Month: August 2023

Understanding the genius of Donald Trump

Everybody is talking about him. How the New Yorker is covering THAT mugshot

It’s unwise to bet against Donald Trump. Last autumn he hit a low point when candidates he backed performed badly in the US mid-term elections. But to see how effortlessly he is leaving his Republican rivals for the presidency in his wake leaves me gasping in a sort of admiration. He does this by breaking every piece of advice and common sense that crowds my feed on LinkedIn. Any person who seeks to be effective in politics, or management, needs to understand why Mr Trump is so effective at self-promotion – even as he is so ineffective at pretty much anything else.

As I was pondering this, I read an article on “The truth behind emotional intelligence”, by FT columnist Janan Ganesh. A lot of what clogs my LinkedIn feed is promotion of emotional intelligence. Mr Ganesh complains that people are muddling emotional intelligence with niceness. In fact many nice people have little understanding of the emotional dynamics of the situations they are in and are consequently ineffective – while many nasty people are extremely good at manipulation, which is founded on strong emotional intelligence. He uses as his example Shakespeare’s villain Iago in Othello.

I agree. I first encountered the idea of emotional intelligence on a residential management course in about the year 2000. It was profoundly influential for me. Our trainers were about promoting management effectiveness, not niceness. On the one hand I found the course very reassuring. I proved extremely good at understanding emotional dynamics at work. I was a good listener. As Mr Ganesh points out, emotional intelligence requires listening, and quiet people are usually better at it than the noisy ones who trumpet their emotional understanding. And I was, and I still am, a quiet person – often painfully so. But, and my trainer was clear about this, that quietness got in the way of my effectiveness as a manager. It held me back from being as assertive as I sometimes needed to be. This summed up my professional career very well. While my quietness somewhat typecast me as being very clever in an introverted, geekish way – a large part of my effectiveness actually derived from listening skills and ability to navigate the emotional chess of office politics. But on the other hand I lacked something big and important, and that held my career back. I flourished best when I worked among a small (ish) team of people who worked well together. After we were taken over by a large multi-national bank I quickly started to fade, and took voluntary redundancy.

But what has that got to do with Donald Trump? Well the first point is that Mr Trump is pretty much everything that I am not. That assertiveness that I lacked is overwhelming in him. He is not good at empathy. And yet Mr Trump succeeds like no other politician in forging an emotional connection with his supporters. A recent poll suggested that 71% said that what Mr Trump told them was likely to be true, compared to 63% for friends and family, and just 43% for religious leaders. That, presumably, is because Mr Trump understands what they think the truth is, and feeds it back to them. Those ratings would collapse if he got up and said that, for example, warnings about carbon emissions were well-founded and that all coal mining in the US should cease. But what gives Mr Trump that understanding? Clearly listening of some sort is happening. In the past I have called this right-brained genius – building on the idea that the left side of our brain is our rationale side, and the right our intuitive side. Advocates of this idea suggest that in the West we overdo left-brain thinking, and we should be more in touch with our right brains. But the right brain has its dark side – Mr Trump is very in touch with his.

But that explanation only takes you so far. His Republican rivals listen to the same people and pick up the same messages. Mr Trump builds on his understanding in his public presentation. This is rambling and incoherent (to an extent you would not appreciate if all you heard was edited sound bites), but delivered with a sly sense of humour. This comes over as authentic – no speechwriter could deliver the the same effect – and he makes his audience feel that they are insiders. All the attacks on him, he says, are attacks on you. The more he is attacked, the more his supporters like him. He uses his recent legal troubles to boost a collective sense of victimhood – most recently in his recent use of his Georgia mugshot. He is able to channel all his audience’s frustrations with the world. It is, once again, very right-brained. Even the best paid political consultants cannot coach their clients into achieving something similar – anyway he got there first, which adds to the authenticity. And the more outrageous he is, the more newsworthy – and the more people are talking about him and only him. Meanwhile others who entered politics to achieve serious things, and spend time trying to understand the world, are most unlikely to have the right head-space for that type of behaviour.

There is an evil to Mr Trump’s evil. It is entirely about self-promotion. Naturally he thinks that the world would be a much better place with him in charge, because nobody understands the world like he does. But he is fundamentally un-serious about government and his ego undermines any attempt to implement serious policy. In power he might do some good things, but overall it would be a major step back for the world.

Will he win the presidency? His campaign is better organised and more savvy than in 2016 when he first won. He is running rings around his Republican rivals, even those who are much more capable and qualified than he is. But his challenge will be to reach out to beyond those who worship him – to those who have a better grasp of his weaknesses. That will be hard but it isn’t hopeless. Many have little faith in the Democrats, and their likely candidate, President Biden, has weaknesses of his own. If Mr Trump wins his party’s nomination he will have momentum. His odds of success are better than they should be.

What is the message for the rest of us? Understanding of the emotional side of life is critical to success, whether or not you call it emotional intelligence. But those who possess it are often less effective in other ways, because listening is demanding work and can come at the cost of assertiveness. For some people intuitive emotional connection can substitute for this. But that brings its own dangers.

