In 2016, America’s talking heads and ideological elites struggled to explain real-estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump’s unexpected, dramatic rise to power.

As a candidate, Trump had neglected to articulate a complete policy platform aside from bold promises to do big things — build a wall, ban Muslims, and make the country great again. Though he lost the popular vote, a handful of votes in crucial swing states gave Trump the advantage in the electoral college, securing him the office of the 45th President of the United States.

The salient lesson from 2016 appears to be that the relationship between a government and its people isn’t defined by policy specifics. When people vote for a President, they don’t vote based on the fine print of each candidate’s platform, they vote based on how each candidate made them feel.

As Michael Nelson writes in The Presidency and the Political System, “Americans attitudes about the presidency, like presidents’ actions, are psychologically as well as politically rooted. Studies of schoolchildren indicated that they first come into political awareness by learning of, and feeling warmly toward, the President.”

Though Hillary Clinton may have drawn up a detailed plan and espoused a comprehensive vision for the future we could have had if we chose her, many of the disaffected white voters who voted for her husband over two decades ago were inextricably drawn toward her opponent this time around.

Trump effectively infantilized the electorate, speaking in sweeping, definitive terms and offering unrealistic, though reassuring at face value, solutions that belied the complexity of the issues he claimed to be capable of tackling when he declared at the Republican National Convention that “I alone can fix it.”

Xenophobic, authoritarian, and anti-intellectual as Trump may be, he was elected President the same way each of his predecessors was, by capturing the hearts, minds, and imaginations of enough of the electorate to win the electoral college.

Before delving too deep in the psychological underpinnings of our current administration, it is necessary to embed this effort is a broader analysis of Presidential elections and leadership.

By examining various Presidents in terms of the relationship between their individual psyche and the collective psyche of the people who elected them, we can gain invaluable insights into some of the underlying trends and motivations that shape Presidential leadership.

There are numerous theories that attempt to explore the psychology behind the Presidency, with mixed results. Political scientist James David Barber was the pioneer in this pursuit, achieving fame when he foresaw Nixon’s downfall years in advance by using a psychological profile to project how the President would behave as a leader.

As Michael Nelson explains in his analysis of Barber’s work, “he argued that Presidents could be divided into four psychological types: ‘active-positive,’ ‘active-negative,’ ‘passive-positive,’ and ‘passive negative.”

“What’s more, according to Barber via Time, by taking ‘a hard look at men before they reach the White House,’ voters could tell in advance what candidates would be like if elected: healthily ‘ambitious out of exuberance,’ like the active-positives; pathologically ‘ambitious out of anxiety,’ like the active-negatives; ‘compliant and other-directed,’ like the passive-positives; or ‘dutiful and self-denying,’ like the passive-negatives.”

These four categories (active-positive, active-negative, passive-positive, and passive-negative), though certainly lacking and arguably ill-fitting for some of the men to which they were ascribed, still offer some valuable insight into various Presidents.

According to Barber, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton are all examples of hard-working, self-confident, active-positive Presidents, while James Madison, William H. Taft, Warren G. Harding, and Ronald Reagan all fall into the category of affection seeking passive-positives, who are “not especially hardworking.”

Barber labeled George Washington, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight Eisenhower as passive-negatives who “neither work nor play,” and are driven by “duty, not pleasure or zest,” while lumping John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon together as active-negatives who “compulsively and with little satisfaction throw themselves into their presidential chores.”

Barber’s theory, taken with a grain of salt, is useful for its insight into the motivations that shape the ways in which Presidents approach the office. It allows for the possibility that, more so than the policies they pursue or the backroom deals they make, a better window into a President’s behavior might be through their state of mind.

A similarly psychoanalytic, but also very different, theory to approaching Presidential leadership was put forward by UC Berkeley professor of cognitive science and linguistics George Lakoff. In a 2016 blog post titled Understanding Trump, Lakoff posited the theory that one way to understand our current political circumstances is to look at the relationship between the President and the people as a metaphor for a family unit.

Lakoff argues that, “we are first governed in our families, and so we group up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families.” Compared to Barber, Lakoff appears to focus his psychoanalysis more on the electorate than on any particular President.

He digs into the symbolism of the language that underpins our national discourse, writing, “We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security.

The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).”

These metaphors seem to strike at the heart of American democracy, when we consider the psychological effects of an event such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which resulted in the formation of the Department of Homeland Security — now the third largest department in the executive branch.

In fact, we can see that this way of thinking has been prevalent since the formation of the office itself, with psychology playing a large role in the delegates of the constitutional convention’s selection of George Washington as President.

