Donald Trump and The End of Power

I've Got Good News and Bad News

President Trump in his happy place, the White House Situation Room.

Earlier this month I ran a workshop for the senior leadership team of an energy company on the art and science of productive disagreement. We talked about how open disagreement at work is so valuable, why it’s hard to get right, and how to do it better. It went really well: we had a great discussion and the feedback afterwards was excellent. I’d like to do more of these. If you or your organisation might be interested, drop me a note.

Catch-up service:
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5 Reasons There Won’t Be an AI Jobs Apocalypse
Why Is TikTok Rocket Fuel For Populists?
We’re All Viennese Now
Why Am I At My Lowest In The Middle of the Night?
Seven Features Of Post-Literate Politics

Among other things, recent events in the Middle East have reminded us of Donald Trump’s genius for making himself the main character of global news. It’s still unclear what or how much was achieved by America and Israel’s one-two punch on Iran, but it is clear who the chief protagonist was supposed to be. Trump was quick to associate himself with Israel’s successful strikes, and then, having made theatre out of his indecision, took everyone by surprise with his follow-through. After bullying Israel and Iran into a ceasefire, he swore on TV, just to show that he could. This kind of blood and thunder display makes liberals nervous, and understandably so. If there is a How To guide for aspiring authoritarians, it includes the projection of martial strength and the ostentatious flouting of norms.

Yet almost simultaneously, we saw signs that Trump is nowhere close to becoming a dictator, even presuming he wants to. The military parade he demanded as a birthday present to himself was a flop, poorly attended and unpopular. His comment about wanting everyone to stand for him like they do for Kim Jong Un in North Korea came across in this context as rather forlorn. He seems confused about how to handle what is meant to be his signature issue, illegal immigration. His approval rating is in decline, and while not yet disastrous is low by historical standards and always has been.

This puts a limit on his scope for rule-breaking. To succeed in becoming a populist autocrat, you do actually do have to be popular. Orban, in his heyday, had approval ratings in the high 50s; Modi in the 80s. Without The People at your back, you cannot override checks and balances or ignore dissent. As Noah Smith recently pointed out, Trump has already retreated, at least partially, on several fronts: tariffs, DOGE, immigration, Ukraine, and NATO.

In each case, he has come up against obstacles that he cannot overcome through sheer force of personality, mainly because there aren’t enough Americans who love his personality. Trump has an adoring and reverent fan base, but half the country detests him and many of those who voted for him think he’s fine but not worth breaking the constitution for. Voters really didn’t like his militaristic crackdown on illegal immigrants, and after the LA riots, his ratings on the issue went into steep decline. That bit wasn’t in the How To guide. His Big Beautiful Bill will probably pass but it’s an ugly mess of interest-group priorities and already very unpopular.

In fact, for all the sound and fury of Trump’s first six months, and notwithstanding his talent for appearing powerful, this is already starting to look like a conventional second term, in which a president who can’t make much progress at home looks to the world stage. Brokering an end to the war in Ukraine has proved beyond him, but in military affairs he can still experience pure hits of agency. When the commander-in-chief commands, those B2 bombers fly. As his recent predecessors discovered, almost nothing else in the White House works like that.

I am relieved there’s little prospect of Trump becoming all-powerful, but his ineffectualness - at least, relative to his image - is also a sign of how hard it is for any president to make radical changes. Trump is more unpopular than the average president, but the average has been in decline anyway. Presidents are just more unpopular than they used to be. Voters are more hostile to politicians and more divided, not just politically but informationally: the electorate is becoming an archipelago of epistemic islands. Throw in a degraded governing class, and you have conditions for executive incapacity that are very hard to overcome by any leader.

The levers of national power aren’t working anymore. I’m not just talking about America. Britain has choked up five prime ministers in six years, none of whom have wielded power effectively. This isn’t all down to elite incompetence. The conditions under which our leaders govern verge on impossible. Party allegiances have fragmented and loosened; it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a party break 40% again. Voters have splintered into interest groups which share little more than resentment at their plight. Activists whip up online campaigns to stop new initiatives in their tracks. The result is that it’s become much easier to break the things we hate than build the things we need. The real national anthem is Whatever It Is We’re Against It.

Liberals and leftists fret about the concentration of power, but perhaps the real problem is its dispersal. Back in 2013, Mosés Naím published a book called The End of Power. It argued that power itself was being eroded by forces that made it “easier to get, harder to use, and easier to lose”.¹

At the global and national level, in government and in business, “superpowers” are becoming constrained by armies of “micropowers” who oppose or constrain what the big actors do. The internet makes it easier to fund and organise protests, boycotts, legal actions, single-issue campaigns, even terrorism. It is consequently harder for large entities to maintain their authority or exert their will. When everyone has the power of veto, nobody has the power to get things done. At the same time, governments generate more and more laws and regulations and find it hard to prune the ones that already exist, while corporations generate their own bureaucracies. Every giant is tied down by Lilliputian ropes, and none of the Lilliputians are big enough to drive far-reaching change.

You can see the truth of this in the impotence of successive governments and also in the dearth of truly effective protest movements. Disruption has become easier; construction harder than ever. As Zeynep Tufekci once put it, ‘Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.’” In a complex society governed by a procedural state vulnerable to challenge at every step, real change requires, as a former civil servant once told me, “more meetings, and more maths, than you can ever imagine”. Social media isn’t so good at that.

This is a cultural shift too. The internet has accelerated a long-standing trend towards the flattening of hierarchy - that ancient, primate-brained method for getting shit done. In Britain, as elsewhere, nobody is content to defer to anyone else, or even to accept that those in charge might have a tough job. Our unwillingness to accept that politicians do anything valuable is of a piece with this, as is the self-defeating truculence with which we address them: You’re all shit and we don’t trust you. Why can’t you deliver what we want? In fact, voters barely blame politicians for the country’s problems anymore: the culprit is more likely to be a shadowy them. Conspiratorialism is becoming the dominant currency of political conversation.

Naím held to a vision of informed, rational citizens holding leaders accountable, rather that voters who self-medicate with TikTok and nihilism. He also underestimated - as he later admitted - how effectively authoritarian regimes could adapt to and exploit these same trends. Russia, China, and other authoritarian states have discovered that concentrated power remains possible if you're willing to be sufficiently ruthless and sophisticated.

The end of power, it turns out, applies mainly to democracies. But Naím was at his most prescient when he argued that it would result in, not just stagnation, but discontent: “If there is a mounting risk to democracy and liberal societies in the 21st century, it is less likely to come from a conventional, modern threat (China) or a pre-modern one (radical Islam) than from within societies where alienation has set in.”

It is hard to see leaders with the imagination and talent to fix this. These trends have coincided with a collapse in elite competence, not accidentally. We are raising generations of politicians and public servants who have never learned to wield authority effectively because authority itself has become so constrained. It’s a vicious cycle: weak institutions produce weak leaders who further weaken institutions. The problem with our current Prime Minister isn’t that he can’t impose his will on government so much as that he doesn’t have a will to impose.

Just as I don’t think Trump is about to leap free of electoral constraints, nor I do I think that Nigel Farage would break the British constitution were he to become Prime Minister. Not even close. A Reform win at the next election wouldn’t mean fascism; it would just mean an even more disastrously ineffectual government. We’re not living through the end of democracy, we’re dealing with the end of power.

After the jump, for paid subscribers only: more on what I think the real problem with Keir Starmer is. Plus a Rattle Bag of delights. Paid subscriptions are what makes The Ruffian possible. Give it a go today, it’s a power move for sure.