What would a personality test say about the American president, and how shall we lead and make agreements with such a person?
The level of madness is wild. Two days ago, Danish and Greenlandic officials at the highest level held talks with the American administration and believed they had reached an agreement on a joint committee that would work towards a healthy future for all parties. That lasted two days. Then President Trump imposed taxes on the EU countries that allowed themselves to send soldiers to Greenland, preventing him from buying Greenland!
Therefor we can ask ourselves: Why do politicians, experts and others continue to believe that there is some kind of normality inside Donald Trump? Something you can appeal to? Something that makes sense?
Public debate often assumes that political and organizational leaders can be engaged through rational argument, shared norms, or appeals to common values. This assumption becomes problematic when the leader in question does not operate within such a framework. Drawing on personality psychology and narrative psychology, particularly the work of Dan McAdams, this article analyses Donald Trump’s psychological profile. It examines the concrete leadership challenges such a profile creates for trust-based leadership in organisations.
The purpose is analytical rather than moralising: to clarify patterns of behaviour and their implications for leadership, governance, and organisational functioning. Finally, I will make suggestions on how to approach and persuade such a leader to agree to and stick to agreements.
Personality traits: a psychological analysis
Although Donald Trump has not been formally personality tested in public, decades of observable behaviour, speeches, interviews, and decision-making allow for a reasonably robust trait-based analysis.
From a Big Five personality perspective, several patterns stand out.
1) Neuroticism appears high rather than low. Trump demonstrates pronounced sensitivity to criticism, a persistent preoccupation with how he is perceived, strong reactions to perceived slights, and a tendency to hold grudges. Mood volatility and combative responses to opposition are recurring features. These are inconsistent with emotional stability and align more closely with high neuroticism.
2) Extraversion is also high, particularly in its dominance-related facets. Trump displays social assertiveness, high energy, and a constant drive for attention. At times, this borders on manic expression, especially in rally settings or unstructured communication contexts.
3) Agreeableness is extremely low. Empathy, humility, trust, and cooperativeness are largely absent. Interactions are often framed in zero-sum terms, with others positioned as winners or losers. Loyalty is demanded but rarely reciprocated.
4) Openness to experience is low. Trump shows limited tolerance for ambiguity, nuance, or unconventional lifestyles and perspectives. The world is framed in binaries: strong or weak, loyal or disloyal, winning or losing.
Taken together, these traits align closely with narcissistic and megalomaniacal patterns: grandiosity, entitlement, hypersensitivity to ego threat, aggression toward obstacles, and instrumental use of others.
The absence of a self-narrative: the episodic leader
Dan McAdams’ most consequential contribution to understanding Trump lies not in trait psychology but in narrative psychology.
Most individuals construct a self-narrative: a coherent story about who they are, what they have struggled with, and what gives continuity and meaning to their actions over time. This narrative constrains behaviour. It creates internal consistency, moral reference points, and long-term orientation.
McAdams argues that Trump lacks such a narrative. Instead, he functions as an episodic individual. Experiences are lived moment by moment, without being integrated into a broader story of self, purpose, or development.
This has several implications.
- First, consistency is not a value. Statements made yesterday impose no obligation today. If proposition A serves immediate advantage, it is embraced. If not-A serves advantage tomorrow, it is adopted without perceived contradiction.
- Second, morality and norms are situational. Without a guiding narrative, there is no internal pressure to align actions with past commitments, shared values, or institutional expectations.
- Third, predictability is radically reduced. Behaviour is driven by immediate perception, emotion, and perceived advantage rather than by strategy or principle.
McAdams concludes: “He is the episodic man – living forever in the combative moment, striving to win each moment, moment by moment, episode by discrete episode. (…) It is shameless. It is primal. Unexpurgated, unmediated, completely divorced from doubt or reason or the need to be consistent and truthful in the long run, Trump erupts with what currently captures his consciousness, the unfiltered expression of his wholehearted embrace of the moment. Like an impulsive, angry child. Or a wild beast.”
What happens when a “episodic man”, lead? A man that is permanently engaged in the present moment, striving to win each episode independently, unburdened by coherence or long-term accountability?
LEADERSHIP: Decision-making and power
In such a psychological structure, decision-making is not oriented toward sustainable outcomes, institutional health, or collective benefit. It is oriented toward immediate dominance, affirmation, and victory.
Conflict is not instrumental but existential. Life is experienced as continuous struggle rather than as a sequence of challenges moving toward resolution. There is no stable definition of allies or enemies; both are contingent and reversible.
