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A few months ago, there was a piece in the Financial Times titled, “Political Leaders Must Push Back Against Tech Bullies.” Written by Marietje Schaake, a director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, she pointed out that tech executives have “increasingly resorted to threatening officials and governments over democratically legitimate proposals that don’t suit their business models.” Her advice to political leaders was to get tough! Push back hard against threats made by “tech bullies” to withhold investments or pull out of markets. She warned government leaders that their “independence and authority” were at stake.

She’s right. In theory it’s important that democracies ensure that government controls business, not the other way around. Trouble is the problem is not in theory; it’s in practice. How is a top political leader supposed to manage a top tech company leader if the former has no idea what the latter is doing? No idea of how the cloud works. Hardly any idea of what a data center is or even an algorithm. Only a weak idea of what artificial intelligence can do today – and not the slightest conception of what AI will be capable of tomorrow.

No wonder that tech leaders have been bullying political leaders or trying to for years. In addition to their knowledge-power, tech leaders have money-power. Lots of it. Elon Musk’s financial support for the candidacy of former president Donald Trump was only the most visible recent example of the role that American tech titans now play in American politics, freely using their money in addition to their expertise to sway voters’ preferences and shape political outcomes.

Musk is also the most visible example of how easily America’s government can slide into dependency on America’s tech companies. Musk is the mastermind behind Starlink, a powerful satellite internet network. And he is the mastermind behind Space X, a powerful space technology company. Both companies already have their tentacles deep into the U. S. government, including the Defense Department.

Nowhere, though, is it written that public sector leaders must bow before their private sector counterparts. The European Union has long been ahead of the United States in using the law to set boundaries on behemoths such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple, forcing them to comply with rules on, for example, data privacy and content regulation. Just recently the EU’s highest court went further than it did previously, dealing a major blow to Apple among others, forcing it to pay billions of dollars in unpaid back taxes. In France, a few months ago, the government even saw fit to arrest a leading tech executive, Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, who is facing charges that include complicity in child exploitation.

Perhaps Europe’s jurists explain why America’s jurists are somewhat bolder now than before. In Pennsylvania, a federal court recently ruled that TikTok can potentially be held liable for harm caused by its algorithms. Similarly, a Federal District Court ruled that Google is illegally maintaining a monopoly over internet search. But so far – indicative of the complexity of a problem seeking a solution – the remedy to the monopoly remains elusive. Forcing the company to sell Chrome – Google’s very, very widely used internet browser – which recently was proposed by the Justice Department, could be a cure worse than the disease.

The issue of tech dominance and, therefore, the dominance of leaders of America’s most powerful and advanced tech companies, is so large it’s hard to wrap our heads around it. Just this month Australia became the first country in the world to ban the use of social media for those under the age of 16 – a significant step toward controlling a bad situation that up to now has been uncontrolled. Notwithstanding successes like these, challenges brought on by the new technologies are so many in number, and so complicated, that most mere mortals can barely understand them.

Last week, a little-known extreme right-winger scored a significant, shocking, success in a Romanian election. How did this ultranationalist catapult himself to center stage? He went viral on TikTok. After the fact, Romanian regulators requested that TikTok be suspended – they requested the barn door be shut after the horse got out.

It’s possible we’re at a tipping point. That leaders in the public sector will increasingly be emboldened to take on their private sector counterparts, specifically those at the top of America’s top tech companies. But count me a skeptic. Those who have drawn parallels between 20^th century regulatory efforts and those we should and could see in the 21^st, seem to me to imagine that the present resembles the past. But it does not. Regulating anyone or anything in the Internet Age – and now the age of AI – is not like regulating anyone or anything in the Gilded Age.

America’s Wild West tech landscape is one of the reasons why America’s tech industry has been exceptionally successful. Unfettered capitalism. But the problems associated with the lack of meaningful regulation are bad and they are getting worse. In large part this is because corporate leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, and Satya Nadella – and oh, yes, Mr. Musk – continue for the most part to roam freely.

