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Friedrich Merz was just elected chancellor of Germany. But what a miserable start! For the first time in Germany’s modern history the candidate was humiliated on the first vote, denied the chancellorship by parliament. While he mustered the necessary votes on the second round, Merz’s authority as leader of Germany was compromised even before he left the gate.  

So, what else is new? Democratic leaders everywhere and in every sector are finding leading tough sledding. Don’t believe me? Ask Katrina Armstrong, who lasted for all of seven months as interim president of Columbia University. Don’t believe me? Ask Rishi Sunak, who lasted less than two years as British Prime Minister. Don’t believe me? Ask Ashley Buchanan who was just booted out as CEO of Kohl’s after five months.

Don’t believe me? Look at the numbers. Rising rates of top tier turnover are everywhere. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal: “More CEOs Head to the Exits.” Last year some 373 leaders of publicly held companies left their jobs, up almost 25 percent from a year earlier. It’s a remarkably high figure – especially given the rewards they receive. Lots of authority. Lots of money. Lots of perks from private planes to corner tables. Still, CEOs who are very well fed but very fed up are heading for the exits in unprecedented numbers.

Which raises the question of why. What is it about this moment – the third decade of the 21^st century – that makes democratic leadership so difficult?

The piece in the WSJ provides a few answers including the fresh challenges of AI, tariffs, and the scrutiny of diversity.  In the end though the piece leaves us wondering. Hard to deduce from its description of the syndrome why what’s happening is happening, especially since it applies not only to leaders at the top but to managers in the middle. Apparently “the leadership issue extends beyond the C-suite. The pipeline of up-and-coming executives is thinning.”

Part of the piece is however about stress – about how many at the top are so sick of the stress they quit – that seems to me to be key. Leaders are more stressed now, much more stressed now, than they used to be.

Which raises the all-important question of where their stress comes from. Why are leaders more anxious today than yesterday? More now than a generation ago?  Yes, AI is a big issue, and so are tariffs, and so is this, and so is that. But are these challenges so much greater than those faced by CEOs in the mid to late 20^th century, or in the early 21^st? Or is something else going on?

To these questions I have, no surprise, an answer. In the past, CEOs of large publicly held companies were compensated for their labor in two ways: remuneration and respect. They got lots of the first and, in addition, lots of the second. Now they still get plenty of the first – but nearly none of the second.

Same holds for democratic leaders everywhere. They still get well paid, but they get little if any respect. We as soon tear leaders down as build them up. In the old days presidents of colleges and universities were, for example, shielded from the riff raff by the ivory towers within which they were ensconced. Now no longer. Now nothing protects them against the people – the press and the public; parents and politicians; alums, faculty, students, administrators and donors. Everyone wants a piece of them.

Bottom line is it’s tough out there. Most leaders get good money. In some cases, outrageously good money. But most even of them get no respect. We are quick, extremely quick, to trash our leaders. We are slow, extremely slow, to respect them.      

When Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker spoke in New Hampshire a few days ago he made headlines for railing not just against Republicans but against “do-nothing Democrats.” He got attention for seeming the fighter that so many Democrats – along with countless independents – want and need.

That’s typical. Followers long for a leader who seems strong. Who seems to be a winner, not a loser, who can elevate them and as necessary, protect them.

But while Pritzker got a lot of attention, since the presidential election the breakout stars of the Democratic party have been Senator Bernie Sanders together with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of American politics!

Like Astaire and Rogers, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez constitute what now at least is a formidable team. In this case not a dancing team but a prancing team. Bernie and Alexandria have been strutting their stuff, pulling in large “electrified” crowds wherever they go.  

So unanticipated was the striking success of their recent “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, it should be explained. So, here fifteen reasons why the unlikely Bernie Sanders along with the little-known Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attracted tens of thousands to their rallies even when they took place in Trump territory.  

