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Two days ago, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime speech during which he focused on the integrity of American elections. Though he reiterated his usual longstanding grievances, many pundits concluded that Trump’s talk was less about the past and more about the future. The president’s speech was broadly seen as an attempt to prepare the American people for the upcoming November election. To prepare them for an election that he might claim was rigged and that would, therefore, justify federal intervention on constitutionally designated state terrain.

Congressional Democrats reacted strongly to Trump’s speech. Connecticut Representative Jim Himes said that the president’s claim to have evidence of widespread voter fraud was a “baldfaced, 180 degree obviously provable lie.” Georgia’s Senator Jon Ossoff accused Trump of “clearly signaling his intent to attack the elections and to undermine voters’ rights.”

The point of this post is not to prognosticate. I have no idea what Trump will and will not do if voters rebuke him in November. What I will, however, suggest is that to make meaning out of what’s happening between now and the end of the year you keep your eye less on the leader and more on his followers – especially on his loyalists. What will they do if the president’s behavior is increasingly outside the mainstream; increasingly beyond traditional norms; increasingly flaunting the letter of the law; and increasingly personally and politically erratic?

Here is a list of those to watch most closely.

• Congressional Republicans.
• Elected Republicans at the state and local levels.
• Members of the executive branch.
• Major Republican donors.
• Major Republican media.
• Key leaders in the private sector.
• Key celebrities and influencers.
• The MAGA middle.

It is not the leader who will determine the fate of the nation. It is his followers.

When someone dies people tend to be kind. As with Senator Lindsey Graham who passed over the weekend.  In the last 48 hours politicians and pundits have bent over backwards to say good things about Graham – even if they found his late life pivot to President Donald Trump personally and politically reprehensible.

I see him as a man who was two things at the same time. For many years he was known for being among a small group of highly effective senate leaders. And for the last decade he was known for being among a small group of singularly servile presidential followers. Graham metamorphosed into a consummate groveler.

Graham is a minor character in my forthcoming book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.* In the book I explore what motivated such a man – a man with his establishment history and independent ideology – to become a Trump lap dog.  

But in a book that I wrote several years ago titled, The Enablers: How Trump’s Team Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, Graham is a major character.**  A quintessential example of an enabler, which I defined as follows. Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive. Given that those being enabled are leaders, what they do has an impact on others, sometimes many or even millions of others. What we have then, alongside bad leaders, are bad followers.  

For those of us who consider Trump a bad leader, Graham was all along, during the president’s first term and into his second, a bad follower. Moreover, Graham seemed sometimes in a class by himself. Which is to say that he was exceptionally, excessively, fawning. I should add though that it paid off. Graham was desperate to become a Trump crony and a Trump crony he quickly became. By 2019 Graham could describe himself, accurately, as a member of Trump’s “smaller orbit.”

Many if not most of us contain multitudes – a rule to which Graham was no exception. In one thing he was, however, exceptional. In his willingness abjectly to follow a leader who, earlier in his life, he did not just quietly dismiss but loudly disdain.

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*University of Toronto Press, 2026.

** Cambridge University Press, 2021.

In my book Leadership from Bad to Worse I wrote that “bad leadership and its conjoined twin, bad followership, are as ubiquitous as pernicious.” I further observed that “once bad has burrowed in, it digs deep and then deeper,” making it increasingly difficult to extract or excise. *

Of course, questions about what exactly constitutes “bad” leadership and who exactly is a “bad” leader are always up for debate. Your “good” leader might well be my “bad” one.

Nevertheless, in the political realm it’s easy enough to make our values clear. My values are liberal and democratic. I believe in fair elections and in fundamental civil, political, and legal rights. For me, then, a good political leader must be a liberal democrat.

Is being a liberal democrat sufficient? No – it is necessary but not sufficient.  Leaders who are liberal democrats can be, for instance, callous or corrupt, inefficient and ineffective. Still, liberal democracy is the base line on which every good political leader must, in my view, stand.

