The Truth about Trump's Enneagram Type
I’m going to be completely honest here, I shouldn’t be writing this article. I should be working on my book, or doing laundry, or walking my dog. But there has been a disturbing trend in the Enneagram community over the last few weeks that has me frustrated to no end, and since no one seems to be saying the things that have been on my mind, I guess that just leaves it up to me.
Several very prominent teachers in the Enneagram community have taken to typing the 45th president of the United States, and after reading their articles, I have to say, they’re all wrong.
I respect these teachers very, very much, and to their credit their cases are strong and well thought out, but (and there’s a huge but here) no one knows anyone else’s type. EVER. END OF STORY. Sure, their articles are written with heavy disclaimers at the beginning about how we can’t know, and how this isn’t to stereo type the president, and how they could be wrong, etc. I’m not saying they’re all wrong about what type they assume 45 to be, what I’m saying is they’re wrong for trying to type him in the first place.
Why we don’t type other people:
It may be the most important and most ignored rule in the Enneagram community: don’t type other people. I must admit, I’m as guilty as anyone of this, but thinking to myself that someone may be mistyped, or that a friend has some qualities that greatly resemble a certain type is wildly different than trying to type a person who might be the most divisive character in our county’s short history. No matter who it is though, trying to type another person is always a bad idea. There are three main reasons why we should never type other people (or at very least, keep our thoughts to ourselves):
It takes away their opportunity to come to it on their own terms. This is soooo huge. The way we come into contact with information will greatly affect how we use that information. By simply putting in answers and having a computer spit our an answer, we sell ourselves short. The Enneagram is meant to be a tool for personal and spiritual development, it’s meant to be used as a map that can lead us on a transformational journey, and discovering our type is a large part of that journey. If someone is just labeled as a type, they could spend the rest of their lives believe that’s all they’re capable of being, instead of embarking on a journey toward so much more. By typing celebrities and well-known public figures, we make the assumption that they won’t ever be interested in using the Enneagram for their own growth and transformation. We turn those people into nothing more than cardboard cutouts of themselves and rob them of the opportunity to use a tool that could change their life. If the Enneagram teaches us anything it’s that we must learn to see more of people’s humanity, not less. Typing celebrities like this robs them of their humanity.
We can only see people through the lens of our own type. I have a dear friend who’s mother is a 9 (self-reported!). After learning about the other types, this 9 was certain her daughter (who is very much a 7 with strong 6 wing) was an 8. When my friend relayed this to me, I laughed and said, “To a 9, everyone seems like an 8.” While that may not be exactly true in all cases, 9’s extreme aversion to engaging in conflict would make even the average person seem like someone who actively enjoys conflict. Each of us in our types and in our personal experiences have lenses like this that skew the way we see the world. And while our work in with the Enneagram helps us to understand this and shift our perspective, we always be looking through our own rose-colored-glasses and won’t be able to see others clearly.
It’s an invasion of privacy. The Enneagram isn’t a personality typology based simply on behavior, its focus is on motivation. Not only that, it details so much of our personal trauma and the ways we tried to cope with it. To make assumptions about a person on this level is deeply intrusive, and quite frankly offensive. Long story short, we shouldn’t be typing anyone. We should be treating this tool and what it illuminates with in us with the respect they deserve. By simply throwing around numbers and types, we cheapen the Enneagram and what it’s capable of, not to mention the possibility of deeply wounding another person.
So what about Trump?
There are plenty of arguments for why we should know Trump’s type, and why his type matters, and I’d like to address a couple of them here and explain why they’re misguided.
“Knowing Trump’s type will help us understand how he came to power.” I love the Enneagram y’all, I really do, but I also know that it has it’s place. And this is not the place for the Enneagram (or at least, not the personality typology piece of the Enneagram). Knowing Trump’s type won’t give us any more insight into how he came to power than we had before we knew his type. And to be honest, we don’t really need it. Trump used money, fear, and the Russian government to make it into the White House. He is nothing more than a symptom of a much larger issue in our country and in our society. In so many ways, he’s a pawn or a scapegoat, his personality doesn’t actually matter. AND, to top it off, knowing his type won’t help us understand how he came to power, because there’s no way to know for sure what his type is unless he does the work himself to find out. All it is is speculation and conjecture, simply an intellectual exercise with little bearing on reality.
“Knowing Trump’s type will help us have compassion for him.” WRONG. Let me explain: We don’t gain compassion for other people by knowing more about them. This is a common misconception in the self-awareness/self-help community. Understanding and knowing are head-based faculties, while compassion is heart-based. Compassion for others doesn’t come from knowing more about them, it comes from knowing more about ourselves. As we learn more about ourselves, and do the work of exploring and reintegrating our own shadows, we learn to have true compassion for other people, because we understand how difficult the journey really is. If our goal is to have more compassion for Trump knowing his type won’t help us get there, only doing our own work on ourselves will bring us the ability to see him in a truly compassionate light.
“He is a prime example of the unhealthy elements of type XYZ.” I understand there may be value in seeing a real life example of the unhealthy characteristics of a given type, but if the person hasn’t self-identified as that type, we’re really only seeing what we want to see, and this can end up hurting a lot of people. Also, as a community, this sentiment is dangerous for us and the real transformative work of the Enneagram. There’s no way that Trump is going to change, we have no way of making that happen, but there are millions of Americans who we could reach and who’s lives could be changed that are still supportive of Trump. By simply labeling Trump (or any other celebrity) as the pathological extreme of a type, we cut ourselves off from the people who might actually be open to using this powerful tool to build more self-awareness and compassion in their lives.
What’s at stake:
Trump is an incredibly divisive character, as well as an extremely unstable one. Some view his instability has a sign of his psychological incapacity, while others believe he’s just “telling it like it is.” When we type someone like this, all we’re really doing is showing our own biases. I know many of the Enneagram experts have typed Trump as an unhealthy 8 or 3 or counter-phobic 6, but really all that shows us is how they feel about Trump and those types. I’m sure if there were a Trump-supporting Enneagram-buff they might say that he was a perfect example of a 1, living out exactly what he believes, or a healthy 8, taking charge and “making America great again.” What I’m saying is, what we see has a lot to do with what we believe about this person from our own perspective, and to project those things on to a type could severely limit how that type is seen. The more we play into these limits, the less people are going to be interested in using this tool, because it will become ineffective and demeaning instead of expansive and life-giving.
When I did my Enneagram training with The Narrative Enneagram in California, there was a day where we all got together in a class room and watched several clips of a movie. We then had to guess what type the main character was. Then we were divided into groups based on what type we believed this fictional character to be and we were asked to discuss how we had come to our conclusion. After each group had talked it over, we each sent a representative to the front of the room to present our case and convince everyone else in the room that we were right. The biggest group at the end won the game. It was actually a lot of fun (mostly because they allowed us to heckle the person up front giving their argument) but it also hit home a very important lesson: You can make a case that anyone is almost any type, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because that’s not our work.
So, this isn’t a call out, but a call in. I hope that we as a community can move past the desire to label other people and focus more on the real transformative work that the Enneagram offers us. If we are really concerned about the state of our country and the world, getting down into the real work the Enneagram provides us is the best way to move things in a more conscious and compassionate direction. If we want to see the Enneagram spread and be a catalyst for global transformation, we as a community need to treat it like that’s what it is! I hope we can stop using the Enneagram as an intellectual exercise and put it to work as a truly 3-centered transformational tool. I hope that we can live up to our own standards, and treat the Enneagram like the sacred map that it really is.