A dissenting opinion on Donald Trump’s leadership

The best columnists in America, like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, talk about Donald Trump’s presidency as “a colossal failure of leadership.” That misses the point by a mile.

Anyone can lead people away from a raging fire, like the Coronavirus pandemic. It takes real leadership ability to successfully lead people into the flames. Many are now dead and buried or cremated.

Hitler showed this kind of able, if malignant, leadership when he led his army on a suicidal mission, invading the largest and one of the coldest countries in the world as winter approached. Many of his troops froze to death, the survivors fled ahead of Soviet tanks leaving a trail of corpses all the way back to Berlin.

Jim Jones and Charles Manson had similarly perverse leadership abilities. Anyone could have led people to a hippie Utopia of drugs and sex in California or Guyana. It takes charisma to get people to follow into an abyss of murder, mayhem, and suicide. To induce people to murder a pregnant woman (Sharon Tate) or to take poisoned Kool Aid en masse requires powerful leadership because these things go against deeply engrained human values and tendencies for self-preservation.

Herbert Hoover was a failed leader. Donald Trump was something else: a malevolent, cruel, ignorant man who was also a master entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of hatred without peer, a much superior version of Joe McCarthy, supercharged by savoir faire about how to weaponize a huge right wing propaganda machine masquerading as media and use it to sell himself—a Manhattan heir and a mediocre real estate wheeler dealer—as the consummate businessman and a man of the people.