Prefatory Note: My choices for 2025 Leader of the Year and 2025 Follower of the Year – the latter will be revealed in a subsequent post – reflect my political preferences. They are for government that is reasonably democratic and reasonably decent.
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My criterion for 2025 Leader of the Year is the same as it was last year and the years before that. It is not which leader was the most ethical nor is it even which leader was the most effective. It is which leader had the greatest impact. In the past year which leader – more than any other – left their imprint on the time and place in which they lived and led?
This year the answer is obvious. I wish I could be novel, original. But the man makes it impossible. In 2025 no leader has had as seismic an impact on people and place as American President Donald J. Trump.
In theory I suppose this is arguable. The Financial Times designated Nvidia chief executive, Jensen Huang, as its 2025 “Person of the Year.” Huang is, of course, remarkable. Nvidia’s advances in technology have made its chips near indispensable not just at home but abroad. And Nvidia’s advances in business have catapulted the company to where it is now – the most valuable in the world. But Huang’s leadership has been over a period of thirty years, of which the last year has not, in fact, been the most remarkable.
Similarly other leaders such as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin who have had a major impact. Both have been top dog for over a decade (in Putin’s case for over two decades) and neither stood out more this year than any other.
In the last twelve months especially Trump has had the greatest impact of any leader anywhere in the world. He was, of course, president previously, from January 2017 to January 2021. But that was then. The impression he made then was great, but not as great as this time around. This time, this year, his thumb has been so heavy on the scale that he deserves the title, 2025 Leader of the Year.
Leadership is not of course the handiwork of any single individual. Leadership is a system with three parts, each of which is equally important. The leader. The followers. And the context. Trump’s impact cannot therefore be understood apart from what has been up to now his famously loyal base. Or from Republicans in the House and Senate who until recently have stood by him as reliably as obsequiously.
Nor can Trump’s outsized impact be understood apart from the political system within which he operates – which in several ways is deeply flawed. Examples include checks and balances that are neither checking nor balancing; Supreme Court judges getting lifetime appointments; Montana having the same number of senators as California; and the few who are enormously rich having far, far more political clout than the many who are miserably poor.
Still, one of the hallmarks of the Leader of the Year is the degree to which they stand out from whoever else is a player and from whatever else matters. Trump is such a leader. Wherever he is, whenever he does anything or says anything, he sucks the air out of the room.
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in late January there is scarcely a single aspect of American life on which he has not left his stamp. Science and medicine; politics and economics; government and business; ideology and technology; education and religion; culture and the courts; money, media, morals and mores. His outsized impact has been felt not just at home but abroad. Abroad looks different now than it did a year ago – in good part because of Trump.
This piece is a post not a book. So instead of delving into the specifics of his impact on domestic politics and policies, I will single out two aspects of his character that have left their mark on the American people. Presidential character matters. While it is impossible precisely to define character, and equally impossible precisely to describe how it matters, we know from historical experience and contemporaneous evidence that the president’s persona impacts who we, we Americans, are, what we think, and how we behave.
After discussing the impact of two aspects of Trump’s character on the American people, I turn to his impact on American foreign policy. Obviously, I can only skim the surface of how in the last year Trump’s world view has changed the world in which we live. Still, this brief discussion will demonstrate how Trump has used the power and authority of the presidency to turn the ship of state.
The President’s Character – Trump’s Transgression
Never in American history has a president been so badly behaved. It would be tempting to describe him as a toddler unleashed but that would shortchange the seriousness of his offenses and the outrageousness of his coarseness. Between his penchants for corruption and retribution, his proclivities to lying and fabricating, and his tendencies to vulgarities we, the people, have had our hands full. Our hands are full trying to hold to our shared history and common decency; to our past progress toward civil rights, women’s rights, and gay, lesbian and transgender rights; and to the American Dream that recedes as I write. The disappearing American Dream is not of course all Trump’s fault. It’s more that sympathy with, and empathy for those less fortunate than he is not part of his persona. Most of his politics, policies, and preferences bend toward those already securely at the top, not toward those in the middle and certainly not those stuck at the bottom.
