Why liberals hate Trump (cont.)

Note: if you're unfamiliar with Myers-Briggs Type Theory or Keirsey Temperament Theory you might want to review this.

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While researching yesterday's post on Donald Trump, I came across "Donald Trump ESTJ Personality?" by Ross Reinhold. Apparently quite a few students of personality type have been assessing Trump as an ESTJ.

It's quite an easy mistake to make: Trump can do a very good authoritative CEO impression when he feels like it. But there is more to it than that: his core (ST) authoritarianism hits a deeper nerve with the psychotherapeutic community, who are extremely liberal.

I equate liberal (in the Jonathan Haidt sense) with the Myers-Briggs/Keirsey category of Idealist.

Ross Reinhold writes:

"While we are supposed to respect and celebrate the values of all 16 personality types, deep in the hearts of many fans of personality typing ESTJ and ENTJ types are the bad guys in the type world.

The “types” of people most often reacting negatively to ESTJ/ENTJ (and to the kind of behavior Trump frequently exhibits) are what David Keirsey has labeled as having an Idealist temperament (see his seminal book “Please Understand Me”).

Keirsey also studied Myers work and identified four personality types who share the Idealist temperament: INFP, INFJ, ENFP, and ENFJ. All Intuitive Feeling types.

Since both ESTJ and ENTJ extravert their Thinking and are by nature “command and control” folks, by their very nature [they] are easily off-putting to all Feeling types.

Feeling types who also favor Intuition can be particularly sensitive. When they see some evidence of what they consider as improper behavior or attitudes they will tend to “intuit” there is more of the same, that what they observe is only the tip of the iceberg.

In a 1996 landmark study of Personality Type in the general population, researchers Allan Hammer and Wayne Mitchell found that 15.7% of the adult population fit into the four Idealist personality types. In a 2004 compilation of the type distribution of the membership of the Association for Psychological Type (at the time the largest worldwide association of type professionals) showed that these four Idealist personality types comprised 46.3 % of the membership.

While a minority in the general population, Idealists are easily the dominant temperament among professional users of and teachers of personality type. So when you understand that there is natural conflict between Extraverted Thinking types and Feeling-Intuitive types you can see how even among professional “experts,” the negatives associated with ESTJ and ENTJ can loom large.

Because Trump does exhibit some characteristics associated with ESTJ and he also offends a number of people (and a large number of Idealists I suspect) it is easy to conclude he must be an ESTJ because it is perceived as one of the two most offensive personality types.

... continue reading.

The author (who wrote the piece I linked to yesterday) suggests Trump is actually an ESTP.

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Dick Cheney is an ENTJ - a classical hate figure for liberals. Incidentally Cheney is the main villain in super-liberal Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" trilogy I was reading over Christmas.