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In our recently published book, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy, Todd Pittinsky and I argued that a leader who lusts for power is China’s president, Xi Jinping. We 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.

One of the stories we told is Xi’s. He is not only an irresistible example of a leader who lusts for power, but an important one. In fact, I would argue that knowing this about Xi, understanding it about Xi, is of paramount importance specifically to Americans. It is of paramount importance if the United States does not want to end in a state of perpetual conflict or even crisis with China.

Evidence of Xi’s lust for power is amply provided in the book. Moreover, since Leaders Who Lust went to press the evidence has only grown.

China’s creeping crackdown on Hong Kong has accelerated to a full gallop. Five months ago, China imposed an oppressive national security law on Hong Kong. Since then have been increasingly intrusive measures, to the degree that just last week four pro-democracy lawmakers were ousted from what is effectively the city’s parliament. They were followed by some 15 other elected officials, well known members of the opposition, who resigned in gestures of solidarity and protest. All this in consequence of the authorities in China bestowing on the authorities in Hong Kong the power to remove “unpatriotic” politicians without going through the courts.

At the same time, President Xi’s longstanding dispute with Jack Ma came to a head – with Xi, of course, coming out on top. Ma is a corporate titan of international repute, co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group, a technology conglomerate that is China’s best-known corporate entity. Ma is immensely wealthy, widely influential, and famously philanthropic. Unlike Xi, a staunch communist, Ma has also developed a reputation for being, relatively at least, a capitalist, specifically he has been a vocal proponent of globalization and open markets.

Ma has long been a thorn in Xi’s side – Ma being a man who, notwithstanding his diminutive stature, has grown in Xi’s view far too big for his britches. Comes along Alibaba’s Ant Group, a financial unit slated to be an offshoot, and just about to be a $37 billion initial public offering (IPO) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It was all a bit much for Xi, a bit too rich for Xi, who just days before the Ant Group’s slated debut made the decision to put it on hold. The IPO was held up by the Chinese government, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently.  It was in any case Xi’s decision to do so. Though he almost certainly sought some sort of consensus for a decision so major, and a cutdown of Ma so complete, some sources close to the process confirmed that only the Chinese president could have made the decision. “Nobody else would have the authority to do so.”    

Xi? A lust for power? The evidence is clear and with every passing year the more compelling. Moreover, as the definition of lust itself makes apparent, his appetite only grows with eating.

This said, it is, as already implied, the job of American policy makers to grasp this without simultaneously demonizing the the leader of some 1.35 billion Chinese people. It will do the United States no good to reduce to its lowest, simplest level a relationship that should be treated for what it is: complex and nuanced as opposed to, necessarily, adversarial to the point of ineluctably hostile.  

The title of this blog is taken from the subtitle of a book recently written by Mary Trump. She is by training a clinical psychologist. She is also a niece of President Donald Trump – the daughter of his older brother, Fred Jr, who died in 1981, of alcoholism, at age 42. Essentially Mary Trump argues or, better, concludes, that because her uncle’s “pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often unpredictable,” he poses a real and present danger to America. Which, if you take her point, would certainly not have ended with his defeat at the polls on November 3^rd.  Trump might even be more of a menace now as a wounded animal than he was before.

In my previous post I predicted among other things that Trump would never concede that he lost the election. But I did not say much about what he might do during what we should think of as the American interregnum: the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day, on January 20^th. Some of what Trump has already done was as good as foreseen. For example, his tweeting and then retweeting about how the election was rigged, and his firing one and then another of his underlings for not being slavishly loyal.

It could be argued though, and I do, that gestures such as these are child’s play, typical of Trump. In a different category is the president’s refusal so far to permit an orderly transition to the next administration which, if it persists, could have serious long-term consequences. Also in a different category is the president’s capacity to make mischief – to continue to break china by upending norms and traditions, by stirring up angers and resentments, by disrupting and even subverting the presidency of Joe Biden.   

Here’s a dynamic to watch: the president’s relationship to those parts of his base that are the most fervently and even feverishly devoted. More than 72 million Americans voted for Trump to have a second term. For the sake of this exercise let’s say that 20% of these are people who, if Trump held a rally in a one or two hundred-mile radius would make it a point to attend. They would go wearing those red MAGA caps and not wearing masks, and they would shout loud and clear Trump’s favorite refrains, from “Lock her up, lock her up, lock her up!” to “Fire Fauci, fire Fauci, fire Fauci!”

