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President Donald Trump has developed a taste for war. He did not used to have an appetite for armed conflict. To the contrary. He frequently insisted that he was a president for peace and, in his second inaugural address, he declared that he would measure his success not just by wars we win but by “wars we never get into.”

That though was then. Since then, he has intervened near and far by using America’s military might to accomplish or to try to what he deemed a desirable end. This most obviously and ominously includes, a few days ago, in Iran. In Iran again, this time far more forcefully than previously.

Trump’s intervention has of course triggered an avalanche of reactions at home and abroad. Here then are just three more.

First, ironically, Trump’s most recent decision to undertake American military intervention comes just when his health is again being questioned. His mental health. For years it has been said of the president that he is, among other things, an extreme narcissist who, moreover, is divorced from reality. But Trump’s behaviors even in recent weeks have triggered a new onslaught of questions. His proclivities to extreme self-aggrandization and self-mythologizing have become even more exaggerated, unsettling even some of those who up to now were strong supporters. Have the countless attacks on Trump’s proclivity to cult of personality stopped him? Not at all. If anything, he has become more extreme, more of what he was before, more of what he has always been which includes being largely indifferent to what others think or feel.  

Second, Trump went ahead in Iran without requesting Congressional authorization, or informing America’s allies, or explaining to the American people why he was authorizing military action and what was the endgame. He went ahead on his own, with the blessings only of those who anyway bless everything he does and says. A bad idea. It’s especially a bad idea in a time when, instead of going meekly and mildly along with their political leaders, followers are nearly as likely to not go along with them. This is the third decade of the 21^st century. And in the third decade of the 21^st century followers – voters, constituents, electorates in liberal democracies – cannot be counted on to follow. Several prominent members of Trump’s own MAGA base are already rebelling against his assault on Iran, and they are attacking the president personally and politically for deciding to get militarily involved. Moreover, as of this morning, only 27% of the American people support the president’s engagement in armed conflict in the Middle East. President Harry Truman committed American forces to the war in Korea without formal congressional authorization. But we are not living in the time of Truman.  

Thirdly, while most Americans tend to think of Trump – or at least they did – as primarily a domestic president, in the past year his impact on world politics has become clear. As Robert Kagan pointed out in The Atlantic, the second Trump administration declared the American dominated world order was over.* Trump demanded America’s traditional allies in Europe and Asia take over their own defense. Trump launched aggressive tariffs against them, and he waged ideological and political warfare against them. Further, he threatened territorial aggression against, of all countries, Canada and Denmark. Meanwhile, Trump seems to regard Russia and China not so much as adversaries but as partners in carving up the world. Even before America’s most recent intervention in Iran, Kagan concluded that “Trump’s megalomania is transforming the United States from international leader to international pariah, and the American people will suffer the consequences for years to come.”

Kagan regards Trump’s imprint as permanent or, at least, indefinite. I though am less certain. I think it possible that post-Trump will be a return to both domestic and foreign politics as they were pre-Trump. Not exactly pre-Trump, of course. But much more akin to pre-Trump than to Trump.

The far future depends in good part on the near future. Trump’s second presidential term has nearly three more years to go. The more badly they go the more likely history will treat him as an awful aberration.   

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*March 2026 issue.

NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. MY EXCUSES ARE LACK OF MORE TIME – AND SO MANY OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, IT, THIS VERY SHORT COURSE, CONTINUES.

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As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.

The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writers as leaders – or, if you prefer, leaders as writers – are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Recall that their immediate predecessor in this series was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. All three were products of the Enlightenment and all three were products of their time – specifically the year 1848. As I previously wrote, it was a year during which there were, in several countries in Europe, popular revolutions against unpopular monarchs. Perhaps no surprise then that 1848 was not just the year during which Stanton penned her brilliant feminist rant but also the year during which Marx and Engels wrote the most famous, and infamous, revolutionary document of all time, The Communist Manifesto.

It is impossible to overestimate the enormous and enduring impact of the Manifesto. Consider this: in the mid-20^th century Communists were in control of fully one third of the world’s total population. Moreover, communism endures, most obviously in China. Under the iron grip of President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China continues to have final say on nearly everything of consequence in China, including history and ideology, politics, economics and education.    