Which still leaves open the question of whether leaders in government and jurisprudence will take on the tech bullies. Will the tail continue to wag the dog – or will the dog finally wag its tail?

I have made this point before – see, for example, the two posts linked below – and I will continue to repeat it until it no longer pertains.* Until women and men approximate equity in top leadership posts.

I will especially repeat it when there is new information that underscores my overarching point. Which is that one of the reasons the number of women at the top remains everywhere so low is that the bodies of women are different from those of men. Moreover, unless and until these differences are accommodated, women will continue to be disadvantaged.

It recently became known that one of the effects of menopause is musculoskeletal. The effect is not rare – it impacts more than half of all menopausal women – and it can be debilitating. The “musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause” is characterized by symptoms including joint pain, loss of muscle mass and bone density, and worsening osteoarthritis.

Women can try to prevent the syndrome and, when it occurs, to remediate its symptoms. But if body aches characteristic of menopause are widespread and some of the time difficult to deal with, they will impact the capacity of women to compete with men for top leadership posts.

Additionally, the timing could not be worse. Symptoms of menopause occur just when career trajectories for women and men alike peak – between the ages of approximately 45 to 55.

To suggest that this and other physical and psychological differences between women and men are irrelevant to the leadership gap strikes me now as it did before. As ridiculous.  

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A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap

Leadership Gender Gap – Redux

*Also see my chapter titled, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” in Randal Thompson et al, Women Embodied Leaders (Emerald, 20024).

Remember what leadership used to look like? No, I don’t mean in the old days. The good old days when we were young, or when America supposedly was great, as in “Make America Great Again.” I don’t even mean when the United States of America was a fledgling. I mean long before that, before there even was such a thing as a nation state. I mean do you remember what leadership used to look like centuries ago – millennia ago?

You don’t? OK, some reminders.

• Leadership used to be tribal. People lived mostly in groups that had little or nothing to do with other groups. Other groups that were assumed usually to be competitors if not actually enemies.
• Leadership used to be the province of single individuals who were the strongest and most assertive, if not even the most aggressive. They demanded total loyalty; they brooked no dissent.
• Leadership used to be limited to males. Females were excluded from the top ranks.
• Leadership used not to be shared. Ideas such as democratic leadership or distributed leadership or participatory leadership did not exist.
• Leadership used to be permanent, indefinite. The only way a leader would surrender his post was if he was weak, ill. Or by force – if those lower ranked than he would push him out, forcibly, and replace him with someone else.    
• Leadership used to be instinctual, intuitive. There were no people to whom leaders could turn for information and expertise, and there was no body of knowledge such as medicine.    

More recently, as the centuries, the millennia passed, humankind became more sophisticated. For example, we evolved from having single leaders who were the strongest and most assertive, if not even the most aggressive, to having single leaders whose rank, often inherited, bestowed privilege. Such as kings (and occasionally queens), tsars, emperors, khans, chiefs, sultans, pharaohs, and sheiks.

Even more recently were the ideas of the Enlightenment – especially the idea that power should never be the province of any single individual with an automatic right to rule. But that, instead, it should be shared. In time what came to be known as liberal democracy had implications that overturned nearly everything about leadership that previously was convention.

• Leadership became less tribal, one group less walled off from other groups. Moreover, groups regularly interacted with other groups, as did individuals who often moved freely from one group to another.    
• Leadership became less likely to be bestowed only on those whose main qualification was thier strength, or their genes. It was more likely to be bestowed on those with experience and expertise.    
• Leadership was no longer limited only to males. Sometimes it happened – not often but sometimes – that women rose to the top.
• Leadership came to be shared. In fact, divisions of power such as checks and balances became mainstays of democratic leadership.
• Leadership in democratic systems was not a privilege that was permanent. It was intended to be limited, turnover at the top assumed without question.  
• Leadership became less reliant on instinct and intuition and more on hard information – and hard science.

