Whoever said Donald J. Trump was not a reader?! Whoever falsely maligned the man? Well…lots of people.
In his bestselling book, Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff described Trump as barely glancing at the written word. “He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff wrote. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.” Wolff quotes Trump’s onetime economic adviser, Gary Cohn: “It’s worse even than you can imagine,” Cohn claimed in an email. “Trump won’t read anything – [not] one-page memos, not brief policy papers, nothing.”
Fake news! Slander! How do I know? I know because it’s obvious that Trump not only read Machiavelli’s The Prince, he’s about memorized it. The Prince is Trump’s gospel, the book in which he fully believes and whose dictates he follows.
The Prince is a primer. A manual, an instruction on leadership originally written for Lorenzo de ’Medici who became Duke of Urbino in 1516. But there’s a reason the book has endured, has been as popular as pertinent for fully five centuries. It’s because, like all great leadership literature, The Prince is two things at once. It is particular and it is universal. It speaks to the situation immediately at hand – and simultaneously it transcends it. The book is a subjective reflection, based on Machiavelli’s own experience as a politician and diplomat, who earlier in his life fell woefully out of favor, to the point of being briefly imprisoned and tortured. At the same time, The Prince is an objective discussion of governance and the nature of the human condition.
More than anything else, the book instructs on the exercise and preservation of power. It is purely pragmatic: The Prince lacks not only a moral code but a legal one. God is absent from the book, so is the rule of law and every other moral compass. The prince is the ruler, the governor, the leader who is responsible to himself and, after a fashion, to his people, but certainly not to a higher power or authority of any sort.*
Machiavelli’s view of humankind is dim, dark. “For one can generally say this of men,” he wrote. “They are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain.” When you are good to them, he adds, “they are yours.” But if you are not, beware. “They revolt.” In other words, pay attention. And do what you must to ensure that your subjects – your followers – stay loyal. For if they don’t you’re done.
But contrary to conventional wisdom, Machiavelli is not what is usually thought of as “Machiavellian.” Rather he is transactional. He argues it’s in the interest of leaders to be liked, not disliked. To this end, the prince should do what he can to be “held in esteem.” He should “show himself a lover of virtues” – though how “virtues” are defined is debatable – and “prepare rewards” for those who do what he wants them to do. The back of his hand should be reserved only for those who fail to fall into line.
The Prince is equally clear on the prince’s priorities. He should never be casually cruel. But if cruelty is necessary to maintain order and, or, the prince’s power, it could and should be employed. “A prince, therefore, so as to keep his subjects united and faithful, should not care about the infamy of cruelty, because with very few examples he will be more merciful than those who, for the sake of too much mercy, allow disorders to continue.” So, it is much “safer,” Machiavelli maintained, “to be feared than loved.”
I rest my case. Is it not evident that Trump not only read The Prince, he took it to heart? It is.
But one caveat. Machiavelli’s prince is careful and calculating. As Trump earlier today testified, he is capable even on a day as august as this one is, of being neither. Trump’s first speech, his scripted, formal inaugural speech, was Machiavellian. His second, delivered almost immediately thereafter to a large group of acolytes, was not. It was entirely impromptu, weirdly long, full of falsehoods, and in every way incautious. It suggested that Trump should be feared all right – but not for reasons Machiavelli would sanction.
President Trump, “Sir,” I respectfully request you give The Prince another read.
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This and the preceding paragraph are based in part on comments I made about The Prince in my edited and annotated collection of the great leadership literature. (See Barbara Kellerman, ed. Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence. McGraw-Hill, 2010.)