Which brings me to two feedback loops. In both cases leaders have gone from being plain vanilla autocrats to being autocratic in the extreme. These two men have moved, inexorably, from being bad early in their tenures to being in time far worse.

The first example is China’s President Xi Jinping. This excerpt is from an article titled, “Xi Steamrolls Dissent with Old Playbook” that a few days ago was in the Wall Street Journal. 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is [now] employing the sort of autocratic tactics once wielded by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to stamp out opposition and stack the leadership with acolytes as he prepares to extend his reign. In a throwback to the most powerful Communist leaders of the 20^th century, Xi has purged dozens of senior officials… overseen the growth of a cult of personality and demanded absolute loyalty. His goal: Dictate China’s destiny for years to come.

The second example is, no surprise, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Since he came to power in 2000, Putin has become steadily more repressive and oppressive. Moreover, since Russia attacked Ukraine, in 2022, Putin has become even more controlling. Concerned in recent months that the increasingly high costs of the war, in both men and materials, will make the Russian people restive, Putin has cracked down. These lines are from an article titled “Russia Further Restricts Telegram, Escalating Internet Clampdown” that a few months ago was in the New York Times. I should add that the crackdown continues; even in recent weeks were more restrictions on internet access. 

Russia tightened its step-by-step throttling of the ubiquitous communication app Telegram, escalating a crackdown on what remains of the free Russian internet amid {Putin’s] war against Ukraine…. The moves are broadly seen as an attempt to extend Kremlin control over what Russians are able to see, do and say online.  

History testifies that bad leaders always get worse. More precisely, they always get worse unless they are stopped. For never ever do bad leaders stop getting worse on their own!

To see where this can and sometimes does lead, I suggest you see the film “Two Prosecutors.” Most of it takes place in a Soviet prison during the worst of Stalin’s purges. It is, as a critic for The New Yorker wrote, a “superbly chilling historical drama.” It is, as I write, a lesson of itself.

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*Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers (Oxford University Press, 2024).

The ideological origins of the American Revolution were resolutely anti-authority. They were, equally resolutely, anti-leadership or, more precisely, anti-any leadership that previously was legitimate.

The ideological origins of the American Revolution were – no other word for it – revolutionary. They called for the total overthrow, by violence, if necessary, of the old order.  The leader of the old order, the British king, was to be tossed on the ash heap of American history. Whereas the leader of the new order, the president of the United States, was to be something altogether different. A leader who was accountable to his followers.

Unlike the leader of the old order who was an autocrat, the leader of the new order would be a democrat. Unlike the leader of the old order who inherited the right to rule, the leader of the new order would be granted the right to rule. Granted the right to rule by those over whom he ruled. And, unlike the leader of the old order who was leader for life, the leader of the new order would be obliged after a time to surrender his power to another who peaceably would replace him.

The American Revolution was like all revolutions – the action was driven not by those at the top of the established order but by those in the middle and at the bottom. It was driven not by leaders but by followers. By followers some of who, in turn, became leaders.

Of course, the original leaders were the intellectual leaders: the political philosophers who led the Enlightenment. Leading lights such as John Locke, Montesquieu, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom planted the seed. Planted the idea that ordinary people, followers, had rights. Rights that included electing the leaders they wanted and rejecting the leaders they did not.

Which explains why during the decade that led up to the American Revolution it was defiance of people in power that “poured from the colonial presses and was hurled from half the pulpits of the land.” It was the right, the need, the absolute obligation to disobey legally constituted authority that had become “the universal cry.” In other words, the American Revolution was also like all revolutions in that the “doctrine according to godliness” was turned on its head. No longer was obedience to authority valued, the coin of this new realm was resistance to authority.*

The rebels were not given to empty cries and murmurs. Their resistance and defiance and their suspicion of people in power were not merely in theory. They were in practice. Hence Americans’ innate antagonism to authority was to be etched in the equivalent of stone. It’s why the United States of America has a government deliberately designed to check power and to balance it. And it’s why the United States of America has a government deliberately designed to distribute power among the three different branches – executive, legislative, and judicial. And among the three different levels – federal, state, and local.

