In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These four are among the questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following? Today’s post is in keeping with this theme – with the focus on followers.
In her weekly piece for the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan chose last weekend not to write, as she usually does, about the high and the mighty. She chose instead to write about ordinary people – the American people.* Her subject was the impact on us of “Trump-era corruption.” The impact on us of Trump’s rampant “personal enrichment” and his use of “government to satisfy private goals.” Noonan worries that the president is serving us a toxic brew that will damage, permanently, our sense of ourselves a “moral actors… to whom politicians have to answer.”
To her credit, Noonan tries in her column to do something unusual. She tries to answer the question of how it happened. How “Trump-era corruption” came to pass? Specifically, why has there been such an “absence of furor”? Why has there been “no public outcry”?
Noonan goes on to answer her own questions.
- Because corruption is a constant, and the “other side is dirty too.
- Because the scandal threshold has skyrocketed.
- Because Trump never sold himself as a man of moral rectitude.
- Because the corruption is on such an enormous, nearly overwhelming, scale.
- Because the extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition.
- Because when scandals add up and become a blur, they no longer serve as a call to action.
I say, “Yay Noonan”! Because when the history of this period is written the mystery will not be the man at the top. Trump has always been an open book. Moreover, the risk of a leader like he has always been known. Including by the Founders who were acutely aware of the dangers of leaders who were louts, insatiable for, say, money or power.
No, the mystery lies not in leaders who act in their self-interest. Rather it lies in followers who frequently do not. Or so on the surface it appears.
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*“The Art of the Self-Deal” in the Wall Street Journal, August 22-23, 2026.