PRESIDENTIAL PSYCHOPATHS

Who were the most psychopathic US Presidents? Who were the least?

Oct 02, 2024

If Mount Rushmore were only for psychopaths, which presidents would be on it? Hang in there, Crime & Psychology fan, because I’m about to tell you. Know what? You’re in for a surprise.

Almost certainly you’ve heard various Presidents described, informally, as psychopaths. You may remember how regularly the word was used when George W. Bush was in the White House. If I remember rightly, it was used a bit less when Barack Obama was there. And then came a four-year period when one seemed to hear the word ‘psychopath’ exactly as often as one heard the name ‘Donald J Trump’. (Was it fair? We’ll get to that.) But armchair diagnosis is always questionable and rarely accurate. What do the experts say?

Well, one of the things they say is this: a lot of people misunderstand the word ‘psychopath’. Let’s blame Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock. Bloch wrote the novel and Hitchcock directed the film Psycho. Together, they fashioned a public image of an unhinged shower-stabber who had demented delusions inside his head and an equally- demented wig on top of it. To a clinical psychologist, ‘psychopath’ might not be the first word that came to mind.

It is, however, the word we are going to use today. Why not ‘sociopath’? You might well ask. It’s a euphonic word that trips rather too easily off the tongue. ‘Sociopath’ is a sales executive of a word: a bit glib; a touch oily. Its definition is hazy, as if it would rather not be pinned down to any definite promises. Sometimes, social scientists use the word as a synonym for ‘psychopath’; occasionally they use it as to name a different syndrome altogether.[i] You and I may do best to avoid it altogether.[ii] The newer phrase ‘antisocial personality disorder’ is better and aligns much more closely with the term ‘psychopathy’.[iii]

Diagnosis is generally made using one scale or another. (If you’d like to know how psychologists make scales, I gave a short introduction here.) An example is the Psychopathy Checklist, created by the criminal psychologist, Robert Hare. It features twelve criteria. For each one, the patient receives a grade between 0 and 2, giving a potential maximum of 24. Diagnosis is made when the score is above 17.[iv] By that definition, about one per cent of the regular population qualify as psychopaths. You’ll probably agree that Norman Bates might score higher on some of these criteria than others:

Superficiality

Grandiosity

Deceitfulness

Lacking remorse

Lacking empathy

Refusal to accept responsibility

Impulsivity

Lack of behavioural controls

Lack of goals

Irresponsibility

Adolescent antisocial behaviour

Adult antisocial behaviour

That ‘one per cent’ comes with qualifications. The proportion differs across different groups. Psychopaths are, of course, heavily over-represented among the prison population (they would be). They are heavily over-represented in other, more surprising, populations, too.

In part, psychopaths are motivated by ‘power over others’.[v] No wonder they tend to seek out high-status positions in business, academia, organised crime, or politics. Here the proportion of psychopaths might easily be four per cent. Not only do psychopaths have the motivation: they also possess the tools (such as ruthlessness) that help a person to get promoted. Some say that the people who turn left when they get on an aeroplane have similar personalities to the people in the prisons they fly over. They’ve simply found a different way to manifest it. Does your own boss or line-manager seem cold, ruthless, remorseless, manipulative? Maybe that’s how they got to be your boss in the first place.

One other – more surprising - psychopathic quality might have helped. Psychopaths are often rather charming. Charm may be a consequence of learning rather than genetics. Psychopaths discover that it helps them get ahead in life. While they may be the embodiment of sweet reason with those on the ladder above them, they may behave quite differently towards underlings. They may discard people once their use comes to an end. Does your own boss behave that way? Some do.

We begin to see why a President might be psychopathic. Rather, we see how a psychopath might become President.

Certain traits are actually rather positive. Psychopaths, for instance, tend to remain calm even in stressful or dangerous situations. That’s certainly a desirable quality in some jobs – surgery, say, or firefighting, or the military.

The psychologist Kevin Dutton provides a list of professions that have the highest proportion of psychopaths. It includes CEOs, lawyers, journalists, police officers, clergymen, chefs, and civil servants.[vi] All (perhaps with the exception of the clergy) tend to be ‘high-risk, high-status positions [that] place a premium on decisiveness, mental toughness and emotional detachment – all of which are made easier by high settings on certain psychopathic qualities’.[vii]

Dutton is the brains behind the project that brought you here in the first place. In 2016, he published a paper called ‘Would you vote for a psychopath?’[viii] He asked the biographers of a number of historical figures to complete one of those psychopathy checklists on their subjects’ behalf.[ix] He wondered which ones would qualify as psychopaths.

Now, the word ‘psychopath’, as we mentioned before, doesn’t exactly sound great. For most people, Dutton’s question – ‘Would you vote for a psychopath?’ – probably provides its own answer. But, just as we admire certain qualities in surgeons and firefighters, the same may be true of politicians. Here’s Dutton again:

‘[T]here are particular psychopathic traits that can benefit leaders enormously and others that lead to disaster in office […] To imagine psychopathy better, imagine a personality “mixing desk” on which its hallmark traits[…] consist of a hodgepodge of knobs and sliders.’[x]

‘Knobs and sliders’ are arranged across three sections of the mixing desk. They are called Fearless Dominance, Self-Centred Impulsiveness, and Coldheartedness. These are psychopathy’s three main ‘factors’.[xi] You can think of them as its component parts.

