Looking for the source of Trump’s appeal.

It’s quite impossible to watch president Trump for any length of time and remain unperturbed. He possesses what psychoanalysts call “high transference valence.” The ability to provoke strong reactions in others. In fact, this appears to be a big part of his appeal. Love him or hate him, you have to look.

You may argue that Trump elicits such strong reactions because he embodies a great threat in the mind of some and an attractive promise in the minds of others. We respond strongly to both threatening and attractive objects. Yet, given the basic ideological divide in contemporary American politics, this duality holds true for practically every president. Nothing there to explain the unique reaction Trump generates.

A better guess is that it’s the high degree of Donald Trump’s novelty that attracts attention across the board. Novelty is innately arousing to us regardless of its valence. People who slow down on the highway to rubberneck at the scene of an accident do not enjoy seeing mutilated bodies. They are compelled to look at something not ordinary.

But what is it that’s truly novel about Trump? Some argue that his uniqueness resides in his ‘outsider’ status as a novice politician, a businessman who has beaten the professional politicos at their own game. But this argument is weak. After all, we’ve seen political novices win elections before, and we’ve seen businesspeople succeed in politics, both in the US and abroad.

Moreover, the concepts of “business leader” and “political leader” are not that far apart in the cultural imagination. The fact that a rich, white Chief Executive Officer becomes Commander in Chief does not violate cultural expectations. There’s no genuine surprise in this narrative twist, other than, perhaps, that it took so long to materialize. Continue reading “Psychology Today: Trump Is a Four-Year-Old” →