The anger that he has consistently displayed in public and his tendency to lash out against his critics, whomever they might be, even the parents of a slain soldier, has sent Republicans into a full-scale panic. His willingness to make false statements or to play around with facts involving matters of national security has generated immense criticism.
There is even some evidence that his inner circle of advisers, including Paul Manafort, doesn’t feel that they have control about what he says when in front of the crowds and the camera. In a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, only 33 percent said Trump has the “kind of personality and temperament” to serve effectively as president, compared to 59 percent for Clinton.
Julian Zelizer
There are many things that we don’t really learn on the campaign trail. Candidates make all sorts of policy promises that will never come true. They present portraits of themselves and their families that are often at odds with their private reality. They talk about new eras of civility and bipartisanship that have no chance of surviving the realities of a polarized Washington. The organizational and strategic challenges of campaigning are very different than those of governing.
But there is one lasting characteristic of a candidate that does become apparent as presidential campaigns drag on, and that is their temperament. The way that candidates respond to the immense pressures of the campaign trail and the way that they do or don’t withstand the inevitable onslaught of attacks that they face from their opposition gives us a very good glimpse into what kind of person we would be electing to this job.
And temperament matters in a presidency. Having a good temperament, being able to remain constrained in the public eye, showing good judgment on how to speak about adversaries and allies, being able to contain moments of anger and outrage that will be a key part of four years in the White House, making certain you know the facts before making potentially provocative statements – all of this matters very much.
Temperament is essential to successful diplomacy. The words that a president says in public and private have a huge effect. Many of the more successful moments for presidents have taken place when they chose to use the right words rather than rely on bluster in moments of crisis.
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President-elect Donald Trump has been in the spotlight for years. From developing real estate and producing and starring in TV shows, he became a celebrity long before winning the White House.
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Trump at age 4. He was born in 1946 to Fred and Mary Trump in New York City. His father was a real estate developer.
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Trump, left, in a family photo. He was the second-youngest of five children.
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Trump, center, stands at attention during his senior year at the New York Military Academy in 1964.
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Trump, center, wears a baseball uniform at the New York Military Academy in 1964. After he graduated from the boarding school, he went to college. He started at Fordham University before transferring and later graduating from the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania's business school.
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Trump stands with Alfred Eisenpreis, New York's economic development administrator, in 1976 while they look at a sketch of a new 1,400-room renovation project of the Commodore Hotel. After graduating college in 1968, Trump worked with his father on developments in Queens and Brooklyn before purchasing or building multiple properties in New York and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Those properties included Trump Tower in New York and Trump Plaza and multiple casinos in Atlantic City.
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Trump attends an event to mark the start of construction of the New York Convention Center in 1979.
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Trump wears a hard hat at the Trump Tower construction site in New York in 1980.
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Trump was married to Ivana Zelnicek Trump from 1977 to 1990, when they divorced. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
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The Trump family, circa 1986.
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Trump uses his personal helicopter to get around New York in 1987.
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Trump stands in the atrium of the Trump Tower.
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Trump attends the opening of his new Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, in 1989.
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Trump signs his second book, "Trump: Surviving at the Top," in 1990. Trump has published at least 16 other books, including "The Art of the Deal" and "The America We Deserve."
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Trump and singer Michael Jackson pose for a photo before traveling to visit Ryan White, a young child with AIDS, in 1990.
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Trump dips his second wife, Marla Maples, after the couple married in a private ceremony in New York in December 1993. The couple divorced in 1999 and had one daughter together, Tiffany.
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Trump putts a golf ball in his New York office in 1998.
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An advertisement for the television show "The Apprentice" hangs at Trump Tower in 2004. The show launched in January of that year. In January 2008, the show returned as "Celebrity Apprentice."
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A 12-inch talking Trump doll is on display at a toy store in New York in September 2004.
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Trump attends a news conference in 2005 that announced the establishment of Trump University. From 2005 until it closed in 2010, Trump University had about 10,000 people sign up for a program that promised success in real estate. Three separate lawsuits -- two class-action suits filed in California and one filed by New York's attorney general -- argued that the program was mired in fraud and deception. Trump's camp rejected the suits' claims as "baseless." And Trump has charged that the New York case against him is politically motivated.
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Trump attends the U.S. Open tennis tournament with his third wife, Melania Knauss-Trump, and their son, Barron, in 2006. Trump and Knauss married in 2005.
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Trump wrestles with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin at WrestleMania in 2007. Trump has close ties with the WWE and its CEO, Vince McMahon.
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For "The Apprentice," Trump was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2007.
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Trump appears on the set of "The Celebrity Apprentice" with two of his children -- Donald Jr. and Ivanka -- in 2009.
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Trump poses with Miss Universe contestants in 2011. Trump had been executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants since 1996.
