Donald Trump not only inflicts pain and humiliation on others, but he actually derives pleasure in the ways he treats people. Like most bullies, Trump enjoys the hurt he causes. This is the very definition of a sadist.

While he ran for president on a platform of bringing down the cost of living for middle- and working-class people and deporting violent immigrants, his major focus has centered on reversing the rights of marginalized people and on dismantling the structures of government that protect and serve the public.

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The long list of orders and policies Trump has signed in both his first and second term can be classified as “sadistic.” These have little or nothing to do with supporting or serving the country and include, but certainly are not limited to:

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· Separating young children from their parents and locking them in dehumanizing cages (some of them have not been reunited with their families to this day)

· Failing to invite members of the Ukrainian delegation for the initial peace talks with the Russian and U.S. delegations, blaming President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukrainians for instigating the war with Russia, and referring to Zelenskyy as “a dictator without elections”

· Lodging humiliating names on his political opponents and detractors like Marco Rubio as “Little Marco,” Rosie O’Donnell as “a fat pig,” Ron DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious,” Hillary Clinton as “crooked Hillary,” Adam Schiff as “Shifty Schiff,” and calling our military personnel who gave the ultimate sacrifice to their country “suckers and losers”

·  Nominating the most visible and highly disqualified people to head important governmental offices

·  Attacking transgender people in every way

·  Signing orders to enrage those who are interested in saving the planet from human destruction, like ordering the return of ecologically polluting plastic straws to replace the more environmentally friendly paper straws and reversing virtually all environmental regulations on industries and corporations

· Randomly renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” as well as threatening to retake the Panama Canal, incorporate Canada and Greenland into the United States, and “own” the Gaza Strip.

A distinguished group of leading mental health clinicians, researchers, and practitioners initially broke the glass and pulled the alarm in what they considered their “duty to report” the clear and present dangers to the body politic posed by Trump’s narcissistic sociopathic personality.

The group published a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, as part of their “duty to report” the dangers posed by this president. Instead of retaining extreme power, Trump requires care and treatment so that he no longer poses a danger to himself and the world.

Add to this his obvious sadism, and we are seeing what has come to be known as “The Trump Effect,” in which many people are feeling emboldened to mirror his behavior. People see the president’s behavior as justification for their own mean-spirited and uncivil actions.

Role models matter

Social Learning Theory, sometimes referred to as “Social Cognition Theory,” proposes that individuals learn by observing and associating with others (modeling), and through the process of reinforcement, one’s beliefs and actions are in some way supported by others.

The developmental and educational psychologist Albert Bandura proposed that young people learn primarily through observation and that one’s culture transmits social mores and “complex competencies” through social modeling. As he noted, the root meaning of the word “teach” is “to show.”

Bandura asserted that the process of modeling alone — free from social reinforcements — can, in fact, be enough for young people to incorporate certain values into their own beliefs and behaviors.

Bandura posited that positive modeling by knowledgeable or advanced peers and classmates can develop even higher efficiency and cognitive developmental competencies than teachers modeling the same activities.

Society at large, adults, and peers present an array of modeling, a continuum from very productive and affirming to very biased, aggressive, and destructive. Modeling to Bandura included much more than simple observation of concrete actions followed by imitation (“response mimicry”) but also included what he called “abstract modeling” of such abstract concepts as following rules, taking on certain values and beliefs, and making moral and ethical judgments.

On the negative side of the modeling continuum, for example, Bandura concluded that young people acted out aggression modeled by adults in their homes. This finding contradicted the premise that parental/guardian punishment would inhibit young people’s aggressive behaviors.

To test his hypothesis that social modeling had a primary impact on children’s learning and on their behaviors and beliefs, Bandura and his associates developed their “Bobo Doll” experiments. The purpose was to determine whether adult modeling resulted in either aggressive or non-aggressive behaviors by the young children in the study.

Research participants included 36 boys and 36 girls, with a control group of 24 children. The participants ranged in age from 3 to 6 years, with an average age of 4 years and 4 months, all from the Stanford University Nursery School. The researchers investigated and were knowledgeable about each participant’s prior behavioral history, and this was factored into the final data analysis.

Each young person was taken individually into a playroom filled with a variety of “non-aggressive toys,” including a tinker toy set, and “aggressive toys” including a wooden mallet and a Bobo Doll: a large inflatable clown, weighted on the bottom so it could stand unaided, approximately the size of a pre-adolescent child of 5 feet.

The experimenter told each young participant that the toys were only for the adult model to play with and that the young person was to watch the adult. The young people in the control group, however, were each told individually that they could play with the toys. No adult model was to enter their playroom.

For half of the participants, the adult model initially played with the tinker toys for one minute, then for nine minutes, attacked the Bobo doll with a sequence of verbal insults and physical violence, including kicking, punching, and hitting about the head with the wooden mallet.

For the other half of the participants, the adult model played with the tinker toys and ignored the Bobo doll for the entire 10-minute duration of this phase of the experiment. Following their observations, each young person was taken individually by the experimenter into another playroom with an assortment of toys, which included an airplane, a fire engine, a doll set with clothes and a carriage, and others.

To instill a certain degree of anger and frustration, the experimenter told each young person that they could play with the toys in this room for a very short time and that these toys were reserved for other children.

The young participants were then taken individually to a third playroom and left alone for 20 minutes to play with aggressive and non-aggressive toys. The aggressive toys included the Bobo doll, a wooden mallet, two dart guns, a tetherball with a face painted on it, and others.

Among the non-aggressive toys were paper and crayons, a tea set, two dolls, a ball, cars and trucks, and plastic farm animals. Experimenters observed each child behind a one-way mirror and evaluated their behaviors on a series of specific measures of aggressive behavior.

Bandura found that the youth who observed the aggressive adult model were much more likely to exhibit both imitative physical and verbal aggressive behaviors when left alone in the third playroom, as opposed to youth who were exposed to the non-aggressive model or no model.

In addition, Bandura’s initial assumption that same-sex models more highly influenced youth was validated. Both the males and the females exhibited higher degrees of aggressive verbal and physical behaviors following modeling by a same-sex experimenter than by an experimenter of the other sex. Finally, overall, males tended to behave more aggressively than females in the study.

Bandura and his associates succeeded in supporting their theory of social learning. Young people, they found, can indeed learn specific behaviors, such as forms of verbal and physical aggression, by observing and imitating others. This was found to be true even in the absence of behavioral reinforcements.

Bandura concluded that youth are highly influenced by observing adult behavior, leading them to believe that such behavior is acceptable and, in this instance, freeing their own aggressive inhibitions. They are then more likely to behave aggressively in future situations.

Disarming the “Trump Effect”

With Social Learning Theory as our conceptual organizer, what can we surmise are the lessons Donald Trump is teaching youth and adults alike either by design or through “The Trump Effect”?

A 17-year-old high school student expressed to me recently that if anyone in their school acted like Donald Trump, they would immediately be sent home and ultimately expelled.

Donald Trump, with his words and behavior as his wooden mallet, treats people as if they were his personal Bobo Dolls, and thereby, he represents a negative role model to all youth and adults alike.

But as more and more of us stand up, speak out, and interrupt his sadistic, sociopathological, and narcissistic behaviors, collectively, we will disarm him and model for our youth that his words and actions in all their forms are inappropriate and counterproductive to a just society.

People who counteract Trump’s teachings will become those whom Bandura viewed as positive teachers by example.

Eventually, we will send Trump home and expel him from our politics. We will exemplify the character of positive role models and get our country back on track to become the more perfect union we have been working for.

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