1. Their pairing. Louis B. Mayer couldn’t have coupled them better.
2. Their differences. Most obviously, he’s 83, she’s 35. He’s visibly old and grizzled; she’s visibly young and gorgeous.   
3. Their similarities. What they say. They echo each other. They sing from the same hymnal.  
4. Their style. Informal, casual, approachable.   
5. Their speech. Forceful, angry, urgent.
6. Their content. Anti-establishment.
7. Their argument. The upper class are oppressors. The middle and lower classes are oppressed.
8. Their pugnaciousness. American democracy is in question and American capitalism is in decline.
9. Their orientation. To the future not the past.
10. Their appeal. To the young and restless, to those left of center, to all those raging against, especially, income inequality.   
11. Their sense of excitement. Their rallies are what Trump’s used to be. Lively, fun, forging communities of like-minded souls.
12. Their domestic context. America 2025 – in which inflation lives while the Dream, the American Dream, dies.
13. Their global context. Unending wars. And unprecedented competition coming from China with whom the United States is, or is not, engaged in a new Cold War.
14. Their Democratic opposition. “Do-nothing Democrats” or hapless Democrats or unknown Democrats or drowsy Democrats.
15. Their Republican opposition. The corrupt, inconsistent and incompetent President Donald Trump in tandem with a sea of congressional Republicans who have surrendered their independence to the White House.  

It’s not clear how long Bernie and Alexandria will be joined at the hip. Nor is it clear how long their act will play to large and largely wildly enthusiastic audiences. What is clear is that in recent months these two leaders have connected to their followers in ways that no other Democrat can claim. What’s equally clear is that the appeal of Fred and Ginger, the team of Fred and Ginger, is timeless.

It’s never a good idea. A lightweight taking a swing at a heavyweight? The latter is sure to win! Inevitably he’ll take out his weaker – and dumber – adversary.  

This simple law of physics dictates it was brainless of President Donald Trump publicly to challenge President Xi Jinping over tariffs. Setting aside the inevitable competition between China and America, Xi is far stronger than Trump both personally and politically.

Unlike Trump, who early in his life led a sheltered existence, protected against hardship by a demanding but nevertheless stable and wealthy family, Xi’s late childhood and adolescence were traumatic. When he was ten, his father was arrested for political reasons and his family life destroyed. Unlike Trump who was helped by his father to get into the real estate business, and who for most of his life was rich, famous, and amused, Xi’s spectacular political success was exceedingly hard earned.  He was able to work his way to the top – not just of the Chinese Communist state but of the all-important Chinese Communist party – because he was a preternaturally smart and skilled, and a ruthless political animal.

Trump is in the first year of his second four-year term as president. Xi – who in 2017 declared himself president for life – became chair of the party in 2012 and president of the country in 2013. At every step he consolidated and grew his power so that now there is not a single aspect of Chinese life that is not dominated by Xi’s politics and personality.       

Whatever Trump’s attempts to extend and expand his control, they are, necessarily, feeble in comparison with those of his Chinese counterpart. After all, last I looked the United States remains a democracy while China has never been anything but an autocracy. By this criterion alone, Xi is far, far more dominant than Trump ever was or will be. Which means that Xi can wait Trump out for as long as it takes for him to realize who is the stronger, the more stable and secure.

Until Xi decides it’s in his interest to negotiate with Trump over tariffs or anything else, Trump will be forced to cool his heels. He might huff, puff, and bluff, but the experience will teach him a lesson. Xi is in it to win. No way in hell will Trump triumph over his Chinese counterpart.

For years the phrase “Big Lie” has referred to the false claim that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. The claim that it was not Joe Biden who won in 2020 but Donald Trump.   

Increasingly however Americans are learning about another Big Lie – one that is far more pernicious in its consequence than the original spread by Trump & Co. I refer to the deception, the disinformation that surrounded Biden during his last year in office. That explicitly and implicitly spread the lie that he was perfectly fit to serve for another term as president.

Now, finally, much, much too late, the truth is cascading out. That Biden was both physically and cognitively far frailer than the American people were given to understand. That he was being protected by close family and friends, and by Democrats appointed and elected too timorous and, or, self-interested to speak out. To speak truth to power – to tell Joe Biden individually and in groups that he had to get out of the race in ample time for his party properly to field another strong candidate. Moreover, if Biden continued to refuse, to tell the truth to the press and the people so the pressure on the president would have been impossible to resist.

We now know the idea that Biden as he presented in 2024 would be fit to be president in 2025, and 2026, and 2027, and 2028, was, on the face of it, absurd. An outright and outrageous lie for which those who perpetrated it should be held politically and, yes, morally, accountable. How else to respond to a leadership class now apparently as comfortable fabricating as truth-telling?

For heaven’s sake, people, tell it to us straight!

My most recent book – Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers – concludes with this brief paragraph.  

