The Hammer and the Nail

It is a coincidence or the work of the spirit that I made a comment in a recent blog that the trouble with Trump’s negotiations is that he appears to have one approach to his Art of the Deal. Keep in mind that Trump didn’t write that book as it was written by a friend of one of my friends with Trump communicating his ideas verbally.

But in an editorial in the Inquirer one of my heroes, Trudy Rubin, wrote that Trump has one tool in his arsenal of deal making. It is a hammer as he only knows how to treat people by bullying them such as he did with Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You don’t have the cards.” I have had dinner with Trudy multiple times and have told her directly that she is one of my heroes as she knows and communicates regularly with the players in Ukraine as well as the Middle East.

Unlike Trump, she goes to those areas of the world and puts herself in dangerous territories to get the truth of what is occurring so that she can report that accurately in her newspaper columns. You wouldn’t know that she is a hero by her appearance as she is small in stature and not a casting director’s idea of what someone should look like who goes to dangerous areas to get the truth. She is not Indiana Jones.

In her recent column she underlined my belief in a blog that Trump as a bully has one approach, but she mentioned someone who I studied in grad school and am still informed by his beliefs in understanding how human nature works. She mentioned Abraham Maslow who once made the comment that “if we see ourselves as a hammer, then others will always be a nail”.

Maslow indicated the Law of the Instrument which means to overly rely on familiar tools and methods applying the same solution to every problem without regard to fit limiting you to a narrow approach to decision making. In other words, you don’t use the same solutions repeatedly that fail to solve a problem.

Maslow is an American psychologist who created a hierarchy of needs with self-actualization being the goal. His hierarchy of needs were that first you need to have the basics such as food and water, then you can move on to personal security, a sense of belonging, respect and freedom, and finally the goal of self- actualization which is being at one with self and others (and I would say God).

From the standpoint of Iran, it is impossible to get to self-actualization if you don’t have access to food and water, respect, etc. Iran has done terrible things and killed many of its own people, but Trump’s war was a war of choice. He misread the situation at many levels including that they would just give in, nor that they had the card, so to speak, of the Strait of Hormuz which controls 20% of the traffic carrying oil for all other nations.

This has placed Americans living paycheck to paycheck concerned for their basic food needs, their safety (with Trump’s Ice attacks on everyone who is thought to be an illegal immigrant and not the most harden immigrant criminals). The American people are concerned about issues of freedom and respect before they can reach self-actualization. Both the American culture and Iranian culture find themselves in the same position.

In ethics class the students learn about the theory of Existentialism where a definition of hell is the inability to make change occur turning a bad situation to a good one. The American people and people of Iran are caught waiting for Trump to make a deal when history tells us he only has one approach, a bully, who already has brought a war of choice to their country. This is seen as a betrayal and during a cease fire closing the strait which is not a sign of trust.

Trump is following the guidelines of his mentor, Roy Cohn, a lawyer, who taught him to never apologize and never admit that you did something wrong. Deny, deny, and deny.

Someone should break it to Trump that Roy Cohn died alone and broke, and had been previously disbarred. Trump famously broke from him and distanced himself from him at the time of his death.

Cohn was the ultimate hammer, and he saw other people as his nails. He singlehandedly shaped Trump’s view of behavior.

What tool do you and I see ourselves as? I think a great one is something a friend of mine used in a meeting to correct the lack of actions of a particular leader who did not have any sense of fairness or the importance of helping others to live right. Sandy chose a plumbline which is a weight with a string attached held up by carpenters to make sure that everything is level and correct.

Sounds like a better choice than a hammer! That choice may even help Trump in his approach to solving this problem of his own making.