“They knew that Washington aroused powerful and, from the standpoint of winning the nation’s support for the new government, vital psychological responses from the people.” (Nelson) Or, as Lakoff would likely put it, Washington was an ideal first parent for the country.

Ultimately, the one common denominator that runs through every successful relationship between the President and the people is the factor that gave Washington his god-like status — trust.

Regardless of whether any given President is best characterized as an active-positive, a passive-negative, a nurturant parent, or a strict father, the one factor that undoubtedly determines their success or failure proves to be the degree to which the electorate trusts them.

The electorate had pure, unbroken trust for Washington, empowering him to set the course for our fledgling nation and establish the precedents that would prove to define the office over the course of the centuries to come. In a way, he actually was the nation’s literal founding father, setting a model for how future fathers ought to conduct themselves — strict, but gentle, decisive, but caring.

As the nation aged, the electorate expanded, and Presidents came and went, the level of trust between the man in the White House and the people who put him there fluctuated at varying points in time. We began with complete trust in our founding father, Washington, though early Presidents hardly had any meaningful interactions with the actual population of the nation they led.

When Jefferson was elected in 1796, the people still didn’t vote directly for Presidential candidates, instead either electing the electors who would vote for President, or electing state legislators who would then elect electors. This meant that these Presidents were more myth than man, existing as a symbol of what Benedict Anderson would call our “imagined community” — the abstract concept of nationhood that existed in the minds of early US citizens.

Over time, campaigning for President became a drawn-out, demanding public process, necessitating that candidates unify increasingly diverse coalitions within a constantly growing electorate while waging partisan warfare with their opponents.

As Presidents began to interact with the media on a more regular basis, speaking to a greater share of the population, they satisfied the psychological demands of their voters by communicating with them and attempting to convince them that they were still worthy of trust. The longer a President stayed in office, the harder it became to maintain that trust.

Regardless, numerous Presidents still managed to maintain the trust of their electorate and serve as effective father figures, the quintessential example being Franklin Roosevelt.

At a time when the nation was enveloped by chaos on every front, with our inevitable involvement in World War II looming on the horizon, Roosevelt invited himself into the living room of nearly every American when he delivered his reassuring fireside chats.

He was the strict father that defeated the Nazis and oversaw our ascension to global dominance, and he had no problem getting re-elected four times in a row. Another President to achieve a similar level of trust through his communication with the people was Kennedy, who boasts the average highest approval rating among modern Presidents for his tragically abbreviated first term.

When he was assassinated in 1963, something fundamental in the relationship between the President and the people died with him. Kennedy wasn’t just any President, he represented the serendipitous conversion of several threads of American life into a brief, glorious moment that his widow Jackie would brand “Camelot.”

She wasn’t the only one who grieved after his death, “Surveys taken shortly after the Kennedy assassination recorded the startling depth of the feelings that Americans have about the Presidency. A large share of the population experienced symptoms classically associated with grief over the death of a loved one.” (Nelson)

With the ability of the electorate to trust their government waning in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam war, President Nixon dealt a significant body blow to the reputation of the office when the Watergate scandal broke and he was forced to resign.

This is where Barber’s classification of an “active-negative” President becomes most relevant, as Nixon was clearly an intelligent and determined man, ill intentioned as he may have been. To Lakoff, Nixon would be a clear example of a strict father President who earned the trust of the electorate, only to traumatize them when his deception and corruption was revealed.

Overall, whether seeking a nurturant parent or strict father, the defining factor in how the electorate both chooses and judges each President is trust — which is why the phenomenon of Donald Trump is so fascinating.

On one hand, he is the perfect “strict father” President, subscribing to “the basic idea that authority is justified by morality, and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate.

The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined above the Undisciplined, the Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, America above other countries. The hierarchy extends to: Men above women, Whites above Nonwhites, Christians above nonChristians, Straights above Gays.” (Lakoff)

On the other hand, Trump is hardly the same popular brand of strict that won Reagan 525 electoral votes in 1984. More than anything, he seems to be a symptom of a disturbing trend in American politics, our electorate’s inability to trust either major party.

Trump’s Presidency is largely the result of a series of scandals and flukes made possible by the electoral college that resulted in a minority of the electorate with unwavering trust in the orange authoritarian getting him elected.

Even many Presidents who went on to lose the public’s trust over time were initially elected because they seemed trustworthy, but a majority of the electorate never trusted Trump to begin with. Since his election, he has still been unable to convince any Americans who didn’t vote for him that he is the strict father figure we need.

Ultimately, I can’t help but wonder whether Trump’s inability to gain broad support among his constituents is related to his inability to gain his fathers affection, and the bizarre forms of affection he bestows upon his children.