After the second Republican debate, when it appeared Donald Trump’s lead was finally starting to slip, and Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio were gaining traction, Trump himself, in typical fashion, appeared to only see positive signs. He told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that only the polls (Time, Drudge Report, Newsmax) that showed him having picked up support mattered because they represented “the people who vote.” The happy talk was relentless: After speakers at the Emmy Awards on Sept. 20 ridiculed him, Trump told Politico that the evening had been “amazing.” More recently, Trump berated a news photographer who dared to take pictures of empty seats at one of his rallies, insisting his events were as packed as ever.

Is this guy for real? Or more to the point, could anyone really possess that much self-confidence? There has been no shortage of explanations—a huge inferiority complex, infantile narcissism, delusional thinking—for Trump’s undying self-assurance. But as I discovered when writing a book about Donald, his father, and his grandfather, if you want to understand what goes on underneath the blond comb-over, you’d do well to look back to two crucial events in the early 1950s.


Event No. 1 occurred in October 1952, when a book appeared called The Power Of Positive Thinking. Written by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and translated into 15 languages, it remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 186 weeks and sold 5 million copies. Donald was only 6 years old at the time and didn’t read the book until much later, but it quickly became important in the large Queens household in which he grew up, and it would play a critical role in his future. His parents, Fred and Mary, felt an immediate affinity for Peale’s teachings. On Sundays, they drove into Manhattan to worship at Marble Collegiate Church, where Peale was the head pastor. Donald and both his sisters were married there, and funeral services for both Fred and Mary took place in the main sanctuary.

“I still remember [Peale’s] sermons,” Trump told the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in July. “You could listen to him all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.” A month later, in the same news conference at which Trump tossed out Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, he again referred to Peale as his pastor and said he was “one of the greatest speakers” he’d ever seen.

Known as “God’s salesman,” Peale merged worldliness and godliness to produce an easy-to-follow theology that preached self-confidence as a life philosophy. Critics called him a con man, described his church as a cult, and said his simple-minded approach shut off genuine thinking or insight. But Peale’s outlook, promoted through his radio shows, newspaper columns and articles, and through Guideposts, his monthly digest of inspirational messages, fit perfectly into the Trump family culture of never hesitating to bend the rules, doing whatever it took to win, and never, ever giving up.

“Believe in yourself!” Peale’s book begins. “Have faith in your abilities!” He then outlines 10 rules to overcome “inadequacy attitudes” and “build up confidence in your powers.” Rule one: “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” “hold this picture tenaciously,” and always refer to it “no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.”

Subsequent rules tell the reader to avoid “fear thoughts,” “never think of yourself as failing,” summon up a positive thought whenever “a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind,” “depreciate every so-called obstacle,” and “make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.”

Peale’s philosophy fell on willing and eager ears in the Trump family. Long before this self-esteem guru codified his canon, Donald’s grandfather Friedrich used Peale-like confidence and tenacity to make the first Trump fortune during the Klondike gold rush. A few decades later, Donald’s father, Fred, deployed proto-Peale thinking to become a multimillionaire real estate developer in Brooklyn and Queens. And Donald Trump himself has cited Peale’s advice many times in his own career.

One notable example occurred in the mid-1980s, when Trump paid $9 million for a second-tier professional football team, the New Jersey Generals, which played in the spring off-season and belonged to the fledgling United States Football League. Trump immediately began pressuring the other team owners to switch the USFL to the prime fall season, which meant going head to head with the National Football League. Ultimately they agreed, and soon afterward the USFL was defunct—whereupon Trump filed a $1.3 billion federal antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, claiming it had plotted against the USFL and was a monopoly. The jury agreed that the NFL was a monopoly but awarded damages of only $1, which the judge then trebled for a grand total of 3 bucks.

The media saw this as a stunning defeat; by contrast, Trump, who had sunk $12 million into the USFL, channeled Peale, declaring “a moral victory.” He later expanded on this in his book The Art Of The Deal, insisting that he had been such a compelling witness and that his lawyer—the infamous Roy Cohn—had been so powerful a litigator that the jurors had simply taken pity on the NFL.

