation in insurrection but “aid and comfort,” in the words of the 14th Amendment, Section 3, to support those active agents.

Even without a majority, Trump’s angry defiance of widely accepted facts can secure himself a place in ongoing political debates. He can claim to be standing up against mainstream and elite power, while ironically benefitting from the mainstream media, if they continue to pay attention to his bold claims because they make such good copy. This was central to his long-shot drastic moves to retain his office, and it could secure his status as Political Celebrity Without Office. In his post-presidential position, he could engage in hectoring opposition to the new president, Joe Biden. The presidential power to persuade could continue with this ex-president.

Americans face a choice: is politics a theater of war? The path of hostility includes selective attention to the worst in opponents, rather than governing to bring out the best in all people. Trump waged cultural war, praising the good qualities and ambitions only of supporters and denigrating those they oppose—and some in his movement took his provocative language literally waging “trial by combat,” as Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani explicitly called for right before the actual violent attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Of course, each of the Trump-targeted enemies has exhibited problems: some Muslims are extremists turning to terrorism; some Mexicans have engaged in narco-trafficking and crime; and many Chinese trade policies have been unfair. With Trump’s reliance on politics as war, he not only overlooks problems among some of his supporters, including domestic terrorism, but also selects the worst problems in his declared enemies and rejects encouragement of their positive potentials.

Looking for beneficial potentials is what James meant by meliorism, for outlooks to ameliorate, to serve as toeholds toward improvement. That means a readiness for careful listening to all citizens, even to the hopes and fears of those people that ideological contestants so readily categorize into Us and Them. Promote the better possibilities even if elusive—in fact, especially if elusive because that is when these efforts are most needed. The world is a pluralism” of good and bad traits, James pointed out; leadership “consists chiefly of an effort to redeem” experiences from any wayward potential.

Despite those possibilities, Americans may choose political warfare. For those who feel threatened, it feels vital. But like a dessert eaten instead of a robust meal, it can give a sugar high. The benefits of confrontation are usually only short lived, for gaining immediate security in the face of danger or for standing up to dreadful behavior.

Using selective attention to search for better qualities, even among supposed enemies, can sow seeds for longer-term resolutions. Selection for prevention can direct energies toward constructive tackling of problems. By contrast, the stylized warfare of recent politics has allowed wallowing in the temporary thrills of fighting. For those who have been animated by the warrior spirit of Trump—or animated to declare war on him—even these sentiments can be enlisted instead for tackling problems.

The energy and resources expended on hostilities shows the political power available to address the hemorrhaging social and moral issues racking the nation. With more public attention to tangible issues, what if Trump continued declaring culture war and no one came?

Seems unlikely? Dismissal of such efforts to divert from hostilities tacitly encourages more cultural warfare. However, an improved future can begin, to paraphrase the Old Testament’s Isaiah, with any one sword of hostility hammered into a ploughshare for addressing a particular problem.

Instead of hand wringing about the elusiveness of ideals, and blood boiling about the evils of the other side, get to work toward making the ideals a little more real. That would be a more masterful use of our tendencies to pay attention selectively.

______________

Paul J. Croce is Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Stetson University, author of Young William James Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), and recent past president of the William James Society. He writes for the Public Classroom and his recent essays have appeared in Civil American, History News Network, the Huffington Post, Origins, Public Seminar, and the Washington Post.