Now though we are about to get a rare treat. We are about to experience the pleasures of nostalgia. Nostalgia not just for the past or even for the distant past. But for the very distant past.

• We Americans will be more walled off than we used to be. Not just from our enemies but from our friends.
• We Americans will be led by a president who is a strongman.
• We Americans will lead by a man who regularly surrounds himself with other men.
• We Americans will be given a much-needed rest by a president who prefers to control everyone and everything. Our passivity will be preferred.
• We Americans might not have to think about who will succeed our next president. To ensure he will forever escape the law, could be our next president will arrange to succeed himself.
• We Americans need not worry any longer about our health and wellbeing. We are in the able hands of men like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz who will wish away everything from cancer to cavities.   

Nothing like a trip down memory lane – perfect for Thanksgiving!

Elon Musk. By far.

A partial list of his assets:

• He is the richest man in the world.
• He has the ear of the world’s most powerful national leader.
• He has the ear of the world’s third most powerful national leader.
• He has a new, formal position in the American government. (As co-leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency.)  
• He has a new, informal position in the American government. (E. g….this week he met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, to explore the reduction of tensions between Iran and the U.S.)
• He is chief executive officer of Tesla, one of the world’s leading car companies.
• He controls X Corp (aka Twitter), one of the world’s leading social media sites.
• He is the founder and effectively in control of Neuralink, which develops brain-computer interfaces.
• Most importantly, he is the founder and CEO of SpaceX. SpaceX is described as “an American space technology company.” But this does not begin to capture its present performance or imagine its future feats. SpaceX already has its tentacles deep into space exploration, into America’s military-industrial complex, and into satellite constellation technology. Don’t you just love this line, from Wikipedia. “SpaceX, NASA, and the United States Armed Forces work closely together by means of government contracts”?  Says it all, straight faced!

But for all his tangible assets, Musk’s greatest strength is his indisputable and undiminished genius. Compare him to, for example, his new best bud, Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t know much about governance but likely he knows more than Musk. But Musk can run rings around Trump and most every other American leader on subjects that pertain to technology – which most subjects now do. Musk’s mastery of technology gives him a preternatural control of the country, the world, in which we now live.  

He is not my favorite person in the world. Far from it, very far from it. But give the man his due. The power of Musk’s presence is an astonishment.

In Part I of “Followers Refuse to Follow” – posted three days ago – I pointed out that though the results of the American presidential election were momentous, they were not atypical. Just the opposite: they were typical.

As I wrote in the post, “The incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that held national elections in 2024 were ‘given a kicking’ by voters.” I added that never in 124 years of tracking had this happened, until now.  To frame the point slightly differently, for the first time since World War II, every governing party in a developed country that this year faced an election lost vote share.  Which is to say that this year in every developed country incumbent leaders were at the mercy of followers who were fed up.

To understand what happened in the American elections – especially Donald Trump’s thumping of Kamala Harris – it is essential therefore to consider not just one of the contexts within which they took place, but three. The first is the national context. The second is the international context. The third is the temporal context.

To illustrate my point, I will list the explanations for last week’s outcome and organize them accordingly.

