Mark Perry is the author of Talking To Terrorists. His new book, The Pentagon Wars, will be published this coming year.



Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman essayist and stoic, wrote volumes about anger. He was against it. Anger is counterproductive, he argued (“he who gets angry is overthrown”) and a moral flaw — “anger comes, not from affection, but from weakness.”

While it’s not clear that Donald Trump has even heard of Seneca, he clearly failed to embrace his lessons. During his recent appearance at a rally in Alabama, Trump said he had spent the previous week “screaming” at senators. That Trump screams is not a surprise; it’s a habit. Back in June, after hearing that a U.S. Navy jet had downed a Syrian fighter, Trump launched a tirade at national security adviser H.R. McMaster that was described to me by an onlooker as “volcanic,” “over the top,” “out of control” and “off the rails.” Trump accused McMaster of trying to start a war. “He was screaming at the top of his lungs. It was really something,” this person told me. (A White House spokesperson strongly denied that the president got angry with McMaster, adding that the president was “not upset” by the Syria incident.)


In August, according to the New York Times, the president lashed out at chief of staff John Kelly for trying to control his political meanderings at public rallies. He was personal, rude, demeaning. After Kelly reportedly told colleagues that he’d never been spoken to like that before—and would not allow it again—Trump tried to smooth over the incident. “General John Kelly is doing a great job as Chief of Staff,” he tweeted. “I could not be happier or more impressed.”

Trump once reserved his fury for business associates he believed were doing shoddy work, reportedly ripping the handle off a piece of furniture in one of his hotels and hurling it across the room. During the 2016 campaign, conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin described Trump as “angry, impulsive and mean” — and that hasn’t changed now that he’s in the Oval Office. Eight days after his inauguration, Trump followed up an icy telephone exchange with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull by launching into a tirade that left his staff shaken and white-faced, according to CNN. It got only worse: According to the New York Times, Attorney General Jeff Sessions submitted a letter of resignation after Trump called him an “idiot” for recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation; the president, according to his friend Chris Ruddy of Newsmax, was “pissed … I haven’t seen him this angry.” At night and in the early mornings, multiple accounts have relayed, he rages at the television, then vents on Twitter.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first president to lose his temper, even if his fury has sometimes crossed the line separating the “irritated” from the “unhinged.” In fact, our best presidents have understood that there’s a direct relationship between private demeanor and political success. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Dwight Eisenhower and even the sunny Ronald Reagan had tempers, but each took steps to curb it. Washington, for instance, was so concerned about his rages that he read and reread Seneca as a kind of personal therapy. The corrective worked, if only in part: At the Battle of Monmouth during the American Revolution, Washington swore at a subordinate, as one onlooker described it, “til the leaves shook on the trees.” Such storms, while rare, continued into his presidency. After one especially contentious Cabinet meeting, Jefferson later recounted, Washington was so distraught that he tore off his hat, threw it on the ground and stomped on it.

During the nation’s first five presidencies (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe), a phrase like “sir, you are a marplot” was an insulting stand-in for what would later become “you God damned son of a bitch.” Of this bunch, John Adams (who, in a fit of pique, called Washington “a muttonhead”), had the worst temper. James McHenry, his secretary of war, witnessed one of Adams’ tirades—and resigned in disgust. Adams was, McHenry later said, “totally insane.” So too, we are told, was Andrew Jackson, at least for a time.

As a young man, Jackson fought so many duels that, one of his admirers said, his body was so filled with lead that it “rattled like a bag of marbles.” But like Washington, Jackson’s ambition overcame his eruptions; he used his reputation as a frontiersman, soldier, planter and Indian-killer to vault his way into the presidency, where he privately nursed ceaseless grievances against Henry Clay (“the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of God”), John C. Calhoun (“I will hang him higher than Haman”) and John Quincy Adams—who was as rude and tactless as his father. But, at least once, Jackson’s anger became public: When a would-be assassin’s gun misfired, Jackson turned on him, beating him with a cane. He might be forgiven.