But while there is debate about how much, if at all, The Communist Manifesto bears responsibility for what has been done in its name, there is no doubt that in general communist regimes – especially but not exclusively those in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao Zedong – have been relentlessly ruthless, oppressive and repressive, brutal even, to the point of killing many millions of their own.   

However, to read The Communist Manifesto is not to read a political document so much as an economic one. For what Marx and Engels sought to address was what they considered the insidious impact of capitalism. The insidious impact of dividing people into two groups: one consisting of small numbers of employers (owners, bourgeoisie) who were permanently advantaged; the other consisting of large numbers of employees (workers, proletariats) who were permanently disadvantaged. As they saw it the situation that even then existed was intolerable and unacceptable and certain to get worse. It was certain to get worse unless someone or something intervened to stop it. Which is of course where Marx’s and Engels’s economic argument become a political one. It’s impossible to overturn the economy, they argued, without overturning the ruling class.

Hence the urgency for the “formation of the proletariat into a class.” Hence the urgency for the “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy.” Hence the urgency for the “conquest of political power by the proletariat”! And hence the need for The Communist Manifesto – a treatise in which pens were used as swords. A treatise that ended with an exhortation to revolution. You have nothing to lose but your chains…. Workers of the world, unite!

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Excerpts from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto – 1848.

• A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism….

• The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, professor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another….

• The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

• The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

• In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things….

During his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night President Donald Trump did not once mention artificial intelligence. Which in a perfect world would be a curious if not even unconscionable omission. But in this imperfect world it must be added that he is not alone. Nearly none of America’s political leaders – nor for that matter political leaders anywhere else in the world – are addressing other than perhaps tangentially what arguably are humankind’s greatest challenges. First, to make it as certain as possible that AI will do no harm; second, to harness AI to our collective advantage.

Come to think of it, no surprise. Political leaders are usually too ignorant of AI intelligently even to talk about it. To be sure, both the president of China and the president of the United States know enough to know that they do not want to lead from behind. Both Trump and Xi Jinping are intent on having their respective countries out front in the tech arms race. Still, more specifics are not just unknown to them but to nearly everyone over the age of – to pick a random number – 35.

When it comes to AI, therefore, the only leaders that we have are, by default, leaders in the tech industry. Which brings me to the point of this post. Arguably the only one among them who is not just brilliant but thoughtful and responsible – and, deliberately, a public intellectual – is co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei.

Can you imagine, say, Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison, not to speak of Elon Musk, penning a document as smart and filled with forethought as this one, titled “The Adolescence of Technology”? (The link is below .) It should be required reading for any leader of any organization of any size anywhere in the world – which, alas, it is not.    

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology

In an interview he gave last weekend, White House border czar Tom Homan announced that more than 1,000 immigration agents (ICE) had already left the previously ICE-besieged city of Minneapolis. He added that several hundred more would exit in the coming days and that only a “small force” would be left behind.

Though Homan did not of course say so, and though the victory could be considered Pyrrhic, it was nevertheless a win for the citizens of Minneapolis and a loss for the administration of Donald Trump. The latter had been so badly shamed by the former, and at such a high political cost, that the president reluctantly concluded he had little choice but to retreat.        

How did this happen? How did it come to pass that the followers, the people of Minneapolis, forced the leader, the American President, to back down? After all, the people were unarmed whereas ICE agents, agents of the administration, were heavily armed. It appeared then that the people in the streets, the protesters, were weak while the authorities were strong. Especially since the people in positions of authority had not just the power of a gun to back them up but the power of the state.

Before answering the question of how the ostensibly weak beat the ostensibly strong I want to stress how counterintuitive the outcome was. After all, our assumption is that those in positions of power have power, power that they can exercise over those who have no power and even over those who have less power than they do. Our assumption equally is that those who are not in positions of power have no power or, at least, not much power in comparison with those in positions of power. But what came to pass in Minneapolis demonstrates it ain’t necessarily so. That what is expected to be the outcome is not always, not necessarily anyway, the outcome.

