Donald Trump and his family were strongly influenced by Norman Vincent Peale, a Christian minister who wrote the bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. Trump’s father Fred was close to Peale who helped him use this philosophy to acquire real estate. Peale officiated at Donald Trump’s first wedding. As Politico Magazine detailed in its late 2017 article, “The Power of Trump’s Positive Thinking”, Fred brought the Donald up to use positive thinking “to be a winner” and to assert that he is winning, even when all evidence is to the contrary. Note that what makes this thinking “positive” is not that it is good, moral, true or loving; what makes it “positive” is that it is an affirmation of what the thinker desires to be true, despite what’s really showing up in the world.
Politico walks us through many of times in his life and career that this strategy has worked for Donald Trump. But we hardly need the detail because we have all watched this in real time. I notice it perhaps more than some might because it is a perverse version of what I teach, the power of the word, the power of my mind over conditions.
Indeed, Politico Magazine quotes best selling positive thinking writer Mitch Horowitz on the president, “‘He is a kind of Frankenstein monster of the philosophy’ of positive thought,” said Horowitz. “Trump seems to be an example of at least the short-term, destructive gains that you can attain through self-help, through self-assertion, and people’s willingness to believe what they think that they see.”
Although I encourage you to read it for yourself, the point of Politico’s article is different in thrust from mine. Its author, Michael Kruse, is interested in whether Trump has reached the limitations of the use of this philosophy. Eighteen months later, the answer is clear–we cannot rule out that he will use it to maintain power at any cost, despite all logic and appearance.
Trump’s rise to power on a river of hate through the force of his mind and the triumph of his will illustrates both the power of these principles, the true neutrality and nonjudgmental character of infinite or universal law, and the danger of teaching people to work with this law without grounding their actions in values, like the ones my denomination (the Centers for Spiritual Living) teach, which include diversity and inclusion, accountability, love, compassion, caring, and integrity.
On the one hand, Trump’s success could be seen as an inspiration to anyone who is considering the possibility that they need not be bound by precedent or apparent conditions. By any standard in our history, external conditions were these: Donald Trump had zero chance of being elected president of the United States. He had no political experience, no military experience, no public policy experience, no foreign policy experience. He has multiple broken marriages, multiple affairs, multiple accusers of sexual assault and harassment. He won’t be handled. He broke with Republican orthodoxy to be anti-free-trade, pro-protectionism. He is openly racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic, encouraging of white supremacy and nationalism. He courts oppressive anti-American oligarchs and dictators around the world. In short, this is not a man who was supposed to win a Republican primary, let alone a general election. Any other candidate with his baggage, with his negatives, would have, as Politico points out, dropped out early on. Yet he was in it to win it and win it he did.
What if the people supporting Trump are as attracted to the use of the power of his word as they are to his policies? As a new thought minister, I know we often walk into a Center for Spiritual Living hurt, broken, and sad. We feel disempowered. Often we are having trouble making ends meet. Sometimes we are in broken relationships. Maybe we are in ill health. We are attracted to what we teach as “Science of Mind” because if we believe only in external conditions then we feel hopeless and trapped. We are attracted to a philosophy that teaches us that no matter what our circumstances, they can change. No matter how bad things seem, conditions have no power over us. As a lawyer and legislative advocate, after years of losing the fight for Medicare for All in Congress and the state of California, I was attracted to this teaching partly because I saw a way to use it to alter the parameters of the possible. I saw that until we mobilized universal law to our aid, no amount of marching, petitions and press releases alone would be successful.
