![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2281650227.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Trump Mistakes the Bully Pulpit for Bullying Leadership \u2014 History\u2019s Villains Were Never Heroes<\/strong><\/p>\n Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan\u2019s explosive new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump<\/em>, reveals that Trump views himself as a \u201cgreat man of history,\u201d whose power eclipses that of feared tyrants like \u201cAttila the Hun, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of the media coverage has focused on the farce of the sourcing \u2014 the quote, attributed to a \u201cpresidential historian,\u201d actually came from golf pro Gary Player\u2019s caddy. But what is far more important is the deeper, almost Freudian glimpse into Trump\u2019s psyche \u2014 and the blind spots of his vision \u2014 that this episode illuminates.<\/p>\n President Theodore Roosevelt famously referred to the U.S. presidency as \u201cthe bully pulpit,\u201d using the arcane term \u201cbully\u201d as slang for \u201csuperb\u201d or \u201cfirst-rate\u201d \u2014 rather than brutal. Even the frequently miscited Italian political theorist Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli, the author of The Prince<\/em>, published in 1532 and widely distorted ever since, never argued that leaders must be feared rather than loved to be respected.<\/p>\n Trump has a distinctly distorted understanding of what it means to be a great leader of history. In the Trump playbook, leadership is the exercise of raw power, obtained through brute force. He is awed by tyrants \u2014 not just current autocrats such as China\u2019s Xi Jinping, Turkey\u2019s Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, and Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin, who rule their countries with iron fists \u2014 but the bloody conquerors of history, such as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Hitler, who in his own words \u201cmaintained power through fear.\u201d<\/p>\n But what Trump fundamentally misses is that this autocratic mode of leadership \u2014 one built on brute force and blood \u2014 is not only emotionally and morally hollow, but it ignores the core elements of effective leadership: conviction, compassion, and inspiration. Democracies are composed of citizens with free will, not subjects cowering at the feet of rulers. No leader can unilaterally impose his or her will on the American public the way a patriarch can boss around employees at a family company.<\/p>\n To achieve true greatness as a leader of a democratic society, a president must inspire and anchor followers to an enduring set of values. That is not the Trump approach.<\/p>\n This is a long-running conversation that the first author has had with Trump personally and directly for two decades, some of it playing out in high-profile spats. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld noted in the pages of the Wall Street Journal<\/em> two decades ago, when he was asked to review the first episode of The Apprentice<\/em>, that \u201cthe assigned team projects neglect the core function of leadership: integrity, inspiration, and invention. No business invention surfaces, no societal problems are solved; instead we see people hawking sex, clothes, booze, water, bags of dirt, more sex and celebrity access.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s response? \u201cSo? That\u2019s life, that\u2019s business. The real world has all of the things that he hates. He says there\u2019s too much sex \u2014 I can tell you it exists, from personal knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n But there is an inherent void at the core of that vision of success \u2014 a worldview based entirely on power, money, and sex. Here are the missing core elements of leadership which Trump fails to understand, which define true greatness and separate the truly great leaders of history from the brutal thugs of history, as we write about in our New York Times<\/em> bestselling study on Trump\u2019s unique leadership, Trump\u2019s Ten Commandments<\/em>.<\/p>\n In Trump\u2019s world, he is the sun around which all else must revolve. There is no power except that which emanates directly from Trump, with all those around him serving as executors of his unilateral decisions.<\/p>\n But the greatest leaders in history have defined leadership as leaving legacies and institutions that transcend any one individual. Even Steve Jobs, who shared a similar centralized leadership style, came to view building an enduring institution as his ultimate masterpiece. In one of his final interviews with his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs explained: \u201cMy passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. [\u2026] That\u2019s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That\u2019s what I want Apple to be.\u201d<\/p>\n In the political arena, Franklin D. Roosevelt similarly wielded massive centralized power, but used it to build lasting institutions. FDR\u2019s New Deal programs and government agencies transformed American society and endure today. That institutional legacy is the missing ingredient in Trump\u2019s disruption playbook. As House Speaker Sam Rayburn famously quipped: \u201cAny jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a skilled carpenter to build one.\u201d<\/p>\n To Trump, his yardsticks of success are simple: the only thing he hates losing more than money is pride. He measures greatness by leveraging power, fortifying his personal grandiosity, and slapping his name in gold on as many surfaces as possible.<\/p>\n But the truly great leaders of history measure success by something far greater \u2014 progress toward a common moral purpose. Abraham Lincoln steered the country and his cabinet of bitter rivals by remaining laser-focused on a righteous cause, the abolition of slavery, which remained his North Star.