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2024 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

International Relationships: How Presidents Trump and Biden Think and Feel About Other Countries

Authors : Peter Suedfeld, Bradford H. Morrison

Published in: Presidential Leadership and Foreign Policy

Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

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Abstract

This chapter reports the results of a comparison between how presidents Trump and Biden think about other countries and their leaders, and how this relates to each president’s worldview and policies. The comparison is based on content analyses of presidential speeches, interviews, and other texts. Content analysis provides nonreactive measures of a cognitive process (integrative complexity), motivation (the needs for achievement, affiliation, and power), and emotion (psychological distance or closeness), both overall and with respect to specific nations. A separate analysis identifies changes in Trump’s rhetoric between findings published in 2021 and the current dataset. Cluster analysis is used to identify each president’s groupings of countries sharing similar relationships with the USA.

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Footnotes
1
Many articles and books have presented personality analyses of the two men. Some are little more than “We don’t like him,” dressed up in medical or social science jargon (e.g., Lee, 2019). See also Barzun (1974). Interesting studies using systematic content analysis, but of a type different from ours, can be found, e.g., in Immelman (2017) for Trump, and Griebie and Immelman (2021) for Biden.
 
2
The currently preferred term “participant” is not appropriate here, as the individuals whose communications are analyzed are neither aware of, nor participating in, a research project. Their texts are issued in the course of their daily life and activities.
 
3
The Thematic Apperception Test consists of a series of pictures, with the person being tested asked to tell a story about what the picture shows. Such contents as who is in the picture, what they are doing, wanting, thinking, remembering, feeling, planning, etc., are used as clues as to aspects of the respondent’s personality.
 
4
Data from Suedfeld et al. (2021). In that study, the Nonimmediacy subscores were standardized and by definition had means of roughly zero. Therefore, the mean is not interpretable or comparable to this study.
 
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Metadata
Title
International Relationships: How Presidents Trump and Biden Think and Feel About Other Countries
Authors
Peter Suedfeld
Bradford H. Morrison
Copyright Year
2024
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52799-9_6

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