Which raises two questions: First, how will Trump want to harness the energies of his most ardent adherents? Second, how will Trump’s most ardent adherents react to what Trump tells them to do?

We’re talking millions of people here. Some will be willing to “stand back and stand by,” as Trump recently instructed the Proud Boys. All will be hungry to hear whatever it is that their leader has to say.    

Someone in my line of work should never ever predict the future. Foolhardy. Particularly to predict in a way that’s preserved. That’s on paper so to speak – as opposed to a casual remark.

Still… impossible for me to resist making these twelve bets.

• President Donald Trump will lose his bid to be reelected for a second term.
• President Donald Trump will take the matter to court. Over and over, and over again.
• President Donald Trump will lose all his consequential electoral litigations.
• President Donald Trump will never accept that he has lost the 2020 election.
• President Donald Trump will do whatever he can to preserve himself in his post, no matter the collateral damage.
• President Donald Trump will lead his followers to the brink of the precipice – at which point some but not all will jump.      
• President Donald Trump will forever insist that the election was stolen.  
• President Donald Trump will not get out of the White House in any traditional way.  
• President Donald Trump might have to be pried from the White House.
• President Donald Trump is more likely to quit the White House weeks before he is legally obliged (on January 20, 2021).
• President Donald Trump will finish out his tenure as president not in Washington but in Palm Beach or, if he decides to quit the country, at his golf resort in Scotland.   
• Donald Trump will have a hold on the American psyche so long as there is an American psyche.

In my book written years ago, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, I made a distinction that to this day I find useful. I defined good/bad leadership along two different axes.

The first was along a spectrum that ran from ethical to unethical. The second was along a spectrum that ran from effective to ineffective. In other words, it was possible for a leader to be:

• Ethical and effective.
• Unethical and ineffective.
• Ethical but ineffective.
• Effective but unethical.

President Donald Trump has illustrated the utility of these distinctions. Because in some ways he has been a bad leader, in other ways he has been a good leader, and in still other ways he has been a great, as in exceptional, leader.

First, how, during the last four years, has Trump been a bad leader? He has been unethical – so unethical that he has been at one end of the axis that runs from ethical to unethical. Let me count some of the ways.

• He has been chronically corrupt.
• He has been chronically dishonest.
• He has been chronically divisive.
• He has been chronically defensive.
• He has been chronically disruptive.
• He has been chronically abusive.
• He has been chronically bigoted.
• He has been chronically crass.

How has President Trump fared on the other axis, the one that runs from effective to ineffective? Here the answer is more mixed.     

• He has been woefully ineffective as it pertained to the pandemic.
• He has been quite ineffective as it pertained to domestic policy.
• He has been quite ineffective as it pertained to foreign policy.

He has been, however, exceptionally effective at accomplishing much of what he wanted and intended.

Goals Trump set and successfully reached include:

• He gained and maintained a sizeable base of fervently dedicated and fiercely loyal followers.
• Re refashioned the Supreme Court.
• He took over the Republican Party.
• He reduced Republican Senators to being servile and supine.
• He turned Fox News into a presidential puppet.
• He politicized the civil service.
• He diminished expertise.
• He demonized the opposition.
• He demoralized the intelligence community.
• He alienated America’s allies.
• He shattered norms at home – and abroad.

Final verdict: In some ways Trump has been a bad leader. But, in other ways, Trump has been a good leader – good as in effective. And, again, in still other ways he has been a great leader – a leader who has been inordinately, atypically effective. By this I mean that President Donald Trump’s imprint on America has been deep. Whatever happens tomorrow, Election Day 2020, his presidency will go down in American history as one of the most consequential ever. If liberal democracy trumps Trump, it will be remembered by many of his contemporaries as a close call.      

The title of this post is the title of my just-published book (by Cambridge University Press), co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. The book was the subject of today’s column by Andrew Hill. Hill is the management columnist for the Financial Times.

Here is his piece. https://www.ft.com/content/387bdfbe-b5a2-46e6-8a63-f3a41c2e7f68

After a hiatus, this column will now resume on a regular basis. My new book, with Todd Pittinsky – Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy – was published on October 29 by Cambridge University Press.  My next book, title to be later revealed, will be published by Cambridge University Press next year.   

I have no idea what will happen if this happens. Specifically, I have no idea what other American leaders will do if it comes to pass that the president of the United States violates, as he has repeatedly threatened to do, the normal electoral order. For months President Trump has declared that unless the presidential election is a clear win for him, on November 3^rd, or maybe early on the morning of the 4^th, he will consider the results rigged.   