To say the president behaves badly does not begin to capture his lack of class and deficiency in decency. Two recent examples. A couple of months ago Trump tweeted an AI video of him in a fighter jet dumping feces on cities crowded with anti-Trump protesters. Upon which a White House spokesperson went on gleefully to post the president defecating “all over these No Kings Losers.” A couple of days ago Trump tweeted his response to the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner, a message less shockingly crass than shockingly heartless. It was so bad that even some otherwise slavishly loyal Republicans felt obliged publicly to distance themselves.
The point is that Trump can’t stop. He can’t stop himself from being that toddler unleashed, from being that bad boy trapped in the body of a visibly aging man. He can’t stop himself from debasing himself, defiling his office and dragging the American people down with him.
Do the president’s transgressions affect us? While it’s impossible to prove a direct connection between cause and effect there is evidence that Trump has had a deleterious impact. According to a 2025 Pew Research poll almost half of Americans think that we are ruder than we used to be, with nearly a fifth saying that we are a lot ruder. Moreover, the coarseness of our political discourse is one of the two reasons cited – the other is social media – for the decline in civility.
Leadership experts speak about the importance of role models – about how good leaders are good role models. Which of course implies the converse – that bad leaders are bad role models. It explains why one of the best-known legends about George Washington is about him as a six-year-old admitting to his angry father that he cut down his cherry tree. George was said to have said, “Father, I cannot tell a lie… I cut the tree with my hatchet.” His father’s response was to embrace his young son, declaring his honesty worth more than a thousand trees.
Trump of course is famously a fabricator – he has told tens of thousands of lies over the course of his political career and he continues to do so. Did Fred Trump forget to tell his boy Donald that truth telling was good and lying was bad?.
The President’s Character – Trump’s Aggression
President Donald Trump likes fights.
Trump enjoys watching fights. Literally. Such as those that take place in the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s Octagon, that eight-sided chain link cage in which one mixed martial arts expert is hellbent on dominating another mixed martial arts expert. (Mixed martial arts, I should perhaps add, is described as “an extreme combat sport.”)
Trump enjoys picking fights. Goading other people into taking him on by taking them on. By insulting them in the extreme and calling them names; by labeling them outsiders hellbent on destroying the American way of life; by challenging those who have the temerity to disagree with him; by seeding disputatiousness and divisiveness between and among individuals and groups; by threatening revenge and retribution; and by taking on his opponents both in the courts and in the court of public opinion.
Trump enjoys provoking fights. To him the halls of justice are a battle ground, a familiar one as he has been litigious lifelong. Just this week Trump sued the BBC for 10 billion dollars (for defaming him and violating Florida’s Unfair Trade Practices Act). And just this year the Trump administration was sued over 500 times, a figure that is “drastically higher” than the average.
Nor is Trump averse, at least in theory, to fighting to the death, the death, that is, of others. When several members of Congress recently reminded those serving in the American military that they could refuse to obey illegal orders, Trump called them – they included among others Senator Mark Kelly, previously both a navy captain and an astronaut – “traitors.” Nor did Trump stop there. He went on to add that traitorous behavior was seditious behavior. And that seditious behavior was “punishable by death.”
Trump is so fond of fights that he is prone to pardoning those who engage in them, no matter how illegal, immoral, or outrageous their behavior. On January 20, 2025, his first full day back in office, Trump granted clemency to the nearly 1,600 people involved in offenses relating to the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol. And on December 1, 2025, President Trump pardoned Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernanez – who had been serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking and firearms offenses – which Trump knew full well would provoke outrage not just among Democrats but also some Republicans.
Again, the impact of Trump’s disposition to aggression is impossible precisely to calculate. Still, it’s a mistake to underestimate it. Research shows that the president’s “hate speech and demonization of Non-whites, mainstream media, and oppositional politicians, and his implicit and explicit praise of violence” lead to increased verbal and physical attacks, including in schools.* It is presumably no accident then that “since the beginning of Donald Trump second term in January, acts of political violence in the United States have been occurring at an alarming rate.”**
The President’s World View – Trump’s Expansionism
President Donald Trump’s lust for money is threaded through his world view.*** Money is what Trump lusts for – money is far more important to him than power. To Trump power is a means to an end: the end is not power per se but power as way of making money. Money is also far more important to Trump than ideology – in this case liberal democracy. It’s not so much that democracy is unimportant to Trump as it is irrelevant, sometimes even an impediment.