Lincoln was rarely angry, at least during his presidency. Instead, his problem was “melancholia.” In the 1850s, to treat this malady, Old Abe took “Blue Mass” mercury pills, which sent him into sudden rages. Biologists who subsequently studied the pills say they contained 120 times the accepted dose of mercury, which helps to explain why Lincoln returned to his calmer self when he stopped taking them. If only we could say that about Mary Todd, his wife—or “the hellcat,” as Lincoln’s young assistants called her. Abe and Mary’s marital confrontations (punctuated by the hellcat’s buying sprees), were donnybrooks fueled by Mary’s grief over the death of their son, Willie—who died of typhoid fever in 1862. Mary’s response was so disturbed that Lincoln issued a warning: “Mother,” he said to his wife, “do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.” (Ten years after Lincoln’s assassination, their son Robert had her committed to an asylum in Batvia, Illinois.)

Teddy Roosevelt’s anger, on the other hand, was public—and studied. TR used sweeping gestures, a nodding visage, a mouth bristling with white teeth, a tightly balled fist and a leaning-over-the-lectern approach to seduce his audiences. He weaponized the media, who adored him. Which is not to say that the Rough Rider wasn’t calculating. TR, one journalist noted, “was as sweet a man as ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat,” and he would wag his finger and project his booming voice, though this too was rehearsed. But the man who mastered the bully pulpit was actually less a bully in private: He was an affectionate father, a loving husband, a loyal friend.

Which is not something you could ever say of Warren G. Harding, our most forgettable president. “Wurr’n” (as his doting wife called him) was explosive. A White House visitor recalled an incident in 1923 when he let himself into the president’s office only to see Harding choking a man against a wall. The victim was gasping for breath, waving his arms, while Harding raged at him. “You yellow rat!” Harding screamed. “You double-crossing bastard. If I ever… ”—at which point Harding noticed his visitor. Taken aback, he loosened his grip on the man who, eyes ablaze, staggered from the room. “You have an appointment,” Harding said to his visitor. “Come into the next room.” The government official Harding was choking was Charles Forbes who, after being appointed as director of the Veterans Bureau, proceeded to loot it of $2 million. Under Harding, the U.S. government was open for business—and the business was theft. Harding compensated for the mounting scandals by eating (he ballooned to 240 pounds), and finding solace in the arms of his young mistress Nan Britton (who coupled with him in a White House closet “no more than five feet square,” she revealed in a tell-all memoir). Harding died in San Francisco of a massive heart attack. “No one can hurt you now, Wurr’n,” his wife cooed.

Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, had no temper at all (he loved practical jokes, often ringing for all the White House servants, then hiding under his desk, giggling, when they appeared), while Herbert Hoover was more paranoid than angry—responding to the Great Depression by increasing his security detail.

Franklin Roosevelt had a famous temper, but it was usually reserved for his political opponents. He despised fellow New Yorker Thomas E. Dewey (“that little man,” he called him), who ran against him in 1944. When Dewey accepted his loss with grace, Roosevelt harrumphed: “I still don’t like the son of a bitch.” During the Great Depression, Roosevelt cut the Army budget, then cut it again. Douglas MacArthur, the Army chief of staff, met with FDR on the issue. It didn’t go well, as MacArthur recounted: “I said something to the effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.” With that, FDR reached his limit. “You must not talk that way to the president,” he roared. It’s not clear who was more chagrined, MacArthur (who said he would resign) or Roosevelt, who was embarrassed he’d lost control. “Don’t be foolish, Douglas,” he said.

MacArthur eventually got his comeuppance at the hands of Harry Truman—who could be peevish, petulant and vengeful, though he reserved the bulk of his anger for his diary. He described MacArthur as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur,” then threw in a couple of MacArthur’s Republican buddies for good measure: “He’s worse than the Cabots and the Lodges—they at least talked with one another before they told God what to do.” Give ‘em hell Harry could be confrontational in person, but he was out of control in print. When music critic Paul Hume gave his daughter Margaret a bad review after a piano recital, he was apoplectic: “Some day I want to meet you,” he wrote. “When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below.” But Truman’s anger was nothing compared with Ike’s.

Eisenhower’s temper was so legion—the White House staff dubbed him “the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang”—that he disciplined himself against it. When he got angry he quoted his mother (“he who conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city,” she told him), purposefully walked away from the bridge table when his partner misplayed (he was a world-class player), wrote down the names of those who enraged him on slips of paper he consigned to an “anger drawer” and took up golf because it relaxed him. Not much of this worked: He exploded as if on cue when anyone mentioned communist witch-hunter Joe McCarthy and flew into a rage with Secretary of State Christian Herter for talking with journalist Joseph Alsop: “Never talk to that bastard again,” he ordered. Then too, golf was not the diversion Ike intended. Eisenhower biographer Evan Thomas notes that when squirrels burrowed away on the White House green, Ike got so angry he ordered them shot (his staff sent them into exile), and once, when he muffed a shot, he launched his sand wedge at his personal doctor, nearly breaking his leg.