But there is an irony in all this. For the 21^st century threat to American democracy has come not from where the Founders imagined. Not from leaders who wanted more power. Instead, it has come from leaders who want less. It has come from leaders, specifically elected officials, who have so wholly surrendered their power and authority that they can longer be called leaders. Rather they are followers – followers of the most craven sort. Followers who dare not breathe even a word or lift even a finger against their leader – lest he punish them.

One could argue that President Donald Trump makes King George III look like child’s play. And one could argue that current Congressional Republicans are the abject subjects that the king could only have dreamed of. But the danger that America250 faces – the danger of autocracy smothering democracy – does not come from a single individual or even a collection of individuals. Rather it is a failure of imagination. Neither the Philosophers nor the Founders conceived of a world in which the greatest political threat came not from those who wanted more power but from those who wanted less. For there can be no practical purpose to checks and balances, or to separation of powers, unless people do what they are supposed to do. This includes exercising power when it is called for – and resisting power when resistance is right. Cowering in a corner will not cut it.     

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*The quote is in Barbara Kellerman, The Political Presidency: Practice of Leadership (Oxford University Press, 1984). It is from Bernard Bailyn’s classic, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.  

Donald J. Trump has been lustful lifelong. Lifelong he has lusted for money and power; sex and success; women and attention.  But, lifelong, a single lust has transcended the rest – his lust for money.

In a book titled Leaders Who Lust, my coauthor and I defined lust this way. 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.

Lust soon returns, again to be all-consuming. On the plus side a leader who lusts is a force of nature. On the minus side, a leader who lusts is driven by a single passion that crowds out everything, and everyone else.  

Since he first ran for president of the United States in 2015 it has been widely assumed that Trump’s overweening desire was for power. During the first year of his second term this assumption was reinforced by his unyielding demands for first for abject loyalty and second, that those who denied him be punished.

But Trump’s lust has never been for power. Or at least not power per se. Rather power has always been and it still is a means to an end. A means for him to satisfy his lust which is for money. Policy is secondary, even tertiary.  

In the last 24 hours were shock and awe at the revelation that in 2025 Trump’s revenue jumped to at least $2.2 billion – staggeringly more than it was before he became president a second time. And, obviously, staggeringly more than any other president in American history.

People are wringing their hands, seemingly stunned by what Trump himself has trumpeted as long as he’s been in the public eye. When he first ran for president, in 2016, Trump gleefully boasted, “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.” And once he won the White House, the edifice itself has testified to his obsession with abundance and affluence. All that gilt, all that gold? Silent signs of Trump’s lust.

From a psychological perspective it’s far more instructive to think of President Trump as a kleptocrat than as an autocrat. They’re related, of course – the lust for money and the drive for power. But they are not the same and, in this case, the first dominates and drives the second, not the other way around.   

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For more on lust generally, and on Trump and lust specifically see:

Barbara Kellerman and Todd Pittinsky, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2020.

and

2025 LEADER OF THE YEAR

In 2025 the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) published a piece titled, “Can You Identify Your Organization’s Leadership Culture?”* The piece prompts me to return to my post of June 15 (2026) in which I defined how I use the term, “leadership culture.”

In CCL’s discussion of leadership culture, it is an aspect of, a subset of, organizational culture. I however define “leadership culture” differently, more broadly. According to my definition leadership cultures transcend organizations. Leadership cultures reflect more, far more, than the organizations of which, sometimes, they are a part. (Note moreover that not all human groups are organizations.)

Organizational cultures are themselves situated in larger cultures. These larger cultures might be, for example, national or regional, religious or educational, public sector or private. The point is that they impact, influence, and indeed shape the organizations located within them. Therefore, every organization’s leadership culture is derived in part from the larger cultures, or contexts, within which it is situated.  

Alibaba’s organizational culture is described as a “blend of Eastern philosophical traditions and Silicon Valley dynamism.” In contrast, Amazon’s organizational culture is described as “an intense, data-driven, and highly competitive environment.” While there is, no doubt, some overlap between the organizational cultures of both, there are also very significant differences.  Among these are some screamingly obvious ones such as Alibaba is a Chinese company and China is a communist state, while Amazon is an American company and America is a capitalist state. Further, China has an ancient history of autocratic rule and America a recent history of democratic rule.

