What Machiavelli Would Say About Trump

Paul Krugman put up a nice post on his Substack last week, pointing out how other countries are rapidly losing their fear of U.S. President Donald Trump and starting to join forces and push back against his erratic and predatory approach to foreign policy. He’s right, but what caught my eye was when Krugman cited Niccolo Machiavelli’s dictum that to be a successful prince, “it is better to be feared than loved.” Ideally, a prince should seek to be both, but Machiavelli observes that this feat is hard to pull off. If one must choose, therefore, being feared is preferable because men are fickle and their affections are unreliable. Fear, however, is maintained “by a dread of punishment that never fails.” As Krugman notes, Trump’s ability to threaten and intimidate others has been undermined by his own blunders (such as the war with Iran) and the general incompetence and inconstancy of his regime. I mean: What’s the point of negotiating with Trump or reaching an agreement when he might change his mind and tear it up a few months later? And this is far from the only way in which Trump is acting contrary to Machiavelli’s advice. In fact, if you read key sections of The Prince carefully (as the students in my realism class did a few weeks ago), it’s clear that Trump is in many ways the poster child for How to Be a Very Bad Prince. For starters, after arguing that it is better to be feared than loved, Machiavelli points out that there is something even worse: You could end up hated or despised. To avoid the former, he cautions the prince not to go after his subjects’ property or their women. Trump has certainly violated the former rule, having enriched himself at public expense and undermined the well-being of many Americans through his misguided economic policies. Moreover, his own sordid personal life and close association with Jeffrey Epstein betray a highly predatory attitude toward women, which may make him popular with misogynists such as the Tate brothers but has also contributed to the deep hatred felt by a sizable number of Americans. What about being despised? Machiavelli warns that a prince is “rendered despicable by being thought changeable, frivolous, effeminate, timid, and irresolute.” Nobody would call Trump “effeminate,” but the other adjectives apply in spades. For all his macho bluster, Trump’s vacillations and inconstancy are now well-established, and leaders made of sterner stuff (e.g., Chinese President Xi Jinping) have figured this out and taken advantage of it. Corporate leaders, university presidents, and law firms that bent the knee to Trump early in his second term look both craven and foolish, while those who stood up to him now seem both courageous and farsighted. Not only is Trump no longer feared as much as he once was, but he’s also well down the road to being both hated and despised. Machiavelli also argued that a prince should not be overly “liberal” (meaning generous) and “must care little for the reputation of being a miser.” This advice might sound counterintuitive—why would being a cheapskate help a prince retain power?—but if you read Chapter 16 of The Prince carefully, his central message is that a wise prince should manage his finances prudently and not try to buy his subjects’ loyalty by being profligate. If he does the latter, he will soon exhaust his resources and “be forced to impose heavy taxes, become exortionate, and do everything possible to obtain money”—actions that will also cause his subjects to hate him. Trump may be a cheapskate who many have alleged liked to stiff creditors in his private life, but as president, he’s a chronic spendthrift. To be fair, he is hardly the first president to run huge deficits, cut taxes on the wealthy, overspend on the military, and increase the size of the national debt, and he couldn’t have done any of these things without the active collusion of Republicans in the House and Senate. But no president has spent nearly as much public money subsidizing his own indulgences (such as golfing), and he’s the first president to offer to pay Americans to vote for his party by promising them a $5,000 check. To be clear: Not only would this be illegal, but in effect, it means bribing Americans with their own money and would increase the deficit even more. The bond market and Machiavelli agree—Trump’s lack of fiscal discipline is most unwise. Machiavelli also devotes an entire chapter of The Prince to military affairs, and he tells the aspiring prince to be a master of the military arts. His attention to this topic reflects the central role of military power in war-torn Renaissance Italy, of course, and one could argue that the required skill set is different today. We don’t expect modern political leaders to know how to command a squadron or a ship, let alone an entire army, though it doesn’t help if they look silly trying to gain some military street cred. But a solid understanding of the role and the limits of military power, and the conditions that are likely to lead to success or failure in war, can still be essential for modern politicians, and it’s easy to think of plenty of world leaders (including several U.S. presidents) whose careers ended because they mismanaged military affairs and made big strategic blunders. A few even lost their lives. Trump’s disastrous war with Iran confirms the wisdom of Machiavelli’s advice. A draft-dodging president has appointed an incompetent secretary of defense, put compliant commanders in key positions, and assigned key diplomatic roles to his untrained son-in-law and a real estate lawyer with zero background in international affairs. He insisted on arranging a military parade in Washington on his birthday but failed to conduct a careful assessment of the pros and cons of going to war with Iran and now finds himself mired in an unwinnable conflict that is doing far-reaching damage to the world economy, undermining the U.S. position in the Middle East and elsewhere, and likely helping Democrats triumph in the upcoming midterms. We shouldn’t require presidents to be military