Once you have achieved high office, certain traits will prove helpful: the ability to make important decisions under stress; willingness to send young people to war; excellent presentation skills. A degree of charm won’t hurt, either, plus endless self-confidence, ruthlessness, and mental toughness. All these traits sound a bit psychopathic. Here are the optimal settings on the mixing desk: low Self-Centred Impulsivity; an adjustable degree of Coldheartedness; and high Fearless Dominance. That’s what the best Presidents are made of.

Dutton created three top-ten lists of American presidents. One was for total psychopathy score, and there was one each for Fearless Dominance and Self-Centred Impulsivity. No fewer than four different Presidents made it onto the top-ten lists for both Fearless Dominance and Self-Centred Impulsivity. Of those four, three also took gold, silver, and bronze positions for total score. They were the most psychopathic Presidents.

Maybe it’s time to name names. Would you believe that the top three most psychopathic American Presidents were, in reverse order, James Munroe, Millard Fillmore, and (gold-medal winner) William McKinley?

Mt. Rushmore during daytime — Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash

If your answer to that question is ‘No’, well, you’re right. I tried to fool you: Those were actually the names on the very bottom of the list. William McKinley appears to have been least psychopathic; Fillmore and Munroe runners up. When I asked students in my Criminal Psychology class whether they could name a single thing any of the three had achieved, they came up blank. That may be no coincidence.

The real top three psychopathic Presidents (again in reverse order,) are these: In bronze medal position, we find Andrew Jackson. In silver, Bill Clinton. Winning the gold medal, though, we find a president both surprising and, I guess, to some, disappointing.

If you do happen to feel disappointed, please remember that not all psychopathic qualities are necessarily bad. Indeed, Fearless Dominance can be very positive in the right context. Even Coldheartedness has its place. After all, if you are going to have major surgery, you don’t want your surgeon to be is filled with empathy and trepidation. The knife might slip. You want a surgeon who is relatively cold-hearted. It’s the same story if your country stands on the brink of nuclear confrontation with, say, the USSR. Imagine that godless communist missiles have just found their way into Cuba, an island so close to the United States that some immigrants arrive by raft. Such a situation must be dealt with, and, preferably, by the kind of person you’d trust with your appendectomy.

Our top spot, then, goes to John F Kennedy, a man whose admirers might well be disheartened to hear it.

What about presidential performance? Did psychopaths do well? Any answer must be qualified. Just as Dutton predicted, ‘higher settings on the Fearless Dominance dials were associated with higher ratings of presidential performance, leadership, persuasiveness, crisis management, perceived standing on the world stage and congressional relations’. Meanwhile, ‘higher settings on the Self-Centred Impulsivity dials were associated with indicators of an insalubrious personal style – such as invoking congressional impeachment resolutions, tolerating unethical behaviour in subordinates and having an unsavoury reputation in general’.[xii]

That may make you ask which Presidents scored highest on those two indicators. The top three in Fearless Dominance were, in reverse order, Franklin D Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, and Teddy Roosevelt. Two of them – the Roosevelts – are often considered to be among the best Presidents ever. None of the three featured on the Self-Centred Impulsivity list. The medallists there were Andrew Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, and (arguably no surprise) Bill Clinton.

I mentioned that four Presidents made it onto both top-ten lists. They were the medallists for Total Score (Kennedy, Clinton, and Jackson) plus George W Bush.

Now, you may be wondering about this year’s presidential candidates. There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that Dutton’s paper dealt only with Presidents up to and including George W. The good news is that he did include the 2016 candidates, one of whom is back again this time.

What did Dutton have to say about Donald Trump, as compared to his 2016 competitors, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton? Well, he outscored all of them on the Fearless Dominance Scale, which, as you’ll remember, is a good predictor of a successful presidency. Unfortunately, he also scored higher on the negative traits of Coldheartedness and Self-Centred Impulsivity, which aren’t. Ted Cruz managed almost the same score as Trump, falling behind only in the championship rounds: ‘if it were a boxing match [Trump] would have won a unanimous points decision with Cruz still on his feet at the final bell’.[xiii]

As far as his total score was concerned, Trump was said to be ‘in league with Hitler and Idi Amin’. In 2016, only one candidate might have scored higher. That was his eventual Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Once researchers allowed for gender differences, they found that this race, too, was very nearly a draw.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, landed rather late for psychologists to study. I could find nothing in the psychological literature to tell you about. So far, she seems almost an unknown quantity. It will be interested to see whether she remains that way.

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PRESIDENTIAL PSYCHOPATHS

Who were the most psychopathic US Presidents? Who were the least?

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