Word for unrealistic optimism series#

“If you are simple enough to buy a self-help book, you may be congenitally programmed to fail,” Tom Tiede wrote in 2001 in his own book, Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation’s Soul. The industry is prevalent in American culture to the point that it has spawned its own sub-group of critics who dismiss it as silly at best and dangerous at worst.

Airport shelves groan under the weight of how-to and pick-me-up books churned out by writers who all are essentially Peale progeny. Self-help is a multibillion-dollar business. Science, it turns out, has something to say about this. Is Trump’s relentlessly optimistic insistence on his own version of reality an asset, a sign of admirable grit for a politician desperate to score some legislative victories? Or is it a sort of self-delusion that risks embarrassment, or worse, in the highest-stakes geopolitical arena? “It’s a fact.” The power of positive thinking? “He weaponized it.”īut now, in the political realm, where the space between spin and truth is parsed constantly-and with consequences-it is Trump’s very success that has opened him up to questions that simply didn’t matter as much when he was a television star, or opening golf courses, or licensing his last name to steaks, bottled water or far-flung condominium projects. “I don’t even think it’s an argument,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me recently.

Word for unrealistic optimism series#

Trump, who used this self-confidence to blow right past a series of seemingly fatal gaffes and controversies to win an election last fall that polls said he couldn’t and wouldn’t, in this respect has been a prize Peale pupil-arguably the most successful Peale disciple ever. Never permit it to fade.” It was a mindset perfectly tailored for an ambitious builder determined to change the skyline of one of the globe’s great cities. “Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” Peale urged his millions of followers. Trump and his father were Peale acolytes-the minister officiated at at the first of Donald Trump's weddings-and Peale’s overarching philosophy has been a lodestar for Trump over the course of his decades of triumphs as well as the crises and chaos. This is not his mother’s flinty Scottish Presbyterianism but Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking,” the utterly American belief in self above all else and the conviction that thoughts can be causative, that basic assertion can lead to actual achievement. They are a direct result of the closest thing the stubborn, ideologically malleable celebrity businessman turned most powerful person on the planet has ever had to a devout religious faith. For Trump, though, these statements are not issues of right or wrong or true or false.

And yet his fact-flouting declarations of positivity continue unabated. He’s raging privately while engaging in noisy, internecine squabbles. His approval ratings are historically low.

“I’ve had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month period, that’s ever served,” he said this week in an interview with Forbes, contradicting objective metrics and repeating his frequent and dubious assertion of unprecedented success throughout the first year of his first term as president. “We get an A-plus,” he said last week of his and his administration’s response to the devastating recent hurricanes as others doled out withering reviews.