The Tories don’t need more humanity: they need competence

Last weekend The Observer reported that a senior Conservative had suggested that the Tories were in danger of being the “nasty party” again. They needed to show more humanity, he said. This followed some provocative language on the subject of asylum seekers from the Home Secretary and the party’s deputy chairman. The nasty party epithet resonates because it was attributed to the party during the long period of its doldrums while Tony Blair was prime minister, and and the party suffered three crushing defeats to Labour in general elections. It took a conscious rebranding effort by David Cameron to break free of the tainted Tory brand.

The Tory brand is undoubtedly deeply tainted once more. Their poll ratings are dire. Even in traditional heartlands, like where I live in rural Sussex, the party is being rejected in local elections by spectacular margins. Nice middle class people treat the party with disdain. The party’s main electoral strategy, though, is not to woo these voters but lower middle class and older working class voters who were part of the anti-establishment coalition that supported Brexit, and flocked to the party in 2019 in the “Get Brexit Done” election. It now seems that appealing to these voters is one of the driving principles of government policy, casting aside all considerations of national or wider interest. These voters are thought to like the “nasty party” image.

The problem of small boat crossings across the Channel illustrates the government predicament well. It is this flow of illegal immigrants that provoked those nasty comments. The government promotes a series of “tough” but token policies – such as trying to transport migrants to Rwanda, and housing them on a barge that looks distinctly like a prison ship. Ministers then attack “leftie lawyers” for slowing down (or even stymieing) these ideas, in the hope that mud will stick to Labour, led by lawyer Sir Keir Starmer. Certainly the flow of migrants across the Channel irritates Brexit-supporting voters, who are no sticklers for the rule of law.

But the flow of boats goes on. There is apparently a slight dip in numbers in 2023 compared to 2022, but this may just reflect weather conditions. The people traffickers are getting better organised, and are easily able to outwit government efforts to impede them. For some rather puzzling reason government ministers have been claiming that their policies are designed to “break the business model” of the traffickers. Perhaps they think this form of words sounds clever. But their policies are not directed at this goal at all. The business model depends on the absence of legal routes of migration, or even alternative illegal means – this forces migrants into the traffickers’ arms, allowing them to extract high prices and therefore invest significant money and effort in beating the government efforts efforts to make their lives difficult. Of course the government does not feel it can offer alternative routes, because that means letting more in legally, and their whole aim is to reduce flows overall.

And the longer the flows persist, the more the government has to confront difficult questions. The first of these is why all this is blowing up now, after Brexit, when Brexit was meant to enable Britain to “control its borders”. The business of managing borders is clearly a lot harder than most Brexit advocates had said. Then there is the the rather pathetic scale of the Rwanda and barge policies compared to the volume of incoming people: hundreds compared to tens of thousands. Worst of all is the effect of painfully slow processing of asylum claims, which has left tens of thousands in limbo, many having to be put up at state expense. What the government has not quite admitted was that this backlog arises from deliberate incompetence, as the former Home Secretary Priti Patel seems to have though that processing claims more slowly would reduce the incentives for people to come over and make claims. That hasn’t worked: instead state agencies and their political masters are made to look chronically ineffective.

Polls now show that few people think that the government will fail to stem the flow of boats. In the short term it might work for the Conservatives to deflect the anger towards the liberal “elites”, personified by leftie lawyers. But we probably have more than a year to wait before the next election. It is hardly worth suggesting that the opposition would do no better, when it doesn’t look as if things could get much worse.

If it is to turn the tide of opinion, the Conservatives needs to demonstrate competence above all else. Those nice middle class voters will forgive a lot of nastiness for that. Angry Brexiteers are not so dissimilar. And as for international standing, foreigners have their nasty side too – it is competence that inspires their respect. The problem for the party is that it has turned incompetence into something of a feature since they chose Boris Johnson as their leader. Both he and his successor, Liz Truss, openly selected cabinet ministers on the basis of loyalty rather than ability. Political posturing mattered above all.

Since then there have been an endless succession of ministers evidently not up to the job. Mr Sunak seemed to break from that idea. His stock (and the government’s) was never higher than when he reached a deal with the European Union over Northern Ireland – allowing competence to trump political posturing. But then again, his appointment of the inexperienced but ideological Suella Braverman as Home Secretary always pointed in a different way. Now political messaging is once again the priority, as the government stumbles from one mishap to another.

This recalls the government of John Major in the 1990s, with the party exhausted and fractious after the Thatcher years. It is true that this government managed to pull off an election win against the odds in 1992 – but at that point the government was being given the benefit of the doubt on its economic strategy, while doubts over Labour leader Neil Kinnock persisted. By 1997 the government’s haplessness was exposed to all, while his Labour opponent, Tony Blair, was the very picture of slick competence. Sir Keir can’t aspire to Mr Blair’s heights, but he looks competent enough. Mr Sunak’s supporters may keep clutching at straws (as did Mr Major’s “the darkest hour is just before the dawn”, they said, inaccurately) but it is heading for humiliation all the same.