National Explanations

• Harris was a weak candidate.
• Harris did not have enough time to mount a first-rate campaign.
• Harris made a mistake in her choice of a running mate.
• Harris never separated herself successfully from the unpopular administration of Joe Biden.
• Harris relied too heavily on celebrity surrogates.
• Harris was too cautious, for example turning down opportunities to reach unfamiliar audiences such as through monster podcaster, Joe Rogan.  
• Harris failed to repudiate some of her earlier, ultra progressive, positions.  
• Harris was a victim of racism.
• Harris was a victim of misogyny.
• Biden was weaker in every way – physically, mentally, politically – than the Democrats either understood or let on. Or both.
• Biden chose unwisely in the first place, when he selected Harris as his vice president. She was seen as so weak a successor to the incumbent that she effectively shielded him from calls to step aside earlier in the 2024 presidential campaign.
• Biden’s early assignments to Harris – especially his instruction that she address the “root causes” of immigration – were as absurd as unfair.
• Biden failed to do what he intimated he would do – to be a one term president.
• Biden took far too long to get out of the race.
• Biden made embarrassing gaffes even during the abortive campaign.  
• America’s messy and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan was a fiasco from which the Biden administration never fully recovered.
• Democrats fought constantly among themselves. They failed to unite around a coherent message.
• Democrats never understood the issues that mattered most to most voters. These were not freedom and abortion. They were inflation and immigration.
• Democrats never understood Americans’ objections to their tiresome focus on political correctness – on being adequately “woke.”
• Trump was a much more formidable candidate than the Democrats appreciated.
• Trump’s grievances echoed Americans’ grievances.
• Trump’s legal troubles seemed to confirm the picture he painted of himself: as a victim not a perpetrator.   
• Americans were willing to overlook what they knew were his flaws because they saw him as better at serving their interests than his opponent.
• Americans were attracted to the idea of a leader who was a strongman. 48 percent of Republicans thought the country needed a leader who was “willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”
• Americans were especially attracted to the idea of a leader who was a strongman given his opponent was widely perceived a weak woman. Kamala Harris was never seen as anything resembling an “Iron Lady” as was, for example, Britain’s longtime prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. (See my October 15^th post on this point titled, “The Alpha Female.”)      
• Americans were turned on rather than off by another strongman leader who took center stage toward the end of the presidential campaign. And who was in the end one of Trump’s staunchest and most generous allies – Elon Musk.

International Explanations

• Leaders in the West are becoming generally weaker.
• Followers in the West are becoming generally stronger.
• Increasing distrust in the West both of leaders and institutions that have shaped their lives since the end of the Cold War.
• Civic values are only feebly taught and therefore only feebly learned. These include Western Enlightenment ideas and ideals such as democracy and equality, freedom and individualism.
• Civic information has been diminished and devalued. For example, less than half of all Americans can name the three branches of government. They have no conception therefore of checks and balances, or of how essential they are to precluding power corrupting.  
• Global misinformation and disinformation.
• Offshoots of the information age – for example, the addiction to smartphones producing feelings of isolation and anxiety.
• Siloed information exacerbated by the growing ubiquity of podcasts – some of which now reach exponentially larger audiences than do traditional media.  
• Siloed information keeping audiences in a state of heightened anger and permanent mobilization.  
• Largely unexamined but nevertheless real symptoms of Covid grief.
• Inflation, inflation, and inflation. Immigration, immigration and immigration. These issues hit home with voters everywhere in the Western world. As we have seen, the preservation of democracy, liberalism, and centrism does not.
• Choice of candidates. Too many resemble Joe Biden – that is, they are old school. They echo the 20^th century rather than epitomize the 21^st. I include in this category familiar figures such as Rishi Sunak and, yes, Kier Starmer; Emmanual Macron; and Olaf Scholz.
• The apparently widespread longing for an alpha leader. A leader who can fix what’s broke, or what feels like it’s broke.
• The apparent disenchantment with liberalism and centrism – leading to a shift to the right.
• The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – both of which are unsettling and even upsetting. They give the impression that leaders who are incumbents in both the United States and Europe cannot keep the peace.
• Even worse, leaders who are incumbents cannot, apparently, guarantee prosperity. Voters are not dumb. They know damn well that income inequality is greater than ever. That the disparity between what they earn and what their bosses earn has never been greater. This reflects a failure not just of democracy but of capitalism.
• One global order is giving way to another global order, or disorder. Western hegemony is declining. Russian aggression will be rewarded. And America’s archenemies – Russia, China, North Korea and Iran – have formed a loose alliance.    

