Temperament Tantrum. Some say President Donald Trump's personality isn't just flawed, it's dangerous
By Susan Milligan | Staff Writer
Jan. 27, 2017, at 6:00 a.m.
Modern presidents, whatever their party or approach to governing, face the same fate: win the White House, and get on the couch. Presidential temperaments and personalities are exhaustively examined by professionals and lay people alike, as both experts and the public try to figure out what makes the most powerful man in the world tick. Richard Nixon was widely regarded as paranoid, keeping an enemies list. Bill Clinton, his biographers write, had a "hypomanic" personality that included a high-energy, hard-working and creative work style coupled with an impulsiveness and quick temper.
With President Donald Trump, however, the observations of the presidential personality have taken on a more ominous tone. Lawmakers and experts say they are troubled by Trump's extraordinary focus on his own brand and popularity, including frequent and angry insistences that his crowds are bigger and more enthusiastic than anyone else's and that, despite official vote counts to the contrary, he really won the popular vote for president.
The man Hillary Clinton called temperamentally unfit to be president because of his insults of women, Latinos and disabled people has not calmed his demeanor since becoming the 45th president. In a recent interview with ABC, Trump declared he had "the biggest crowd in the history of inaugural speeches," and then showed his interviewer an aerial photo of his inaugural, insisting that other photos clearly indicating a smaller in-person crowd than President Obama's 2009 inaugural were manipulated to demean his own supporters. He said in the same interview that he got a bigger standing ovation in a recent speech at CIA headquarters than star quarterback Peyton Manning got after winning the Super Bowl. And despite having indisputably won the election, Trump declared he could have won the popular vote if only he'd made more visits to states like California and New York, and reiterated his plan to investigate what he said was massive voter fraud in the election, despite a lack of any evidence that such fraud occurred. When Trump was told that he was mischaracterizing a Pew study the president said showed evidence of voter fraud, Trump attacked the study's author, accusing him of now "groveling" – the same word then-candidate Trump used to disparage a disabled reporter in a separate dispute with Trump over facts.
The behavior of the new president in his first week in office has experts and elected officials wondering: is this just a case of a president with predictable quirks, or is it something that raises concerns about Trump's judgment and adherence to factual reality?
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