This explains why negotiation, expert advice, or procedural governance often fail. These assume continuity, learning, and shared reality. The episodic leader experiences them instead as constraints or threats to immediate agency.
Implications for trust-based leadership
Trust-based leadership relies on several foundational assumptions: consistency, psychological safety, reciprocity, transparency, and a shared understanding of purpose. When we have an episodic, narcissistic leader, he/she systematically undermine each of these.
Concrete challenges include:
- Erosion of psychological safety: Employees cannot rely on stable expectations. Praise, blame, loyalty, and exclusion fluctuate unpredictably. This fosters anxiety, self-censorship, and defensive behaviour rather than engagement and learning.
- Breakdown of trust: Trust presupposes that words, decisions, and values retain meaning over time. When positions shift opportunistically, trust becomes irrational rather than prudent.
- Instrumentalisation of relationships: People are valued only insofar as they serve the leader’s immediate needs. This undermines intrinsic motivation, commitment, and ethical responsibility.
- Collapse of distributed leadership: Trust-based organisations depend on delegation and empowered decision-making. Episodic leaders centralise power, as autonomy threatens control and ego stability.
- Strategic incoherence: Without a guiding narrative, strategy becomes fragmented. Long-term planning is replaced by reactive moves, creating organisational volatility and fatigue.
- Normative confusion: Rules, ethics, and procedures lose authority when they are selectively applied. This increases compliance risk and moral disengagement among employees.
So now we can ask ourselves: How does a proposal for a working group from the danish parliament land with such a personality?
For such a personality, every day is a struggle. But the war is not understood as we understand it. The war does not have the usual narrative, where there are clearly defined enemies, stable alliances and a goal that the war will one day end and be part of history. No, life is one long war, without progression and without direction, writes McAdams.
That is what the world are up against: A narcissistic megalomaniac who is engaged in one long episodic war – without progression and without direction. And until we understand that, we will not be able to tackle this properly. It will only get worse.
Partial conclusion on psykology
The central mistake in engaging leaders like Donald Trump is the assumption of normality: the belief that rational argument, shared values, or institutional processes will eventually prevail.
A psychological analysis grounded in trait theory and narrative psychology suggests otherwise. The episodic, narcissistic leader does not experience contradiction as a problem, consistency as a virtue, or trust as a reciprocal relationship.
For organisations, this creates an environment fundamentally hostile to trust-based leadership. Without structural counterweights, such leadership becomes impossible to sustain. Understanding this is not pessimism; it is a prerequisite for realism. Only by recognising the psychological logic at play can institutions, boards, and stakeholders design governance mechanisms that limit damage and protect organisational integrity.
Until that understanding is widespread, attempts to “reason” with episodic power will continue to fail, and the consequences will continue to escalate.
Leading upward and negotiating with an episodic, narcissistic leader
Principles for leading upward
Leading upward in this context is not about influence through values or shared purpose. It is about risk containment and tactical alignment.
- Reduce abstraction: Communicate in concrete, binary terms. Avoid nuance, theory, or long-term vision unless directly tied to immediate advantage.
- Anchor everything in personal gain: Frame proposals explicitly in terms of how they enhance the leader’s power, image, victory, or control. Organisational benefit is secondary and implicit.
- Control exposure: Minimise unsolicited input. Speak when invited or when silence creates greater risk than engagement.
- Assume volatility: Treat every agreement as provisional. Build internal buffers and contingency plans from the outset.
- Use status signals: Reference external authority, prestige, or competitive comparison. Peer recognition matters more than internal logic.
Negotiation strategies that work
Negotiation must be episodic, not relational.
- Win the moment: Focus on what helps the leader “win” now. Do not rely on past agreements or future consistency.
- Create visible ownership: Ensure the leader can publicly claim the decision as their own. Shared credit weakens commitment.
- Limit choices: Present two options at most, both acceptable to the organization, both framed as wins.
- Tie agreement to immediate action: Convert decisions into concrete next steps on the spot. Delay increases reversal risk.
- Reinforce repeatedly: Restate the agreement in different contexts, always linking it back to the leader’s perceived success.
What not to rely on
- Appeals to values, ethics, or institutional norms
- Logical consistency or factual contradiction
- Long-term strategy without short-term payoff
- Trust as a stable relational asset
Bottom line
Upward leadership and negotiation in this context are tactical, not transformational. Success depends on accepting the psychological reality of episodic power and designing interactions that align with it, while quietly protecting the organisation from its inherent instability.
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Inspired by Helle Hedegaard Hein