The outcome in this case was not an act of magic, nor was it happenstance, nor was it, so far as we know, divine intervention.  Instead, it was the result of a lot of ordinary people doing a lot of hard work – as individuals and as members of groups – while demonstrating discipline and determination. Above all these people – the resisters – remained throughout unafraid to do what they thought was right, unafraid to speak truth to power.       

If the overarching strategy of those in Minneapolis who strongly objected to Trump’s immigration policies was organized resistance, what were their tactics? What more specifically did the resisters do to push the president to tell Homan to tell ICE to retreat?

Their tactics included but were not limited to:

• Organizing
• Participating (the more protesters the better the protest)
• Recruiting (the more various as well as more numerous the protesters – representing civic groups, religious groups, educational groups, business groups, etc. – the better the protest)
• Employing tactics that were deliberately, consistently, and exclusively nonviolent
• Networks (the more networks – for example of protesters, caregivers, and communicators – the better)
• Employing different strokes for different folks (using different tactics in different situations and with different constituencies)  
• Employing technologies (for example, filming what was happening and using social media to inform, connect, incite, recruit, and activate)

What happened in Minnesota was so evident a case of a leader overstepping his authority, and so evident a case of followers resisting a leader overstepping his authority, it did not take long for the story to attract attention. Especially after the second fatal shooting of a follower who failed in the eyes of ICE to follow, the context widened beyond the city of Minneapolis and even the state of Minnesota. The context was now national and American public opinion was becoming a factor. Enter the pollsters. Once their findings became public, it was game over. The followers in Minneapolis had won. And the leader in the White House had lost.

I’ve written about the high rate of leader turnover before. (See, for example, my two posts linked below.) It’s not a phenomenon limited to one sector or another, it’s across the board. Or to be more precise, in democracies it’s across the board. In autocracies, the tenure of political leaders, of strongmen, is as long as its ever been. To wit in Egypt, Turkey, and Hungary and, of course, in Iran, Russia, and China.  

Democracies are different. In recent years British prime ministers have turned over at an almost embarrassingly rapid rate. In Germany Olaf Scholz, the chancellor before the current one, Friedrich Merz, lasted less than four years. His immediate predecessor, in contrast, Anglela Merkel, served for more than sixteen years. Even in the United States has been churn. Bill Clinton was president for eight years. His successor, George W. Bush, was president for eight years. And his successor, Barack Obama was also president for eight years. But his successor, Donald Trump, was voted out by the American electorate after four years. As was his successor, Joe Biden. Turnover in Congress, heading into the 2026 election, is also high, with over 10% of members not seeking reelection. Which represents a “significant, accelerated transition.”

In the private sector the churn has been even greater, and it has been faster. “Turnover in CEOs is Most in Over a Decade” ran a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. The reasons why? Given my insistence that leadership is a system not a person – a system that has three parts, the leader, the followers and the context – I find the explanations the Journal provides necessary but not sufficient. The Journal claims the reasons for the high rate of turnover at the top are contextual. Changes in the context that include, “the swift rise of artificial intelligence, the unraveling of long-established trade practices, and an unsettled economy and geopolitical order.”

All true. Each of these pertains. But context is not the only reason for the change. The other reason is the third cog in the system – the followers. Who more precisely am I talking about? Who needs to follow CEOs for CEOs to get their jobs done? Who needs to fall into line not just literally but rhetorically? To, in other words, go along with the leader without incessant bitching and moaning, without incessant belittling and complaining?

The list is not long, but usually it’s large. The list is especially large when we are talking about CEOs of large publicly held companies. In which case the list of those who must follow the leader for the leader to do their work includes boards of directors, C-suite executives, rank and file employees, stockholders, clients and customers, and supply chain providers. Again, not a long list but a list that could consist of followers numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands, even in the millions and tens of millions. Most of whom must acquiesce to CEOs – or at least not resist them – for them to do what they were hired to do.

But what if some or, worse, many among this long list of people refuse to follow? Or, what if they follow but they do so only grudgingly and reluctantly, while carping and criticizing whoever their leader? Not a pretty picture. Not a circumstance calculated to satisfy or gratify the leader or to make their position tenable for long.     

Which is precisely what’s happening. The reasons for the high rates of leader turnover are not then just about context. They are also about followers who are bolder and ruder than they used to be; less patient and quicker to pull the trigger; armed with more information, and with ample outlets, especially social media, for registering their complaints and airing their grievances.   