experts, perhaps, but Machiavelli would look askance at any leader as blissfully ignorant of the military arts as Trump. Then there’s the question of justice. Machiavelli clearly believed that a prince must rule with a firm hand and not hesitate to inflict punishment (including taking a life) if someone deserves it. But he emphasizes that the prince must do so only when “there is a proper justification and manifest reason for it.” In other words, the imposition of justice must be legitimate. A prince may have to do cruel things, but not for arbitrary, selfish, or personal reasons, lest he once again provoke public hatred. Needless to say, Trump’s campaign to weaponize the Justice Department and use it to seek revenge on those he regards as personal enemies (including some former members of his first administration) goes far beyond the similarly dubious acts of a former President Richard Nixon or a former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The vendettas that he has launched against former special prosecutor Jack Smith, former FBI head James Comey, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, and several others all violate Machiavelli’s warning that justice (and where necessary, punishment) should be wielded in proper and legitimate fashion. He understood that leaders must do cruel things on occasion, but he opposed arbitrary cruelty as both dangerous and wrong. But wait, there’s more! Machiavelli acknowledges the need for deception and reminds the prince that he may sometimes need to break his word. In his words, “a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest.” Why? Because others will act the same way: They will not keep their promises to you if their interests lie elsewhere. You might think that Trump has taken that advice to heart, given his long track record of cons, frauds, lies, and broken promises, but Machiavelli’s advice is more subtle. While recognizing the occasional need for deception and the need for the prince to be willing to do things that might seem wrong or at odds with well-established moral principles, he emphasizes that leaders should go to great lengths to conceal this trait. In his words: “It is not, therefore, necessary for a prince to have all the above-named [virtuous] qualities, but it is very necessary to seem to have them. … A prince must take great care that nothing goes out of his mouth which is not full of the above-named … qualities, and, to see and hear him, he should seem to be all mercy, faith, integrity, humanity, and religion.” In other words, a successful prince must be “a great feigner and dissembler.” And that means that you can’t run around breaking your word and acting faithlessly or cruelly on every occasion, because it will soon become apparent to others that you are dangerous and cannot be trusted. In fairness, Trump owes most of his political success to a remarkable ability to convince people that he is something he is not, and one could argue that all those bizarre posts on Truth Social depicting him as a military hero or a religious figure or whatever are intended to keep the myth alive for the “Make America Great Again” faithful. The problem he faces today, however, is that the shtick has worn thin, and it has become obvious that he is none of the things that he has pretended to be. The public mask has slipped badly on several occasions, as when Trump told reporters he didn’t care about affordability, or said “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.” Truer words were never spoken. Machiavelli’s guide to successful leadership is often incorrectly viewed as an amoral (if not immoral) guide to the political dark arts, which is why we tend to label especially wily and morally flexible politicians as “Machiavellian.” But when Machiavelli wrote that “the end justifies the means,” he had very specific and morally defensible ends in mind. He wanted the prince to succeed because he believed that this was necessary to provide order and stability, and to protect the state from internal rebellion or external interference. A prince must “learn how not to be good,” not for their own amusement, profit, or indulgence, but rather for the purpose of preserving the state. For this reason, a wise prince will do bad things only when necessary. “One must learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case,” he writes. The end may justify the means, but not any end, and certainly not a leader’s personal whims. In his five-plus years in office, Trump has violated that principle repeatedly. His presidency has not made America “greater”: On the contrary, it is more divided at home, more corrupt, less credit-worthy, and much less admired abroad. Its long-term future is being compromised as Trump takes a wrecking ball to many global partnerships and to the United States’ once world-leading scientific and academic institutions. What has he left in its place? In addition to increasing his and his family’s personal wealth by more than $2 billion dollars, he’s building a new White House ballroom and trying to plaster his name on as many public buildings as possible. Machiavelli was not a fan of princely rule; on the contrary, he was a strong proponent of the republican form of government. He even extolled the virtues of the “well-ordered” kingdom of France, where “we find numberless good institutions on which depend the liberty and security of the king.” The Prince is something of an outlier in his writings, therefore, in part because it was in a sense an unsuccessful job application. Machiavelli wrote it in an attempt to curry favor with a new Medici government in Florence (and get his old government job back), which is why it begins with a fawning dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici (who probably never read it). But were Machiavelli alive today, I suspect that he’d see Donald Trump as Exhibit A for why a well-ordered republic is preferable to the rule of an erratic and self-absorbed potentate. I can even imagine him including Trump in a revised edition of his famous work, as a revealing illustration of What a Prince Should Not Do.