by WorldTribune Staff, April 21, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
Soon after Donald J. Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York City on June 16, 2015 to announce his candidacy as a Republican for president, legacy media and late night talk show hosts wrote it off as a joke.
After the contested election of 2020, the Left's lawfare campaign to keep him tied up in court, and surviving two assassination attempts, Trump beat the odds and returned to the White House in 2025.
[caption id="attachment_155027" align="alignleft" width="451"]
Donald Trump with Norman Vincent Peale at Peale’s 90th-birthday celebration at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City in May 1988. / Tom Gates / Getty Images[/caption]
How did he manage to keep it together through all that?
Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has be profoundly influenced by Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking," an analysis said.
The president said during the 2024 election campaign "that he was ordained by God to become the President, alluding to assassination attempts he had survived. He paired his belief in being the one chosen by God with what (Norman Vicnent) Peale taught: unfailing self-confidence in the face of all challenges. What his detractors see as over-confidence, wild boasts and blatant self-branding are said to emerge from Peale's philosophy of positive thinking," an
analysis by The Economic Times noted.
"The Power of Positive Thinking", published in 1952, rivaled sales of the Bible in its initial years and has been a perennial bestseller. Peale's philosophy of pairing religious belief with self-belief encouraged people to get successful by correcting their attitude through prayer, visualization and self-motivation.
“Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination,” Peale wrote.
Trump has carried that philosophy, supporters say, into his second term and amid the ongoing Iran War and the continued obstacles put up by Democrats and their allies in legacy media.
Trump posted to Truth Social:
"Never allow the Traitor Democrats like Low IQ person Hakeem Jeffries, or Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, or the totally corrupt Fake News Media such as the phony and decaying Wall Street Journal, the Failing New York Times (Subscriptions way down!), or dying “60 Minutes,” to demean or criticize Operation Midnight Hammer, which totally obliterated the Nuclear Dust locations to the point where bloodthirsty Iran has been unable to get to it, or dig it out. Space Force has cameras on every inch of the 3 sites that were so brilliantly hit last June! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT
"Operation Midnight Hammer was a complete and total obliteration of the Nuclear Dust sites in Iran. Therefore, digging it out will be a long and difficult process. Fake News CNN, and other corrupt Media Networks and Platforms, fail to give our great aviators the credit they deserve - Always trying to demean and belittle - LOSERS!!!"
Trump got an early introduction to winning and got to know Peale "through his father," The Economic Times noted.
When "The Power of Positive Thinking" came out, Trump was only six years old.
"[He] didn’t read the book until much later, but it quickly became important in the large Queens household in which he grew up, and it would play a critical role in his future," Gwenda Blair, author of "The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate" and "Donald Trump: The Candidate", wrote in Politico in 2015. "His parents, Fred and Mary, felt an immediate affinity for Peale’s teachings. On Sundays, they drove into Manhattan to worship at Marble Collegiate Church, where Peale was the head pastor. Donald and both his sisters were married there, and funeral services for both Fred and Mary took place in the main sanctuary."
In July 2015, Trump told the Iowa Family Leadership Summit: “I still remember [Peale’s] sermons. You could listen to him all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.”
Blair noted: "Peale’s philosophy fell on willing and eager ears in the Trump family. Long before this self-esteem guru codified his canon, Donald’s grandfather Friedrich used Peale-like confidence and tenacity to make the first Trump fortune during the Klondike gold rush. A few decades later, Donald’s father, Fred, deployed proto-Peale thinking to become a multimillionaire real estate developer in Brooklyn and Queens. And Donald Trump himself has cited Peale’s advice many times in his own career."
Trump has described how positive thinking helped him get through crises: "...in 1990, after splurging on a third casino, an airline, the world’s second-largest yacht and the Plaza Hotel, Trump found himself nearly a billion dollars in debt and the banks were threatening foreclosure," Blair wrote in Politico. "But after weeks of round-the-clock negotiations, he emerged relatively unscathed, and in a 2009 interview with Psychology Today he gave Peale’s book credit for his survival.”
Citing his father’s friendship with Peale and calling himself “a firm believer in the power of being positive,” Trump said, “what helped is I refused to give in to the negative circumstances and never lost faith in myself. I didn’t believe I was finished even when the newspapers were saying so.”
In another illustration of Trump's use of positive thinking, a 2017 NPR article talks about how Trump decided to campaign in "seemingly solid blue upper Midwestern states, which most political professionals incorrectly thought Hillary Clinton would win. At 1 a.m. on Election Day, Trump closed out his campaign with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
"Today we are going to win the great state of Michigan, and we are going to win back the White House," candidate Trump said to roaring cheers.
As Peale wrote: "Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself."
A little more than 24 hours later, Trump would become the president-elect.
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