No one likes to admit they were wrong. Politicians, it seems, are straight up allergic to it.
Former President Donald Trump has practically never admitted to making a mistake, while Vice President Kamala Harris has, in her three months as a presidential candidate, somersaulted and dodged questions about how her presidency would look different from that of the current administration, of which she is a part.
In a town hall with CNN on Wednesday, Harris was asked outright if she had ever made a mistake in her life. Prefaced with the qualifier that Trump has never admitted a mistake, and that “most politicians don’t,” Anderson Cooper asked the vice president: “Is there something you can point to in your life, political life or in your life in the last four years that you think is a mistake that you have learned from?”
Cooper asks Harris if she could identify and mistakes she’s made in her career or the last 4 years (noting Trump does not admit mistakes).
Her answer: pic.twitter.com/Gy4f2uTyN0
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) October 24, 2024
“I’ve made many mistakes,” Harris began. “They range from, you know, if you’ve ever parented a child, you know you make lots of mistakes, too.”
She then reflected on her time in the White House, but stopped short of offering an admission of error, pivoting instead to her strengths as VP.
“In my role as vice president, I mean I probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well-versed on issues and I think that’s very important. It’s a mistake not to be well-versed on issues and feel compelled to answer a question,” Harris said.
Her answer to a question asking about a specific time she was wrong was that she works hard to understand the issues.
A week ago, at his own town hall with Univision, Trump was asked by a Republican voter to address his actions on Jan. 6, 2021 — an opportunity for the former president to distance himself or make amends about an event that a majority of Americans tell pollsters they believe was an “attack on democracy” that should never be forgotten.
Donald Trump faced tough questions from Latino voters during a town hall hosted by @Univision Wednesday.
When questioned by one voter about his response to the 2020 insurrection, the former president referred to January 6th as “a day of love.” pic.twitter.com/80Ae7mHWeH
— Scripps News (@scrippsnews) October 17, 2024
His answer? The riot at the Capitol was a “day of love” in which “nothing was done wrong at all.”
So, why is it that politicians can’t seem to admit fault? That they’ve grown and changed their views based on some kind of new information? After all, it’s something all of us do with some regularity, whether with a spouse, children, friends or at work. The ability to change one’s mind in the face of new evidence is what Jeff Bezos once called the number one sign of intelligence.
Newsweek spoke with five psychoanalysts who tried to explain what prevents people from being vulnerable, how politicians are “sensitive” to it, how Trump’s brand of refusal works, and whether voters would embrace or penalize a candidate who could just own up to past mistakes.
Why is it so hard to admit we’re wrong?
There are three factors that prevent us from being vulnerable about our mistakes, Paul Spector, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Florida’s Department of Psychology, told Newsweek: weakness, the stress of uncertainty and the lack of psychological safety—three luxuries that politicians don’t think they can afford, especially not in an election year.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty
The political environment, for one, doesn’t lend itself well to these obstacles. In a competitive arena where candidates are being directly compared to another, politicians do everything to avoid looking weak. If their opponent doesn’t make mistakes and they do, they’re at an obvious disadvantage, Spector said.
Steven Pinker, Harvard University’s Johnstone Professor of Psychology whose written several best-selling books on rationality and how the human brain works, told Newsweek that it’s a primitive human reaction to treat an admission of error as a confession of weakness.
“In the case of politics, it’s exacerbated by the accusation that the politician is unprincipled or pandering to different constituencies,” he said.
These are also people who are trying to control as many variables as possible for electoral success. If you’re trying to limit uncertainty, you won’t put yourself in a position where there’s no way of knowing how your constituents would respond.
Arguably, the most important thing preventing people from admitting mistakes is “psychological safety.” People need to feel accepted for who they are and that they could express their opinions without being attacked, ridiculed or criticized for them to admit their mistakes.
Politics, however, “is not a psychologically safe place.”
“It’s easier to admit a mistake to someone who understands you’re already a moral person or that you already have good judgement,” Steven Neuberg, a psychology professor at Arizona State University, told Newsweek. “They already trust you foundationally.”