Thus, the leadership culture of any organization in China, or in America, or anywhere else for that matter will be impacted not only by the organization per se, but by the larger culture of the country within which the organization sits.  

As I define it then, a leadership culture is a manifestation of, an amalgam of, each of the contexts within which they are located. The leadership culture at JPMorgan Chase (JPM) reflects the history and habits, values and attitudes, patterns and practices of JPM itself. But the bank’s leadership culture is additionally derived from the capitalist, corporate, financial and national contexts within which JPMorgan Chase necessarily sits.

* https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/whats-your-leadership-culture/

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On June 15, 16, and 17, I posted a three-part series about leadership culture. While all three focused on America’s leadership culture, the first of these posts introduced the concept of leadership culture by describing it as similar to national culture and organizational culture. Specifically, while “culture” is impossible precisely to define, it suggests shared values and beliefs, traditions and norms. Leadership culture then refers to those values and beliefs, traditions and norms that apply to relations between leaders and followers.         

Leadership cultures are related to and even derivative from the larger cultures within which they are located. So, America’s leadership culture is different from Russia’s leadership culture because the U.S. and Russia are different. And, so, similarly, the leadership culture of the Catholic faith is different from that of the Jewish faith; Harvard University’s leadership culture is different from Liberty University’s leadership culture; and the leadership culture at General Motors is unlike that at Volkswagen.  

Russia’s leadership culture is in stark contrast to America’s. Moreover, unlike President Donald Trump, who is in disharmony with America’s leadership culture, President Vladimir Putin is in harmony with Russia’s. Trump is a proto autocrat who leads in a democratic leadership culture. Putin is an authentic autocrat situated in a leadership culture that is authentically autocratic. So, inevitably, Trump has had a bumpy ride during his less than six years in office – recall that he was impeached twice in his first term – while Putin has enjoyed a relatively smooth ride especially given that he’s been in office for over a quarter century.

Putin is in the Russian leadership tradition, a quintessential product of Russia’s leadership culture. He is a recognizable successor to his most famous 20^th century predecessors, Lenin and Stalin. And he is steeped in Russia’s more distant history – replete with its succession of autocratic czars and of similarly powerful patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, Putin consciously fuses the two: whenever he dedicates a new statue to one of his czarist predecessors, he does so in the company of by an Orthodox priest who speaks to the holiness of the moment.

Putin’s otherwise inexplicable 2022 decision to attack Ukraine, under the illusion the country could be conquered in less than a week, was seeded in his fantasy of grandiosity. Putin was certain he could restore the Russian empire to something resembling what it was under his czarist predecessors beginning in the 17^th century, and then continuing into the 20^th under their successors, Lenin and Stalin.

In general, leadership cultures suggest leadership that is predictable. So, Putin has been a predictable product of the leadership culture within which he is situated. But, as always in these matters, to every rule there are exceptions.  As with Trump who deviates from the leadership culture into which he was born and over which, as president, he presides.

British Prime Minister Kier Starmer finally bit the bullet – he resigned his post. Even though he won Britian’s last national election in a landslide victory, and even though he is by all accounts a political centrist and man of moderation, Starmer concluded he had no choice – he had to quit. In astonishingly short order he had become miserably unpopular both among the electorate and within his own party and, therefore, woefully ineffective.  

By the time he leaves office Starmer will have served as prime minister for scarcely two years. Moreover, when his near certain successor, Andy Burnham, takes his place, he will be the seventh person to serve as British PM in the last ten years. It’s an astonishment. Or, more precisely, it would be if Britain were alone in having voters so fickle that they render their respective countries near ungovernable.  

Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s approval ratings are around 19 percent. Same for France’s President Emannuel Macron. President Donald Trump would boast of his comparatively good approval ratings – they’re at about 37 percent – but those who know better might remind him that not in nearly two decades have Americans had a president who had such stats for more than a few days in succession.

