Trump's Personality

Studies paint a negative picture of Trump's inner character. So how did he win?

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Reminder: My book, Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change, is now available for preorder! Nothing helps a book’s success quite like preorders, so grab your copy today!

---

If you’ve been on the internet sometime in the past nine years, you have probably come across a genre of content that can be described, roughly, as “what’s wrong with Donald Trump?” It’s writers trying to figure out whether he’s a psychopath or merely “highly combustible.” Is he declining mentally? Or is he disinhibited, meaning low in the personality trait of conscientiousness?

It’s hard to judge strangers’ personalities from afar, but Trump might be an exception. During the past decade or so that he’s been running for president, he has produced hours of footage and reams of tweets and statements. Many political journalists have written books about him based on interviews with him and his confidants. All of these public and private quips and mutterings provide ample material for experts who wish to analyze him.

And if you look at all the studies that have ever tried to measure Trump’s personality, you come away with the impression that he’s an impulsive meanie. Specifically, he seems to—over and over again—score low on agreeableness, the personality trait associated with empathy and kindness; low on conscientiousness, or orderliness and dutifulness; and low on emotional stability, a trait that suggests a person is even-tempered and calm. The picture painted of him by academic psychology is that of a disinhibited a-hole.

One study that asked 75 experts in U.S. politics to appraise him found that he’s low on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, but very high on extroversion. Another examined all of the “spontaneous remarks” that Trump spoke between 2017 and 2021 and deemed him high on distrust of others, high on self-confidence, and low on “task focus”—again, these roughly correlate with low agreeableness and low conscientiousness.

Another study, using a slightly different personality scale, found that he was low in honesty, empathy, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Yet another, based on the ratings of 28 experts, found that he was low in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and once again high in extroversion. (It also found he was high on the “dark triad” of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.) “Our results illustrate Trump’s off-the-charts personality and campaigning style and suggest that even when compared with other abrasive, narcissistic, and confrontational political figures, he stands out as an outlier among the outliers,” write the authors of that study.

It’s easy to think of examples of Trump exhibiting all of these traits. The 40-minute dance solo in the middle of a rally? Low conscientiousness. Calling people rapists, suckers, and losers? Low agreeableness. And the fact that Trump is so energized by his fans and so in love with the spotlight—that’s extroversion, through and through.

But, as you might have noticed, Trump is now president-elect, his supposedly bad personality notwithstanding. If his personality is so awful, how could more than half the country have voted for him?

The answer, it seems, is that not everyone sees him as disagreeable and scattered. Some people view him positively. And those people are Trump voters.

Another study of Trump’s personality took an unusual approach: Instead of asking experts, it asked regular voters of all different political persuasions to rate the personalities of both Hillary Clinton and Trump. It found that Trump voters do see him as conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable—much more so than Clinton voters, moderates, or liberal expert raters do. (Everyone agreed that he is extroverted.) In fact, this paper concluded, experts’ ratings of Trump’s personality seem to resemble those of Clinton voters—perhaps because academics are overwhelmingly liberal.

In other words, those earlier studies that all converged on the disagreeable, disinhibited diagnosis of Trump might have been colored by the fact that their authors are (probably) Democrats, and so are the experts whose ratings they rely on.

This last paper does concede that, if you consider moderate voters to be the “impartial” judge of Trump’s character, then Trump is indeed less conscientious, less agreeable, and less emotionally stable than Clinton, but he lags behind her on these traits by a much smaller margin than liberals think. (And because the study came out in 2018, it didn’t examine how people felt about Kamala Harris.)

I think this is a useful reminder that personality is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, and our sense of peoples’ personalities can be influenced by external factors, like whether we approve of other elements of their identity. A friend who always gets too drunk is a fun party guy, until he hits on your girlfriend—then he’s an out-of-control jerk. One person’s introvert is another person’s recluse. Our views of the personalities of political candidates—who, despite their seeming ubiquity, we see only in glimpses and snatches—can be influenced by our own politics.

It’s also useful in helping to answer the perennial Democrat gripe after Trump triumphs in some way or another: How could so many people have voted for someone so unlikable? Simple: They do like him.