Ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in pursuit of the presidency, he has been diagnosed by detractors (here, here and here) with having a severe case of Imposter Syndrome. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Millions of intelligent, high-achieving adults are plagued with Imposter Syndrome, the false notion that they have faked their way into the limelight and don’t deserve the success they have achieved. Can you imagine the Donald doubting his success? This is a guy who spins utter failure into faux success, all the while basking in the illusion that whatever he touches turns to gold, a modern day, orange-tinged Rumpelstiltskin with bad hair.
Imposter Syndrome emerged in the 1970s through the work of two psychologists, Suzanna Imes and Pauline Rose Clance. It was initially seen as a severe insecurity affliction in mostly high-achieving women, notably in a culture unwelcoming to female achievement. Years later, however, researchers found that men were also prone to the condition. According to the International Journal of Behavioral Science, 70 percent of people experience the syndrome at some point in their lives. It has been described variously as an inability to internalize your own successes, and a “pervasive feeling of self-doubt, insecurity, or fraudulence despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
That assuredly is not Donald Trump, a man whose toxicity could be significantly reduced through daily injections of self-doubt. His only relationship to this disorder is that he has undoubtedly validated the distorted feelings of insecurity among those actually suffering from the syndrome. After all, if a genuine, real-deal imposter like Trump can masquerade his way into the West Wing through the hocus-pocus of smoke and mirrors, then how real can anyone’s achievement be?
How, you may ask, could anyone fake their way into the White House? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. Trump has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of being someone he is not.
For example:
ORIGINAL FAKE NEWS. It is well established that, as far back as the 1970s, Trump routinely called major news outlets under a variety of fictitious names, claiming to work for the mogul. In exchange for anonymity, he then concocted brazenly false, boastful stories about the Donald and his projects.
SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRE MYTH. Trump’s life-defining narrative of having built his empire all on his own, with barely any help from his family was totally decimated by a detailed New York Times investigation showing that the president started his company with at least “$413 million from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”
PHONY CAMPAIGN FOR THE RICH LIST. Using a pseudonym to impersonate a source inside his company, Trump repeatedly badgered Forbes Magazine with fabricated numbers to get himself high placement on its annual listing of the 400 richest people. Jonathan Greenberg, the Forbes reporter who took the calls, told the Washington Post he later learned that Trump should not have been on many of those lists. He said he placed him on an early list, for example, on the net worth of $100 million, only to later learn that his actual worth was $5 million.
As president, Donald Trump has consistently played the role of Imposter in Chief. He said his New York-born father emmigrated from Germany. He insisted he had a “wonderful” healthcare plan as a replacement for Obamacare. There was no plan. Mexico would pay for the wall, until it didn’t. Then he’d force Congress to fund the wall, until it didn’t. Now he boasts that part of the wall has actually been built, and then declares the phoniest of emergencies in order to “finish” that which never began.
This is the direct opposite of Imposter Syndrome behavior. Rather than performing at a highly competent level but being unable to own his success, Trump has no idea what he is doing but is blinded to his insecurity through an inability to grasp his ineptness . There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Back in 1999, Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and his student researcher, Justin Kruger, wrote an article for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Its title foreshadowed the Trump presidency: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.
Dunning and Kruger found, according to reporting on their work, that there is “a cognitive basis in which the less able people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities.” Although their work was well respected in academic circles, the Dunning-Kruger Effect went mainstream with Trump’s election. Dunning wrote a piece for Politico in 2017 in which he said that not only was Trump a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but that his base is “grounded in similar ignorance.” Wrote Dunning: “. . .they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps.”
And so it is that our Dunning-Kruger president stumbles his way through governance. He dismisses global warming on a cold day, calls real news “fake news”, believes Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence experts, and boasts of his peacemaking in North Korea while that regime continues to manufacture nuclear weapons. Not knowing what he doesn’t know pulls him and this country further and further into the abyss.
Decades before academicians framed the duality of the Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, philosopher Bertrand Russell perfectly captured the dynamic in a 1933 essay titled “The Triumph of Stupidity”. He wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that . . . the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Still, given a choice between the two, always go with doubt. Used constructively, it can build a path to wisdom.