Ascertaining the motives of Donald J. Trump

I’ve noticed that President-elect Biden, and earlier a fair number of prominent Republican and Democratic legislators as well say on occasion (often enough so as to be noticeable) that they cannot “know” or will not attempt to “read” Trump’s mind (the former may be true if by knowledge here one implies unassailable certainty), or “speculate about what he’s thinking,” or that they “can’t speak to his motives.” This assumes or presumes that one’s mind is solely or primarily within the confines of one’s head (if not brain, the workings of which are not perceived by the senses), and thus one’s motives—which are not unrelated to one’s beliefs, feelings or emotions, desires and so forth (e.g., interests, passions and reasons as distinguished by British moralists of the eighteenth century)—are inscrutable unless the person in question reveals in word (perhaps in conjunction or harmony with a deed or deeds) what they in fact are, that he makes a public avowal of same. But that is implausible and silly. We often, and reasonably if not rationally, read or infer a person’s intentions or motives (be they ‘selfish and vicious’ or ‘social and virtuous’ in the words of Hume) from their behavior, from their actions, from their words, and usually a combination thereof (and this, in the case of public figures, has an accessible history).

We have working assumptions and beliefs about human nature and commonplace reliance on folk psychology that allow if not encourage us to speak to one’s motives, even if our beliefs, ascriptions and speculations are fallible or impartial or simply mistaken. Given the tenets of psychoanalytic psychology with regard to the unconscious and sub- or pre-conscious mind, intentions and motives can be in the first place or prima facie inscrutable or mixed in mysterious ways. But this possibility does not nor should not preclude our attempts to understand the motives of another person (we grant people the presumption of reasonableness or minimal rationality until sufficient reason arises for rebuttal), especially a pathological demagogue like Trump, whose danger to our fragile democratic republic is immeasurably worsened by the actions of his closest sycophants in the administration as well as his more distant minions distributed throughout the population. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to proffering evidence for Trump’s principal and general motivations being passions and (narcissistic) self-interests rather than reason although at times there is coherence or method to his madness. As for the specific quality and character of those motives, that determination is aided by an understanding of why we characterize his behavior as that of a pathological narcissist (addicted to present hedonism), and what is worse, at once both a psychopath and sociopath. That may not exhaust the locus of his motivations, but it explains quite much, as much as we might expect in this case.  

The following works have shaped (for better and worse) my thinking on this subject over several decades, although there is no one theory or philosophy represented by this material, and the influence comes in degrees, with the caveat that I have not dedicated anything remotely close to the time and attention to this topic our authors display or betray here (its length is meant to intimate the range and complexity of the subject). While I took some philosophy courses as an undergraduate and graduate student and taught in a philosophy department for over fifteen years at our community college, I am not a professional philosopher. I have the temerity (or is it chutzpah?), however, to avow an ardent amateur’s interest in philosophy, thereby revealing perhaps a different cluster of virtues and vices (and no doubt more of the latter) than found among contemporary professional philosophers.

Suggested Reading

• Bilgrami, Akeel. Self-Knowledge and Resentment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Brakel, Linda A.W. Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-rational Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Brakel, Linda A.W. Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969 (Prentice-Hall, 1945).
• Cane, Peter and John Gardner, eds. Relating to Responsibility: Essays in honour of Tony Honoré on his 80^th Birthday. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing, 2001.
• Deigh, John. The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud, Insight and Change. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2000.
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Elster, Jon. Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Farber, Leslie H. The Ways of the Will: Selected Essays (Robert Boyers and Anne Farber, eds.) New York: Basic Books, 2000.
• Fischer, John Martin and Mark Ravizza, S.J. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons (Wiley Blackwell), 2018.
• Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997 (1977).
• Hollis, Martin. Reason in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Social Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Holmes, Stephen. Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. [In particular, the first three chapters.]
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Understanding Persons (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 60). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Folk Psychology. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009.
• Lloyd, S.A. Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Lucas, J.R. Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: The roots of human nature. London: Routledge, revised ed., 1995.
• Moore, Michael S. Placing Blame: A Theory of the Criminal Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988.
• Velleman, J. David. The Possibility of Practical Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• White, Morton. Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Wollheim, Richard. The Thread of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
• Wollheim, Richard. On the Emotions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.