Temporal Explanations

• Like the rest of the world the United States of America is in the middle of the third decade of the 21^st century. This means that it, also like the rest of the world, is grappling with changes that are coming fast and loose, especially in culture and technology. People who live in democracies are being affected by these changes, as are people who live in autocracies, albeit in radically different ways.
• Cultural changes were amply in evidence during this most recent presidential campaign for voters chose as their chief executive a man who almost gleefully defies conventional norms such as truth telling and law abiding. Even one generation ago Trump as successful presidential candidate would have been not only impossible but inconceivable.
• Technological changes – to which the now ubiquitous presence of Musk testifies – were also amply in evidence during this presidential campaign. Whether communication or the distribution of information, changes in technologies and in who was able to employ them for which purposes, played a large part in how the campaign unfolded. Moreover, with each passing year the technologies associated with artificial intelligence will play a larger part in determining who wins and who loses personally and politically; in civilian life as in the miliary; at the level of the individual, the organization, and the state.

I return then as I always do – to the explanatory power of the leadership system. To understand what happened in last week’s presidential election, it’s imperative that we look at the flawed leaders, Trump and Harris; at the reluctant or even recalcitrant followers, American voters; and at the changing contexts, national, international, and temporal. Only this way can we know the United States of America in November 2024.

How many explanations have you heard in recent days for why Donald Trump resoundingly beat Kamala Harris in this week’s presidential election? Ten, Twenty, more? There has been no shortage of postmortems, virtually all focused on the United States of America and the specifics of the two candidates.

But as I always argue, leadership is a system with three parts, each of which is of equal importance: 1) leaders; 2) followers, and 3) contexts. I similarly always make clear that the word “contexts” is plural. So, if we want to analyze a certain leader-follower dynamic we need to set it not just in one context but in several simultaneously. Therefore, to understand what happened this week it’s essential to consider not just the context that is the United States of America but the context that is larger, the global one. It puts what happened here, in the U.S., in perspective.

Put simply, the losing ignominiously Democrats are in good company. They include Britain’s Rishi Sunak’s Tories; France’s Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition; Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba’s Liberal Democrats, and even India’s Narendra Modi’s once dominant party, the BJP. Moreover, just this week the governing coalition of Germany’s Olaf Scholz collapsed, virtually guaranteeing that federal elections instead of taking place as originally scheduled, late next year, will be pushed forward, to early next year. Will Scholz remain chancellor thereafter? I suggest you don’t bet on it.

Nor is our neighbor to the north exempt from the general trend. The approval ratings of Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, are under 30 percent, so miserably low they make President Joe Biden’s look good!

To summarize the situation, the incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that held national elections in 2024 were “given a kicking by voters”! Never in 124 years of tracking has this happened – until now.*  

None of this makes the results of the American presidential election any less momentous. Donald Trump is no Kier Starmer (centrist leader of the Labour Party who replaced Sunak as prime minister). Still, the backlash against democratic incumbents worldwide, along with a swing to the right not just in the United States but in Europe, is illuminating. Just what it illuminates about leader and followers in democratic systems will be addressed in my next post.

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*The phrase and the figures are from John Burn-Murdoch, writing for the Financial Times.

• American leaders can be convicted felons and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can be held liable for sexual abuse and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can be inveterate liars, fabricators, and prevaricators and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can threaten, intimidate, and insult and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can play kissy face with foreign leaders who oppose American interests and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can have episodes of cognitive impairment and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can slander their predecessors and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can be impetuous, ill-informed, and incurious and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.  
• American leaders can be widely assessed as narcissistic and self-absorbed and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.
• American leaders can regularly curse in public; remark in public about the size of another man’s penis; gesture in public oral sex and still be wildly successful. American followers generally cannot.