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In 2012, Trump announces his endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
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Trump speaks in Sarasota, Florida, after accepting the Statesman of the Year Award at the Sarasota GOP dinner in August 2012. It was shortly before the Republican National Convention in nearby Tampa.
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Trump appears on stage with singer Nick Jonas and television personality Giuliana Rancic during the 2013 Miss USA pageant.
Trump -- flanked by U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio, left, and Ted Cruz -- speaks during a CNN debate in Miami on March 10. Trump dominated the GOP primaries and emerged as the presumptive nominee in May.
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The Trump family poses for a photo in New York in April.
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Trump speaks during a campaign event in Evansville, Indiana, on April 28. After Trump won the Indiana primary, his last two competitors dropped out of the GOP race.
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Trump delivers a speech at the Republican National Convention in July, accepting the party's nomination for President. "I have had a truly great life in business," he said. "But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country -- to go to work for you. It's time to deliver a victory for the American people."
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Trump faces Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the first presidential debate, which took place in Hempstead, New York, in September.
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Trump apologizes in a video, posted to his Twitter account in October, for vulgar and sexually aggressive remarks he made a decade ago regarding women. "I said it, I was wrong and I apologize," Trump said, referring to lewd comments he made during a previously unaired taping of "Access Hollywood." Multiple Republican leaders rescinded their endorsements of Trump after the footage was released.
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Trump walks on stage with his family after he was declared the election winner on November 9. "Ours was not a campaign, but rather, an incredible and great movement," he told his supporters in New York.
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Trump is joined by his family as he is sworn in as President on January 20.
President George H.W. Bush, continues to receive accolades from many historians for remaining silent as the Soviet Union collapsed. Rather than boasting about the triumph of the Western forces, he allowed the process to unfold so that this would not become a story about the U.S. His son George W. Bush, who remains one of the most controversial presidents in recent years and still comes under criticism for his false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, does receive credit for making an extraordinarily moving speech soon after 9/11 reiterating that the U.S. would be engaged in a battle against terrorism rather than against Muslims.
His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, was often masterful during the tense negotiations between 1985 and 1987 with Mikhail Gorbachev that produced the historic INF arms agreement. Many decades earlier, John F. Kennedy set the standard during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 as he guided his advisers and the public, pushing back against military pressure to employ force, and avoided nuclear war.
In dealing with members of Congress and interest groups, temperament is essential, particularly in the tough and brutal partisan world in which we live. The temptation for presidents is to get angry and to lash out against what can be obstinate opposition.
Even a president as cool and collected as President Obama has found it difficult to contain his emotions at moments, particularly following the horrific mass shootings like Newtown. But to be to as effective as possible in this era, presidents need to exhibit a level of restraint that avoids giving their opponents more fodder.
During the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton was a master of this part of politics when he refused to engage in the vitriol coming from congressional Republicans and witnessed, as a result, the public turn against House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his colleagues even as they were moving to impeach him.
In private meetings, he had the ability to win over members like Gingrich during negotiations over the budget despite their public wars. Clinton kept governing, he restrained himself as their rhetoric intensified and he ended his term with strong approval rates.
The temperament of the president also matters in terms of how the public ultimately thinks of government. Few people were as damaging to the institution of the presidency as Richard Nixon. There were many things about Nixon’s presidency that undermined public confidence in the institution, but one of the big ones was everything that we learned about him as a person.
The shocking kind of language that he used in private, revealed through the tapes, devastated the public’s image of the man in the White House. We could never turn back from “expletives deleted.”
The continued discussion that we have had about the comments Nixon made on the White House recordings, such as once telling an adviser that “Jews are just a very aggressive and obnoxious personality,” revealed a hateful person in the Oval Office. The vindictive way that he treated his opponents was shocking.
All of this forever tarnished the image of the White House and every president since has lived under Nixon’s shadow. With Trump, the problem may be even worse since so many of his most incendiary comments have been made in public. A new generation of Americans is watching this campaign, as one Clinton commercial has reminded voters with pictures of children seeing Trump’s more colorful moments, and perhaps forming lasting impressions about how our democracy works.
Writing in The New York Times, Michael Morell, who was the acting director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013, wrote that he would vote for Hillary Clinton: “Trump has no experience on national security. Even more important, the character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggests he would be a poor, even dangerous commander in chief. These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the law.”
So Donald Trump has a temperament problem and how he handles himself in the next few weeks will be as important as anything else in determining whether this campaign implodes in a way that we have never seen in American history.
If he continues to lash out in public against anyone who comes his way and if he continues to make rambling and disjoined and patently false statements about vital policy issues, he might very well face a Republican National Committee that wishes it could turn to him in the board room in desperation and say: “You’re fired!”