When I was in college I learned about the great man theory of history. I didn’t quite buy it.
And now, thanks to President Trump, I’d like to modify my objections.
The theory, developed by the British historian Thomas Carlyle, is best summed up by his most famous quote, “The history of the world” was but “the biography of great men.” History moves mainly through the operations of powerful and influential individuals, and they influence history and culture more than history and culture influence them.
In this formulation, “great” isn’t a synonym for good. It refers more to impact rather than virtue. Winston Churchill was great and good. Adolf Hitler was great and evil. But they were both men who moved history.
In its most extreme version, the theory can get a bit silly. Even the greatest men and women are also products of their culture and their moment. Would Hitler have been able to create the Third Reich if he’d been operating in a nation that hadn’t recently lost a catastrophic war and that was formed and shaped in part by centuries of Prussian militarism?
At the same time, great men and women undeniably matter an enormous amount. Sticking with the World War II analogy, both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill grew up on the same British cultural soil, but history did in fact hinge on which man was prime minister of Britain in June 1940, when France fell.
Think of it like this — both the great man and the normal man spring from a specific place and context, but the normal leader remains imprisoned by his time. For better and worse, he or she is the agent of continuity. The great man changes the direction of history.
I’m thinking again about the power of leadership after a bizarre and alarming series of events (yes, even by the standards of the Trump era) over the last several days.
First, Trump crashed out (as the kids say) on “Meet the Press” and walked off the set. It’s not unusual for a politician to end an interview performatively. It is unusual for him (or her) to do it while spreading wild conspiracies with his face red with rage.
Watch the entire clip. If you saw a family member behave the way Trump behaved, you’d worry. If a chief executive behaved the same way, a responsible board of directors would convene an emergency meeting.
He was angry about elections — incredibly enough, he believes that a registered Republican, a fellow scandal-plagued reality television star named Spencer Pratt, was robbed by Democrats in the Los Angeles mayoral primary.
Yes, Los Angeles. A solidly blue city. And he’s angry that the Republican came in third.
Pratt had run an unusual campaign that centered on the city’s undeniable problems with drug addiction and homelessness, but it benefited from a series of quirky (and sometimes very weird) A.I. ads that delighted right-wing Twitter.
Early vote returns put Pratt a distant second behind the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, but ballots counted later put a progressive Democratic challenger, Nithya Raman, ahead of Pratt. On Monday The Associated Press projected that she’d finish second and advance to the runoff.
Pratt’s campaign was over. In the end, he finished with more or less the same percentage of the vote that Trump received in 2024 in L.A. — roughly 26 percent. He performed exactly as a Republican would be expected to perform.
But don’t tell that to Trump. He compared the California election to the “rigged” 2020 presidential election and said California officials were “crooked.” He told Kristen Welker, the host of “Meet the Press,” “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” called her “darling” and ultimately stormed off.
I agree with my colleagues on the editorial board that California’s policies, which (among other things) require ballots to be postmarked no later than Election Day but allow them to arrive up to seven days later, needlessly slow down the count. California should count its votes faster.
But it’s one thing to criticize California’s voting laws and procedures, and it’s another thing entirely to accuse the state and the press of election fraud without evidence. The most powerful man in the world, his face twisted in rage, was yelling at a reporter for pressing him on his totally fabricated claims.
You know what happened next. Republicans didn’t rebuke the president; they took up his cause. And the absence of evidence itself became proof of exactly how sinister and diabolical Democrats could be.
The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said: “I’m not saying it’s rigged. I’m saying it stinks to high heaven, and everybody knows that.”
“Some of these efforts,” he added for good measure, “are so diabolical and so far upstream that it’s impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”
Yet there was never any meaningful evidence that Pratt’s campaign had caught fire anywhere other than on right-wing social media. As Alex Kirshner wrote in Slate, “If you spent time on Elon Musk’s algorithmic For You feed on X in recent weeks, you may have gotten the impression that Pratt was riding a tidal wave of support to the mayorship.”
Republicans online believed the hype, and when Pratt instead performed exactly as Republicans tend to perform in Los Angeles, that was proof enough that something was wrong.
It’s a sign of the times that many readers will comb through the paragraphs above and disagree with me. “Wait,” you might say, “I thought you were going to share something that was unusually alarming. All of this is just Trump being Trump and MAGA being MAGA.”
Trump said something deranged, and Republicans rallied to his side. In other words, it was a day ending in y.
But that’s exactly the problem. The fact that we’re so accustomed to Trump’s behavior that even egregious misconduct barely raises an eyebrow helps demonstrate that Trump isn’t just reshaping American policy; in many ways he’s reshaping the American people.
Republicans, as we all know, now defend and even cheer conduct they once found abhorrent. Trump’s own corruption has corrupted virtually the entire party, turning it into a magnet for grifters and conspiracy theorists. And it’s obvious that Trump has influenced the evangelical church more than the evangelical church has influenced Trump.
