Trump is Dangerous Because His Legacy Means No More to Him Now Than it Did with ‘The Apprentice’
Trump and other selfish leaders get into power because the rest of us forget to elect/select a person with healthy notions of legacy.
What makes great leaders is pursuit for legacy. Ideally, you want a leader who wants to do well in the name of favored legacy.
Examples include — A legacy of improving the nation. A legacy of uniting the nation. A legacy of technological advancements only dreamed of. A legacy of making America the global leader and arbiter of international disputes (even though this one comes with many headaches as the Vietnam and the Bush wars can attest to). A legacy of being the first to define health as a human right in a nation. Etc.
To wit, Africa’s grossly ineffective presidents focused on power and ethnic/tribal bias over grander. legacies. The few African leaders who have been successful at healing their states overcame a relevant portion of self (short-term selfish gains) and party in the name of legacy.
Legacy in leadership is not a complicated notion. Even when a political candidate has party-defined obligations, provided her overarching legacy-goal is a variation of “be known as a fair and effective leader who POSITIVELY enhanced people’s lives and elevated this nation to new heights”, then that candidate would likely be some level of a ‘great’ leader.
However, when the overarching legacy is corrupted with greed or tribalism/racism or hatred or divisiveness or worse, in the case of Trump all those things combined with pettiness, then the leader can almost never be great.
To save time, I’ll simplify the definition of ‘great leader’ as a leader who history reflects on as having brought great POSITIVE change.
In there lies Trump’s biggest flaw. Not only is his overarching legacy-goal extremely selfish and petty, but he is also agnostic to whether or not history remembers him as a man who brought about great positive change. Trump has one view of how things should be and who should benefit. In this way, Trump is no better than the African tyrants we lament about.
Beyond enriching and empowering those who are exactly like him — white, rich, and male — Trump only cares about legacy to the extent of trying to do a combination of things:
- Make it so that he goes down in history as the president who fulfilled almost all campaign promises — even the wildest like literally trying a variation of banning Muslims.
2. Make it so that if he has to suffer the constraints of being president (remember that many say he’s depressed by it), he’ll do it in the most dramatic way possible such that the payoff for the high cost of constraint is historical infamy by way of the drastic, selfish, and unfair change he wants or impeachment defined by ‘I tried to give my voters what they wanted but Congress impeached me for my efforts’.
With this mindset, drastic unfair decisions like pardoning a criminal whose crime was defined by racial discrimination or threatening to blow up the financial system by ransoming the debt ceiling are a win-win for Trump. He both gets the selfish and asymmetrical changes he wants, while edging closer to the freedom he wants by way of impeachment.
An American president with nothing to lose by way of legacy should scare us all.