<\/p>\n Similarly, leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi achieved greatness by pursuing morally righteous causes of liberation. Those causes carried timeless moral weight that outlasted Gandhi\u2019s assassination and Mandela\u2019s nearly three decades of imprisonment. Those flames of common moral purpose could not be extinguished by the loss of any single individual.<\/p>\n Furthermore, leaders like George Washington achieved greatness not by hoarding power, but by relinquishing it. Like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, Washington measured his success through defending his nascent country \u2014 and when that job was finished, he voluntarily surrendered his commission as Commander in Chief, then served two terms as the first President before stepping down.<\/p>\n None of these leaders built monuments to themselves; rather, they immersed themselves in causes larger than their own egos, winning immortality through their accomplishments rather than their delusions of grandeur.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s default negotiation tactic is to punch opponents in the mouth until they beg for mercy. While this can yield short-term, transactional wins, it destroys long-term trust. Nobody wants to do repeat business with a brutalizer. Entire civilizations folded before Genghis Khan out of sheer terror \u2014 but the moment Khan\u2019s armies moved on, those same conquered peoples immediately revolted. Fear is a fragile glue.<\/p>\n In stark contrast, the truly great leaders of history build mutual trust by finding common ground and common values that transcend short-term transactional calculation. As recounted in Doris Kearns Goodwin\u2019s classic biography of Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals<\/em>, Lincoln steered his own fractious team of lieutenants \u2014 individuals such as William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates, all of whom thought they themselves should be President \u2014 by fostering mutual trust anchored in shared purpose. Instead of demanding personal fealty or humiliating them to assert personal dominance, Lincoln absorbed their egos and occasional slights, elevating their talents and turning his fiercest political adversaries into his most devoted champions.<\/p>\n Similarly, history\u2019s greatest leaders understand the absolute limits of brute force. As the end of World War II approached and military victory was assured, FDR sought to fortify America\u2019s triumph through diplomatic initiatives, including the establishment of the United Nations. He recognized that sustaining global leadership required building institutions to resolve future conflicts through diplomacy rather than resorting to perpetual, bloody warfare. Leaders like FDR were unyielding and never surrendered their leverage, but they understood that enduring stability relies on persuasion, alliance, and diplomacy rather than unending coercion and subjugation.<\/p>\n As\u00a0Oona Hathaway\u00a0of law school said this week, \u00a0\u201cEven the most powerful state in the world is not all that powerful when it decides to act alone. \u2026.Mr. Trump wants to make America great again, but he fails to understand that what made America great was not its power to achieve its ends unilaterally but its singular ability to build international institutions that embodied its values and interests and that others wanted to join.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, reverence for the likes of Genghis Khan, Hitler, and Attila the Hun mistakes fear for respect, destruction for disruption, and raw terror for true greatness. Conquerors and autocrats may win the immediate battle by bullying their subjects into submission, but their empires inevitably crumble the moment their iron grip falters. In a pluralistic democracy of free citizens, true leadership cannot be bought, bullied, or beaten into people. It must be earned through conviction, compassion, and a moral vision that elevates a nation rather than any individual ego or pocketbook.<\/p>\n By obsessing over the brute force of history\u2019s greatest thugs, Trump has entirely missed the soul of true greatness. As Sonnenfeld shows in his 1988 book The Hero\u2019s Farewell<\/em>, heroes never select themselves but are anointed by society as pillars of that society\u2019s values. The legacy of Trump\u2019s brutal role models is historic disdain for their abusive cruelty rather than a legacy of greatness. Hitler and Stalin are reviled globally and especially in their own nations. Alexander the Great bestowed himself that title \u2014 not his subjects \u2014 and is believed by some historians to have been killed by those in his inner circle. Washington, Lincoln, Gandhi, and Mandela are revered globally and celebrated in their own lands. Trump\u2019s great leaders were villains, not heroes.<\/p>\n If Trump\u2019s leadership mission is to be remembered historically as a villain and not a hero, he is right on course.<\/p>\n The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of <\/em>Fortune.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Trump #mistakes #bully #pulpit #bullying #leadership #historys #villains #heroes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trump Mistakes the Bully Pulpit for Bullying Leadership \u2014 History\u2019s Villains Were Never Heroes Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan\u2019s explosive new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10993,10995,665,10998,10996,3140,4335,10994,260,10997,1135],"class_list":["post-8932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-bully","tag-bullying","tag-donald-trump","tag-heroes","tag-historys","tag-leadership","tag-mistakes","tag-pulpit","tag-trump","tag-villains","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nPower Hoarding vs. Institution Building<\/h2>\n
Grandiosity vs. Moral Purpose<\/h2>\n
Coercion vs. Coalition<\/h2>\n
\n