But here’s the even more insidious part. Trump’s influence has spread beyond Trump’s base. By lowering the bar of acceptable behavior below the floor of normal human decency, he’s made a mockery of the idea that character matters in politics. What value is there in being a virtuous loser?
I can understand, for example, why Democrats in Maine roll their eyes at attacks on Graham Platner, the newly minted Democratic nominee challenging Susan Collins, the state’s incumbent Republican senator. Demanding that Democrats clean their own house means demanding that they make sacrifices that Republicans are unwilling to make. Why should only one party have standards for its politicians?
When that argument comes from Republicans, it’s impossible to take seriously.
On Tuesday night, for example, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former counselor and his campaign manager during his first presidential run, went on Fox News and had the gall to ask Democrats: “Ladies and gentlemen, what else do you need? Is there a magic number in the scandalabra that would make you stop?”
“Would it have to do with Nazis?” she continued. “Or putting upon women, perhaps underaged women, but definitely women not your wife of two years? Would it be that you’re lying about, that you’re insulting heroes? He’s not even fit to lick their combat boots. So I’d ask the Democrats: Is power really worth that to you?”
But doesn’t much of that describe Trump as well? He’s been unfaithful. He’s insulted military heroes, and that’s the tip of the iceberg of scandal and corruption.
The very fact that Platner could win a primary so resoundingly is evidence of the way that Trump is transforming American political culture. To use an old phrase, the quest for “authenticity” as a means of answering Trump’s populism with a populism of the left is a form of defining deviancy down.
Not every Platner voter is compromising her or his conscience, just as not every Trump voter is a hypocrite. There are lots of Americans who’ve never cared about character in their politicians. They vote their economic or cultural interests, and that’s essentially all that matters when they enter the voting booth.
I understand this approach, but I don’t agree with it. Terrible leaders can and do damage virtuous causes, and there are few better ways to discredit a movement than by putting a bad person in charge.
I still don’t buy the great man theory of history, at least not entirely. Systems and cultures matter, and Trump’s candidacy grew in fertile cultural soil. But leaders can amplify the best or worst of the culture that created them, and they remake the institutions they lead.
This is one reason so many of us believed that it was naïve to think that Trump would be absorbed into Republican culture rather than the other way around.
I like to think of a leader as the person who sets the course of a cultural river. It’s not that everyone has to immediately conform to the leader’s vision or character, but to resist the leader is to swim upstream. You can do this for a time, but eventually you’ll tire and be swept downstream along with everyone else, or you have to swim to the bank and leave.
Trump has set the course of the Republican river. He can rant and rage, and it is the Republican responsibility to rant and rage right alongside him. He can indulge in conspiracy theories, and it’s the Republican responsibility to feed his paranoia. He can enrich himself, and the smart play is to join him — taking what you can, while you can.
But it’s a mistake to think that his opponents are immune from his influence. Trump has the most influence in red America, obviously. The cultural influence of presidents is never contained to their party.
Many of our children, for example, are growing up with no memory of politics without Trump. They are coming of age in a world where pursuing virtue is seen as a sucker’s game, where decency is a distinct disadvantage.
As a result, even Trump’s critics can be swept away in the cultural river of Trump’s leadership. He’s setting the new rules, and all too many of his opponents play the same dreadful game.
The same theory of history that holds that a terrible man like Trump can shift the culture also holds that a better man or woman can help heal our nation. As we lament our cultural decline we may forget that leaders can be just as influential toward virtue as they are toward vice.
If you wonder whether leaders truly do corrupt their followers, look no further than to the continued Republican devotion to a man who is so clearly out of control.
The solution to Trumpism isn’t to conform to the spirit of the age, but to transform it, and the great man theory of history tells us that we could be one good leader away from turning the page on this miserable age.
Some other things I did
The Saturday round table I did with Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle was also mostly about Platner. We walked through his scandals and their impact on the race in Maine, but I also wanted to talk a bit about what it means to “fight” in politics. If James Talarico loses in Texas, will it be because he didn’t fight hard enough?
In a moment of extreme negative polarization — at a time when there is an enormous amount of raw hatred — the presence of this vice says, and broadcasts to partisan voters: “I have no walls. I have no rules.” And you can see this mirrored in the talk around Platner, because you keep hearing: “I want a fighter. I want a fighter.” And I think if Talarico loses — and let’s be clear, I mean, the odds are against him.
I think there’s this burst of optimism, but the reminder is that Texas is the Lucy with the football for Democrats, and it has been for some time. He’s got an enormous structural deficit to overcome. Not to say that he can’t do it, but it’s a tough race. But I guarantee you, if he loses, one of the knocks against him will be, “Well, he wasn’t a fighter.” What do they mean by that? I guarantee you that Talarico will campaign his heart out, that his staff members will exert themselves to the limit of their endurance to try to win this race, but he will not be a fighter because he’s not cruel, he’s not belligerent.
He is leading and leaning into the race in a way that is trying to emphasize this sort of, even if you disagree with me, I’m going to treat you with decency. And that is not fighting right now.
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