Since the 2016 election, I have heard questions from the left about Trump’s sanity and mental fitness. It came to a head last year after the annual presidential physical when the White House physician declared that his mental state was top notch, but in between the shock waves from the latest scandal but the talk of irrationality and insanity comes up again here and there. My thought is that he is not mentally unstable but rather a rational actor acting rationally. This fact is not really different than any other US President. What’s different here is the set of preferences, and the consequences of those preferences. In contrast to past presidencies, Trump’s preferences are centered solely around himself, which engenders a brand of personalist politics unfamiliar in the US. To explain the logic, let me give a brief background on rational actor theory, how that has generally played out in past presidencies, and then how the Trump administration has turned the theory upside down.
Rational actor theory basically posits that all people are rational, meaning that they always act to maximize an ordered list of preferences. Those ordered preferences are ordered based on an intrinsic value attached to each preference, and therefore maximizing preferences might involve trade-offs – for example, if the value attached to a set of five preferences is such that someone must choose between achieving their first preference or achieving preferences two, three, four, and five, if the sum of the latter choice is greater than the sum of the first choice then they should choose to forego their first preference. Obviously ordered preferences in real life are not so clear cut, stable, or objectively valued, but the general concept still holds.
In past presidencies, administrations followed the expectation that, upon assumption of office, the president’s ordered preferences valued the interests of the country at large highest on the list. In other words, when the president was a rational actor and maximizing their ordered preferences, they would also be maximizing the preferences of the country at large. That also meant that, in general, if the president was faced with a choice between a gain for the country or a gain for himself, the intrinsic value of the preference for the country would outweigh the preference for himself. In many ways, the practice of a president and their administration of divesting themselves from personal interests that could cause conflicts was a token of that expected shift in ordered preferences. Another consequence of ordering preferences with the country first is that the focus of a president’s actions was on the country, and the institutions that represented it, as opposed to solely the president himself.
When considering the current administration, it is clear that its actions are usually in the interest of Trump himself, not the country. The simplest explanation of that is that the set of ordered preferences did not shift, as one would usually expect, when the administration assumed power. Instead, he is still a rational actor, maximizing his ordered preferences, and his ordered preferences do not align with the country’s ordered preferences. The consequence of this behavior is personalist politics – every action then focuses on the president, not the country, and one essentially agrees with the president’s actions if one agrees with the president as a person. Trump feeds off this adoration of supporters, which he can fan by lashing out at his critics and with shock and awe actions. None of this is good for the country, but that is precisely what you would expect when the good of the country is so far down a list of ordered preferences (or maybe isn’t there at all). Trump clearly fits the rational actor theory, just not the way we usually expect from the president.
Theory in Practice 