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posted by janrinok on Monday November 14 2016, @09:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-a-different-president dept.

I've come across an article on The Atlantic that analyses Trump's personality:

Many questions have arisen about Trump during this campaign season—about his platform, his knowledge of issues, his inflammatory language, his level of comfort with political violence. This article touches on some of that. But its central aim is to create a psychological portrait of the man. Who is he, really? How does his mind work? How might he go about making decisions in office, were he to become president? And what does all that suggest about the sort of president he'd be?

It's a long, but very interesting read.

Here's a list of sentences the article itself highlights:

Combined with a gift for humor, anger lies at the heart of Trump's charisma.

Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion, which analogizes out-groups to parasites and poisons.

Narcissism in presidents is a double-edged sword. It is associated with historians' ratings of "greatness"—but also with impeachment resolutions.

Andrew Jackson displayed many of the same psychological qualities that we see in Trump.

Trump has never forgotten the lesson from his father: The world is a dangerous place. You have to be ready to fight.

And the final paragraph summarizes:

Who, really, is Donald Trump? What's behind the actor's mask? I can discern little more than narcissistic motivations and a complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost. It is as if Trump has invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially dominant role that he has nothing left over to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation. It is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Monday November 14 2016, @11:17PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Monday November 14 2016, @11:17PM (#426726) Journal

    What I like is that nobody in the mainstream media saw Trump having a chance except 538
    http://fivethirtyeight.com [fivethirtyeight.com]

    Now the mainstream media says NOBODY called it correctly.

    "So, if we were wrong, so was everybody else": stick head in sand, so say we all.

    Just funny.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    Starting Score:    1  point
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       Interesting=1, Total=1
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @12:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @12:18AM (#426753)

    Actually, fivethirtyeight's updates were while the election results were coming in. Before the voting booths started producing results, fivethirtyeight said it was most likely Hillary.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @01:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @01:10AM (#426775)

      That is correct. Their odds moved around, but the weekend before they had it 2-1 and by Tuesday it was 3-1.

      Here's the page where you can see for yourself: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/#now [fivethirtyeight.com]

      To be fair, they seemed the most willing to contemplate a systemic polling error, talking about the possibility on a frequent basis and that does seem to be at the root of the problem.

      A certain type of person would like to believe that people lied to the pollsters, but the evidence does not bear that out, the polls were most accurate in blue states - areas where people would theoretically be most inclined to lie due to social pressure from all their trump-hating neighbors. More likely it was "differential non-response" as in Trump voters were simply less willing to respond to polls at all, especially whenever there was embarrassing news about Trump in the headlines - thus the large swings in the fivethirtyeight's predictions that almost precisely tracked reporting of bad news.

      Modern polling is running on the ragged edge, with response rates less than 10% when 2 decades ago it was closer to 50%. Such low response rates when actual voting turnout rates are about 10x that can introduce significant unseen error.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @01:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @01:11AM (#426776)

    Um, a week before the election 538 had Hillary wining by a landslide. It wasn't until the night of the election that started to turn.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:18PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:18PM (#427087) Journal
      They also had given a high chance of being wrong. Given how close the election was, I think 538 did well.