Which raises the question of what other American leaders will do if the leader-in-chief launches an attack on the American political system. We already know, or at least have good reason to believe, that we cannot count on Congress, specifically the Republican controlled Senate, to protect us. We similarly already know, or at least have good reason to believe, that the American military is highly unlikely in any way to intervene. No less than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley, has already made as clear as he reasonably can that the American military would be reluctant, if not prepared to refuse, to intrude on what it determined a political, a civilian, dispute. This leaves one group of prominent American leaders from whom we so far have heard nearly nothing. Leaders of American business – especially leaders who control the levers of corporate power.

Historically they have preferred to stand aside, stay separate and apart from the political fray. Most, not all, but most, have deemed it not in their personal or professional interest to take a stand. And so, they have not. This past week, after Trump claimed that it would be “totally inappropriate” for election officials to keep tallying ballots after Election Day, business leaders did join in an anodyne statement that urged all Americans to support the process and the American tradition of free and fair elections.

But while some members of the elite will be familiar with their statement, effectively no one else is. By and large the American people have no idea that leaders of American business have taken even a careful, politically neutral, procedural stand.

Which is fine if on December 4^th the election has been settled to widespread satisfaction. But, if it is not, leaders in American business cannot in good conscience continue to hide behind the cloak of their corporate curtain.

After a hiatus, this column will now resume on a regular basis. My new book, with Todd Pittinsky – Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy – was published on October 29 by Cambridge University Press.  My next book, title to be later revealed, will be published by Cambridge University Press next year.   

          Joe Biden is the quintessential American politician – with one exception. There is a single thing about him that always has stood out and does so still. His passion, his ambition – his lust for success.

Notwithstanding his congenial persona and companionable style, notwithstanding his congenital backslapping and glad-handing, and notwithstanding that big, bright, broad Irish smile for which he was known for so long, his personality is steely. Biden is made of far sterner stuff than his public persona would seem to suggest.

From an early age, Biden has never, ever, let anything stop him. No matter how long the path, no matter how high the hurdle, no matter how ghastly the tragedy, his trek to the top continued. What, for Joe Biden, was the top? The American presidency – no less.

Even early on, as a teenager and then as young man, he was known for his boundless ambition. In high school he was class president in both his junior and senior years. Later, though he shunned the political protests of the 1960s and 70s, he made it a point nonetheless to be politically engaged. A supporter from Biden’s home state of Delaware, Gilbert Sloan, remembers Biden from all the way back, when he was “very young and ambitious.” What Biden wanted though was not to march in the streets – but to run for political office.

His single-minded drive extended to his personal life. He made it a point to meet Neilia Hunter, a pretty, young woman from a well-to-do family near Syracuse. He additionally made it a point to tell his future mother in law that what he wanted was to be president of the United States. What, we have to wonder all these years later, did she think of this still callow young man, so apparently relentlessly driven? In 1966 Joe Biden and Neilia Hunter were married. He was still in law school – he had decided to attend Syracuse University College of Law to be close to his future bride – and within a few years they had three children, Biden worked at law firms in Wilmington, and became involved in Democratic politics.

Just six years after his marriage, just four years after receiving his law degree, and just 29 years old, Joe Biden ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate from the state of Delaware. The ensuing catastrophes are all too well known: the death, in a ghastly accident, of his wife and one-year old daughter, in the early 1970s; his own brain surgeries in the late 1980s; and the death, of a brain tumor, of his fiercely beloved son Beau, at the age of 46, in 2015.

Any single one of these disasters would have felled or at least stopped most of us. They did not, not even strung together, stop Joe Biden. Biden, whose first of several runs for the White House was more than three decades ago. For most of the last five years, Biden’s almost unbearable grief in the wake of the death of his son appeared debilitating. Beau’s death visibly aged Joe Biden, diminished him, depressed him. But, came the 2020 campaign, the old warhorse was all in once again, driven by the passion that has personified him lifelong – the passion to be president.

In Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy, we 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.” Joe Biden’s unslaked drive to occupy the White House fits this definition perfectly. He ran for president for the first time in 1987. He ran for president for the second time in 2007. He was joined at the hip to the president as vice president, between 2009 and 2017. And he ran for president for the third time in 2019.

Here then my prediction: No chance in hell that if Joe Biden does win a narrow victory, and that if Donald Trump does make trouble, Biden will go quietly. Barring a big victory for Trump, Biden will fight to be president to the end. Literally.

