Trump is an 'Episodic Man': Extremely interesting extracts from a book by psychologist Dan P. Adams

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8763223/

The Episodic Man: How a Psychological Biography of Donald J. Trump Casts New Light on Empirical Research Into Narrative Identity
 
"People make meaning through life narrative. The central thesis of my book-length psychological biography of Donald Trump is that the 45th president of the United States defied this general meaning-making tendency and epitomized instead the episodic man. Like no other president in modern history, Trump seems to be nearly devoid of a narrative identity, which is an internalized and evolving story of the self that reconstructs the personal past and imagines the future in order to provide life with temporal continuity and meaning. Instead, Trump has always lived in the emotionally vivid moment (episode), fighting to win each moment, moment by discrete moment. Seeing him through the lens of the episodic man helps to explain many puzzling features of Donald Trump’s personality, from his charismatic effect on millions of Americans to his penchant for lying and malice. Importantly, the analysis of Trump’s episodic nature informs the scientific study of narrative identity and meaning making more generally, suggesting that people vary not only with respect to the kinds of stories they create for their lives but also with respect to the extent to which they construe life in narrative terms. Therefore, the analysis of Trump illustrates the potentially reciprocal relationship between the idiographic case and the nomothetic effort to develop and evaluate more general scientific hypotheses."

(down page..)

The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump (para3)

...“Over the next 3 years, as I further researched Trump, I gradually came to realize that my inability to find evidence for a narrative identity in Trump’s life was less about the inadequacy of biographical sources, of which there are legion, and more about a bald psychological reality in Trump’s life. I became convinced that Trump has no narrative identity at all, or at best, he has a starkly depleted one. Trump does not see himself as a developing person who moves through time. The past has no purchase on him, and the future has no pull. Instead, he lives in the exuberantly combative moment, fighting like a boxer to win the round, fighting furiously as if it were the last round he will ever fight. The moments—the rounds, the episodes, the discrete scenes that would comprise a story if he had a life story—do not add up. They do not build in his mind to form a plot. The protagonist of this non-story never changes, never learns anything, never carries anything forward from one scene to the next. He is instead a “stable genius,” to quote one of Trump’s favorite self-attributions. Like the main character in the movie Memento, Trump wakes up each morning with something akin to a blank slate. But unlike the movie, Trump does not suffer from retrograde amnesia or any other kind of purely cognitive deficit. This is not about dementia, for Trump has always lived his life this way, chosen to do so, it seems. He is capable of remembering yesterday, but yesterday is irrelevant except insofar that it can help him win today.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that Donald Trump has no sense of time’s passing. He grasps the temporality of life. He even understands the value of stories in general, as mechanisms for conveying meaning in time. His popular political slogan—“Make America Great Again”—suggests a culturally compelling story about the United States: Once upon a time, America was great; then it lost its greatness; and now it will recover the greatness it has lost. Moreover, Trump is perfectly capable of ascribing to himself a trait that might be central to the description of a character in a story. For example, he describes himself as a “fighter,” a “hero,” and so on. He has some degree of psychological insight, and he understands how others see him. But these self-attributions are always static rather than dynamic, as if he exists in the eternal present rather than in an unfolding narrative through which a protagonist changes or develops over time. Instead, his focus is mainly on the present episode within which he finds himself immersed, striving to triumph within that episode so that he can then move on to the next discrete episode.

Trump’s episodic approach to life frees him from the moral and normative conventions that constrain other human beings. It does not matter to Trump if what he says today blatantly contradicts what he said yesterday, or what he will say tomorrow. Critics can claim that Trump lies constantly (which is true), but “truth” for Trump is purely transactional, just like his relationships with people. What is true (or good) for Trump is what works to win the current episode. If saying “A” helps him win on Monday, then “A” is true. If saying “nonA” helps him win on Tuesday, then “nonA” is true. Both cannot be true, you say. But Trump does not consider the contradiction to be important; indeed, he may not even see the contradiction because for Trump, truth is episodic, as is life more generally.

Trump’s total embrace of the moment has always worked to his advantage, both in business and politics. For instance, his episodic nature gives him tremendous authenticity in the eyes of his millions of devoted fans. When they encounter Trump at a rally or watch him at a news conference, they know that he is ALL HERE NOW. He is not hiding anything. He is not planning the future or trying to stay consistent with the past. Even if every sentence that comes out of his mouth is a falsehood, he is telling it the way it is right now, in the moment, what he believes he needs to say in order to win the moment. It is shameless. It is primal. Unexpurgated, unmediated, completely divorced from doubt or reason or the need to be consistent and truthful in the long run, Trump erupts with what currently captures his consciousness, the unfiltered expression of his wholehearted embrace of the moment. Like an impulsive, angry child. Or a wild beast.”
more…