Chapter 1: Why do Americans believe the president should be a role model?
90% of Americans believe it's important for the president to be a good role model. For all but the most diehard MAG occultists, Donald Trump is the furthest thing imaginable from a role model. The consequences of his deficiencies are creating lasting damage to future generations of Americans. Role Models, as read by George Hahn.
Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they'll never sit under. There's an inverse to that wisdom. Great societies decline when old men chop down forests meant to provide shade and oxygen for future generations.
Chapter 2: What are the consequences of Donald Trump's actions as a role model?
Donald Trump isn't making America great again. He's clear-cutting American values. Late last Thursday night, the president posted a video promoting his debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories. The clip includes images of Michelle and Barack Obama as apes.
The following morning, the video drew widespread backlash, including from Senator Tim Scott, a Trump ally and the only black Republican in the Senate, who called it the most racist thing he's seen out of this White House. Note the implication. Trump has provided other examples of racism for Senator Scott to benchmark against.
Initially, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt dismissed the criticism as fake outrage. Insisting he hadn't made a mistake, Trump doubled down, calling the video very strong in terms of voter fraud and adding that he was the least racist president you've had in a long time. Trump's crisis management role model remains Roy Cohn, the lawyer who served as Senator McCarthy's attack dog.
Cohn taught Trump to respond to criticism immediately using asymmetrical force. Admit nothing, deny everything, and always claim victory no matter the actual outcome. I teach a session on crisis communications in my brand strategy course at Stern. The scale of a crisis isn't a function of the mistake, but how you react to it.
The better playbook, acknowledge the issue in plain language, take responsibility, and don't just fix the problem, overcorrect with force disproportionate to the mistake. As criticism of Trump's video continued to mount, he moved on to other targets, calling an American Olympic skier who criticized his policies a loser.
Next, he attacked Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime performance, writing on Truth Social, "...nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children watching." Not to worry. Kid Rock performed at an alternate halftime show, which felt like watching a Ford Pinto compete at F1 Monaco.
Supposedly, the criteria for entrance to Kid Rock's performance was knowing the purchase limits on Sudafed or wearing an ankle monitor. Trump's performative concern over bad role models, won't someone think of the children, is rich from a man who appears in the Epstein files 38,000 times. More times than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible.
More times than the word meth is uttered in all five seasons of Breaking Bad. Hashtag awesome. Trump's depraved behavior is so omnipresent it's been normalized. Worse, it's become the cultural context for an entire generation of future civic, business, and nonprofit leaders.
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Chapter 3: How does the concept of role models impact society?
Trump has been running for president or in office for a decade. If 2024 was the first election you were old enough to vote in, that's more than half your life. According to a 2018 Quinniac poll, 90% of Americans believe it's important for the president to be a good role model. Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term role model in 1957 while studying the socialization of medical students.
Distinguishing between reference groups ā the crowd you want to belong to ā and role models ā individuals you emulate in a specific social role ā Merton found that we learn scripts from role models that teach us how to behave in a specific status, doctor, leader, parent, et cetera.
Emulating role models, the med students engaged in anticipatory socialization, adopting the professional values and norms of practitioners before officially becoming doctors themselves. Building on Merton's work, psychologists Thekla Morganroth, Michelle K. Ryan, and Kim Peters argued in a 2015 paper that role models serve three motivational functions.
Acting as behavioral models, representing what's possible, and serving as sources of inspiration. In her book, Pull, Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, historian Pamela Walker Laird argues that access to role models is essential for accumulating social capital and influencing the career paths of American business leaders.
According to Laird, Ben Franklin, the prototype for an American inventor and entrepreneur, served as a role model to countless 19th century business leaders, including Thomas Mellon, B.F. Goodrich, and Frederick Weyerhaeuser. For a contemporary example of a business role model, see the Steve Jobs uniform, black turtlenecks, Levi's 501s, and New Balance sneakers.
Explaining the enduring popularity of Jobs' coded looks on TikTok last year, psychotherapist Eloise Skinner told Fortune, Zoomers have expressed confusion about what to wear for work, given that many started their careers working from home in their pajamas during the pandemic.
In other words, more than a decade after his death, Jobs continues to provide a script for how aspiring business leaders should carry themselves. Medical students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and sartorially confused Zoomers don't choose their role models at random, however.
In his 2015 book, The Secret of Our Success, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich argued that what sets humans apart from other species is our capacity for cultural learning. According to Henrik, role models are storage units for cultural survival skills, and we're hardwired to identify high prestige role models.
Explaining a scenario where players had the choice to contribute money or not to a community project, Henrik wrote... When the high prestige player had the opportunity to contribute money first, he or she tended to contribute to and thus cooperate in the joint effort, and then the following low prestige player usually did as well. So, everyone won.
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