Whoever said in America was no double standard? Whoever said in America life was fair? Whoever said in America could never be a tyrant? A single individual who dominates the national discourse. A single individual who dominates the national agenda. A single individual who dominates the poltical culture. A single individual who dominates his party. A single individual who dominates the courts. A single individual who dominates fiscal policy. A single individual who dominates foreign policy. A single individual who will be so powerful he will dominate everyone and everything around him.

Whoever said was wrong. Donald J. Trump will certainly dominate me. Unless I emigrate he – or, in the event of illness or death, one of his minions – will be my leader and I his follower until, at least, January 2029.

In August the journal Leadership published an article I wrote titled, “Bad Leadership – Why We Steer Clear.” Why, I asked in the piece, did the leadership industry focus almost entirely on good leadership while it ignored almost entirely bad leadership. “Overwhelmingly,” I wrote, “leadership centers and institutes; programs, courses, workshops and seminars; teachings and trainings are dedicated to growing good leaders, not to addressing bad ones.”

While there are of course exceptions to this general rule – including some of my own work, in which bad leadership and followership have been through lines – it is widely acknowledged that the leadership industry’s focus remains heavily on leadership that is constructive as opposed to destructive. Which is curious given that the world in which we live really – as opposed to ideally – is replete with bad leadership of every type.*

So, why is it that we, ostensible experts in the field, distance ourselves from what is a plague on the human condition – bad leadership. To this question, in the article I provided four answers. Given Kamala Harris’s loss in her campaign for American president and given what the Washington Post heralded as Donald Trump’s “triumph,” I will focus in this post on one of these: “The Breaches Between Us.”

What do I mean by this? I mean that applying labels to leaders such as “good” and “bad” would be easy if we could agree on what these words meant and to whom they applied. But we do not and, it appears, we cannot. In other words, my bad leader might be your good one.

Trump is an obvious case in point. To some Americans he is riddled with personal deficits ranging from being a threat to democracy, to being a harasser and abuser, to being a chronic liar and even a convicted crook. To some Americans he is riddled with political deficits ranging from being a threat to women’s health, to surrounding himself with rightwing extremists and toadies, to cozying up to some of the world’s most dangerous dictators. And, to some Americans he is riddled with psychological deficits of which the most frequently mentioned is narcissism, extreme narcissism.

But as we know the morning after if not the day before, to some other Americans whatever Donald Trump’s deficits, they matter less than his strengths. What are his strengths? Personally, he is the anti-Kamala Harris. He is male; she is female. He is white; she is black. He is a law breaker; she is a law enforcer. He glowers a lot; she grins a lot. He conveys strength; she conveys conciliation. Politically he is more right-wing, and she is more left wing. Moreover, they differ on everything from taxes to tariffs; from abortion to immigration; from Ukraine to the Middle East. And psychologically they are opposites. His campaign reflected him: he emphasized damage and darkness, American carnage. Her campaign reflected her: she emphasized hope and joy, the future not the past.

Final point: American voters had as they usually do, a binary choice. They could select either Trump or Harris. Which meant they had to choose between one candidate they thought better and one they thought worse. But because this time around the two candidates were so dramatically different, to vote for one over the other meant strong feelings were involved. I have no doubt that Kamala Harris’s most dedicated supporters feel worse this morning than did the morning after Michael Dukakis’s most dedicated supporters. (In 1988 Dukakis lost his bid for the presidency to George H. W. Bush. But the differences between Dukakis and Bush were not nearly so stark as those between Harris and Trump.)

Because of these breaches between us – breaches that in recent years have become more fervent and fractious – leadership teachers, trainers, and, yes, scholars tend to steer clear. The academy especially prefers that we avoid rendering opinions and making judgments. That we avoid delicate and politically sensitive subjects. Who needs trouble?

Well, we do. If those of us in the leadership industry continue to refuse to engage the debate – what is good leadership and what is bad? – we will continue to fail at our most important task. Which is to make clear there is a distinction between right and wrong, between good and bad.

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*In my book, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), I identify seven different types of bad leadership.  

