THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY BLOG

Trump’s Personal Catastrophic Failure of Presidential Leadership: Why?

 

The Trump Presidency will end on January 20, 2021. However, it died, morally and politically, on January 5 as a result of a series of personal presidential leadership blunders of historic dimensions.

 

A riotous spasm of resentment took place in Washington on that date. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters had come to town primarily to protest what many felt was a stolen election. President Trump made a clearly equivocal address to the marchers in which he said both, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” and also “Make no mistake, this election stolen from you, from me and from the country.” 

 

Even as Trump was talking, a sizeable group had split off from the main marcher assembly and began their physical assault on the Capitol building. They overran an inexcusably light Capital Police Guard presence. They breached restraining barriers, entered the Senate and began a riot that temporarily shut down the official counting of electoral votes confirming Joe Biden as the next president.  

 

Senators were evacuated under armed guard. Senate offices and the Senate floor itself were occupied. Five people died, including one unarmed protester shot by a Capital policeman and a capital policeman who collapsed and later died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. It was a shocking crescendo to Trump’s determined two month effort to reverse an election result he couldn’t and didn’t accept by casting doubt on its legitimacy.

 

Trump’s political judgment and leadership skills failed him in the aftermath of his election loss to Joe Biden and culminated in two key events on January 6. In the first, Trump said that Vice-president Mike Pence had it within his power to deny Mr. Biden election certification, and urged him to do so. Had that happened, it would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives and led to a possible Trump victory. However, it would have thrown the country into a major constitutional and political crisis from which it would not have easily recovered.

 

The second major failure of Trump’s Judgment and leadership skills occurred in his address to the crowd of his supporters. Even as a riot was taking place in the Senate chambers and Trump was urging calm, he could not keep from raising again the same stolen election issues that had helped fuel, but were not the only cause, of the marcher’s resentment and anger in the first place. 

 

Trump has been impeached a second time in the House for incitement of insurrection in connection with that speech. Whether Trump’s equivocal message to the marchers qualified for this second impeachment will be debated. What is now clear in retrospect however, is that a number of those who came to Washington for the march had been planning on violence for some time. Trump’s talk had little to do with their rioting; they were already planning it before they arrived.    

 

However, Trump knew that a large number of courts had considered, some fairly fully, his and his supporters’ allegations of fraud. They had not found sufficient evidence to move forward. However, instead of moderating his talk to the marchers by just voicing a determination to see these issues legally through, he gave the impression that if only the crowd could, by marching towards Congress and letting their voices be heard, pressure Mr. Pence or Congress to do the “right thing”, he would win. In his own words: “All Vice-President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

 

In so saying, Trump placed a mountain of his own hopes and those of his supporters, on a very thin reed with likely catastrophic constitutional and political consequences. In so doing, he also set up his supporters at the march and across the country, for a wholly expectable disappointment. Trump traduced their support in the service of his own inability to accept a loss he didn’t think possible or warranted and for which there could be no other explanation, in his mind, than fraud.

 

The question is why did Trump’s judgment and political skill collapse. 

 

Trump had managed to withstand withering 24/7 attacks and efforts at sabotaging his presidency from all quarters, inside and outside his administration and from almost every major American cultural and political institution, even before he entered office. Yet he still made substantial progress on the policies, agree with them or not, that animated his presidency. A number of Trump’s judgments made during his presidency were certainly questionable, but they were also frequently understandable and, unlike his post-election judgments, were not overtly and obviously catastrophically self-sabotaging. 

 

For Trump critics, the answer is clear. Trump is a narcissist, who only cares about himself and was willing to countenance untested and highly debatable constitutional means to stay in power. This all-purpose narcissistic narrative point for every Trump criticism fails to take into account any other evidence. For example, from early into and throughout his presidency, Trump wanted to do a good job for the country and be recognized for doing it if he were successful:

“I am awed by the job, as anybody would be, but I honestly, Tom [Friedman], I feel so comfortable and you know it would be, to me, a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two years and say — and have a lot of the folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job.’ And I don’t mean just a conservative job, ’cause I’m not talking conservative. I mean just, we’ve done a good job.”

 

It doesn’t take into account his wanting to protect the country from China’s one-sided trade policies, getting Europeans to help pay from their own defense, trying to bring new accords to old conflicts in the Middle East, and a number of other Trump policy initiatives.

 

No, narcissism-- that all- purpose answer for Trump critics doesn’t work. What then does? One clue is found in Trump’s life-long experience of being told no--by his father on his move to Manhattan, by others when he wanted to develop Manhattan real-estate, when he lost and then regained a fortune, when he made a successful career out of branding and being a T.V celebrity, and finally politically, as president. Trump’s life-long-experience of always having overcome adversity through prodigious effort led him to do the same when he lost the election.

 

Trump truly believed that he won the election. That conviction was most likely fueled by his belief that Biden was not as formidable a candidate as Hillary Clinton on many grounds. After the election, Trump was faced with a dramatic choice: accept the result or fight on. 

 

Based on a life-time of experience he fought on. However, while doing so, he became increasingly disconnected from the smart shrewd judgments that had gained him the presidency and the leadership skills that had allowed him to make progress under very adverse circumstances.

 

The great social psychologist Kurt Lewin once noted that the same heat that melts the butter, fries the egg.

Trump’s ability to see outside the box and his psychological capacity to act on what he saw brought him the presidency and the successes he accomplishes. Fight back hard and keep pushing forward was a life -long learned recipe for success, and it worked—until circumstances changed and Trump’s paradigm for success didn’t.   

 

Trump ended his presidency as a victim of his own success.