Tak­ing stock of the first offi­cial year of Trump in pow­er means with­stand­ing a mul­ti­front assault on real­i­ty. Pre­sent­ed in a relent­less bar­rage of Make Amer­i­ca Great Again hyper­bole, the president’s crush­ing fail­ures are mag­i­cal­ly trans­formed into unprece­dent­ed suc­cess­es, and all expres­sions of dis­sent become the work of pet­ty ingrates, ide­o­log­i­cal fab­u­lists and priv­i­leged elites. His sig­na­ture ini­tia­tives — the shame­ful tax bill and the mer­ci­ful­ly stalled Oba­macare repeal — become his­toric wind­falls for the very mid­dle- and work­ing-class con­stituen­cies they delib­er­ate­ly set out to beg­gar, to say noth­ing of how Trump and his appa­ratchiks have dis­fig­ured basic and hith­er­to set­tled facts of his­to­ry, such as the notion that the Civ­il War was fought over slav­ery.

In the president’s alternate-universe Twitter feed, the polls continue to ratify his amazing and historic legislative successes, and it’s Hillary Clinton, not the scores of shady Trump campaign cronies, who has been colluding with the Russians

At one lev­el, these mind-bend­ing pro­nounce­ments are the ran­cid fruits of a con­cert­ed assault on basic cat­e­gories of mean­ing and sig­ni­fi­ca­tion. To the scat­tered forces of the anti-Trump resis­tance, the ongo­ing appeal of such bald lying is dumb­found­ing: Shouldn’t the truth win out — or at least count for some­thing? But such befud­dle­ment stems main­ly from a key ele­ment of the Trump phe­nom­e­non, one that lies firm­ly out­side their cul­tur­al frame of ref­er­ence. Trump­ism has tak­en root in our pub­lic dis­course because it is square­ly in the main­stream of Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­al life. It is the most extreme, and per­verse­ly log­i­cal, appli­ca­tion of the pos­i­tive-think­ing gospel.

In the president’s biog­ra­phy and busi­ness career, the role of pos­i­tive think­ing is hid­ing in plain sight. From child­hood on, Trump wor­shipped in the tem­ple of the movement’s prophet, Nor­man Vin­cent Peale: Manhattan’s Mar­ble Col­le­giate Church. Indeed, Peale presided over Trump’s first wed­ding in 1977. Trump’s father was a die-hard adher­ent of Peale’s preach­ments, as is his daugh­ter Ivan­ka, who wrote in her 2009 self-help tract, The Trump Card, that ​“per­cep­tion is more impor­tant than real­i­ty” and you shouldn’t ​“go out of your way to cor­rect a false assump­tion if it plays to your advantage.”

Peale’s mid­cen­tu­ry self-help bible, The Pow­er of Pos­i­tive Think­ing, is, at its core, a dis­til­la­tion of the mes­sage of the Chris­t­ian faith into a series of achieve­ment-mind­ed axioms. ​“Pic­tur­ize, prayer­ize, actu­al­ize” was Peale’s mantra, and he applied this sim­ple for­mu­la to every facet of the believer’s life — but most espe­cial­ly to the sphere of mate­r­i­al advance­ment, which was the surest sign of divine favor in the her­met­ic social world of Pealeism. The implaca­bly right-wing Peale cheer­ful­ly described him­self as a ​“mis­sion­ary to Amer­i­can busi­ness” and made good on that by wag­ing a relent­less cam­paign against the New Deal, unions and oth­er affronts to true-blue indi­vid­ual achieve­ment in the pages of his pop­u­lar self-help mag­a­zine, Guide­posts.

So long as an earnest, aspi­ra­tional Chris­t­ian duly intoned the Bible’s max­ims of lav­ish­ly reward­ed per­son­al faith, he (in Peale’s gospel, the achiev­er was almost always a man) was on the path to amaz­ing world­ly suc­cess. Keep incant­i­ng the scrip­tural­ly sanc­tioned slo­gans of upward mobil­i­ty, and a world of won­ders will open before you:

This process will change you into a believ­er, an expecter, and when you become such, you will in due course become an achiev­er. You will have new pow­er to get what God and you decide you real­ly want from life.

The Pow­er of Pos­i­tive Think­ing remained on the New York Times best­seller list for 186 con­sec­u­tive weeks and helped launch the mod­ern self-help indus­try; more than five mil­lion copies remain in print today. Peale’s gospel became the suc­cess creed for a new­ly cor­po­ra­tized and pros­per­ous Amer­i­can social order. Rather than harp­ing on the drea­ry demands of socioe­co­nom­ic jus­tice and the hard work of equi­tably dis­trib­ut­ing the unprece­dent­ed mass boun­ty of the post­war Amer­i­can scene, the pos­i­tive-think­ing faith sim­ply reject­ed per­son­al fail­ure as spir­i­tu­al weak­ness. When Arthur Miller sought to sum up the cru­el, fact-averse nature of our country’s unique brand of pos­ses­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism in Death of a Sales­man, Willy Loman’s career cre­do was an out­burst of pure Pealeism: ​“He’s a man way out there in the blue, rid­ing on a smile and a shoeshine.”