A Cult of Personality Without a Personality

Trump’s rise isn’t an aberration—it’s the endpoint of decades of lowered standards and unserious leadership.

There’s an H.L. Mencken quote that’s been stuck in my head over the past couple of months. Read it and you’ll know why:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Mencken was writing in 1920, when Warren G. Harding was on the campaign trail. For nearly two generations before Watergate, Harding would become synonymous with presidential corruption and executive incompetence in America. He looks practically saintly by today’s standards.

What is jarring about the current political moment in America is how plainly corrupt Donald Trump is. He is a walking, talking conflict of interest. There’s his installation of Elon Musk, owner of one of the largest federal government contractors, to a position of official government power. Or every scheme to help sycophants profit off of his schizophrenic trade policy. His last administration’s use of Trump Corporation-owned properties for official functions seems quaint and unproblematic by comparison.

Equally jarring is that, through all of this, Trump continues to command intense, personal loyalty. Not to any policy agenda or to his office. To him. Donald Trump. You have everyone from cabinet officials on down repeating the easily disprovable lie that Trump received the “biggest majority” in American political history. He has to know that he won’t beat George Washington’s electoral record.

I used to believe that such a cult of personality required total control of the airwaves. Trump is forcing me to reevaluate my priors. A more apt moniker might be the joking description my Soviet compatriots and I had for geriatric arch-communist Leonid Brezhnev’s “cult of personality without a personality.”

Now, Trump has a personality, honed through years of reality TV and perfectly carried forward into the social media age. But it’s ultimately a superficial and vacuous one, and the fact that the president’s opponents have not been able to match him is an indictment not only of the current Democratic Party, but a stagnant political culture three decades in the making.

It starts with President Bill Clinton, whose personal misbehavior—some of it literally taking place in the Oval Office, or should we say, more accurately, beneath the Resolute Desk?—was excused by Democrats. He’s a bastard, they said, but he’s our bastard. Sound familiar?

Then we come to George W. Bush. A decent man, unlike his immediate predecessor. But the conduct of the Iraq War normalized official dishonesty and a culture of cover- ups in Washington.

Next, we have President Obama. Obama was arrogant and unserious. His eight years in Washington cultivated a sense of smug liberal self-assuredness that allowed the establishment to completely miss a despot-in-the-making. As president he promoted a satirical rally hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that caricatured the political views of half of the country rather than take seriously rising extremism and polarization.

Finally, we are left with Joe Biden. As the only person to defeat Trump in an election and the man who enabled his return to the White House, Biden shepherded both the pro-democracy camp’s highest hopes and most crushing disappointments. And central to this was the shameless obfuscation about Biden’s age-related impairments. Some media pundits even had the temerity after the debate—you know, that debate—to still talk about Biden’s “childhood stutter.” Spare me. You and I might agree that, even so, there’s no equivalence between Biden and Trump. But tens of millions of Americans won’t see that distinction, and we can thank the last president and his defenders for that.

Out of this toxic brew, is it so surprising that we got Donald Trump—as Mencken puts it, a “downright moron”?

Where I don’t agree with Mencken is that this represents the “inner soul” of America. Americans are not (all) idiots, but, like any nation, they want direction. So you fight a cult of personality with character. Someone who can show that public service is a noble thing in a democracy and demonstrate a little internal consistency. That profile isn’t a unicorn—it exists. But in order to find new leaders to shore up democracy in America and around the world, we need to be honest about where our old ones have fallen short.

Whatever side you’re on, if you’re not satisfied with the substance of your leadership, then it is on you to seriously vet the candidates the next time you head to the polls.