I’m a “people hacker.” That means I hack into people’s personalities to identify their M.O. and then find ways to help them (in the cases of suicidal or chronically ill people) or be like them (in the case of visionaries). In my recent book, Talking to Crazy: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life, I identified “9 common M.O’s of irrational people” and then in the book explained how to deal with them.
I’m in the process of “hacking Donald Trump” and here are some early insights into the “World according to Donald” that’s a work in progress.
He’s all about leading with anger rather than leading through fear (the fear that all his supporters feel under their anger). In fact, he has shown little to no compassion or true empathy for people in fear and his “caring pronouncements” ring hollow and are patently disingenuous.
What we all know about him is that he likes to fire people up (great for ratings and fanning the flames of fearful people who would much rather come from anger than fear) and then he fires them. The success of The Apprentice series was more about viewers rubbernecking to hear him say, “You’re fired,” at the end of each episode. That was so much the case that when he finally said, “You’re hired,” to the last one standing, it was anti-climactic.
More than a few reporters and media experts have said that much of Trump’s appeal to his supporters is that they want to be him which means having what he has and the swagger to go along with it.
What of course he’s failing to tell his supporters is: “If you want to be me and you want to have what I have, then you’ll need to do the things to make you as successful as I am (which is nearly impossible because I’m so great).” And if he told his supporters that it meant: a. learning skills that you don’t believe you’ll be able to learn; b. becoming versed in technology or finance and better than your peers at both because that is where the money is and that is where the competition is fiercest; and most of all c. you’ll need to be unfazed by failure and be willing to fail and fail again and fail much more than you’ll succeed and if you're not willing to do that, you'll will not only not succeed, you'll be a loser. If you can’t take the heat, you shouldn’t even go into the kitchen.
How many of Trump’s blue collar supporters would be willing or able to embrace those three realities?… And BTW if you don’t, you won’t get fired, because none of you will get hired in the first place.
Trump is also like demagogues who appear so powerful and so willing to take on any enemy, that you feel they will protect you and take care of you. In the end such people only care about themselves, feel they above the rules and in some tragic cases come to believe they are above all humanity.
Perhaps one saving grace you can probably count on with Trump is that he may fire you or not hire you in the first place, but he’s probably not going to make you drink Kool Aid.
STAY TUNED: In an upcoming blog, we’ll discuss how to lead through fear, because people feel much more of that than they feel anger. They stay away from feeling fear because it feels that it could lead to panic and immobilization. At least when you come from anger, you're activated.