Lyndon Johnson’s fury was actually eloquent: His enemies were “little pissants,” North Vietnam was “a raggedy-ass fourth-rate country,” John F. Kennedy was “sonny boy.” At 6 feet 4 inches, he was purposely intimidating (the Johnson treatment included an iron handshake accompanied by a clavicle-breaking grip), but when that didn’t work he was vengeful, profane (he sat on the toilet while telling Robert Kennedy he wouldn’t be vice president) and occasionally crazed: Once, on Air Force One, he ordered his aide Horace Busby off of the plane. “But we’re over the ocean,” Busby said. “I don’t give a fucking damn,” LBJ responded. Later, Richard Nixon would complain about him: “People said my language was bad, but Jesus, you should have heard LBJ.”

Nixon—self pitying, narrow-minded and spiteful—was in a class by himself. Consumed by rage, his was the worst kind of temper: personally abusive. His shove of press secretary Ron Ziegler might have told us more about Nixon than any White House tape—there’s abuse of power, and then there’s just abuse.

Gerald Ford had no temper at all, it seems, nor did Jimmy Carter, though he feigned it—pumping his fist against a table for emphasis. His aides remember hearing him use the F-word once, during the Iran hostage crisis—an event so unusual that it stunned his aides. Ronald Reagan rarely showed his temper, but when he did it was to good effect—and unlike Carter’s, it was unfeigned. In 1980, during a candidate’s forum in New Hampshire, the irritable Great Communicator turned on a federal election official: “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green,” he bellowed. The statement brought an approving roar from the crowd. Reagan used his temper as a kind of exclamation point, to show others that he’d made up his mind. George H.W. Bush followed, his trademark genetic marker passed on to his progeny, Bush 43. Both showed anger, but expressed it with aloof disinterest. When father and son didn’t like something they would turn their back on the listener. Bush 43 gets high marks for transforming himself from a dilettante of alcohol-fueled tantrums to a politician who mastered the art of the peevish expression and clipped sentence.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, had the mother of all tempers, vying for that title with John Adams. “I am a little disturbed by my anger,” he once wrote. “Because of the way Daddy behaved when he was angry and drunk, I associated anger with being out of control and I was determined not to lose control.” Control? One night during the early years of his presidency, Clinton was watching a congressman on C-SPAN talking about his new legislation, which Clinton had never heard about. He erupted, called an aide, screamed at him for 10 minutes and demanded he come to the Oval Office the next morning with a full report. When the aide appeared, Clinton gave him a puzzled look, then waved him away: “It’s not important,” he said. Clinton’s tirades, dubbed “purple fits” by his aides, were often accompanied by a wagging finger and threats. He got this way during his wife’s first presidential campaign, telling questioners to shut up, hectoring others. “The one thing Bill Clinton has is a temper,” Democratic strategist Robert Shrum told one reporter. “He has always had a temper. He did not show it in public when he was president. I think he gets more aggravated by attacks on his wife, and he tends to show it.”

Barack Obama had a temper, though it was tightly controlled, despite numerous testimonials that he occasionally raised his voice or thumped a table. “You knew Obama was angry when he backed up his chair, muttered to himself and left the room to have a cigarette,” a senior military officer told me. “But he could be cutting, mean.” Once, in the midst of a National Security Council meeting on Afghanistan, Obama turned on Samantha Power, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide and his ambassador to the United Nations. “Yes, Samantha, we know,” he said, curtly. “We’ve all read your book.”

History provides endless counterfactuals to any given notion, but rage is often a sign of incompetence. What made Washington, Lincoln and FDR so effective was the application of anger’s inverse rule: The tougher things got, the calmer they became. “When his position permits a man to do all that anger prompts,” Seneca says, “general destruction is let loose.” Which is simply to say that to admire a leader’s anger, a quality so many venerate in President Trump, is to flirt with one of history’s primary lessons: that mad men often become madmen.