Healthy guilt can lead to remorse and self-correction. What happens when both are missing?
I was watching Katy Tur's show the other day and a guest was discussing Trump's grifting, his crypto scheme and charging for early Truth Social posts. He said "shamelessness was his superpower." I thought this was a great description and checked to see it was applied to him before. It was at least twice:
In May 2025, MSNBC ran a segment specifically titled "His superpower is his shamelessness": A look at Trump's crypto, with Teddy Schleifer and William D. Cohan discussing the ethics of Trump's crypto ventures.
And the formulation goes back even further. A 2019 Washington Post column by Max Boot was literally titled "Trump's superpower is his shamelessness."
Then I got to thinking about shame and its cousin guilt.
The simplest distinction is that guilt is about behavior, while shame is about the self: guilt says, "I did something wrong"; shame says, "There is something wrong with me."
Trump seems incapable of experiencing either of these.
Healthy guilt can serve a purpose that shame often does not. Appropriate guilt can lead to acknowledgment, responsibility, apology, restitution, and changed behavior. Shame is more likely to produce hiding, defensiveness, humiliation, or attacks on whoever exposed the failing.
For decades, existential philosophers and humanistic psychologists have distinguished the capacity to experience appropriate guilt-- recognizing that one has actually done something wrong and accepting responsibility for it-- from the excessive, irrational or neurotic guilt that can impair psychological health. (See footnote > 1
Clearly, the boy on the right in the illustration at the top of the page represents Donald "No Guilt, No Shame" Trump.
He is the child who gets caught red-handed and responds not with embarrassment, remorse, or even a moment of self-reflection, but with a smirk.
In the cartoon below he has moved beyond sneaking a cookie or two and and he's cleaned out the jar entirely. That's the point: Trump's most striking trait is not simply that he does things most politicians know better than to do, but that being caught seems to carry so little emotional cost for him -- and to make matters worse he rarely if ever suffers any significant consequences for his misdeeds.
When guilt and shame appear to exert little restraint and significant consequences rarely follow, wrongdoing loses some of its most important deterrents. Hence we see Trump defying one norm after another. Here are a few of the many examples:
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launching and promoting the $TRUMP meme coin, then offering its largest holders access to a presidential dinner; Reuters estimated buyers spent about $148 million acquiring the coin to qualify.
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his company now charging institutional customers $60,000-$100,000 a month for early access to Truth Social posts, including potentially market-moving presidential statements.
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firing independent inspectors general without the required advance notice to Congress; a federal judge subsequently found eight of those firings unlawful.
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