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Yesterday President Trump signed legislation intended to cut off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform abortions. He thereby nullified a rule signed by President Obama that barred state and local governments from withholding federal funds for family planning services that performed abortions.

The new legislation is in keeping not only with Trump’s particular priority of restricting abortions; it is also in keeping with his general priority of building a budget that strongly favors hard power over soft power. As New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out, Trump’s proposed budget aims to cut if not decimate those parts of government that seem to him “soft and nurturing” (like poverty programs), or “emotional and airy-fairy” ((like the National Endowment for the Arts), or “smart and nerdy (like the National Institute for Health).* In contrast, it aims to beef up funding for those parts of government that seem to him “manly, hard, muscular and ripped” – most obviously those associated with the military and national security.

Trump’s budgetary priorities are evident in these numbers:
• On the one hand, he proposes to slash federal funding for the Department of State and the Agency for International Development by over one quarter – 28%.
• On the other hand, he proposes to boost federal funding for the Department of Defense by 10% – in the coming fiscal year alone. (Similar increases are slated for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Nuclear Security Agency.)

Trump’s budget is not yet etched in stone. But the president’s preferences are clear. As Mick Mulvaney put it – he was Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget – “There is no question this is a hard-power budget. It is not a soft-power budget. This is a hard-power budget. And that was done intentionally.”**

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Trump’s budget is like Trump himself – all man.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/opinion/let-bannon-be-bannon.html
** http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520305293/trump-to-unveil-hard-power-budget-that-boosts-military-spending

Do you remember hearing about Barack Obama’s testosterone level? Or George W. Bush’s? Or even Bill Clinton’s? I do not. But, Donald Trump is different. He made sure a month before the 2016 presidential election that we all knew the level of his testosterone.

When he released his medical records this month, Donald Trump appeared on the Dr. Oz show to reveal his health information. After doing a blasé rundown of results, noting many of them “good” or “normal” or “low,” Oz made one number stand out.

Trump gave a faint smile and a meaningful eyebrow raise. The crowd cheered.*

To be sure, Trump is not the only American man preoccupied with the level of his testosterone. Testosterone prescriptions in the United States have nearly doubled in recent years, to 2.2 million in 2013, up from 1.2 million three years earlier. Clearly many American men, middle-aged and older, even those who are healthy, are turning to testosterone as an antidote for everything from sagging muscles to flagging sex drives.

Still, most men keep their concerns about having “low T” private. And, most men with “high T” do not make of themselves a public display. But, then, most American are not Donald Trump. They do not need regularly, repeatedly, loudly and publicly to confirm, and then again to reconfirm, their manhood.
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*http://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/494249104/trump-and-the-testosterone-takeover-of-2016

There are not many differences between male and female leaders, and those differences that do exist are not great. But there are some, and sometimes they matter. Similarly, there are differences in how people perceive male and female leaders – and in how they prefer them.

In general, the traits that we attribute to leaders are those stereotypically viewed as masculine: dominance, assertiveness, task-orientation, and risk-taking. Women, in contrast, are thought more collaborative and cooperative, more cautious and careful, more honest and ethical. For example, in 2015 the Pew Research Center reported that 29% of Americans associated honesty more with women, while only 3% associated honesty more with men.

In part because of these perceived differences, men and women in leadership roles adjust accordingly. Women leaders have, for example, learned that if they are seen as too dominant, they will be disliked. So, they tone down their assertiveness, lest it be viewed as aggressiveness. Similarly, if conversely, female political leaders tend to play up their interest in matters of national security, for fear of being seen as weak on defense.

Men have some of the same issues. They are not immune from gender stereotyping, including associating their own leadership prowess with their own unflagging masculinity. No leader in 21st century America exemplifies this proclivity more than President Donald Trump. We were forewarned even during the presidential campaign. When he belittled his various rivals not by challenging them on their policy positions, but by challenging them on their masculinity, we saw what was in store. Jeb Bush was derided for being “low energy.” Rick Perry was belittled for insufficient “toughness.” And Marco Rubio was emasculated, nearly literally, by being tagged “Little Marco.”

Trump’s mind-set was, then, clear early on. A real leader is a man. And a real man is a he-man.

Ironically, Trump’s hyper-masculinity is evocative of no one so much as his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who famously chose to display himself bare-chested, astride a large horse, the personification, presumably, of Machismo. Which leaves us with this question: in a face-off between the United States and Russia, which one of the two leaders is more all-man, and which one less?

According to the information we now have, some 18 people were involved in making yesterday’s decision to carry out a missile strike against Syria. Seventeen were men. One, Dina Powell, Deputy National Security Adviser, was a woman.

The decision to carry out some sort of attack against the government of Bashar al-Assad has been widely praised, both at home and abroad. Moreover, a nearly all-male decision making group is hardly unusual at the highest reaches of government or, for that matter, at the highest reaches of business or anything else.

Still, when a leader is as fixated on the virtues of being manly as is Donald Trump, and when the matter at hand is violence, attention must be paid. Attention will be paid.

For now, suffice to say no surprise that the first thing that President Donald Trump did to receive plenty of plaudits was an act of war. The man and the moment met.

Few members of the Trump administration have survived their early months in office with their reputations unscathed. Fewer still have emerged with their reputations enhanced. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is an exception to the general rule. Based on her brief performance as America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, she will be an increasingly prominent player on the political stage.

During her six years as governor she was known as a star politician. She was not, however, known for being a policy wonk. And she most certainly was not known for having even an ounce of expertise in global affairs which is why, when she was appointed UN Ambassador, eyebrows were raised. But, so far at least, Haley has proved the skeptics wrong. She has proved a quick and serious study. She has shown an unerring instinct for being on the right side of an argument. And she has demonstrated her willingness to take on those more highly positioned than she.

