The Psychology of Trump Meeting Zelensky at Pope's Funeral
The potential impact of a funeral meeting on diplomatic relations.
Updated April 30, 2025 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Just a few minutes before the beginning of the formal funeral service, Trump and Zelensky met briefly inside St. Peter’s Basilica.
The two leaders, who recently were at loggerheads, were now seen, surprisingly, in deep, apparently collaborative, discussion. The White House described the 15-minute meeting with Zelensky as "very productive," while the Ukrainian president said it had the "potential to become historic."
It was Trump's first face-to-face encounter with the Ukrainian president since February's acrimonious Oval Office punch-up.
How to account for such an apparent dramatic change in attitude to each other, and also to explain why the conversation might have been much more cooperative and fruitful, compared with the previous shouting match?
The St Peter's Basilica encounter could have 'worked' better, psychologically, for all sorts of reasons. After all, they were likely to 'bump' into each other at an event both were invited to, but this also meant they were meeting more informally and spontaneously, without an army of adversarial advisers, and both understood, given the solmenity of the occasion, that they would have to emotionally restrain themselves even if provoked.
But beyond these more obvious explanations, is it possible that there is something about the psychology of funerals, operating even at an unconscious level, that could have made a key difference?
The Psychology of "Terror Management Theory"
In fact, there is a controversial branch of academic psychology referred to as Terror Management Theory (TMT), which might also account for what happened.
Psychologists Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg pioneered TMT after being inspired by books written by the late anthropologist Ernest Becker, including The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971) and The Denial of Death (1973).
TMT posits that this clash of our core desire for life, with awareness of the inevitability of our demise, creates paralyzing terror, perhaps even at an unconscious level.
The answer, according to TMT, is that we turn to a meaningful, orderly, and comforting understanding of life, which helps us come to terms with the problem of death.
Reminding people of the inevitability of death leads to a broad range of attempts to maintain faith in their worldviews. Unconscious psychological work is triggered when emotionally defending against threats to our sense we are going to live forever.
TMT, therefore, leads to what is referred to as the mortality salience hypothesis: reminding people of the inevitability of death, just like attending a funeral, can generate massive yet rapid psychological transformation.
In the typical study, participants are reminded of death and then exposed to challenging experiences.
One of the earliest and most widely replicated findings of TMT is that reminders of death increase nationalism, rendering people more accepting of those who are similar to themselves, while more antagonistic toward those who are different.
Being Reminded of Death Produces Psychological Transformation
Interestingly, in light of the predictions of TMT, writing on his Truth Social account, Trump reportedly said of Putin, after the meeting with Zelensky, that now the Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities "makes me think that maybe he (Putin) doesn't want to stop the war, he's just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through 'Banking' or 'Secondary Sanctions?'"
Trump had previously said Russia and Ukraine were "very close to a deal."
In a very early study into TMT, reminding people of death led them to react more positively toward a person who praised America and more negatively toward a person who criticized the United States. When subtly reminded of death, Germans sit closer to fellow Germans and farther away from Turks, while Dutch citizens exaggerate how much the Dutch national soccer team will beat the rival German opposition.
In a recent study, people interviewed in close proximity to a funeral home indicated attitudes toward two charities. Those who were interviewed in front of the funeral home reported more favorability toward these charities than those who were interviewed several blocks away. Also the funeral home seems to prompt a preference for more 'American' charities.
But did the great Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens, also anticipate these most recent psychological research findings?
This is the argument mounted in a paper entitled, 'The Scrooge Effect: Evidence That Mortality Salience Increases Prosocial Attitudes and Behavior'. In A Christmas Carol , the ghost of Christmas past and the ghost of Christmas present show Ebenezer Scrooge how his meanness and self-centredness have harmfully affected his own life, and the lives of others.
However, it is not until the ghost of Christmas future displays vividly for Scrooge his own future, a lonely inscription on the head of a tombstone, that his miserliness and greediness give way to kindness and consideration for others. Scrooge was able to manage his terror of total extinction by changing for the better, making social connections, and therefore developing a sense of personal significance, which are parts of the psychological defence against our universal fear of death.
So, the pioneers of TMT contend that A Christmas Carol becomes a literary foreseeing of the power of mortality salience.
TMT is contending that funerals remind us of death and our mortality, and our best defence against these disturbing thoughts is to become more "prosocial" and less self-interested.
But the key emotional defence is the idea of immortality.
Two Kinds of Immortality
Literal immortality refers to those belief systems that promise that death is not the end of existence, that some part of us will live on, perhaps in heaven, and so TMT predicts that worldwide religious conviction in the afterlife would have inevitably developed for these psychological reasons.
It is no accident, according to terror management theorists, that beliefs in literal immortality are nearly universal across the planet and throughout history, with the specifics varying widely from culture to culture.
But there is also, besides literal immortality, the hope of attaining symbolic immortality.
This is achieved by being part of something larger, more significant, and more enduring than ourselves, such as our families, nations, ethnic groups, and even professions. These entities will continue to exist long after our deaths, so we attain symbolic immortality by becoming valued parts of them.
Is it possible that these sorts of psychological processes were put in train by Trump and Zelensky attending the funeral of the Pope?
Could this also explain the remarkably different meeting?
A Note of Caution About Extrapolating from Theory
Terror Management Theory remains controversial, and its predictions are not always replicated in experiments, plus it's sometimes difficult to understand why a particular result would have been specifically predicted by TMT.
Maybe one of its most valuable contributions is that it helps us focus on how we want to be remembered after we are gone. Maybe the true vanity of our leaders would become better illuminated if they were asked more directly what they want their enduring legacy to be.
The Presidency has just passed its first one hundred days, with various assessments of what this tumultuous beginning foretells for our future.
But maybe it all begins to finally make more sense if Donald Trump , like many politicians, is basically really always pursuing his own brand of immortality.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.