Darwin's enduring theories on instinct evident in Trump's language

Trump has been making these statements for years: in his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal he told his readers that business depends on "instincts, not marketing studies". He even has a "natural instinct for science". However confusing the world is, Trump suggests we don’t need studies or science or brains to understand it.

This idea is comforting to some partly because it rehashes a popular idea about instinct as survival, a powerful tool in the evolutionary a "struggle for existence" described by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, which celebrates its 165th anniversary this week. Talking from his gut, Trump tells us that the world is a battleground, in which only the strong survive; some people have more instincts than others, and they are the people to trust.

Trump isn’t exactly wrong: Darwin saw instinct as a mechanism "leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die". But Darwin was led to this idea partly because he could not stomach the thought that instincts, so often cruel and barbaric, had been created by God. He began chapter 7 of On the Origin of the Species, which he devoted to a discussion of instinct, admitting that he couldn’t "attempt any definition" of what it even was. All he could say was it was performed by "many individuals" of the same species "in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed". Instinct was defined by its mindlessness, the lack of power any individual had to change it. Why would the world be made that way on purpose?

And why would species do such strange and terrible things? Darwin began with a classic example: the cuckoo, cruelly dropping its eggs in other birds’ nests. Had it forgotten its instinct for "maternal love and care", Darwin wondered? Had God made the cuckoo bad? No: natural selection explained that the cuckoo’s body had inherited, over successive generations, the ability to give her offspring an advantage by allowing them to benefit from "the mistaken maternal instinct of another bird". Even if she could not understand it herself, the cuckoo’s cruelty was a means of survival. It wasn’t her fault.

But what about the "extraordinary" and "odious" "slave-making instinct" of certain types of ants? Bad mothers were one thing, but surely slavery was not a fact of nature? Darwin was, famously, against human slavery. But again, natural selection explained things: both ants and humans needed the "division of labour" to survive, but only "civilised man" possessed both "acquired knowledge and manufactured instruments", the intellect and tools to choose who did what tasks. With only "inherited instincts and... inherited tools or weapons", ants could not make choices about fairness or equality as humans could. Instead, they inherited the division of labour in the very forms of their bodies, leaving worker ants sterile, and the fertile free but useless. Even the female hive bee, with her near-unbelievable and "inimitable architectural powers", was working from instinct rather than knowledge. So great was the pressure to survive that both terrible and wonderful things were possible in nature, but most beings had little control or understanding over what they were doing.

Trump's use of instinct

In his victory speech on 6 November 2024, Trump joined together images of technology and fertility as images of history-in-the-making, but he also did it to evoke a sense of American power. He told his audience that he had recently been mesmerised by witnessing on TV a powerful spaceship right itself using fire, which "held it. Just like you hold your baby at night, your little baby". He instantly knew that the tech billionaire Elon Musk was responsible, he said – that Russia, China, even the US government could not produce such a technical feat. "That’s why I love you, Elon," he proclaimed.

Days later, amid widespread speculation about Trump’s plans to continue curtailing women’s reproductive freedoms, Musk would tweet that "instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness". Here we have Darwin’s struggle for existence in its most recognisable form: a sense that history is made by men with the technological power to conquer "nature", to turn human survival into a race against itself, while women (like animals) function as nature, forced into reproduction with all their powers removed. The spaceship is cradled like "a little baby". Trump’s instinct to protect his people is the same thing as his power to conquer and control.

This is a popular evolutionary tale, but it forgets the fragility and powerlessness of instinct that also animates Darwin’s writing. "Each species," Darwin also wrote, "tries to take advantage of the instincts of others, as each takes advantage of the weaker bodily structure of others". Instincts made species vulnerable, as well as strong.

On the anniversary of Darwin’s publication, we might do better to remember the traces of fragility and suffering, of powerlessness and vulnerability, that lace Darwin’s writing on this matter. Or perhaps, even better, like Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin, we ought to do away with the idea of "instinct" altogether and allow ourselves to think more openly about the worlds we could create rather than the ones we have inherited against our will. Perhaps then we’ll truly have a shot at changing our destiny.