Only four world leaders have an approval rating higher than Donald Trump: those of Switzerland, Argentina, Mexico and India.
There is blank incomprehension in the minds of western liberals as the US president in his frenetic first three weeks deports manacled immigrants, closes AIDS-prevention programmes, starts and stops and restarts a tariffs war, vows to cleanse Gaza of its troublesome inhabitants and demands that all Israeli hostages be released by Hamas by midday on Saturday or he would “let hell break out”. They recoil from the notion that swathes of the American public don’t just tolerate, but actively endorse this man.
What we’re seeing in Trump is the impact of power on the human brain. It acts like cocaine, and in high doses makes people feel elated, super-confident and aggressive – like coked-up late-night revellers on Dublin’s Dame Street throwing the punches at strangers just because they can. Trump’s great power is also a rejuvenator and energiser – an antidote to late-life senescence. Power increases testosterone, which in turn boosts dopamine – just like cocaine.
This fuels an aggressive, feel-good state of mind, particularly in dominant, amoral personalities such as Trump’s. It also creates a restless, hyperactive state of mind which, when combined with a feeling of omnipotence, fosters the delusions that you can snap your fingers and sort every problem.
Unelected Musk holds court in Trump’s Oval Office as he defends efficiency drive
Leopardstown racecourse earmarked for 1,000 social and affordable homes
Romance, relationships and financial abuse: ‘They are terrified to go and spend €50 in Dunnes because they will be quizzed'
Dublin law firm received €15m for advising State transport bodies responsible for roads and rail infrastructure
And when that doesn’t happen – when Gaza or Greenland can’t be bought, or US birthright abolished – this ramps up a hyperactive rage at being thwarted and escalates a flurry of even more frenetic and unmeasured responses.
So a bigger question than why Trump is acting as he is may be why his approval levels are so high – and how the American public seems to be willing to tolerate this, even applaud it.
During the Obama era, I had lunch with an Irish friend, long-settled as a senior figure in a big US corporation. A clever and decent person, in the past he would have espoused the typically liberal outlook of his European home country.
But then I asked him about Obama’s healthcare initiative and the 40 million people who would now be covered. His face darkened: “They choose to spend their money on other things rather than buying health cover – that’s their responsibility. I know one guy who has millions and doesn’t bother to insure.”
Now here is a puzzle: how could any intelligent person possibly believe that families living in hardship because of unemployment and house foreclosures were simply choosing to avoid paying for health insurance?
I expressed my confusion about this conversation to another Irishman temporarily stationed in the US. “He works in a corporation where all the senior management think like that and he lives in very high-end suburb – all his neighbours believe that. He works long hours and never talks to anyone who believes anything else,” he said of the other man.
We evolved as a group species and what we do, think and feel is shaped almost entirely by the norms of our tribe. As these norms change, so do our judgments of what is right and wrong, and hence what it is acceptable to do and say.
We already know that human beings are capable of doing objectively terrible things while feeling morally justified and emotionally unscarred.
An extreme example of this comes from Nazi Germany’s Reserve Police Battalion 101, one of several units from Hamburg, consisting of civilians – many middle-aged and middle-class – who were sent to the newly occupied areas of eastern Europe in 1940.
These ostensibly respectable men, who had not been brutalised by military combat, who were under no duress and could have requested transfer from such operations without fear of sanction or criticism at any time, participated energetically in the systematic mass executions of Jews and other civilians.
Few refused to take part or asked to be given other duties. Any moral compunctions they may have had – one did later report that having young children refuse to leave their mothers and having to shoot them together was disturbing – were extinguished by the tribal esprit de corps of their units and the need for the approval of their fellow policemen and senior officers.
The thing about norms is that once embedded in a group, they appear self-evident. That includes the norms of one historically unusual tribe that reached its peak around the millennium: Western liberals.
This tribe is unusual because its norms were that the world should be rules-based. And these rules were largely based on the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Notions of equality, fairness and impartiality in economic, political and judicial systems reigned supreme.
This resulted in a remarkable change in behaviour of millions of people that cut against the grain of the more primitive impulses of a tribal species – which include in-group favouritism, out-group dehumanisation and the assumption that might is right. It’s chilling to realise how short-lived was the post-second World War consensus of a rules-based world order.
“Cometh the hour, cometh the man” could be Trump’s motto. He is a man whose rules – what we typically call morals – so diverge from anything we recognise and who is so intoxicated by power that he is capable of shredding this remarkable rules-based development of human civilisation and replacing it with a global gangland ethos in the Vladimir Putin mould.
A recognisable moral code and the mechanisms of political or corporate governance are the only known constraints of the effects of great power on the human brain. The western world now has a leader of the most powerful nation on earth who seems to lack the first and who is dismantling the second.
But there is one other effect of great power on the human brain: it distorts judgment, blinds you to risk and makes you impulsive. The majority of autocrats eventually over-reach and make bad decisions that blow back on them: Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 is a prime example.
It is a certainty that Trump will over-reach. And when he does, it will be up to ordinary, moral people to come together to strengthen the best antidote to his brain-corroding power addiction: the decency of careful, rule-based political and legal governance.
Prof Ian Robertson is emeritus professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin and author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief (Penguin, 2022)
- Listen to our Inside Politics Podcast for the latest analysis and chat
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