In the end, then, this is a book about time. About what happens, and does not happen, when leaders begin to go bad and then get worse. About how time is finite. About how time is of the essence.

Why does time matter as much as it does? Because once bad leaders and their followers dig in, they dig in deep and then deeper, making them finally exceedingly difficult to excise or extract. In other words, the more time passes the heavier the lift.  

Bad leaders and their enablers understand this. On the assumption that President Donald Trump is a bad leader – a leader who is less competent and ethical than he is incompetent and unethical – the best example of an enabler who grasps the importance of time is his longtime advisor, Steve Bannon.

In a 2019 interview Bannon famously talked about “flooding the zone.” By which he meant that as soon as Trump again became president – which Bannon devoutly and, as it turned out, correctly believed he would – he should act and enact whatever he could as fast as he could. So fast that the opposition would never know what hit them. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” Bannon said. “Every day we hit them” – by “them” he meant the media and the public – “they’ll bite on one and we’ll get all our stuff done. Bang. Bang. Bang. These guys will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”  

Which is precisely what happened during the three months since Trump moved back into the White House. Muzzle velocity not only at home but abroad. Muzzle velocity to which other leaders everywhere are scrambling to respond. Muzzle velocity which to the opposition is as destabilizing as stunning.

The straits we’re in were foretold by a few but missed by the many – for example by most of America’s most prominent chief executives. It’s why this moment in American history is fraught with anxiety about the future of democracy. It’s why most of the best and brightest – for example, partners in the nation’s most prestigious law firms, and administrators in the nation’s most prestigious universities – have been caught flatfooted. It’s why most of the best and brightest seem to have no idea how critical, how essential, they stand up to a bully with a bully pulpit.

What’s happening in the United States right now is not unique. It’s happened before – repeatedly.  Problem is most of America’s leadership class seem never to have cracked a history book.   

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Note: For more on fighting not following see the two posts below.

For Followers Who Want to FIGHT Not Follow

Fight? Or Fold?

The piece linked below was originally posted on April 26, 2023. It was relevant two years ago – it’s more relevant now.

Given the continuing war in Ukraine, in addition to trying to forge Europe into a united front against Russia Ursula von der Leyen is dealing with President Donald Trump’s upending of global trade. She has spent the last two weeks wheeling and dealing not just to support existing trade deals but to, wherever possible, and sensible, create new ones.

There is no single European leader that otherwise stands out. The leaders of Europe’s three largest, most powerful countries – Britain, France, and Germany – are relatively or effectively either new in their posts, or in one case a bit of a lame duck. So, though von der Leyen has no national base or army of constituents to support her, because she occupies the now more important than ever post of president of the European Commission (the European Union’s executive arm), and because she is not only highly competent but highly experienced, she stands out even more than before. It is she to whom her European peers increasingly turn to stablize the unstable situation, and perhaps to seize the day. To get Europeans less to fight among themselves and more to unite among themselves.

To repeat, the following piece is not old hat.  

Superwoman – Ursula von der Leyen

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal claimed that Gen Zers – born in the late 1990s or early 2000s – pose new challenges for business leaders who should be careful how they manage them. Superiors can be direct with their Gen Z subordinates – but only after they have shown interest in their well-being.

Where does this wisdom come from? From the “locker room playbook for managing Gen Z employees.” Leadership coach Fred Johnson, who coaches executives in business and sports, is quoted as saying that managers must adjust to Gen Zers’ work habits or risk their alienation. Notwithstanding its origin in the locker room, the advice is not confined to managers who work with athletes. Leadership coaches more generally suggest that to win “the culture race with this group” – with Gen Zers – leaders and managers must reach out and show them they care.

I was struck by the Journal article because it’s in stark contrast to most of what’s happening in the real world. For example, an American president who never seems in the slightest concerned about what his subordinates think or feel or need or want, no matter their age or stage. Instead, America’s most obvious role model, Donald Trump, presides over his domain as if he were king. King during a time when they ruled by divine right.  

Nor do America’s most successful corporate leaders seem radically different – especially in the tech industry. Even before he commanded DOGE like a brutal general, Elon Musk is known to foster toxic work environments – summarily firing employees, depriving them of benefits, and not giving a damn about their welfare. Same with Mark Zuckerberg. According to an article in Fortune magazine there are five types of bad bosses and Zuckerberg fits three of them. And while he was running Amazon, Jeff Bezos was known for making sky high demands; for being seriously stingy especially when it came to pay for those lowest on the Amazon ladder; for cultivating a culture that was notoriously confrontational; and for firing off phrases like “Are you lazy or incompetent?”

