Since 1980 I have read and re-read The Prince every four years. I have been delighted anew each year as I read his advice to rulers. His central advice:
"A ruler must take power and keep power because without power the ruler can do nothing."
Until this year, reading Machiavelli was an act of cultural translation as well as being translated from 16th Century Italian. I was reading advice to a monarch as a citizen of a republic.
That was then.
This year when I read The Prince I was reading as a citizen of a republic which is slouching slowly towards authoritarian government.
With Trump in office, I don't have to translate into democracy. His every instinct is authoritarian, so he grasps for power. He is limited only by his own willful ignorance and laziness. But that limitation is glaring.
Machiavelli said the leader should constantly study war. He recommends the leader go hunting to allow him to see his land up close and to know how it feels to live off the land. Trump could not be farther from this advice. He is soft, delicate with no exposure to hardship, so some of the pathetic errors he makes would be remedied if he were not a physical and moral coward.
Trump wants to control and close the southern border. If he spent time on the ground on that border, many of the issues would be clear to him. The blazingly stupid foreign policy of abandoning the Kurds would not have happened if he were capable of exposing himself to hardship.
Thankfully, he is a gelatinous coward. Many of my worst predictions of what Trump would do have not come true, overwhelmed by Trump's own aversion to actual hardship.
Machiavelli says people are cowards and fools for the most part. They will swear loyalty to the leader when times are good and desert him when times are bad.
Trump knows and believes this. There are things Trump does exceedingly well because he knows he is talking to fools. Machiavelli says the leader need not have actual religious faith, all that matters is the appearance. Despite bragging about breaking every commandment and being entitled to break every commandment, he draws thunderous applause from white Evangelical and conservative Catholic audiences. The gaggle of millionaire televangelist that gather around to worship Trump declare Trump's true faith.
Machiavelli says that the leader must never use half measures. He must either pamper people or destroy them. He also said if the leader has a choice either to be loved or feared, he should choose fear, because people will easily betray love but respect those who can hurt them. Within the Republican Party leadership, loyalty to Trump is based on fear of his twitter account. In a party where the primary is the election, a Trump tweet can end the career of any red state Republican.
Another glaring Trump failure from Day One has been his inner circle. Machiavelli says we can judge the quality of a leader by the quality of his inner circle. In this Trump is beyond pathetic. Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Betsy DeVos, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, the rogue's gallery is endless. Trump's deplorable quality is evident in those who surround him.
Chapter 23 of The Prince says the leader should avoid flatterers. This advice is pathetically funny. The vile chief of flatterers Mike Pence leads the worship of the Dear Leader. Kissing Trump's dumpy rump is a requirement for continued service in the administration.
Machiavelli ends his little book discussing fate and luck. America has been lucky for nearly two and a half centuries to avoid the incarnation of idiocy that is Trump, but now it's here. Trump has been lucky at every step of his improbable rise from failed casino owner to the Racist-in-Chief. Can his luck hold? I wish him and his minions nothing but failure, but the odds are with an incumbent, so I will fight until he is out of office. And I will look for other places to live that will accept Americans and re-read The Prince in 2024 from somewhere far away from Don Junior's 2024 campaign.
In the meantime, I am re-reading On Tyranny for how to handle the present.
