Important Topics: Variation in Leadership Trait Analysis Scores by Topic

Margaret Hermann’s Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) is a popular approach within Foreign Policy Analysis for assessing a leader’s public persona and their corresponding behavior. The most common approach is to create a summary profile consisting of scores for seven individual differences. Unfortunately, summary profiles often fail to explain the difference in policy behaviors on different topics, such as trade versus immigration, or toward different actors. For example, it is difficult for a summary profile of President Trump to account for both his October 2025 financial support for Argentina and his initiation of armed conflict with purported agents of Venezuela in September 2025. An exploratory study of Trump’s foreign policy using the Topics coding scheme for Profiler Plus presented here shows that topic-based supplemental profiles can account for the apparent contradiction in Trump’s behavior with large differences in Distrust and Task Orientation.