          If the United States of America is the so-called leader of the so-called Free World, on the evidence of the 2024 presidential campaign you’d never know it. Despite the so-called world order being dangerously disordered, the subject of American foreign policy nearly never came up.

Oh sure, Donald Trump insisted that his personal ties to world leaders guaranteed he could end the wars in Europe and the Middle East simply by snapping his fingers. And oh sure, Kamala Harris squirmed seamlessly when pressed on how she weighed the interests of Palestinians versus those of Israelis. But there was no serious engagement in foreign policy issues at a moment of their utmost importance.

First, in the last few years relationships among America’s most problematic and potentially dangerous adversaries – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – have grown observably closer. Second, especially in the last half year Russian President Vladimir Putin has become stronger and more secure both at home and abroad. Third, the war in the Middle East, which so far shows no sign of abating, has weakened America domestically and internationally. Fourth, nuclear weapons are proliferating as are threats to employ them. Finally, American military officials estimate there are now between eleven and twelve thousand North Korean combat-ready soldiers stationed in Russia, some of whom have already engaged with Ukrainian troops.

If America’s political and military establishment had been told when Ukraine was initially attacked by Russia (in February 2022) that in less than three years troops from Asia would be fighting alongside Russians on European soil they would not have believed it. Oh, and did I mention that North Korea has one of the largest standing armies in the world? It is 1.3 million men and women strong!  

Everywhere in the world people are waiting to see who will win America’s presidential election. In recent weeks European leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz have been studiously silent on among key issues the changing balance of power in Ukraine. Though they know full well that even a small sliver of the North Korean army could threaten the balance of power on the entire European continent, once it came to pass they have been mute. Mute because until they know who will next occupy the White House they will know nothing.  

So, while we Americans have been obsessed with ourselves the rest of the world has either taken advantage of our navel gazing or is standing around waiting. It’s everywhere evident that though Americans would prefer it were otherwise, the next American president will have no choice. On the world stage she or he will be center stage.

In recent months has been a growing list of people warning about Donald Trump. Warning about who he is and what he would do if elected president a second time.

The list to which I specifically refer is not just any list. It is a special list composed of those who know him best because while he was president they worked alongside.

The reasons for their cautions range from Trump’s being a threat to democracy to his disdain for the truth to his being ill-informed and incurious. To say the warnings are singular in that they are unprecedented is evident. To say that based on everything we have long seen and repeatedly heard they have the ring of truth is equally evident. What is less evident is why given the experience and excellence of these Trump-dissidents the sound of their alarms has been muted. Rather than ringing through the land loud and clear they’ve been hard to hear.       

Who are they, these dissidents? Generals and admirals. National security advisers. Cabinet members. Trump’s vice president. They are Americans in the highest echelons of their leadership ranks and yet. And yet their voices have not carried, they have not broken through.   

Which is not to say they have had no impact whatsoever. Maybe, cumulatively, they made a modest difference. But they should have made more. We should have been shocked to the core when someone like retired U. S. Marine Corp General and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said that Trump had “nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” But we were not. Why not?

• Because Americans are inured to Donald Trump – nearly immune to who he is and what he says and does.
• Because Americans are anyway deeply divided.
• Because of all the chatter and clatter – all that clamor coming at Americans every day and night.  
• Because of when the criticisms were leveled. The harshest by far were leveled years after Trump left office. Too late.
• Because of how the criticisms were leveled. If you’re going to speak out think how best to be heard. Retired U. S. Army General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff including during the last two years of Trump’s presidency, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was a “fascist to the core.” Woodward then dutifully reported what Milley said. But Woodward channeling Milley is far less powerful, far less likely to resonate, than Milley saying whatever he has to say directly.

Today’s news cycle is a fierce and ferocious competition for attention. To break through you must speak very, very loudly, and very, very clearly, and very, very early. If you are too leery and too late there is no chance your voice will be heard as it should.