For leaders – leaders in every sector – times are tough. While their financial compensation is often outsized and sometimes outrageous, their other compensations tend to be fewer and further between.  

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Leaders are Leaving – in Droves

Turnover at the Top

Hardly a day passes when Artificial Intelligence does not in some way make news.  Make news by describing or predicting its impact on our work and play. On our safety and sanity. On our present and future. Make news by emphasizing the warp speed with which it is evolving. And by sketching the scary scenarios that AI inevitably suggests.     

Maybe AI technology and automation will turn out like others that we, we humans, have experienced. But maybe they will not. Maybe AI really is something new and different. Maybe it really is better by a wide margin than it was even six months ago. Maybe it really will, as AI expert Matt Shumer predicts, replace not just specific skills but constitute a “substitute for cognitive work.” And maybe it really will eliminate the notion of retraining because whatever we might train for will rapidly be supplanted by it.

Given the speed with which AI is evolving, and the radical uncertainties associated with it, what’s a leader to do? Any leader. Any leader of any group or organization in the private, public, or nonprofit sectors; any leader anywhere in the world. What’s a leader to do when the staid Financial Times has a headline like this one, that seems nothing so much as a cry for help. “Are Anthropic’ s New AI Work Tools Game-Changing for Professionals?” (2/16/26)

As always, the specific answers to the general questions depend on the situation. But as leadership experts have thought about how to respond to AI, they have come up with answers intended to apply across the board.

Ironically, the information is at our fingertips. If you ask AI how leaders should lead in the age of AI you get some perfectly reasonable responses. Leaders should “shift from fear to adoption.” Leaders should focus on augmenting “human capabilities.” Leaders should develop a “culture of experimentation.” Leaders should “invest in upskilling.” And leaders should “focus on human centric skills” such as empathy, judgement, and strategic thinking.

Hard to quarrel with any of these. But none respond in depth or with any originality to the “radical uncertainty” to which I refer.

What then can leaders learn that would be new and different? That would better prepare them for changes as unanticipated as unprecedented. Further, what can leaders do for their followers? How can leaders equip their followers for AI that is “game-changing”? For technologies that threaten truths that feel familiar because they are familiar. They are all that we know.  

To these questions I have no simple answer. I will, though, propose this. That we go back to basics. That we go back to the building blocks that for centuries – for many centuries – were considered the foundation of a good education.   

What were they? Before all they were the humanities. The word derives of course from the word human – humanities are academic disciplines that center on what it means to be human. As opposed to being, for example, a bat or a table or a machine or a robot. What are the disciplines that constitute the humanities? The building blocks to which I refer? They are language and literature, history and philosophy, religion, rhetoric and art, among a few others.

Those familiar with my work know that I advocate that leaders learn their craft in three steps or stages.* First, leaders should be educated (in leadership generally); second leaders should be trained (in their area specifically) ; finally, leaders should be developed (lifelong). In this post, I am taking education a step further: I am suggesting that in the age of AI leaders prepare to lead by being educated in, or at least exposed to, the humanities.

AI has already raised the ultimate question – what does it mean to be human? Will artificial intelligence supplant human intelligence as we understand it? Will the distinctions between humans and robots remain real and important, or will they dimmish and finally recede altogether? Will robots read the Bible, Shakespeare, and Faulkner for pleasure? Will they make art like Rembrandt, Rubens, and Rauschenberg? Will they be Christians or Muslims or Jews or Buddhists? Will they craft speeches as eloquent as those of Demosthenes, Lincoln and King?    

We cannot now know – any more than we can know exactly how leaders should prepare for leading in the time of AI. But what we can know is this. Leaders should play to their strength – which is that they are human. Leaders are human and their followers are human. Hence the virtues of the humanities. They are intellectual and, importantly, visceral reminders of our shared humanity. Reminders that we share things – feelings, longings – that robots do not. At least not yet.

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*See my book, Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, 2018).