Similarly, as soon as it became politically palatable post-Covid to require workers to be back in the office full time, several other of America’s most visible executives did just that. Notwithstanding the preference for many if not most for a semblance of work-life balance, JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon was an early and vocal critic of remote work, insisting that “it doesn’t work in our business.” As was Goldman Sachs CEO, David Solomon, who in May 2021 called working from home “an aberration that we are going to correct as soon as possible.”

I’m just a reporter. A reporter reporting on the yawning gap between ideal leadership and real-world leadership. In the former experts recommend that superiors adjust to accommodate their subordinates. In the latter experts insist that subordinates adjust to accommodate their superiors.  

Unless bad leaders are stopped or at least slowed, they will inevitably, inexorably get worse.

Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers.

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Yesterday President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to revoke the security clearances and review the activities of two high-level former government officials, Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Both served in Trump’s first administration – and both had the temerity implicitly or explicitly to criticize him. Trump went so far as to charge Taylor with “conduct [that]could properly be described as treasonous.” Treason, it should be noted, is, in the United States, a crime punishable by death.

Of everything that Donald Trump has done so far in his second term, this is, arguably, the most pernicious, and the most ominous. Liz Cheney, former Republican Representative from Wyoming, did not go too far when she called Trump’s move “Stalinesque.”*

To what specifically did she refer? To Stalin’s lust for power. To Stalin’s securing his total domination in the Soviet Union and the Communist Party by persecuting and prosecuting those who opposed him. Because Stalin was not stopped or even slowed, famously, infamously, he launched the Great Purge, or Great Terror – it lasted from 1936 to 1938 – during which some 700,000 to 1.2 million Soviets died.

Is the United States the Soviet Union? No. Is Trump Stalin? No. But the overarching, all-important point is the same. Which is that in Trump’s case as in all cases of bad leadership the progression from bad to worse is as inexorable as unmistakable – unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or at least slowed.  

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The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, not sudden or hasty. But once bad has burrowed in, it digs deep and then deeper…. [By then] bad leaders and their followers are so entrenched that they control the system itself, which is why, at this point, the only way to totally get rid of bad is to totally get rid of everyone involved.

Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers.

The University is proud to announce the greatest course on leadership ever taught anywhere by anyone. A Masterclass titled Leadership in America will be offered during the fall 2025 semester. The instructor will be Donald J. Trump whose credentials surpass anyone else’s ever, living or dead. As a man’s man who twice was elected president of the United States, a man’s man who was manly enough to reject previous, perfectly idiotic presidential norms, no one better to teach leaders how to get their followers to be servile subjects.  

The course will be offered once a week for ten weeks. Students will be required to sit totally still and stay totally silent. They will be expected to focus solely on the oracular instructor, to revere the instructor, and to obey the instructor without question. There will be no homework. However, absence from a single session will automatically result in a failing grade.

No reading is required for the course – not before, not during, not after.

President Trump prefers to hang loose so the syllabus below is approximate. It could change on a dime. Nevertheless, it provides prospective students with a vague hint of what to expect.

Questions about the course, or for that matter about anything else, should be sent to Mr. Stephen Miller. Mr. Miller currently serves as White House Deputy Chief of Staff. He has been President Trump’s abject acolyte since 2016.

Syllabus

Week One: Definition of Leadership

Americans usually define leadership as influence. Mr. Trump will discuss why such a definition is just for suckers. Leadership is all about power. The power to get other people to do what you want them to do by any means necessary.

Week Two: Ideology of Leadership

Americans usually share ideals such as democracy and equality. Mr. Trump will discuss why such ideals are just for suckers. The real ideal is to win – to come out on top – at all costs. Democracy and equality be damned.

Week Three: History of Leadership  

Americans usually study American leaders such as George Washington, Thomas Edison, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Mr. Trump will discuss why leaders like these are just for suckers. He will encourage familiarity with global role models such as Ivan the Terrible, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.

Week Four: Leadership is a Relationship

Americans usually view leadership as a relationship between leaders and followers. Mr. Trump will discuss why such a view is just for suckers. Leadership is not a relationship. It is only about the leader, about the self. The self is all that matters, ever.

