What a professor who studies outside leaders has to say about Donald Trump
Who were some of the best unfiltered presidents?
Abraham Lincoln’s only national political experience was one term in the House of Representatives. He was an extreme dark horse candidate for the Republican nomination. Basically no one expected him to get it because he was a relatively minor figure.
He was such a success because he did things that, if people had known he was going to do those things, they would never have voted for him. That knowledge link is key. Lincoln positioned himself in the campaign as the least anti-slavery Republican — the Republican most likely to conciliate the South. And then when he went into office, of course, he wasn’t that at all.
.. I do not expect [Trump] to follow through on many of his campaign promises because one of the hallmarks of unfiltered leaders is that precisely because they don’t have a record, they can promise anything in order to get to power. They have more freedom to deviate because those promises have no reflection of their underlying beliefs. That can work out to their benefit. But that being said, the people who are thinking that “gee, this is normal” are deluding themselves.
.. What it demonstrates is the idea that people will be moderated by being in power is almost always false. When you are trying to gain power you say things meant to please the people who will decide whether or not you’re going to get power. That’s your goal. You want to please them in order to gain office and gain power. Once you’re in office, that’s what you have. You have power. Power is not a moderating force. Power is a liberating force.
.. That being said, if you were to pick an unfiltered person to be the president of the United States, it would be hard to imagine someone with worse odds of being a success than Donald Trump.
.. You write about charismatic leaders, particularly narcissistic ones, and their ability to, again, either be extreme successes or failures. You call charisma an “intensifier.” What does that mean?
Intensifiers basically make good things better and bad things worse. Charisma is a classic example. I define charisma as the ability to persuade people to do things through force of personality that you cannot persuade them to do [otherwise]. If the ideas you are trying to persuade them to are good ones, then charisma is incredibly valuable. If they are bad ones, than charisma is incredibly dangerous.
.. Clearly a very large proportion of the American population is affected powerfully by [Trump’s] charisma. He himself said this his followers are so committed that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they would still vote for him. That’s a pretty remarkable charismatic hold: That’s almost classically the definition of a charismatic leader who gets extraordinary amounts of adulation from their followers. You should expect that level of charisma to enable him to do things that a normal political leader simply could not even contemplate.
.. You will find that being a leader is much much harder than telling people how much better a job you would do if you were the leader. So you should take the advice of people who are experienced and the counsel and the help of people who have been there before. You should take it incredibly seriously.