None of this should surprise us. Haley was an extremely popular governor. (In 2014, she won reelection by a landslide.) She had a record of speaking truth to power. (After Dylan Roof killed nine people in a Charleston church, Haley reversed her previous position and crafted a deal that removed the Confederate flag from the front of the statehouse.) And she had a personal and professional history of fighting long odds. (She was not only the first woman to serve as South Carolina governor, she was the first who is a member of an ethnic minority. Her parents were immigrants from Punjab, India.)

Haley’s strong and stirring speech at the United Nations in the wake of the chemical attack in Syria was her most powerful performance as ambassador so far. But, my guess is she’s just getting started. My guess is she’ll soon be at the forefront of America’s political establishment.

Summitry has been a staple of American diplomacy since at least the Second World War. In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Tehran. In 1944 Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Yalta. And in 1945 Harry Truman met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Potsdam. Since then every American president has sat face to face with a wide range of presidents and prime ministers – always from a position of unrivaled strength. Such summits in which American presidents have engaged for the past 75 years, have been with them having the advantage, the strong advantage, in every aspect. Military, economic, political, strategic, tactical – and personal.

Tomorrow’s summit at Mar-a-Lago between U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping will, then, be a radical departure from past practice. For the first time in nearly a century, America’s leader will be dwarfed by his foreign counterpart. On the one hand is Trump, who is personally and politically weak and has never been personally and politically weaker. On the other hand, is Xi Jinping, who is personally and politically strong and has never been personally and politically stronger. It’s not a fair fight. America’s leader is hobbled both by his miserable standing at home, and by his woeful lack of a solid foreign policy apparatus. China’s leader is heightened both by his strong standing at home, and by his experienced, strategic approach to foreign affairs. This means that whatever does emerge from this summit will be in consequence of what Xi Jinping wanted, not of what Trump negotiated.

Woe to those who remember when the United States of America strode the earth like Shakespeare’s Colossus….

Peter Salovey is the president of Yale University. We can assume then that he is smart not stupid. Still, when he was interviewed recently about leadership, he sounded more bland and boring than brilliant and different.*

Salovey sampler:
• “The first task of a responsive and responsible leader is to recognize that many issues are not bipolar – not black and white.”
• “Responsive leadership involves not only talking to people like ourselves, but also having a particular sensitivity to people who are not like ourselves.”
• “In some ways, responsibility is at the core of leadership. Irresponsible leadership can cause great, great harm.”

This raises the question of why Salovey’s responses to questions about leadership were so unsatisfying. Here three answers: 1) because he was altogether general and not at all specific; 2) because he spoke in the abstract, devoid of the context within which he led, that is, Yale; and 3) because he was in every way conventional and correct – politically correct.

Word to the wise: if you’re president of a great university and you know you’re going to be interviewed about leadership, read up on it. Read Plato, say, or Freud, or Hannah Arendt.

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* Q & A, Peter Salovey, Yale Alumni Magazine, March/April 2017.

In my 2012 book, The End of Leadership, I wrote:

Alexei Navalny is a sign of the times. Navalny is a lawyer by training, based in Moscow, whose website reaches between one and two million people a day. While his website was originally intended to expose corruption in business, more recently he has exposed corruption in government – sometimes to great effect…. [But] caution is in order. Putin shows his enemies no mercy…. [Still] because the levels of fraud, bribery, and outright theft in Russia are so famously high, Navalny has had some leeway. [Moreover] by now he has a network in place. If anything happens to him, his work will continue.

And so it has – his work has continued. And so, remarkably, has he – he has continued. Five years later, Navalny remains at the forefront of Russian dissent, arrested again this weekend for spearheading the largest wave of unsanctioned protests in Russia since 2012. This weekend’s protests were, moreover, not only in Moscow, but in hundreds of towns and cities across Russia, from Vladivostok in the East to the so-called window on the West, St. Petersburg. Astonishing!

Navalny’s willingness to disobey authority, and thereby put his life at risk, is singular. He has repeatedly been hauled into court. Employees of his Anti-Corruption Foundation have been arrested and their offices ransacked. And he is regularly denounced by the Kremlin as a widely-reviled nuisance and provocateur. All this in a climate in which Putin’s political opponents incline to be murdered or otherwise dispatched.

Notwithstanding the threats against him, Navalny is openly charging Putin’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, with corruption. Additionally, Navalny has already declared that in the 2018 Russian election, he will run against Putin for president. This is not, then, a time to celebrate anything – not even signs of Russian resistance to overweening power and deep-seated corruption. But, it is impossible not to be struck by one man’s courage against overwhelming odds – and to wish him safekeeping. Brave, brave leader along with brave, brave followers – more than one thousand of whom on Sunday were taken into custody.

This week we learned that President Barack Obama bequeathed to President Donald Trump two Big Things. The first was a new norm: health care in America is not a privilege, it is a right. The second is Putin reborn: Russian President Vladimir Putin reborn as an international menace, no longer an international nonentity.

What this means for Obama is that his record is mixed. He will go down in history as the president who expanded our conception of what is owed every American – basic health care. And he will go down in history as the president who enabled a thug to reclaim what he regarded as Russia’s rightful place of power in world affairs.

What this means for Trump is that he is shackled in ways that he never imagined. He never imagined how powerful the idea that no one should go broke on account of being ill. And he never imagined how Machiavellian his putative pal in the Kremlin, who went on to haunt rather than help him.

The history of Obama’s time in the White House has yet to be written. But I am betting that America’s forty-fourth president will be credited with expanding national health care. And I am betting that America’s forty-fourth president will be faulted for letting a rat in the tent. His legacy to Trump is, in any case, clear. Not one albatross around his neck, but two.