Then, in 1990, after splurging on a third casino, an airline, the world’s second-largest yacht and the Plaza Hotel, Trump found himself nearly a billion dollars in debt and the banks were threatening foreclosure. But after weeks of round-the-clock negotiations, he emerged relatively unscathed, and in a 2009 interview with Psychology Today he gave Peale’s book credit for his survival. Citing his father’s friendship with Peale and calling himself “a firm believer in the power of being positive,” he said, “what helped is I refused to give in to the negative circumstances and never lost faith in myself. I didn’t believe I was finished even when the newspapers were saying so.”

Event No. 2 in the early 1950s—and in the development of Donald’s personality and style—was the emergence of modern branding. At the dawn of the 20th century, most makers of consumer products focused only on selling as much as possible. But by mid-century, manufacturers of everything from laundry soap and baked beans to automobiles and airlines were taking their focus a few steps further: concentrating not just on how much rolled off the assembly line but on polishing and enhancing the aura and attractiveness of the product.

From now on, marketers would not simply tout how well a product performed. Instead, they would study how consumers felt about the maker of the product—and they would bend every effort toward making everything associated with that name as positive and compelling as possible.

Fred Trump was an early branding enthusiast. At the 1939 World’s Fair, a futurist extravaganza for which the theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” a billboard for Trump Homes was a tutorial in the use of basic branding principles. Employing a striking modernist typeface for the name Trump, the billboard incorporates the fair’s eye-catching Theme Center pavilion with its iconic spire and sphere (known as the “trylon” and “perisphere”), tweaks the fair’s slogan to read “The Home Of Tomorrow,” and boasts of the homebuilder’s success (“6,000 People Live In Trump Homes”).

In the years that followed, increasingly assertive branding, now broadcast nationwide on television, would show up in every sphere of American life. By the early 1960s, when Fred Trump built a cluster of 23-story apartment buildings in Coney Island, the largest project in Brooklyn at the time, it seemed a matter of course that he would name the entire complex Trump Village—and that prospective buyers showed up in droves.

By all accounts, including his own, Donald Trump did poorly in the classroom in his early years. But he was an apt pupil of his father’s M.O., and he readily absorbed the importance of self-confidence and of branding. Both were on full display by the mid-1970s, when he took over his father’s real-estate holdings. His initial step was to ditch the pedestrian corporate IDs Fred had used when building in Brooklyn and Queens (for example Trump Village Construction Corp.) and to give the company the imposing name Trump Organization; his next step was to launch his first major project not on his father’s home turf but in the far more challenging environment of Manhattan.

The project was the makeover of a derelict old hotel, the Commodore, into a glitzy tourist magnet. The hotel was named the Grand Hyatt because of contractual obligations, but Trump, ever the Peale disciple, insisted on calling the main restaurant Trumpets and incorporated such signature touches as packing in the maximum number of floors to make the building seem taller (by conventional measure, the top floor would be the 26th, but at the Grand Hyatt it was the 34th) and claiming that the ballroom was the biggest in the city (it wasn’t).

With his next project, Trump Tower, Donald’s surname made its Fifth Avenue debut. Mounted over the main entrance and rendered in all-capital 3-foot-tall brass letters, it was so out of scale that Der Scutt, the building’s architect, joked that visitors to New York could read the name before their plane landed.

From then on, Donald Trump would put his name on everything he did, including high-rise buildings, casinos and a reality television series, The Apprentice. In 2014, he graced the facade of Trump Tower Chicago with his name in all-cap 20-foot letters—once again, grossly out of scale, but when Mayor Rahm Emanuel complained, Trump pointed to the fine-print approval included in contracts signed with city officials.

Over the years, as the public has walked by the buildings, gambled at the casinos and watched the TV show, the name has become ever more associated with overwhelming, gargantuan, and seemingly never-ending success. And in the process, Trump has created the armor-plated branding juggernaut, impervious to criticism, self-doubt, or self-reflection, which continues to roll over much of the Republican Party.

Whether or not Trump’s tireless self-advertisement will be enough to gain the Republican nomination, much less elect a president, is unknown. But it may well be that Trump will run into some of the same criticism as Peale himself later did. In an essay titled "Some Negative Thinking About Norman Vincent Peale," a theologian from Yale University, William Lee Miller, wrote that Peale's books had become "worse" since the original because "the rhetoric of the sermon has been replaced by the short, punchy sentences of the advertisement."

Already it is clear that, thanks to Norman Vincent Peale and the magic of branding, Donald Trump is one of the most self-confident and most successful-seeming candidate the nation has ever seen. The question is whether the product will live up to the ad.