Week Five: Leadership Experience and Expertise

Americans usually think leaders should have relevant experience and expertise. Mr. Trump will discuss why such thinking is just for suckers. To prove his point, he will point to himself. He became president of the United States without a lick of political, governmental, or military experience or expertise.

Week Six – Leadership Ethics

Americans usually prefer their leaders to be ethical. Mr. Trump will discuss why such a preference is just for suckers. He will present himself as an example – a man who was elected to the presidency a second time despite his being a convicted felon and inveterate liar.

Week Seven – Leadership and Diversity

Americans usually believe their leaders should solicit different types of advisors and different sorts of advice. Mr. Trump will discuss why such a view is just for suckers. His own record testifies to the virtues of advisors who are largely white and male – though glamorous women are an occasional exception – and who, above all, are slavishly loyal.

Week Eight – Leadership and Globalism

Americans usually believe in the virtues of the postwar international order that existed for 80 years. Mr. Trump will discuss why such an opinion is just for suckers. No good reason he and Putin shouldn’t be best buds. No good reason to consider Canadians and Europeans our friends. No good reason Greenland is Denmark’s and not the United States’s. No good reason for anything as wasteful and, frankly, namby-pamby, as foreign aid.

Week Nine – Leadership and the Economy

Americans usually believe they should have a semblance of economic safety and security.  Mr. Trump will discuss why this belief is just for suckers. Nothing as exciting as having markets gyrate and then tumble. Nothing as bracing as being anxious about Medicaid, Medicare, and social security. And always there’s the reliable titillation of inflation.  

Week Ten – Presidential Leadership    

Americans usually believe their government is characterized by the separation of powers – by checks and balances. Mr. Trump will discuss why this belief is just for suckers. As his second term in office vividly attests, there are no limits on the American president. All presidents must do to rule by fiat is to invoke their executive powers. What better lesson for leaders? For all leaders? For all leaders anywhere and everywhere, ever?!  

Well, not really. President Richard Nixon and President Donald Trump are not conjoined twins, in many ways they are different. But they are also in one way – in one extremely important way – the same. Both are stained by hate. Hate for anyone and everyone they perceive as an opponent – which in their case means an enemy.

Nixon in/famously kept an “enemies list.” The list started small but grew over time to over 200 names for the express purpose of doing them harm. How was this to be accomplished? By for example, tax audits, federal contracts, litigation, and prosecution. In a memo, White House Counsel John Dean explained the purpose of the list:

This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly – how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.

“Screw our political enemies” – sound familiar?

In his book Nixon vs Nixon, psychiatrist David Abrahamson wrote about him:

He couldn’t forget the snubs, the injuries he received throughout his life, and he was now giving it back word for word. Revenge was at the core of his feelings. Not once did he talk about a wrongdoing he had committed. His behavior followed his early pattern: fighting belligerently while proclaiming his innocence.

“Fighting belligerently while proclaiming his innocence” – sound familiar?

So far as we know Trump never, not literally, had an “enemies list.” Maybe because there was never any need. It has long been understood that anyone who is not strongly for President Trump is against President Trump and, therefore, a potential target. At his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas, Trump meant it when he said: “I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

No surprise then when within days of taking office, in ways both large and small, the president sought to demean and destroy some of his real and imagined enemies. From stripping people of their security details, to suing networks and newspapers, to humiliating a longtime punching bag, Volodymyr Zelensky, to threatening select universities and law firms, to attacking certain members of the judiciary, just two months in Trump has already gone all out.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of Trump’s anger, of his passion for retribution, is his virulent, violent use of the English language. Kamala Harris was labelled “lazy,” “slow,” “Low IQ,” “mentally impaired,” a vice president who should be “impeached and prosecuted.” Since moving back into the Oval Office, the president has called political opponents: “scum,” “savages,” “deranged thugs,” “Marxists,” “violent,” “vicious” “radical leftists,” and “corrupt.” Meantime his henchman, Elon Musk, has repeatedly attacked those who personify the law, judges, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil,” and “deriding the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.”*

Most of us prefer to have everyone love us. But we manage to avoid being obsessed by those who do not. Richard Milhouse Nixon could not, Donald John Trump cannot, do the same. Like Nixon Trump is consumed by the intensity of his antipathy.  

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*For more on this see Peter Wehner, “Trump’s Appetite for Revenge is Insatiable” in The Atlantic, March 20, 2025.