Most politicians are speaking to people who, as a starting point, don’t really trust them.
Only 22 percent of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right, according to a Pew Research poll from April. Public trust in the government has eroded dramatically since the 1960s, and even though the latest figures are an uptick from last year’s 16 percent—the lowest measure in nearly seven decades—a majority of Americans have not said they trust the government since 2001.
Residents line up to vote at the Stamford Government Center on the first day of early voting on October 21, 2024 in Stamford, Connecticut. A Pew Research poll from April found that only 22 percent…
Residents line up to vote at the Stamford Government Center on the first day of early voting on October 21, 2024 in Stamford, Connecticut. A Pew Research poll from April found that only 22 percent of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right.
More
John Moore/Getty Images
“We’re worried about the implications of admitting to a mistake and the inferences people are going to draw about our fundamental characteristics,” Neuberg said. “That’s exacerbated by the fact that elections are competitions, with others ready to attack and spread any potential weaknesses they see.”
Many leaders across varying industries often find themselves face-to-face with this dilemma, though most of them benefit from safeguards. Corporate America can be more tolerant to those who try something that doesn’t work, with the implicit understanding among their boards, shareholders and employees that risk-taking is what breeds success. Voters rarely operate under that same understanding.
“(Politicians) live by the next election, so for them, everything they do is potentially high stakes,” Spector said. “The public isn’t necessarily forgiving, or at least, politicians are afraid that they won’t be forgiven.”
Politicians are just built different
Experts have found that there are great benefits to owning up to our mistakes. Many leaders in professional settings turn what could be a weakness into a strength by using these opportunities to resonate with others and build trust with their networks.
But there are also rare occasions where people gravitate toward someone who never makes a mistake. While limited, those occasions require circumstances where the public is looking for someone to handle something over which they have absolutely no control and little understanding. Politics happens to be one of these instances.
“For running large institutions, like government, you want people who will be as error-free as possible,” Neuberg said.
So the bar is high. And once a politician is elected, that bar continues to climb. An elected leader’s fundamental job is to get more approval—it is how their job performance is measured, and determines their employment.
If a president’s approval rating is low, it can be difficult for them to lead because people are disinclined to trust their decisions. Part of the reason Biden dropped out of the 2024 race was because he was unable to boost his moribund approval ratings, which have been underwater since the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan six months into his presidency.
Political capital is hard to come by, and easy to lose in a hurry.
President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Afghanistan in the East Room of the White House on August 26, 2021 in Washington, DC. As a result of the withdrawal, Biden’s approval ratings dropped dramatically…
President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Afghanistan in the East Room of the White House on August 26, 2021 in Washington, DC. As a result of the withdrawal, Biden’s approval ratings dropped dramatically and for the first time in his presidency, the majority of Americans disapproved of Biden’s performance.
More
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
As “approval-seeking creatures,” politicians are “even more sensitive” to the risk of admitting a mistake, Neuberg said.
Studies show that people who are especially biased toward emphasizing the things they’re good at (and minimizing the things they’re bad at) aren’t typically those with low self-esteem or with stable high-self-esteem. They’re usually people who have unstable, high self-esteem who struggle to admit their mistakes.
“They think they’re worthy, but they’re not exactly sure,” Neuberg said. “And this may characterize many politicians.”
The psychology of Trump
Donald Trump has mystified psychologists for decades.
During the early days of his first presidential campaign, he appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.” When asked if he had ever apologized in his life, Trump responded: “I fully believe that apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”
“I will absolutely apologize in the distant future if I’m ever wrong,” Trump said in 2015.
Nine years and one presidential term later, Trump has only publicly ever said sorry once: in the immediate aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged about grabbing women by the genitals, when it looked like the revelations would sink his campaign in its final days.
Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Greensboro Coliseum on October 22, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Trump just flipped the playbook,” Dan McAdams told Newsweek of…
Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Greensboro Coliseum on October 22, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Trump just flipped the playbook,” Dan McAdams told Newsweek of Trump’s politics. “He’s playing by a completely different book.”