China’s President Xi Jinping is one of the leads in my book, Leadership from Bad to Worse. “Bad” and “worse” are though in the eye of the beholder. They mean different things to different people. Xi, for example, has been in many ways a good leader, in many ways remarkably effective. Above all he has continued, even accelerated the transformation of China from global backwater to global powerhouse. But from the perspective of a democrat, he has been a bad leader. Specifically, over the decade plus that Xi has been president, he has become increasingly oppressive and repressive both inside mainland China and now, crucially, additionally, Hong Kong. As well, he has become increasingly assertive outside China, not least repeatedly reaffirming his close and enduring ties to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Xi is an autocrat, a strong man, maybe even, depending on the definition, a tyrant or a dictator.  He has refashioned the Chinese Communist Party in his own image. He has purged his perceived political enemies and suppressed domestic dissent. In keeping with communist orthodoxy, he has aggressively reinserted the state into the economy. He has clamped down on the professional military. And in keeping with tyrannical tradition, he has encouraged a cult of personality. For example, beginning in primary school and through university students are taught “Xi Jinping Thought.”  

Xi is 72 years old and he seems to like his job. This means that barring the unforeseen he will remain president at least until 2032, when his next term is over. But the man is no fool. Xi knows that barring the unforeseen is impossible – which is why he continues to do what he has done throughout his tenure. Which is to purge his enemies real and imagined. Leaders like Xi believe that only continuous purges can preclude other leaders, and other power centers, from challenging their dominance.

It’s hard to describe how dysfunctional this is especially when, as is often the case, real or imagined enemies are in the highest ranks of the military. And when sustaining and conveying military might is one of your top priorities not just abroad but at home.

China will present the United States with formidable competitive challenges for decades to come. Top of the list is militarily. But when Xi eliminates his high command, he eliminates his most experienced and expert military leaders. Western observers were stunned last month to see Xi purge China’s top general, General Zhang Youxia. It was as described by the New York Times, “the most stunning escalation yet” in Xi’s purge of the military elite. It was nothing less than “total annihilation of the high command.”

Even paranoids have real enemies. Which is to say two things at the same time. Leaders who are dictators are usually paranoid. And leaders who are dictators usually have real enemies. President Xi seems to have concluded that China’s top military ranks are or at least they might be riddled with his political opponents. And that, though the short-term costs would surely be high, he had no long-term choice but to dispose of those who conceivably could challenge his authority. General Youxia was charged with “grave violations of discipline and the law.” But no one in the West believed that purging Youxia was about graft. Everyone in the West believed that it was about eliminating possible presidential competition.

China’s leadership culture is the antithesis of America’s leadership culture. The United States is less than three hundred years old, and it has a political culture that is anti-authority. China is more than three thousand years old, and it has a political culture that is pro-authority. A political culture that is strictly hierarchical and in which those in the middle and at the bottom are expected without question to defer to those at the top.

Similarly, in situations in which American followers might opt to resist, Chinese followers would be highly unlikely to do the same. No matter what they think or feel, Chinese followers are far, far more likely to fall into line than American followers. And the Chinese people are far, far less likely than the American people to protest in the street or for that matter anywhere else. Since its inception the United States has been riddled with resisters. China has never in its exceedingly long history, been the same.  Which leaves Xi largely free to purge his putative opponents as he deems necessary and desirable.

Jeffrey Epstein has been described in different ways. As a pedophile and a grifter. As a fraudster and a trafficker. As a serial rapist and a sociopath. He has not, however, been described as a leader. Which he was – Epstein was a leader. The most mesmerizing thing about him – the reason why years after he came to our attention he remains a national obsession – was his singular ability to get so many of the highest and mightiest of men to follow where he led.  

Epstein was not a “leader” as this word is usually understood – because this word is usually misunderstood. Usually we associate “leader” with a person in a position of authority. Such as a president or a principal, a general or a chief executive. People like this are leaders, they are formal leaders. But as we know when we think about it some people are informal leaders. They do not hold positions of authority, but they are able nevertheless to get other people to do what they want them to do.

How exactly? How exactly was Epstein able to do what he did? To get other men, many of whom were leaders themselves, to follow where he led? Epstein had no formal authority. But rather early on he began to accumulate power and gain influence. By “power” I refer to Epstein’s ability to reward men if they did what he wanted them to do. And to his ability to punish them, or credibly to threaten to punish them, if they did not do what he wanted them to do. By “influence” I refer to Epstein’s ability to persuade men to do what he wanted them to do of their own volition.   

