Trump mistakes the bully pulpit for bullying leadership — history’s villains were never heroes

Trump Mistakes the Bully Pulpit for Bullying Leadership — History’s Villains Were Never Heroes

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s explosive new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, reveals that Trump views himself as a “great man of history,” whose power eclipses that of feared tyrants like “Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.”

Much of the media coverage has focused on the farce of the sourcing — the quote, attributed to a “presidential historian,” actually came from golf pro Gary Player’s caddy. But what is far more important is the deeper, almost Freudian glimpse into Trump’s psyche — and the blind spots of his vision — that this episode illuminates.

President Theodore Roosevelt famously referred to the U.S. presidency as “the bully pulpit,” using the arcane term “bully” as slang for “superb” or “first-rate” — rather than brutal. Even the frequently miscited Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, published in 1532 and widely distorted ever since, never argued that leaders must be feared rather than loved to be respected.

Trump has a distinctly distorted understanding of what it means to be a great leader of history. In the Trump playbook, leadership is the exercise of raw power, obtained through brute force. He is awed by tyrants — not just current autocrats such as China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who rule their countries with iron fists — but the bloody conquerors of history, such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Hitler, who in his own words “maintained power through fear.”

But what Trump fundamentally misses is that this autocratic mode of leadership — one built on brute force and blood — is not only emotionally and morally hollow, but it ignores the core elements of effective leadership: conviction, compassion, and inspiration. Democracies are composed of citizens with free will, not subjects cowering at the feet of rulers. No leader can unilaterally impose his or her will on the American public the way a patriarch can boss around employees at a family company.

To achieve true greatness as a leader of a democratic society, a president must inspire and anchor followers to an enduring set of values. That is not the Trump approach.

This is a long-running conversation that the first author has had with Trump personally and directly for two decades, some of it playing out in high-profile spats. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld noted in the pages of the Wall Street Journal two decades ago, when he was asked to review the first episode of The Apprentice, that “the assigned........

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