Trump’s lust for money explains his sudden passion for cryptocurrencies. It explains his newfound interest in parts of the world such as the Middle East (think Saudi Arabia) and South America (think Argentina). It explains his continuing reluctance to back Ukraine and to break with Russia’s rapacious Vladimir Putin. (A peace deal friendly to Putin would open the door for major money-making opportunities in resource-rich Russia.) It explains his lack of interest in promoting democratic values around the world. It explains why he makes few if any distinctions between America’s allies and its enemies. It explains his bromances with top tech leaders who themselves have major global interests. It explains how he and his family have been able to amass staggering wealth in recent years including some $1.8 billion just since he was reelected. Finally, Trump’s lust for money explains why the best way to think of Trump is not so much as an autocrat as an oligarch. Autocrats and oligarchs are often in bed together, and sometimes they are one and the same. Trump though has never been much interested in politics except as it affects him, and he has never been much interested in, or knowledgeable about government. No, Trump’s lust has always been for money, and it still is. Not withstanding that he is now leader of the United States not The Trump Organization.
Under Trump’s leadership, the United States is now “operating in a new economic order in which the federal government is no longer just a referee, a regulator, or even a customer. It is now the senior partner, the lead investor, and the ultimate arbiter.”**** Under Trump’s leadership decades of American tech policy have been reversed. For example, it used to be American foreign policy not to sell its advanced technologies to its adversaries. Now this policy has been reversed, the starkest example of which was only recently when Trump announced that he had freed Nvidia to sell its second most powerful chip to China. Under Trump’s leadership capitalism in America is turning into state capitalism, maybe even crony capitalism which means the government is starting regularly to intrude on, and intersect with, business, not infrequently Trump’s family business.
Trump’s beloved tariffs are another example of the intersections to which I allude, between the public sector and the private one, and between domestic policy and foreign policy. Trump touts tariffs as money makers for America’s coffers. The monies though are made by charging Americans higher prices for foreign goods. Moreover, the impacts of tariffs on America’s relations with other countries is almost always deleterious. This includes relations with allies ranging from Canada to Australia, with every country in the European Union, and with India, now the most populous country in the world.
Perhaps the best evidence of the importance of money to policy is in a document that represents Trump’s world view – a world view in which economic policy and foreign policy are essentially one and the same. I refer to the recently released 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), which was crafted by the president’s closest foreign policy advisors, and which naturally reflects the his views.
Those who have studied the NSS have been struck by its disinterest in America’s promotion of democracy; by its dismissal of, if not even disdain for America’s longtime allies in Europe; by its lack of focus on great power competition, including with China; by its emphasis on the importance of countries in the Western Hemisphere (think Venezuela); and by its unaccustomed even atypical attention to economics, which is to say to money. Michael Froman, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, summarized the point this way: “The NSS represents the ultimate triumph of economic – or commercial – interests and tools. Openly transactional economic dealmaking is a key organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy under Trump 2. 0.”
Trump is as he deserves to be – 2025 Leader of the Year. But people change and so do the circumstances within which they are situated. So, who knows what this year’s leader of the year will look like one year from now? Chances are good that the strongman, this strongman anyway, will be far feebler than he is now.
The interesting question though is not how he will be, but how we will be. Will the Trump Effect be permanent? Or will he be more quickly sidelined than now imagined?
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* Brigitte Nacos, et al, “Donald Trump: Aggressive Rhetoric and Political Violence, in Perspectives on Terrorism, Volume 1, Issue, 5.
** Robert Pape, “We May be on the Brink of an Extremely Violent Period in American Politics,” New York Times, June 22, 2025.
*** In Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy, Todd Pittinsky and I define lust as “a psychological drive that produces intense wanting, even desperately needing to obtain an object, or to secure a circumstance. When the object has been obtained or the circumstance secured, there is relief, but only briefly, temporarily.” Then the cycle starts again. (Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 2.)
****Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Deal Book,” New York Times, December 11, 2025.