Donald Trump’s rise to political power and his presidency represent a profound disruption of traditional models of leadership. His campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, encapsulated a lifelong warrior narrative grounded in dominance, conflict and conquest. As he asserted in Crippled America, “Everything begins with a strong military. Everything.” This belief system reflects a worldview in which life is an unending struggle between winners and losers—a philosophy inherited, perhaps, from his father’s injunction that the world is dangerous and demands toughness. Trump’s rhetoric situates America in perpetual battle, whether against terrorists or economic adversaries like China. He casts himself as the fighter uniquely equipped to win.
Psychologists have warned that such bellicose language and power-oriented thinking are not without consequence. Studies show that presidents who employ aggressive, dominance-driven rhetoric are statistically more prone to lead nations into conflict. Trump’s high extroversion and narcissism—traits linked to risk-taking and impulsiveness — amplify this potential volatility. While his assertive style can project strength and even deter some adversaries, it also fuels domestic polarisation and international tension. The paradox of Trump’s ‘warrior ethos’ lies in its lack of teleology: winning, for him, is an end in itself, not a means toward a broader moral or civic purpose. Unlike leaders such as Andrew Jackson—whose populism ultimately coalesced into a national vision—Trump’s narrative remains thematically vacant, defined by struggle but devoid of transcendence.
This emptiness at the core of his narrative identity has become a central focus of psychological inquiry. Scholars describe Trump as an individual without a coherent life story, one who lives “episodically”—each event experienced as an isolated contest rather than part of a developmental arc. He does not view himself as a person who grows, learns or changes over time. The past holds no moral weight, and the future exerts no pull. Trump exists in the perpetual now, fighting to win the current moment. Truth, for him, is transactional: what is true is what works. This temporal myopia that some analysts call his episodic self frees him from the moral and normative constraints that guide most individuals, allowing blatant contradictions between yesterday’s and today’s claims to coexist without cognitive dissonance.
Empirical research supports this psychological profile. Multiple studies assessing Trump through the Big Five traits and related scales consistently find him very high in extroversion and very low in agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability. His spontaneous remarks between 2017 and 2021 revealed patterns of distrust, impulsivity and self-assurance. He also scores high on the “dark triad” of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism—traits that collectively describe manipulative, callous and self-serving personalities. As one team of researchers put it, Trump is an “outlier among outliers,” even when compared to other abrasive political figures.
Dan P McAdams from Northwestern University states that a defining psychological characteristic of Donald Trump is his persistent reluctance—or perhaps inability—to engage in autobiographical reasoning, that is, to draw broad insights about self and development from specific life experiences. In The Art of the Deal (1987), Trump recounts several formative memories, yet each functions less as a reflective narrative than as a self-affirming anecdote. He recalls, for instance, punching his second-grade music teacher, an episode he interprets not as a moment of moral or emotional learning but as evidence of his innate fighting spirit. Similarly, he describes accompanying his father, Fred Trump, on rent-collection trips through precarious neighborhoods, where his father’s caution—standing aside in case of gunfire—imparted a singular lesson: the world is dangerous and demands vigilance. Across these recollections, Trump derives no developmental or moral insights; rather, he extracts confirmations of a preexisting worldview. His autobiographical reflections, to the extent that they exist, serve primarily to reinforce two themes central to his self-concept: first, personal traits of power, toughness and intelligence; and second, an underlying belief that human life is governed by aggression and conflict. As he succinctly asserts, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
Trump’s psychological and narrative profile reveals a form of leadership defined by immediacy rather than continuity, performance rather than principle. His warrior myth and solipsistic worldview have recast American politics as a zero-sum contest of strength.
John R MacArthur extends this analysis by suggesting that Trump transcends narcissism and embodies solipsism—a psychological state in which the self is the only reality. Unlike narcissists who crave admiration, solipsists cannot recognise others as truly separate beings; they are merely extensions of the self. This explains Trump’s chronic lack of empathy, his fixation on image over substance and his inability to register others’ suffering evidenced in mocking political opponents and responding to disasters with self-referential remarks. For MacArthur, Trump thrives on conflict because it centres him. Outrage, whether from allies or enemies, sustains his existence. Negative attention is not punishment but nourishment.
The implications of this solipsistic leadership style are profound. Trump’s policies, though consequential, often seem secondary to his performative need for domination and visibility. His presidency became an ongoing spectacle—a theatre of grievance and victory in which policy served mainly as a stage prop. His supporters, bound to his persona rather than his programme, formed what MacArthur calls a movement “united less by ideology than by loyalty.” In this framework, Trump emerges not as a statesman but as a performer-president, driven by impulse, spectacle and a need to win each moment of public attention.
Donald Trump’s self-presentation is strikingly devoid of narrative or introspection. Unlike most politicians, who situate their identities within a personal or historical arc, Trump speaks almost exclusively in declarative terms of power, success and self-aggrandizement. His discourse is marked by assertions of strength, intelligence and invincibility, yet it lacks reflection on the past or projection into the future. In contrast to predecessors such as Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama—who invoked legacy, posterity and moral purpose—Trump exhibits little sense of history or empathy.
Observers and biographers describe this as an absence of interiority. Journalist Mark Singer concluded that Trump lives “an existence unmolested by the rumblings of a soul.” Ghostwriter Tony Schwartz remarked that “there is no private Trump.” Even in his most public and symbolically charged moments, such as his 2016 Republican National Convention address, Trump declined to humanise himself through personal narrative or vulnerability. Instead, he frames life as perpetual combat—a worldview he once summarised as “a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” This conception of self as a heroic combatant rather than a developing human being underscores Trump’s performative and transactional orientation toward leadership, in which identity is not a story to be told but a brand to be asserted.
Donald Trump’s profound need for admiration renders him unusually susceptible to manipulation by those skilled in flattery and ego reinforcement. His decision-making often appears driven less by principle or policy analysis than by the praise or approval of those around him. Advisors, foreign leaders and political allies who master the art of ego-messaging—appealing to his self-image as a strong, decisive winner—can easily shape his perceptions and actions. This psychological vulnerability, rooted in narcissistic self-regard, makes Trump both highly predictable and profoundly influence-able: praise opens doors, while criticism ensures swift alienation. That is a trait typical of narcissists.
Trump’s psychological and narrative profile reveals a form of leadership defined by immediacy rather than continuity, performance rather than principle. His warrior mythology and solipsistic worldview have recast American politics as a zero-sum contest of strength, reshaping ideas about truth, leadership and identity itself. What remains uncertain—and perhaps most perilous—is what follows the fight when the only victory that matters is attention.
The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.