Trump mistakes the bully pulpit for bullying leadership — history’s villains were never heroes
His admiration for Attila the Hun, Stalin and Hitler reveals a fundamental misreading of power: brute force builds empires that crumble, not legacies.
Trump mistakes the bully pulpit for bullying leadership — history’s villains were never heroes
Overview
Trump Mistakes the Bully Pulpit for Bullying Leadership — History’s Villains Were Never Heroes
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s explosive new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, reveals that Trump views himself as a “great man of history,” whose power eclipses that of feared tyrants like “Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.”
Much of the media coverage has focused on the farce of the sourcing — the quote, attributed to a “presidential historian,” actually came from golf pro Gary Player’s caddy. But what is far more important is the deeper, almost Freudian glimpse into Trump’s psyche — and the blind spots of his vision — that this episode illuminates.
President Theodore Roosevelt famously referred to the U.S. presidency as “the bully pulpit,” using the arcane term “bully” as slang for “superb” or “first-rate” — rather than brutal. Even the frequently miscited Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, published in 1532 and widely distorted ever since, never argued that leaders must be feared rather than loved to be respected.
Trump has a distinctly distorted understanding of what it means to be a great leader of history. In the Trump playbook, leadership is the exercise of raw power, obtained through brute force. He is awed by tyrants — not just current autocrats such as China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who rule their countries with iron fists — but the bloody conquerors of history, such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Hitler, who in his own words “maintained power through fear.”
But what Trump fundamentally misses is that this autocratic mode of leadership — one built on brute force and blood — is not only emotionally and morally hollow, but it ignores the core elements of effective leadership: conviction, compassion, and inspiration. Democracies are composed of citizens with free will, not subjects cowering at the feet of rulers. No leader can unilaterally impose his or her will on the American public the way a patriarch can boss around employees at a family company.
To achieve true greatness as a leader of a democratic society, a president must inspire and anchor followers to an enduring set of values. That is not the Trump approach.
This is a long-running conversation that the first author has had with Trump personally and directly for two decades, some of it playing out in high-profile spats. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld noted in the pages of the Wall Street Journal two decades ago, when he was asked to review the first episode of The Apprentice, that “the assigned team projects neglect the core function of leadership: integrity, inspiration, and invention. No business invention surfaces, no societal problems are solved; instead we see people hawking sex, clothes, booze, water, bags of dirt, more sex and celebrity access.”
Trump’s response? “So? That’s life, that’s business. The real world has all of the things that he hates. He says there’s too much sex — I can tell you it exists, from personal knowledge.”
But there is an inherent void at the core of that vision of success — a worldview based entirely on power, money, and sex. Here are the missing core elements of leadership which Trump fails to understand, which define true greatness and separate the truly great leaders of history from the brutal thugs of history, as we write about in our New York Times bestselling study on Trump’s unique leadership, Trump’s Ten Commandments.
Power Hoarding vs. Institution Building
In Trump’s world, he is the sun around which all else must revolve. There is no power except that which emanates directly from Trump, with all those around him serving as executors of his unilateral decisions.
But the greatest leaders in history have defined leadership as leaving legacies and institutions that transcend any one individual. Even Steve Jobs, who shared a similar centralized leadership style, came to view building an enduring institution as his ultimate masterpiece. In one of his final interviews with his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs explained: “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. […] That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.”
In the political arena, Franklin D. Roosevelt similarly wielded massive centralized power, but used it to build lasting institutions. FDR’s New Deal programs and government agencies transformed American society and endure today. That institutional legacy is the missing ingredient in Trump’s disruption playbook. As House Speaker Sam Rayburn famously quipped: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a skilled carpenter to build one.”
Grandiosity vs. Moral Purpose
To Trump, his yardsticks of success are simple: the only thing he hates losing more than money is pride. He measures greatness by leveraging power, fortifying his personal grandiosity, and slapping his name in gold on as many surfaces as possible.
