This week saw a particularly interesting behavioural contradiction.

On November 2, Donald Trump urged Americans to pretend he was on the ballot in the US midterm elections. In fact, he went a step further, saying that he effectively was on the ballot.

And then, on November 3, when Republicans lost control of Congress, he announced: “I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”

In less than 48 hours, Trump had gone from associating himself with anticipated success to distancing himself from an unfavourable result. He was present for the possibility of victory but absent for the reality of defeat.

That is why reading Trump's statements sometimes feels like watching Big Boss through a psychologist's lens. You may not want to write a research paper on every episode, but there is always something worth discussing.

Psychologists are, by nature and professional training, a rather disagreeable community. Put a Freudian, a behaviourist and a cognitive psychologist at the same dinner table, and even the question of who ordered dessert can become a theoretical dispute. But Trump has a remarkable ability to bring everyone into the same conversation.

That is precisely what happened at a dinner when someone brought up his post-midterm statements.

“He says he wasn't on the ballot, and if he had been, they would have won in a landslide.”

“Ah! Classic counterfactual self-enhancement,” someone exclaimed.

(That is just fancy psychological language for protecting one's image through an imagined alternative reality.)

Then came another statement.

“I don't view it as a hit on me.”

“He is just separating his personal identity from a collective defeat.”

“Did you see how he was blaming Fox News for giving Democrats too much exposure? That's textbook external attribution of responsibility.”

“And criticising unsuccessful Republican candidates? He is like that client who always shifts responsibility to others.”

The conversation opened like confetti. Within minutes, dinner had turned into an n=1 study, where n was Trump. We all agreed that coping with failure and learning from failure are different psychological processes and it is concerning when it seems like the head of a state is more concerned about self protection than learning from failure.

What happens when a leader whose political identity is built around winning encounters evidence that he may be losing?

In psychology, this is the kind of behaviour we examine through self-serving attribution: the tendency to credit ourselves for success while explaining failure through circumstances, bad luck or other people. And before we start pointing fingers, most of us do it.

When we succeed, it is because we worked hard. When we fail, the circumstances were unfair. When our child tops the class, it is our excellent parenting. When the child misbehaves, his friends are a bad influence.

Often, this is harmless. After all, a certain amount of self-protection is human. Sometimes, it even helps us recover from disappointment.

Fellow psychologist Livia Kraft and her colleagues examined this very human habit in a 2024 study. The researchers found that people higher in narcissistic admiration were more likely to take personal credit for success. Following defeat, they were also more inclined to perceive unfairness in the opposing group.

For someone with narcissistic tendencies, failure can feel less like a disappointing outcome and more like an injury to self-worth. It is experienced as humiliation, rather than simply a setback. Losing, therefore, becomes something they must prevent from defining them. They explain it through unfairness, other people's behaviour and external circumstances. 

As a result, some may withdraw from people and situations associated with failure. Others may try to restore their positive self-image through new achievements or status. For some, it may lead to renewed ambition. They make another attempt with greater determination, but not necessarily with better insight.

Now imagine that identity is not merely personal but political. Imagine millions of supporters have invested in an image of extraordinary strength, exceptional judgement and almost inevitable victory. An ordinary politician can lose an election. A leader who has made invincibility part of his political brand has a more complicated problem.

So, is Trump a narcissist?

Published research examining his public personality has identified indications of elevated narcissistic traits. But an indirect personality assessment is not a clinical diagnosis. We do not have sufficient grounds to declare that Trump has Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

And, importantly, a self-serving explanation is not uniquely narcissistic. It can also be a perfectly deliberate political strategy.

After all, politicians are in the business of managing public perceptions. Admitting defeat may establish credibility, but it can also invite challenges to leadership. Blaming candidates, media coverage or voter turnout can serve political purposes, quite independently of private emotional distress.

Interestingly, Trump also congratulated the Democrats and acknowledged that the Iran war had hurt Republican candidates. So this was not a simple refusal to recognise reality. He could accept the electoral outcome, acknowledge some contributing factors and still reject the suggestion that the defeat reflected on his leadership.

Perhaps that is what makes political self-protection so interesting. It need not involve denying the facts. Sometimes, it involves changing what those facts are allowed to mean.

