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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Best of All Possible Worlds 

America is the land of positive thinking, from Mary Baker Eddy to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Support Of Arizona GOP Candidates
(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Anyone who has listened to one of Donald Trump’s speeches during the last seven years will be familiar with how he talks about the future. After enumerating the current failures of the liberal program—the southern border, the shamefully managed Afghanistan withdrawal, the cost of a tank of gas—Trump will insist that the forces for good will inevitably prevail. He gives the impression of being incapable of imagining a future in which the open border apologists, woke generals, economic imbeciles, and corrupt Department of Justice officials are not defeated by the MAGA movement. 

Although Trump’s words have been described as “strikingly grim” (New York Times), “dystopian” (Vanity Fair), and “apocalyptic” (Washington Post), the former president’s critics seem attuned only to his dire diagnoses and not his bullish long-term forecasts. In fact, Trump displays an unusually optimistic, even Panglossian worldview. What is the source of Trump’s peculiar brand of pie-in-the-sky-ism? Simply put, Trump is the latest and loudest exponent of the grand American philosophy of positive thinking.

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As an occasional congregant of Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, Trump had a front row seat to the sermons of that movement’s greatest expositor, Norman Vincent Peale. A native of Bowersville, Ohio, Peale acquired a large and urbane following as the pastor of Marble Collegiate and won literary stardom with the aspirational, go-getting, up-with-people philosophy espoused in his 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. It advanced the appealing notion that an abundance of self-confidence combined with plenty of piet invites success, whereas the opposite, self-pity and irreligion, is a one-way ticket to failure. 

“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities!” exhorted Peale, who had little patience for the whiners, groaners, and self-doubters, what Trump might call the “haters and losers.” “It is appalling to realize the number of pathetic people who are hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex,” Peale added.

The ostensibly faithless left has mocked Trump for his obviously incomplete religious training (“two Corinthians”), but if there were ever a creed for him, it would be Peale’s. “You always, when the service was over, you said, ‘I’d have sat there for another hour,’” Trump remembered in a 2016 New York Times pre-election piece on the influence of Peale. “There aren’t too many people like that. It wasn’t the speaking ability, it was the thought process.”

Along with the penny-pinching of his father Fred and the taste for unchecked glitz of his mother Mary Anne, that thought process remains one of the few intellectual inheritances to which Trump will admit. There is no contradiction in Trump’s assertion in The Art of the Deal that he is a proponent not of positive but negative thinking. When he wrote, “I always go into the deal anticipating the worst,” Trump was not doubting his abilities but the good faith of his innumerable adversaries. He was still sure he would come out on top. “Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning,” he wrote. “And that gives people like me a great advantage.”

When he reached the presidency, Trump sought to lacquer the whole country in a thick coat of positive thinking. In the White House, Trump continued to traffic in gung-ho hyperbole—think of his statements that the coronavirus was going to disappear or that the border wall was soon to be finished—not because he was trying to dupe the public but because he felt that such language, rooted in positive thinking, would help make his goals a reality. This is common sense: Is a person (or an administration) more likely to achieve a difficult goal if operating in the belief that the goal is achievable or if they are resigned to failure? 

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“Unless you really want something sufficiently to create an atmosphere of positive factors by your dynamic desire, it is likely to elude you,” Peale wrote. “‘If with all your heart’—that is the secret. ‘If with all your heart,’ that is to say, if with the full complement of your personality, you reach out creatively towards your heart’s desire, your reach will not be in vain.”

Peale is part of a network of American thinkers, salesmen, and benign charlatans who promoted versions of positive thinking. In his great film Barcelona, Whit Stillman grouped together Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling as essential reading for the salesman protagonist, who at one point tells his cousin, “Thanks to the genius of Carnegie’s theory of human relations, many customers also became friends.”

More intellectually rigorous is Wesleyan University professor Donald Meyer’s long out-of-print book The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale to Ronald Reagan. First published in 1965 and later released in an expanded edition in 1980, Meyer produced a family tree of this curious American theology. There are sections on mind cure, Henry Ford, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In his eccentric yet magisterial 2007 book Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, historian John Patrick Diggins presented the fortieth president as a revolutionary optimist in this tradition. “He stood for freedom, peace, disarmament, self-reliance, earthly happiness, the dreams of the imagination and the desires of the heart,” wrote Diggins. As evidence, he cited remarks such as Reagan’s 1988 lecture at Moscow State University, where he said, “In the beginning was the spirit, and it was from this spirit that the material abundance of creation issued forth.”

By the time of Trump’s ascendency, the political class had long since moved on from Reagan’s buoyant confidence. On no issue did Trump’s positive thinking mentality face greater resistance than the pandemic. His on-the-bright-side best guesses—say, that certain pre-vaccine treatments were akin to cures—were met with dismay, fact-checking, and hair-pulling. These naysayers must have forgotten that America is the land where Mary Baker Eddy founded (her church would say discovered) Christian Science. That peculiar faith insists that man induces the illusion of disease. “Matter and its claims of sin, sickness, and death are contrary to God, and cannot emanate from Him,” Eddy wrote in her fascinating tract Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures. 

Even if we reject the actual claims of her curious denomination, Eddy’s firm stance against the fixation on ill health likely resonates more today than it did even in her own lifetime. “When there are fewer prescriptions, and less thought is given to sanitary subjects, there will be better constitutions and less disease,” Eddy wrote. To speak of disease constantly is, at best, to invite hypochondria. The ludicrously high number of recipients of Social Security disability benefits suggests that a large portion of the population views their ailments as fundamental and worth exemption from the normal demands of society. 

Trump emerged from this stew of positive thinking, which can sometimes mean blocking out reality itself. After Trump’s COVID diagnosis in October 2020, he quickly announced his improvement, tried to get out of Walter Reed as soon as possible, and, before long, was landing on the White House lawn. Even if he was not perfectly well, he sought to behave as though he was—positive thinking in hale and hearty action.  

As we have seen from the examples of Emerson, Peale, Reagan, and even Eddy, this is nothing new in our republic. Let us leave the predictions of World War III to the joyless Russians, and the predictions of endless pandemics to the joyless officials in the CDC. As Americans, we ought to be, like the new king of the country that once ruled us, “happy and glorious.” Trump’s positive thinking is not a linguistic quirk or a sign of his dishonesty but a framework to trudge through life—and to achieve his agenda. America will only be made great again with brio, with brashness, with belief—as Peale would put it, “with all your heart.”