DONALD TRUMP CHANNELS HIS INNER LUIGI
Introduction - This piece was originally published on January 20, 2024, when CRISIS was named Trying to Understand…, and only had seven followers. The subsequent 165 subscribers probably missed this post.
I came across Luigi Cornaro, while researching a book on the characteristics of long-lived people.
Luigi Cornaro was a man who contemplated the causes of health and long life. At the age of forty, he concluded that if he wanted to live to a healthy old age, he would have to reduce his food intake and live an orderly life. At the age of eighty-three, he wrote his first piece on, “The Art of Living Long.” He continued writing on the subject until his death at 104 in 1566.
In his later years, Cornaro discussed some “highly important lawsuits brought against me by men of power and position…” His relatives, he writes, were “seized with the humor of melancholy… [which] so embittered their lives, and grew upon them to such a degree, that it brought them to the grave before their time.”
Luigi reacted differently.
“Yet I suffered nothing throughout it all; for in me, this humor was not excessive. On the contrary, encouraging myself, I tried to believe that God had permitted those lawsuits… in order that my own strength and courage might better be made known, and that I should win them to my own advantage and honor…gaining a glorious and profitable victory. And the consolation of soul I then experienced had, in its turn, no power to harm me.”
This brings us naturally to Donald Trump. Like Luigi, Trump has been the target of an astonishing array of legal attacks: the Russia collusion (hoax), two impeachments, a judgment against him for molesting E. Jean Carroll 27 years ago, and so on, and on and on.
Democrats seem obsessed by Trump, a political outsider, a loose cannon whom they claim is a threat to democracy. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, the more suits and indictments brought against Trump, the better his poll numbers.
Luigi Cornaro and Donald Trump are kindred spirits. They responded to attacks and suits – not with “melancholy” but with defiance and vigor. In 2016, when Trump said he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not "lose any voters,” he must have been channeling his inner Luigi whose “glorious and profitable victory” was so satisfying, that no power could harm him.
Trump, like Luigi, has what researchers, Suzanne Kobasa and Salvatore Maddi call the “psychologically hardy personality type.” In their eight-year study, they concluded that the hardy personality type is strengthened by stress, not weakened by it. They score high on the characteristics of challenge, commitment and control, traits that “constitute an optimistic appraisal of the [stressful] events and greatly increase the likelihood of decisive actions that will alter them.”
When stressful events occur, hardy people do experience them as stressful - but also as somewhat interesting and important (commitment) at least somewhat influenceable (control), and of potential value for personal development (challenge)… The psychologically hardy, find a stressful event intriguing and then interact with it intensely, all the while feeling confident that they can influence its outcome.
Sounds like Donald Trump to me.
The “melancholy” Luigi’s relative’s experienced was probably depression, an attitude that can weaken the immune system, allowing disease to attack and kill. But Luigi fought against the suits with, in his words, “strength and courage” eventually winning.
Luigi ‘s book, De Vita Sobria (On the Temperate Life) in the words of Steven Shapin, “was an instant success and has proved to be one of the most long-lasting and influential works of practical medical advice, counseling readers how to live long and healthy lives.” His limited diet is considered life-enhancing even today. Experiments with mice and human conclude that lower caloric intake, increases one’s lifespan.
Donald Trump is not going to live to one hundred, (he’s far too apoplectic), but love him or hate him, his stress resistant, psychologically hardy personality will carry him through the current spate of impeachments, lawsuits and criminal indictments.
Which is exactly what happened.
The more red meat they throw at him, the hungrier he gets.
Melancholy responses are not his style.