The Strongman Problem
What does psychology tell us about leaders who make personal strength central to their authority?

In 2020, political scientists Alessandro Nai and Emre Toros examined expert assessments of 157 political leaders across 81 elections, including 14 identified as having autocratic tendencies.

Their study found that this group was rated lower in emotional stability and agreeableness, and higher in traits associated with narcissism, Machiavellianism and subclinical psychopathy.

This does not mean every so-called strongman lacks emotional control. Nor can we read emotional dysregulation directly from a speech or social media post. Anger, defiance and confidence can be carefully managed political performances.

But when power becomes inseparable from personal identity, I wonder whether accepting unwelcome political information becomes more difficult. After all, how do you examine your mistakes when your entire political image rests on the idea that you rarely make any?

After Republicans lost Congress in 2006, George W. Bush acknowledged the cumulative result as a “thumping”. After Democrats suffered major losses in 2010, Barack Obama called his party's defeat a “shellacking”. He also publicly reflected on what his administration needed to learn.

Neither description made the defeat disappear. Nor did acknowledging it automatically guarantee better decisions. But both made it possible to discuss failure as failure.

This contrasts with the responses of other leaders often described as strongmen.

For example, in Turkey, after the opposition won Istanbul's mayoral election in 2019, the result was annulled following objections from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's governing party.

And in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro did not explicitly concede his 2022 presidential defeat in his first public remarks.

Yes, these are not identical cases. Trump's party lost congressional majorities, Bolsonaro personally lost the presidency, and Turkey's dispute concerned a municipal election. Their institutional circumstances differed considerably.

But together they reveal the distinction between accepting an electoral outcome, accepting responsibility for it and accepting what it might say about one's leadership.

A leader can acknowledge the vote count while disputing its political meaning. An electoral defeat can be accepted procedurally while being resisted narratively.

But we need to understand that, although we think of elections as a contest for power, they are also a feedback mechanism. When voters communicate dissatisfaction, priorities and changing expectations, parties must interpret those signals and decide whether their strategies need revision.

But what if the person responsible for interpreting the feedback is also the person whose self-image is threatened by it?

The Cost of Denial
Imagine a company reporting a disastrous quarter. The CEO had personally championed the strategy, the board had applauded it and employees had been told that success was inevitable. And then the results arrive, with the numbers falling well short of expectations.

So the CEO announces that the strategy was brilliant, the sales team was incompetent, the media had misunderstood the product and the customers had failed to appreciate its genius.

Maybe those explanations are accurate. But should the organisation accept all of them without examination? How would it ever discover what went wrong and what needs changing? Political organisations face a similar risk.

When loyalty to a leader becomes inseparable from loyalty to the party or the nation, questioning the leader's judgement can become a test of allegiance. Advisers may learn to soften unwelcome findings. Candidates may compete to demonstrate loyalty rather than examine unpopular decisions. An institution can become very good at protecting its leader and progressively worse at correcting itself.

For the United States, this is more than an abstract psychological concern.

The Democrats' victory in both chambers of Congress creates new constraints on Trump's administration. Legislative bargaining, budget negotiations, appointments and congressional oversight will require responses to a changed political reality.

Republican leaders and strategists have already raised questions about policy direction, including the Iran war, tariffs and the cost of living. Whether Trump responds through negotiation, policy adjustment, confrontation or some combination of the three will matter to businesses, investors and governments beyond America.

There is also an irony here.

In 2024, UNESCO published a policy guide encouraging education systems to integrate social and emotional learning. We increasingly recognise that children should learn to manage disappointment, tolerate frustration, understand other perspectives and respond constructively to setbacks.

Education agencies have called for school curricula to teach children that losing a game does not diminish their worth, that anger need not dictate their next action, and that mistakes are information, not humiliation.

Yet when we evaluate political leadership, emotional maturity receives far less attention than charisma, confidence and the ability to dominate a room.

I am not suggesting that every president should be sent to an emotional-regulation workshop. Nor does a calmer public temperament guarantee better governance.

But perhaps the ability to recognise when reality has contradicted one's judgement, without treating that contradiction as a personal attack, should be considered an essential leadership skill.

Because democracy requires leaders, and political organisations, capable of learning from being told no. It becomes dangerous when an entire political system must help its leader pretend that he never lost.