Not every Western leader suffers from such abysmally low numbers. Canada’s Mark Carney is an example of an exception to the general rule. His approval ratings are over 50 percent but… he’s an exception.

For students of political leadership and followership the point is the same as the one I made more than a decade ago in my book, The End of Leadership. Which is to say that in democracies leaders are getting weaker while their followers are getting stronger. As currently in Great Britain, it’s the riders who repeatedly decide to change horses in mid-stream. It’s not the horses.

Lest you think that Americans are exempt from this general rule, think again. In the last decade, we had Trump as president; then Joe Biden as president; then again Trump as president. Moreover, if a free and fair national election were held today there is scant doubt Trump would lose.

Such incessant disruption up top and dissatisfaction down below is not conducive to organizational or institutional success. Imagine Apple or Berkshire or General Motors having similar turmoil.  It’s unthinkable.  

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In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book on followership and, therefore, on leadership. It’s titled, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.

NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND ALL THOSE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, 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 – or at least they had an enduring impact. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Betty Friedan. Friedan was both singular and part of a tradition. She was part of a tradition of great women writers – such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – who fought for the cause of women’s rights with such immense eloquence and preternatural persuasiveness that they started or at least suggested a social movement. Friedan though was singular in that she identified a problem – a problem with no name – that most women of her time did not consciously even know existed. After all, in the 1960s women could vote, they could divorce their husbands without losing their children, and they could own property. In other words, unlike the women in Wollstonecraft and Stanton’s time, women in Friedan’s time, especially if they were white and reasonably well-off, had nothing obvious to complain about. Not to speak of revolt about.

But Friedan did it, changed the way women thought. Moreover, her classic contribution, The Feminine Mystique, which was, not incidentally, published the same year (1963) as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” hit a nerve almost immediately. Large numbers of women across the country identified with the issues that Friedan had raised, and they responded accordingly. It is not too much to say that The Feminine Mystique was the match that lit the movement. The women’s liberation movement that in the 1960s and ‘70s especially played a such a prominent part in the American political firmament.   

Friedan continued to be politically active to the end of her life. And she continued to write books. But The Feminine Mystique was her signal contribution. As the New York Times wrote in her obituary, the book “permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world.” In other words, a classic of both literature and leadership.

From Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – 1963:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, and ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – Is this all?

…. If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a mater of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone realizes…. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

 In Part II of this series on America’s Leadership Culture, I listed the culture’s ten key components. I made plain that these were norms – indicators of how leaders were expected to lead. Each was, however, a reasonable expectation, not an unattainable ideal. Americans do, for example, expect their leaders not to compel compliance by using force. They expect their leaders not to violate the law but to abide by it. And they expect their leaders to respect their followers independent of station or status.  

But what happens when American leaders fly in the face of America’s leadership culture? Especially when they flagrantly and repeatedly violate its norms?

The answer is “it depends.” As always, it depends on who is the leader, who are the followers, and what is the context within which the norms are being violated.*

Elon Musk is a glaring example of an American leader who gleefully flies in the face of its leadership culture. No question he is a leader. A leader of several extraordinary companies. A leader on earth and in space. A trillionaire leader who, because of what is now his historically great wealth, will wield even more power in the future than he did in the past.

Musk doesn’t bother with authority or influence. He is so dominant that all he must do to get his way is to exert the power that already is his. Starbase, Texas, is an example. It’s a company town, built to accommodate people who work at, or are otherwise closely affiliated with Musk’s company, SpaceX. Musk controls Starbase as would an all-powerful king, or tsar, or emperor. The town is described by locals as having a “highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies.”**  

What we have then are two truths – truths that would appear contradictory, but which nevertheless coexist. America has a leadership culture that consists of norms to which most leaders are expected to adhere. But to this general rule as with other general rules, there are exceptions. Musk is a genius – which is why he is one.    

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*I always think systemically. Specifically I conceive of leadership as a system with three parts that are equally important: leader, followers, contexts.

**https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-starbase-texas.html