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, most of my digital articles will be short and shorter – and they will certainly be few and fewer!

Why? Because I’m writing another book – one that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published at the end of this month by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.

The cracks have been evident for years. But they were not a menace. Now they are. Now after almost four years of Donald Trump in the White House those cracks in our civics are so wide, they threaten the edifice itself.

In recent decades, has been an almost perfect corollary: my own field, leadership education, has gone up, while civics education has gone down. This applies across the board, in high schools as well as colleges and universities.

Makes sense that the second has been sacrificed at the altar of the first, for leadership accentuates the importance of the individual, while civics accentuates the importance of the group. The community. The citizenry – followers not leaders.

No question that in recent decades courses in civics have declined precipitously. What used to be considered a requisite – a system of public education tasked with teaching, among other things, the virtues of democracy – has to a large degree gone by the board. Learning about civics has been marginalized by other kinds learnings, specifically those focused on preparing students for competition in the private sector rather than participation in the public one.

The cost of this neglect has been steep. First, is Americans’ abysmal lack of knowledge, of even a rudimentary understanding of American history. And of even the basics of our political system. Of the constitution, of the three branches of government, of the rights and responsibilities of the citizenry. Can it possibly be good that at best one third of the American people can name the three branches of government? Can it possibly be good that less than one quarter of eighth graders perform at or about the proficiency level on a nationwide exam in civics?

Even if we were adept at educating, training, and developing leaders – an assumption that regular readers know I question – how does it help if followers, ordinary Americans, are so underprepared to participate in political life? If American citizens have got to the point of electing to the White House a man as miserably ill-equipped and as woefully unsuited as Donald Trump? If Americans have got to the point where violence among them, between them, is a not wholly unanticipated outcome of this November’s presidential election?

High time, past time, to turn back the clock. To return to a time when civics education was rigorous – and required. When civics education was considered essential to preparing a responsible citizenry which, in turn, was considered essential to a functioning democracy.

Bottom line: educate not just leaders, but followers.    

Author’s note: For the indefinite future, my digital articles will be short and shorter – and few and fewer!

Why? Because I’ve gotten myself ensnared in writing another book – a book that will appear after the next one. My next book – to be published in October by Cambridge University Press – is co-authored with Todd Pittinsky. It is titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. 

No need to go to Russia to find one – followers living in fear. We have them here, quite a number, in fact, easily found working in or near the White House.    

Look, for example, at Stephen Hahn. Poor, poor Stephen Hahn. He’s in an esteemed position, highly esteemed. He’s the Commissioner of the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA). So, what’s the problem? Can he possibly be a follower who lives in fear? The follower to whom I refer?

Well, yes, he can be, and yes and he is. What a week Hahn has had! Last Saturday President Trump charged the FDA was making it hard for drug companies to enroll people in clinical trials for vaccines and therapies to combat Covid-19. He suggested the agency’s slow walking was intentional, deliberate, that Hahn’s agency was doing it for political reasons. “Obviously, they’re hoping to delay the answer until after November 3^rd,” the president tweeted.  

What happened after that? Hahn caved. Within no more than a day or two he, in tandem with the president, made a grand announcement at a specially called press conference, both telling their eager audiences that a new convalescent plasma was “a major advance in the treatment of patients.”

What happened after that? Virtually immediately Hahn was attacked. Mercilessly savaged by his medical and scientific colleagues for having used a deeply misleading statistic to back his claims that the plasma treatment would save 35 out of every 100 lives. One medical expert, Dr. Eric Topol, told National Public Radio, “I can’t remember a mistake by the FDA or the commissioner as serious as this one.”      

What happened after that? Hahn caved again. This time to apologize, admitting that the criticisms of him were justified, trying to explain his error by saying it was a poor choice of words. “What I should have said better is that the data show a relative risk reduction not an absolute risk reduction.”

What an awful story. Awful because it undercuts still further Americans’ trust in the scientific establishment. Awful because demeans and diminishes the man whose word we should be able without even a scintilla of doubt to accept. Awful because it reveals Donald Trump yet again to be a bully. A backyard, barnyard bully who is able over and over, and over again to insult and intimidate his underlings.

Had Hahn had the fortitude to stand up to the president’s bullying, he might’ve been fired. But unlikely he would’ve been, as Putin has been known if not prone to do, poisoned. Of what then followers like Hahn are afraid of remains one of the mysteries of the human condition.