Category: Digital Article

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.             

For all the nattering and chattering about how President Donald Trump and his minions are bullying individuals, organizations, and institutions, and for all the nattering and chattering about how these individuals, organizations and institutions are or are not resisting the administration, truth is that those being bullied have tended not to fight but to fold.

For this there are many reasons, many of which are good. Still, it’s become evident that even some of America’s strongest organizations and institutions have already been weakened by the strongman in the White House. Perhaps the most obvious examples are higher education as exemplified by one of the nation’s great universities, Columbia, and one of the nation’s top-ranking law firms, Paul Weiss. The details do not concern us here. What does concern us, or it should is that both powerhouses are perceived to have caved under pressure from the president.

Given that one of my mantras is “leadership from bad to worse,” it’s no sweat for me to predict that unless and until it is stopped, none of the bullying will get better. It will, inevitably, get worse.  More colleges and universities will be targeted by the administration and more law firms will be attacked by it. The more people try to appease and accommodate leaders who lust for power the more leaders who lust for power will swallow them whole. And then, history testifies, they will go on to the next.

What is to be done? Get smart. Above all, get organized. Given the administration is powerful, if the powerless want to fight to win they must, instead of fighting each other, unite to fight their common enemy.

One example: we now know the main reason Paul Weiss accommodated the administration is because it feared that if it did not, it would be badly weakened by the competition. By other large law firms reportedly waiting in the wings to exploit the moment, to poach Paul Weiss clients. Which is of course exactly what the White House was counting on. First divide, then conquer. But this time-honored tactic works only when it works. Only when those under attack instead of uniting divide.

Last month I published a post titled “For Followers Who Want to FIGHT Not Follow.” (Link below.) It had seven suggestions, seven tips for individuals and institutions who want to take on those with more power than they. If one stands out it is that those who fight in tandem are far, far more likely to win than those who fight alone. Woe unto those unable or unwilling to learn this simple lesson.

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For Followers Who Want to FIGHT Not Follow

The man meets moment theory of leadership – which is not so much a coherent theory as a free-floating idea – goes back a century or more. (Hence the word “man.”) It claims that great leaders are forged less by their traits than by the fit between their traits and the times in which they live. If this fit is extraordinarily good, great leadership can and sometimes does emerge.

The example that’s often used is that of Winston Churchill. In the years leading up to World War II, as a member of parliament Churchill warned repeatedly that Adolf Hitler was a menace to Europe, including to Great Britain. Notwithstanding the power of his argument, and the eloquence with which he articulated it, neither it nor he got any traction. More specifically, Churchill got no traction until the circumstance changed. Until September 1, 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. During the two-years between 1938 and 1940, when Churchill became prime minister, it was not he who changed. What changed was the context within which he was situated.

Same now. Same now as America’s longtime political curmudgeon – marginalized for most of his political life – moves from sideshow to center stage. Along with Representative Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez, Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders is suddenly killing it. Drawing enormous crowds wherever and whenever they appear, it’s apparent they are tapping into the feelings of Americans furious at their president but lost without a leader to personify their anxiety.

To be clear, Sanders is not new to the national stage. He became a familiar figure in 2016 when he himself ran for president. Moreover, when he ran against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries he had a considerable constituency. But thereafter, he was, again, marginalized, on the outside not the inside of American politics, presumably permanently.

Until now. Now – though his face is more deeply lined, his posture somewhat stooped, and his hair whiter and wispier – his voice still rings and, more to the point, his message remains unchanged. Now as always he rails against capitalism in its current incarnation. And he advocates for just about everything historically associated with the American left, including taxing the rich, strong unions, raising the minimum wage, and Medicare for all.

Moreover, Sanders’s anger is as palpable as it ever was – made the more real, the more visceral, because of what he is now angry about and who he is now angry at. Now his opposition is to an oligarchical administration and to the man who controls it. To an American president who embodies everything – politically and personally – that Sanders has been raging against for decades.

Man meets moment. A theory of leadership that at the present is in practice.

Since the beginning of time – well, more precisely, since 2003 – Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been the leader of Turkey. First, he was prime minister, then he became president with unprecedented powers. Erdogan is so perfect an example of a leader who went from bad to worse – in his case from democrat to autocrat – he is one of four featured in my recent book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers*

In the book I trace the progression from when Erdogan was young and upcoming, when Turks had reason to hope he would govern as a democrat, to years later, when it became clear he would do no such thing. Instead of being a centrist democrat he is now what he has been for years: an unmitigated and unrepentant autocrat. Given Erdogan is a strongman who, typical of his type, has an insatiable lust for power, the only way his reign will end is if, and when someone(s) or something(s) ends it.

A few days ago, Erdogan invoked what The Economist referred to as “the nuclear option.” At his instruction Turkish authorities arrested the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who happens, oh by the way, to be the president’s most likely opponent in the next election. Erdogan has, then, taken his lust for power to a new level. It’s one thing to use state institutions and the security services to undermine a political rival. It’s quite another thing to have the police remove him forcibly from his home and indefinitely detain him.

Meantime, the value of the Turkish lira has dropped, the Turkish market has slid, Turkey’s central bank has jacked up interest rates, and there are protests in the streets. So, what now? Given the government has already charged Imamoglu with corruption and terrorism, it might want to retract, or to reconsider, or to provide evidence. Then again it – Erdogan – might not. Leaders who lust are bottomless pits. Which means that Erdogan will stop grabbing power and then still more power only when his hands are tied.**

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*Oxford University Press, 2024.

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

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