Donald Trump Is a Weakling. That’s the Problem.

In saying this, I don’t dispute that Trump’s instincts are dangerously authoritarian. Nor would I argue that a bumbling maximum leader is harmless—quite the opposite, in fact. Trump’s last presidency did serious damage. He redistributed income upward to the rich; he separated children from their parents at the border; he secured an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court; and he reduced the proportion of the population covered by health insurance just as a deadly pandemic arrived to kill 40 percent more people than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

But as the latter two examples demonstrate, not all these ghastly outcomes were deliberate, and indeed Trump’s mismanagement of Covid probably cost him reelection. In memoirs, participants in Trump’s first term don’t describe Trump as an evil mastermind. They describe him as vain, foolish, petty, mercurial, and easy prey for con artists and crackpots of every stripe. The result was bedlam. He was a horse loose in a hospital.

In a 2020 journal article, “Immature Leadership: Donald Trump and the American Presidency,” the Tufts political scientist Daniel Drezner argued, persuasively, that Trump’s presidency was hampered by “his temper tantrums, his short attention span and his poor impulse control.” Trump’s tantrums “led to poor decision-making and pathological staff strategies for coping with it.” Trump’s short attention span resulted in “a series of policy announcements that generate[d] poor follow-through and implementation.” Trump’s poor impulse control persuaded many foreign diplomats “to discount many of his threats.” What this added up to, Drezner concluded, was a weak presidency.