One of the rewards that Epstein provided was sex. He provided men who wanted sex with young women with sex with young women. But to see Epstein only or even primarily as a pedophile or a trafficker misses the point. The reason Epstein has resonated for so long and the reason his tentacles have reached so far is because he also had influence. He pulled people into his orbit by beguiling them with his homes as well as his harems; his wealth as well as his women; his persuasiveness as well as his purse; his connections and associations, his intuitiveness and intelligence, his charm and his chutzpah. Epstein did not, in other words, peddle only young women. He was also a banker and a broker, a financer, a flatterer, and a convener whose attractions included money and information; fabulous homes featuring excellent food and better guests; and a large network of powerful players in government and business; finance, technology and philanthropy; entertainment; academia; the media and the law – as well as occasional royals from Europe and the Middle East. All these before – and a decade after – he had been indicted, convicted and imprisoned in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution,

To read some of the e mails between Epstein and his followers is to understand his hold over them. He had tangible assets with which he could reward them. And he had hard information with which he could destroy them. But… Epstein was also described, repeatedly, as being exceptionally good company and an exceptionally good host. Woody Allen was a dinner guest at Epstein’s house. But so was Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi Allen, who in one recently released email thanks Epstein for hosting the them for dinner the night before. To understand why so many powerful people – people who themselves were leaders in their respective fields – followed where Epstein led must be to understand that many of them seemed genuinely to enjoy his company in addition to valuing the benefits that he bestowed.

The voluminous correspondences show that Epstein was associated not just with sex but more generally with the good things in life. These included the pleasures of the largest privately owned home in Manhattan, a private plane, a private island in the Caribbean, good food, good company, and a good time. Just one example: Epstein offered right wing activist and media executive Steve Bannon, with whom he exchanged thousands of texts, the use of an apartment in Paris, a home in Palm Beach, and his private plane. Epstein also gifted Bannon with among other things an Apple watch for Christmas, and he promised to help Bannon raise money for his political activities. But if Epstein procured sex for Bannon there is, so far, no evidence for it.

Like all bad leaders, Epstein did not act alone. He had a large band of enablers, of followers who made it possible for him to do what he did including committing countless crimes. Ghislaine Maxwell was only the most prominent of these, she was Epstein’s indispensable procurer and facilitator. But in addition to Maxwell was a large cast of characters – ranging from bankers and brokers to pilots and drivers to cooks and cleaners – who directly or indirectly enabled his wrongdoing. Followers who followed their leader though they knew or at least strongly suspected that what he was doing was wrong.

Epstein was a leader. He was a bad leader and he still is. He left behind a slew of women victims. And even as I write his hand is reaching from the grave to ruin the reputations, wreck the careers, and destroy the lives of those who chose to follow his lead.

I could be biased. Because I’ve been in higher education all my professional life, maybe it just seems like a microcosm of the world in which we live. Or maybe higher education really does reflect how, in the United States at least, the traditional roles of leader and follower are often reversed. Now leaders frequently follow, and followers frequently lead.

Decades ago, when I, the professor, walked into a classroom, I could assume certain truths. First, that students in the room would be somewhat deferential. Second, that my managers, for example my deans, would leave me largely alone. Would, if I conducted myself properly, give me the leeway to do my job as I saw fit. Third, that the presidents of my institutions would themselves be left alone to lead as they deemed best. That they were free to make decisions without relentless judgment or interference. Finally, I could assume that parents, politicians, and the public generally trusted colleges and universities to carry out their mission with reasonable intelligence and integrity.

 Now none of these apply. Or if they apply at all they do so only episodically and unpredictably. I recently retired from teaching in higher education. But by the time I did instead of students calling me “Professor Kellerman” or “Dr. Kellerman,” they called me “Barbara.” Not that I cared, but it reflected a broader pattern in which authority and expertise were being diminished. Further, instead of being left to teach what I deemed necessary and desirable, I felt obliged to be hypervigilant. I made as certain as I reasonably could that my curriculum and even my informal comments would not be judged by someone inside or outside the classroom inadequate, prejudicial, or politically incorrect.