More
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Even before running for office, the businessman-turned-reality TV host refused to concede on virtually anything, building it into his brand of America’s ultimate negotiator, a cornerstone of Trump’s guide to deal making.
“I don’t do it for the money,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.”
“The Art of the Deal is all about winning,” Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, told Newsweek.
“It’s all about trouncing your opponent by killing him dead. It’s not about negotiating. It’s not about deal making at all. It’s about war, brute power in the moment to win. So yeah, he projects strength. He’s always projects strength.”
And that’s where Trump prevails. McAdams said the former president is by no means strategic in the way he operates — but he is extremely tactical, which makes him “brilliant in the here and now.”
“He’s always in the moment, fighting like a boxer in the ring to win the moment,” McAdams said.
“So, he’ll say anything and do almost anything to win that moment. And then he goes on to the next battle and the next battle. When he says, ‘I never made a mistake,’ or when he says something outrageous in any context, he’s doing it to win that moment. He might say something very different the next day, and it doesn’t matter, because he kind of goes from moment to moment, and they don’t add up.”
McAdams called Trump a “one-off” and “totally unusual” in the way that he refuses to even contemplate that he’s been wrong before.
“There’s never been, as far as I know, a president who has claimed that he’s never made a mistake in his life, in anything but Donald Trump has been saying that about himself for decades,” he said.
A man looks at a shop window plastered with posters of Barack Obama October 13, 2008 in New York City. Obama won the 2008 election on a message of “hope,” a theme that most politicians…
A man looks at a shop window plastered with posters of Barack Obama October 13, 2008 in New York City. Obama won the 2008 election on a message of “hope,” a theme that most politicians have embraced.
More
Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Up until the Trump era, conventional wisdom was that politicians win elections by instilling hope in voters. Ronald Reagan ran on optimism in 1980. Bill Clinton was quite literally the “man from Hope” in 1992. Barack Obama became the first Black president thanks to his campaign focused on “hope and change.”
“Trump just flipped the playbook,” McAdams said. “He’s playing by a completely different book. It works for him, I don’t know that it would work for anybody else.”
It may be hard to imagine now, but in the early days of the 2016 Republican primaries, Jeb Bush was considered the frontrunner. Part of that was the fact that his father and brother had both served as president.
That George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House, including his decision to invade Iraq, could be criticized from within his own party was simply unimaginable at the time. In the primary, most of the GOP field spent time dancing around Iraq.
But Trump, a political newcomer at that time, came onto the scene without such inhibitions.
“George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East,” Trump said at a February 2016 primary debate in South Carolina.
“Do whatever you want. You call it what whatever you want. I want to tell you they lied they said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none! And they knew there were none!”
Trump was met with scattered boos from the crowd, but his decision to knife former President Bush in front of a crowd of Republicans would ultimately pay off, steering his rise to power and eventually leading to his surprise win against another creature of the Establishment: Hillary Clinton.
On his podcast this week, the influential liberal New York Times columnist Ezra Klein attempted something of an armchair analysis of Trump’s ability to say what others are thinking, for better or worse, concluding that his greatest strength is also his greatest weakness: “Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibitions most of us labor under.”
Trump’s absence of inhibition is also “the engine” of his success, Klein said. “It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on the stage. It is what allows him to say things other people would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.”
“Over the years, I’ve interviewed I don’t know how many politicians and talking to them, it’s different than talking to really anybody else,” Klein went on. “Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response to this internal piece of software… It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say given who they are and what they’re doing and the weight their words carry.”
He continued, “But, there is something undeniably electric about watching someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There’s something even aspirational about it. What if I was without fear without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear if if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?”
McAdams, the Northwest professor, said that because Trump supporters see the Republican nominee as “an attack dog” protecting them from the onslaught of the modern world, they don’t evaluate him by “his moral standards, whether he lies or not, or whether he’s consistent from one day to the next.”
“He’s your beast,” McAdams said. “You don’t want to marry him. You don’t want your daughter to have anything to do with him. You would never even sit down with him for dinner, but you’re going to vote for him because he’s scared you half to death and now he’s going to protect you from all these things.”
