“The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age.”
the leaders who make the biggest contributions to history and humanity generally are not the ones we perceive to be ‘strong leaders.’
.. Gates explains Brown’s core argument, a leadership truism many will recognize. “Despite a worldwide fixation on strength as a positive quality, strong leaders — those who concentrate power and decision-making in their own hands — are not necessarily good leaders,” Gates writes.” Instead, Brown’s book posits that those who make the biggest difference “are the ones who collaborate, delegate, and negotiate — the ones who recognize that no one person can or should have all the answers.”
.. “I alone can fix it”
.. an American from Dallas came up to me and looked to see what I was doing. And he said, ‘well, America needs a strong leader and Donald Trump is a strong leader.’ There’s anecdotal evidence and survey evidence that one of the attractions of Donald Trump is that people thought he was a strong leader. I argue that there are lots of other qualities, which are more useful than strength, as defined by someone who’s domineering and maximizes power, and that being a strong leader and being an effective leader are not quite the same thing.
.. the Trump campaign wasn’t characterized by humility.
.. It remains to be seen what kind of team he’ll complete. So far it seems to be a mixture of billionaires and generals
.. the tone of the campaign — was unlike any in my lifetime. It was so aggressive. It’s one thing to say that you want to defeat your rival. But to say that the rival should be in jail — that was something more reminiscent of a third world country.
..
Many people saw Trump as a charismatic leader and then projected their hopes and their existing disappointments. They projected what they wanted to sense onto Trump. It’s rather strange that he was seen as the champion of blue-collar workers when the people he’s appointed [to the Cabinet so far] tend to be people who are very far removed from that milieu. This is a classic example of charisma being bestowed upon somebody.
.. Somebody who paints a bold picture, however remote it may be from reality, is probably more likely to be deemed to have charisma.
.. That the worship of strength, in the sense of domination and maximization, is the worship of a false god. There are other qualities that are more important in a leader — integrity, intelligence, collegiality, empathy, having a questioning mind — and if we’re very lucky, the person has vision as well.
.. I’m defining strength in the conventional way, as someone who is a maximizer of their power and wants to dominate all and sundry.
.. Eisenhower, a general, would be sitting at his desk saying ‘Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike — it won’t be a bit like the Army.’ Trump is used to being in charge of his business empire. How hard is it for someone accustomed to that kind of hierarchy to make the adjustment?
.. I would hesitate to say what kind of president he’s going to be. When he’s faced with the fact that he can’t simply issue a set of instructions and it’ll automatically happen — because it’s a very complex political system and there are still checks and balances — how he reacts to that will be very important.
.. Why do you think people are so drawn to this dichotomy between strong versus weak leaders?
It’s hard to say. There’s something rather primitive about it. Going back to a time when there were clans and people looking to the chief, the person who was the ruler was also usually the strongest person or the greatest military person in the group.
Even Republicans know the Bill Clinton attacks don’t work
Matthews said, female voters viewed attacks on Hillary Clinton’s spouse as “inherently unfair. Ultimately, it came back down to this: Bill Clinton’s not the one who’s running.”
When it came to criticizing Hillary Clinton as an enabler, Matthews said, the reaction was, “yeah, you’re angry. It’s a normal reaction. Any line of messaging on this generates sympathy for her, or voters said it was completely irrelevant.”
The women in the America Rising focus group also identified areas they would consider off-limits in terms of Clinton attacks: “It was her age, her stamina, her health and her looks,” Matthews recalled.
.. With 26 days to go in the race, Donald Trump has said he plans to launch a full-scale attack on the former president. “We’re going to turn Bill [Clinton] into Bill Cosby,” his campaign CEO Steve Bannon told Bloomberg News earlier this week.
.. On Thursday night, Sean Hannity plans to feature three of Bill Clinton’s accusers: Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. And Trump’s campaign has promised new revelations from previously unknown women.
.. But Democratic allies are thrilled with the politically nonsensical narrative.
.. Brock called it “a giant exercise in projection. If there’s a Bill Cosby here, it will turn out to be Donald Trump, not Bill Clinton.”
.. in Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, her operatives found that suburban women in New York disliked Clinton because of her decision to stay with her husband.
.. the campaign chose not to address the issue head-on, focusing instead on working-class women upstate, who viewed Hillary Clinton as a champion.
.. Democrats close to Clinton speculated that the individuals guiding Trump’s strategy, like Bannon, are most likely focused on what will happen after Nov. 8 — and empowering the Trump base to become a movement of anti-Clinton opposition, whether it’s through a media operation or a grass-roots movement.
.. the biggest problem with the attacks, some Clinton allies said, was the source:
Donald Trump’s Sad, Lonely Life
In every town hall I’ve seen, the candidate turns to the voter, listens attentively and directs the answer at least partially back to that person.
The candidates do that because it’s polite, because it looks good to be seen taking others seriously and because most of us instinctively want to make some connection with the people we are talking to.
Hillary Clinton, not exactly a paragon of intimacy, behaved in the normal manner on Sunday night. But Donald Trump did not. Trump treated his questioners as unrelatable automatons and delivered his answers to the void, even when he had the chance to seem sympathetic to an appealing young Islamic woman.
That underlines the essential loneliness of Donald Trump.
.. Politics is an effort to make human connection, but Trump seems incapable of that.
.. He was a germophobe through most of his life and cut off contact with others, and now I just picture him alone in the middle of the night, tweeting out hatred.
.. Trump continues to display the symptoms of narcissistic alexithymia, the inability to understand or describe the emotions in the self. Unable to know themselves, sufferers are unable to understand, relate or attach to others.
.. Women could be sources of love and affection, but in his disordered state he can only hate and demean them. His attempts at intimacy are gruesome parodies, lunging at women as if they were pieces of meat.
.. Bullies only experience peace when they are cruel. Their blood pressure drops the moment they beat the kid on the playground.
Your only rest comes when you are insulting somebody, when you are threatening to throw your opponent in jail, when you are looming over her menacingly like a mafioso thug on the precipice of a hit, when you are bellowing that she has “tremendous hate in her heart” when it is clear to everyone you are only projecting what is in your own.
Trump: ‘I don’t wanna change’
And he boasted of his temperament — his “single greatest strength,” by his account — while knocking Clinton’s disposition in an interview with the La Crosse Tribune.
“I actually think that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a good temperament. I thinks she’s very unstable in certain ways,” Trump told the newspaper.
.. “I think temperament is one of my greatest assets,” Trump added. “I’ve won all my life. I’ve been winning. I always thought that temperament — I mean I have always felt — and been told — that my single greatest strength is temperament.”