We have long since got to the point where close, careful monitoring of leaders by followers reaches the top. Presidents of colleges and universities are now subject to incessant judgements, containments and criticisms by a large cast of characters most of whom lack both the experience and expertise to judge. Instead of higher education being exempted from our prying, jaundiced eyes, it too is suspect and it too is vulnerable. Notwithstanding an occasional exception, Americans’ trust in higher education has declined for a decade.

This week a headline in the New York Times read, “New Laws Subject Faculty to Increased Surveillance.” The article was about how college professors, who not long ago were essentially free from political interference, were now being “watched by state officials, senior administrators, and the students themselves.”

This week another Times headline read, “Talks on Harvard Deal Veer into Uncertainty After Trump’s Attack.” This piece describes how vulnerable the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, is to the whims, wants, and wishes of the president of the United States. Garber does, of course, have arrows in his quiver and within certain parameters he has resisted the Trump administration. Still, as it pertains to Harvard, he has no choice but somehow to respond to what Trump does and says, which, I should add, can be one thing on one day and another thing on another. For all of Garber’s authority then, Trump trumps him. This does not mean that Garber must do what Trump wants him to do. But it does mean that Trump pushes Garber into a corner who is then forced to figure out how to get out.

Nor is President Trump himself immune to the trend to which I allude. He sells himself as an American strongman. But especially in the United States, and especially in the third decade of the 21^st century, seeming to be a powerful leader and being one are not the same thing. American leaders are curiously, astonishingly, vulnerable to their followers. Don’t believe me? Ask Claudine Gay. She was Alan Garber’s immediate presidential predecessor. But her tenure at the top of Harvard’s hierarchy lasted all of six months and two days.

In the last year Americans have tended to attribute what happens not just at home but abroad to a single individual. To President Donald Trump. Love him or loathe him, he is seen as the piston that drives the engine.

Which is natural. It’s natural to make the “leadership attribution error” – which is to credit single individuals, whoever is at the top, with what goes right. And to blame single individuals, whoever is at the top, for what goes wrong.

It’s natural to make inferences about historical causation – and it’s natural to want to keep it simple. To keep it simple by persuading ourselves that there is only one explanation for why what is happening is happening – the leader. The leadership attribution error has the virtue of seeming to keep things simple while simultaneously seeming to order an otherwise disturbingly disordered world. The personification of social causation makes our world easier to understand than it would be if we had to account for several not to speak of countless contextual variables.

But if, as I have argued, leadership is not a person but a system, then all bets are off. Then those of us with an abiding interest in leadership – and especially in why what happens in fact happens – have no choice but to complicate our lives. To see leadership as a system with three parts, each of which is of equal importance. The leader. The followers. And the contexts.  

The reason I raise this now is because we, we Americans, are starting to look ahead to the next congressional election in November 2026, and to the next presidential election in November 2028.  This makes it the right time, the necessary time for anyone with a vested interest in American politics to stop fixating on Trump and to start widening their lens. To wean themselves from thinking that the American president is all powerful and to remind themselves that what the American people do and do not do in the coming months and years will matter. They will matter a lot. As will the larger national and international contexts within which American presidential politics is situated.

          It’s complicated. The world in which we live is complicated, which is why being obsessed with any single individual makes no sense. Even extremely powerful leaders do not act alone. They act in tandem with others – others to whom they are close and others at a greater or even a great remove.  Moreover, they, we, do not act in a vacuum. Our efforts are either enhanced by or constrained by the context(s) within which we are situated.

Freud believed that a biographer’s hopes of finding “coherence, motivation and causality were forlorn.” For lives, he thought, even the lives of strongmen, are dictated by “unpredictable instinctual impulse” and by “the caprice and the vicissitudes of circumstance.”* So, it’s important that we avoid the tempting trap of reductionism. The tempting trap of the leader-attribution error. The tempting trap of the blame game. That instead we force ourselves to see the world as it is. A world driven by leaders. And by a large cast of other characters that can include me and you. And by the “caprices and vicissitudes of circumstance.”

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*The quotes in this paragraph are from Stephen Downs, Gustav Mahler (Reaktion Books, 2025).  Freud, I might add, spent the last six years of his life (1933-1939) under the black cloud of Hitler.