In an extremely unique case, it is Trump’s unpredictability that resonates with his base.
“A lot of these disaffected folks who, seeing the culture change around them, things that strike them as bizarre…(They believe) we just need to take a weed whacker to all of it and start over,” Neuberg said.
“The burn it down psychology enables his volatility to actually be viewed as a strength opposed to as a weakness for these people.”
Do voters even want a president who can admit their mistakes?
There are two types of leadership, according to McAdams. The first, dominance leadership, is the umbrella under which Trump operates, a situation where the alpha rules from the top and exhibits strength all the time. A dominant leader “could never admit weakness, ever, because once you do that, you’re done.”
The other is leadership by prestige or expertise, exemplified by the kind of “warm and fuzzy” politicians many Americans admire. These are leaders who are not necessarily bigger, stronger, more intimidating or more brutish, but project to voters that they have a certain set of skills held in high regard. Obama, arguably the best political communicator of his generation, would fall into this category, as would Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
Most successful politicians need a balance of both qualities, McAdams said. And when they lean more to this second category, they have more room to admit mistakes.
“It’s not a fatal flaw for a leader to admit a mistake, for a leader to show some vulnerability,” he said. “Sometimes it can even be endearing, and it can be positive, because in those instances, you don’t fear the leader so much. Instead, you admire the leader, and you kind of want to be like the leader, and because a leader does things that you think are cool.”
That is where Harris might be trying to thread the needle.
The vice president has come under heavy criticism for flip-flopping on issues like fracking. Although she pledged to ban the controversial practice of oil extraction in 2019, she’s since disavowed that position.
She addressed the reversal in an interview with CNN last month, saying: “The most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.”
Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris fields questions during a town hall style campaign event on October 21, 2024 in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Asked about her reversal on fracking, Harris said, “my values have…
Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris fields questions during a town hall style campaign event on October 21, 2024 in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Asked about her reversal on fracking, Harris said, “my values have not changed.”
More
Scott Olson/Getty Images
“It’s clever the way she did this,” Neuberg said. “She said, ‘Same values, new information, so I changed my position.’ For her base, she’s saying, ‘You can trust me, I’m still the same person.'”
“She didn’t say that her previous view was a mistake. She didn’t frame it that way,” he added.
“It was like ‘No, I changed my mind because the data changed or the circumstances changed.’ A lot of people like to hear that. I think that that’s actually pretty reasonable if you want to have a really good decision-maker. They’ll have a set of principles or a set of values, and then as the inputs from the world change, the outputs of decision have to change.”
Blake Ashforth, a professor of management at Arizona State University, argued that it could be beneficial for politicians to have nuanced conversations about why some sort of externality had led them to change their mind on an issue, or if they were to discuss what they’ve learned from their mistakes.
But most of the time, Ashforth told Newsweek, politicians fall back on forcing their current positions to sound consistent with their old views, or pretending there was no daylight between them to begin with. And attacks on flip flopping are a proven strategy in campaigns (just ask John Kerry).
“The irony is that I think politicians would earn more respect, not less, if they were honest. Who hasn’t changed their mind over time or screwed up? Voters want authenticity, and being human is as authentic as it gets,” Ashforth said.
Easier said than done, said John Jost, a professor of psychology and politics at New York University.
“In a perfect world, yes, political leaders would be able to own up to their misdeeds and their changes of heart. But we are very, very far from a perfect world,” Jost said.
“Trump learned long ago that he can get away with literally anything. He has no accountability, no one to hold him responsible in any serious way. He has been operating with impunity for decades” Jost said.
“So if he can get away with gaslighting everyone about the crimes he has committed, why wouldn’t he?”
Harris, on the other hand, faces an uphill battle when it comes to changing her mind, in part because of gender stereotypes “including the misperception that women are fickle and cannot be trusted to lead decisively.”
“Liberals and conservatives are not engaging on a level playing field,” Jost said.
“There are clearly things that conservatives like Trump can get away with, perhaps because his base will allow him to do so, that liberals cannot. The problem, no doubt, is exacerbated by issues of race and gender.”
