How to understand yesterday’s verdict rendered in an American court: a former president found guilty by a jury of his peers on 34 counts of falsifying records? And how to understand where Americans are today, faced with the real possibility that Donald Trump, now a convicted felon, will be elected president a second time?
How not to understand what happened – is happening – is to fixate, obsesively, on the man himself. On the leader. This is not to say that Trump is unimportant. Rather it is to say that he is not all-important.
Without question he will go down as one of the most significant figures in American history. Politically inexperienced and inexpert when elected president, Trump has nevertheless dominated American politics during the eight years since. Notwithstanding his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020, to this day it is Trump who sucks the air out of our room.
But leadership is not about single individuals. Leadership is a system with three parts – each of which is as important as the other two. Part one is the leader – here Trump. Part two is the followers – here the many Americans who continue to support Trump. Part three is the contexts – here the domestic context, the United States at this moment in time; and the global context at this moment in time, within which democracies everywhere are struggling.
In my book The Enablers, I divided Trump’s followers into two groups: his Tribe and his Team.* His Tribe consists of Trump followers who remain at a distance. They include among others those who make up his often rabid and always reliable base; and members of his party, intractably constant Republicans who continue to support the former president no matter what he does or says.
Trump’s Team is different. It consists of followers who are up close and personal. For example, during Trump’s time as president, it was Vice President Mike Pence’s fulltime job to slavishly follow where the president led. Similarly, Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, who during the four years of Trump’s time in the White House was among his closest advisors, prepared at all hours to do his father in law’s bidding, without questioning.
Of course, not all followers – subordinates – follow all the time. Some of Trump’s underlings quit, such as his onetime Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis. But most have been loyal all along – and they remain so now, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict. Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, spoke for the lot of them when he declared that yesterday, the day the jury handed down its unanimous decision, was a “shameful day in American history.” Johnson then launched a frontal assault on America’s judicial system by calling Trump’s trial “a purely political exercise, not a legal one.”
The contexts within which the trial took place are as important as Trump himself – and as those who remain unfailingly faithful. In the domestic context consider these: the declining trust in American institutions; the declining respect for authority and expertise; the declining belief in the American dream; the declining sense of American community and commonality; and the declining faith in America’s ideology, notably democracy.
And in the global context consider these. First, according to Freedom House, the non-profit organization that measures democracy globally, “Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023. The breath and depth of the deterioration were extensive. Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements.” Second, rightwing parties in Europe are rising in popularity – notably among young people. What becomes immediately clear is that the United States is not an exception. Leaders in most liberal democracies are having a hard time persuading followers in most liberal democracies not only of their own virtues but of the virtues of everything for which they stand.
Whatever your view of Donald Trump, the bottom line is he is a convicted felon. But to make sense of the next several months, attention must be paid not only to him. Attention must equally be paid to the American people – and to the America within which their drama will unfold.
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*The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021).