Narrative psychologist breaks down President Trump's "strange" response to COVID-19

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University psychologist Dan P. McAdams, author of the new book “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning," can speak to media about President Trump's behavior and response in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. 

A narrative psychologist who pioneered the study of lives, McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern. 

President Trump initially responded to the COVID-19 crisis by trying to tamp down anxiety by minimizing the threat and reassuring Americans that we have the resources to defeat the evil foe, delivering his message with a tone and rhetoric to which much of the world is by now accustomed, McAdams said. 

"The virus will not have a chance against us," Trump declared on March 11 from the Oval Office. As medical experts try to prepare the public for a prolonged war against the virus, Trump characterized the problem instead as confined to a "temporary moment in time."

Whether addressing Google’s new website, insurance coverage for treatment of the virus, the Europe travel ban -- which set off a desperate wave of attempts to return to the U.S. by American citizens abroad -- or questions about the availability of tests and whether the president would be tested for COVID-19, much of Trump’s response to the crisis has been met by confusion and contradiction, McAdams said. 

Quote from Professor McAdams

"Pandemics, like natural disasters, do not occur in moments. Rather than comprising a discrete moment, they build to form an ongoing story. 

"Donald Trump does not, however, see life as a story. Unlike any other prominent public figure that I can name, Trump appears to be nearly bereft of what personality and developmental psychologists call a narrative identity -- that is, a morally framed and temporally extended story in an adult’s mind that explains how he or she has come to be the person he or she is becoming. A key psychological resource in modern life, narrative identity reconstructs the personal past and imagines the future in such a way as to provide an adult’s life with a sense of temporal continuity and coherence. 

"The president’s episodic understanding of the virus –--as a phenomenon fully circumscribed within a single episode in time -- recalls his indignant reaction to the reported death toll in the 2017 hurricane in Puerto Rico. Conducting a statistical analysis of the storm’s effects over the course of a year, researchers at George Washington University determined that approximately 3000 people died as a result of the tragedy, nearly twice the number who perished in 2005-06 as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Dismissing the findings as a Democratic conspiracy 'to make me look as bad as possible,' President Trump insisted that '3000 people did not die.'"