Details
But the truly great leaders of history measure success by something far greater — progress toward a common moral purpose. Abraham Lincoln steered the country and his cabinet of bitter rivals by remaining laser-focused on a righteous cause, the abolition of slavery, which remained his North Star.
Similarly, leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi achieved greatness by pursuing morally righteous causes of liberation. Those causes carried timeless moral weight that outlasted Gandhi’s assassination and Mandela’s nearly three decades of imprisonment. Those flames of common moral purpose could not be extinguished by the loss of any single individual.
Furthermore, leaders like George Washington achieved greatness not by hoarding power, but by relinquishing it. Like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, Washington measured his success through defending his nascent country — and when that job was finished, he voluntarily surrendered his commission as Commander in Chief, then served two terms as the first President before stepping down.
None of these leaders built monuments to themselves; rather, they immersed themselves in causes larger than their own egos, winning immortality through their accomplishments rather than their delusions of grandeur.
Coercion vs. Coalition
Trump’s default negotiation tactic is to punch opponents in the mouth until they beg for mercy. While this can yield short-term, transactional wins, it destroys long-term trust. Nobody wants to do repeat business with a brutalizer. Entire civilizations folded before Genghis Khan out of sheer terror — but the moment Khan’s armies moved on, those same conquered peoples immediately revolted. Fear is a fragile glue.
In stark contrast, the truly great leaders of history build mutual trust by finding common ground and common values that transcend short-term transactional calculation. As recounted in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s classic biography of Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, Lincoln steered his own fractious team of lieutenants — individuals such as William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates, all of whom thought they themselves should be President — by fostering mutual trust anchored in shared purpose. Instead of demanding personal fealty or humiliating them to assert personal dominance, Lincoln absorbed their egos and occasional slights, elevating their talents and turning his fiercest political adversaries into his most devoted champions.
Similarly, history’s greatest leaders understand the absolute limits of brute force. As the end of World War II approached and military victory was assured, FDR sought to fortify America’s triumph through diplomatic initiatives, including the establishment of the United Nations. He recognized that sustaining global leadership required building institutions to resolve future conflicts through diplomacy rather than resorting to perpetual, bloody warfare. Leaders like FDR were unyielding and never surrendered their leverage, but they understood that enduring stability relies on persuasion, alliance, and diplomacy rather than unending coercion and subjugation.
As Oona Hathaway of law school said this week, “Even the most powerful state in the world is not all that powerful when it decides to act alone. ….Mr. Trump wants to make America great again, but he fails to understand that what made America great was not its power to achieve its ends unilaterally but its singular ability to build international institutions that embodied its values and interests and that others wanted to join.”
In the end, reverence for the likes of Genghis Khan, Hitler, and Attila the Hun mistakes fear for respect, destruction for disruption, and raw terror for true greatness. Conquerors and autocrats may win the immediate battle by bullying their subjects into submission, but their empires inevitably crumble the moment their iron grip falters. In a pluralistic democracy of free citizens, true leadership cannot be bought, bullied, or beaten into people. It must be earned through conviction, compassion, and a moral vision that elevates a nation rather than any individual ego or pocketbook.
By obsessing over the brute force of history’s greatest thugs, Trump has entirely missed the soul of true greatness. As Sonnenfeld shows in his 1988 book The Hero’s Farewell, heroes never select themselves but are anointed by society as pillars of that society’s values. The legacy of Trump’s brutal role models is historic disdain for their abusive cruelty rather than a legacy of greatness. Hitler and Stalin are reviled globally and especially in their own nations. Alexander the Great bestowed himself that title — not his subjects — and is believed by some historians to have been killed by those in his inner circle. Washington, Lincoln, Gandhi, and Mandela are revered globally and celebrated in their own lands. Trump’s great leaders were villains, not heroes.
If Trump’s leadership mission is to be remembered historically as a villain and not a hero, he is right on course.
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