The Price of Presidential Misleadership
For over five years, this newsletter has been dedicated to highlighting and advocating for excellence in leadership, with the fine art of jazz as a model and metaphor of reference and comparison. Our dedication to excellent leadership often centers on business and organizational concerns as well as the cultural and civic spheres.
Unfortunately, in the political sphere at the national level, more often than not, misleadership overpowers excellence.
In her post last week, Jewel referred to the “torrent of masculinist energy in the White House.” Today, I’m going to detail what she alluded to, but first, let’s begin with the previous president's misleadership.
President Biden won the 2020 election square and fair and promised to be a moderating force amid the pandemic, following the chaos and norm-breaking of Trump’s first term. Yet he bent to the will of the far left of the Democratic Party, allowed millions of illegal emigrants to flood the borders, and didn’t keep his promise to be a one-term president—even after it was clear that most Americans felt that he was too old to run again.
Hubris is a key aspect of misleadership. Had Biden and his enablers made better choices, perhaps we wouldn’t be in our current predicament.
In the case of Donald Trump, hubris is only one of a plethora. Jamelle Bouie of the Times argues that he not only wants revenge against those “who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions” but against the very American “public that denied him a second term.” That’s a novel theory, but it seems somewhat of a stretch. In contrast, Peggy Noonan, in her Wall Street Journal op-ed over the weekend advising the Democrats after their embarrassing behavior at Trump’s speech last Tuesday, argued that “‘Trump bad’ isn’t enough to win. He’s a masculine presence, he’s funny, and he likes Americans. Those are three powerful qualities in America right now.”
Fair enough, Ms. Noonan. But you and I (and we all) know good and well that the Americans Trump likes are only those who like him.
Narcissism is a foundation of misleadership.
Andy Kessler of the Journal writes that there are three Donald Trumps: “trolling Trump, transactional Trump, and transformational Trump.” Of the latter, Kessler points to “shrinking government and getting other countries to pay for their own defense.” Closing the Education Department, he says, is another transformational step. (I agree with closing the Education Department, providing funding directly to the states, and increasing competition with a failing public school system via charter schools.) But for every so-called positive transformation, there are knock-on effects galore—tariffs, anyone?—that point downward.
Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan are, for me, the two commentators who best describe the underlying dynamics of Trump’s misleadership. On The Remnant podcast on Saturday, Goldberg hit bullseye:
Trump doesn’t want to be the leader of the free world. He wants to dominate the free world—that’s different. Trump doesn’t want to show moral leadership of any kind. He doesn’t really think about any sort of high-minded understanding of what leadership is. He just wants to be the boss man who’s respected. He wants to be the big man. It’s appalling.
—Jonah Goldberg
At The Dispatch, Goldberg penned an essay, “A Unified Theory of Trump,” in which he explains Trump’s vision and philosophy:
“Those who disagree with me aren’t merely wrong, they are traitors and enemies. Trump once said that, ‘The only important thing is the unification of the people—because the other people don’t mean anything.’ That’s his vision because that’s the nationalist-populist vision. People who don’t cooperate are saboteurs, wreckers, enemies of the national soul and our manifest destiny.”
In “The Bully and His Pulpit,” Andrew Sullivan gives the devil his due, so to speak, and then body slams him:
“Trump’s ability to invent and sustain a false narrative, however crazy and however incoherent, is preternatural. So are his profound skills in psychological abuse deployed to make it stick: gaslighting, intimidating, manipulating, and menacing you so that, in the end, you have no idea what the truth is or could be, and submit to the man if only to get out of his way. . . .
“With huge self-evident lie after huge self-evident lie, insane exaggeration after insane exaggeration, you are instantly forced to choose between walking away from the nutter or acquiescing to his madness. And since he is president, you can’t walk away. So the lies become Truth for millions; narrative replaces reality; aggressors are victims; exploding debt is fiscal prudence; weaponization of the law is anti-weaponization; and on and on. . . ‘Truth’ is entirely a myth he creates at will to justify the use of power. Critical Trump Theory, so to speak, is unfalsifiable, irrational, and seeks to replace objective reality with Trump’s lived experience so that, in the end, only his power remains. Brute power — immune to fact, argument or debate. Trump power. That’s what the Founders started this country to resist. And it’s what a majority of Americans have now given up on.”
Sullivan began the essay with a troubling, revealing account of Trump at five years old:
The best metaphor for Trump’s entire raison d’être is the incident cited above, when at just five years old, he was found throwing rocks at a baby: find someone weaker, first humiliate them, and then destroy them. And for Trump, this doesn’t have to lead anywhere. It is an end in itself. The bullying of others is what gives him life.
—Andrew Sullivan
Character matters—especially in leaders. The duly elected President of the United States is testing the limits of our liberal democratic republic while undermining the global order of the past eighty years. As much as he’d like to be a “king” or a strongman “Don,” Trump listens to the market. The Supreme Court may keep him in check. If congressional Democrats get their act together and Republicans get a spine and stop bending to Trump’s every contradictory whim, political power could be more balanced. And “we the people” can voice our opinions to local and state officials and exercise our vote in the midterms in 2026.
It’s not too late: Let’s remain courageous and vigilant despite the blues of the moment.
That’s the heart of real leadership.