Donald Trump won over the GOP base through alpha-male displays of dominance. But Red America’s alpha male just picked a fight with Nancy Pelosi – an elderly liberal woman from San Francisco – and lost. If anything can alienate his fans, it’s that.
Presidential candidates often remind the public of leaders from ages past. John McCain’s independent streak — and high-minded jingoism — led pundits to liken him to Theodore Roosevelt. Barack Obama’s oratorical gifts and Illinois roots invited analogies to Abraham Lincoln. Donald Trump’s political stylings, meanwhile, evoked memories of our people’s original civic leader — the large, angry ape.
“In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” the anthropologist Jane Goodall infamously opined in the summer of 2016. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”
Goodall was far from alone in this assessment. In his paper “The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J Trump,” Northwestern University social psychologist Dan McAdams argued that the mogul embodied “the social dominance form of human leadership” — and likened Trump’s Twitter tantrums to the violent rituals performed by ruling chimps.
