ABSTRACT
In her book about her uncle, Mary Trump, a trained psychologist, describes Donald Trump as suffering from ‘toxic positivity’, an attitude that provided the seedbed for the conspiracy theories and dualistic worldview that became embedded in the Trump Whitehouse. The goal of my essay is twofold: first, to explain the origins of ‘toxic positivity’ in the late nineteenth-century movement known as New Thought and, second, to show how and why Trump’s brand of ‘toxic positivity’ appealed to the conservative evangelical Christians, who became such fervent supporters of a trice-married adulterer with little knowledge of Christianity.
