What Single Word Best Sums Up Trump?

Strongman, dictator, fascist, tyrant, authoritarian, autocrat, or demagogue?

Ever since Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president in June 2015, commentators and analysts have been fumbling for the right word to describe him. Some refer to Trump as an “authoritarian” in one breath and, in the next, an “autocrat.” Others jump from “strongman” and “dictator” to “fascist” and “tyrant” as they search for the most accurate term.

Ultimately, the problem with these labels is not that they are wrong about the underlying potentialities of the 45th president. The tragedy of these descriptors is that they lack the precision we need in an enlightened democracy to identify and rectify the system flaws that led to Trump’s rise to power in the first place. As the Renaissance humanist and scholar Desiderius Erasmus put it more than half a millennium ago, “Prevention is better than cure.” 

The pointed focus of these essays on Trump as a “demagogue” is not meant to invalidate the myriad other labels experts apply to him. The intention is to hammer home a fundamental truth about democracy, one that requires readers to appreciate the extraordinary significance of word choice when it comes to prevention. It is that stable, functional democracies are degraded by demagogues in a two-step process well-known to political philosophers since the birth of this free form of government in the 5th century B.C.

The first step in democratic breakdown is the election of a demagogue to a high office like the U.S. presidency. Then, once in office, the demagogue devolves into authoritarianism, dismantling the democracy itself to retain and aggrandize power. Perhaps Alexander Hamilton described it best in Federalist No. 1 when he cautioned Americans in 1787 to study history carefully in order to discover the chief danger to representative government. That danger, Hamilton wrote, is demagogues because this species of political actors achieves elected power by manipulating and deceiving the people, “commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Trump commenced a demagogue, and, as the 2022 hearings of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol vividly attest, he ended an authoritarian, orchestrating a multifaceted campaign to overturn a free and fair election. What the United States and the world have witnessed in Trump’s political behavior is precisely the two-step process of democratic deterioration Hamilton and so many other experts on democracy warn about.

The fact that Trump commenced a demagogue teaches us something urgent about how to protect democracy from self-sabotage. We must thwart demagogues because they, unlike run-of-the-mill authoritarians, possess both the rhetorical genius to get elected and the underlying ruthless personality type that wrecks democracies. It is fair to say, as a rule of thumb, that all demagogues are authoritarians, but not all authoritarians are demagogues. What non-demagogue authoritarians lack is the charismatic ability to get elected. 

Trump was the first full-blown demagogue to become president of the United States. He did it by fostering division and distrust in the American people. He did it by exploiting xenophobia, chauvinism, and racism. He did it through character assassination, conspiracy theory, and outright lies.

A demagogue, as Eric A. Posner, a contributor to this volume, explains in his book The Demagogue’s Playbook, is a political actor “who obtains the support of the people through dishonesty, emotional manipulation, and the exploitation of social divisions; who targets the political elites, blaming them for everything that has gone wrong; and who tries to destroy institutions—legal, political, religious, social—and other sources of power that stand in their way.” 

To understand the system flaws that enabled Trump to win the presidency, we must first acknowledge a fundamental principle that governs the operation of democracies. Demagogues are as ancient as democracy itself, and, historically, watchful gatekeepers have worked to keep them from the bully pulpit and the public trust. Gatekeepers of democracies that survive know that they must keep demagogues out of positions of power. They have eagle eyes for spotting this troublesome subset of political actors, and, by all means permissible, public and private, they labor to sideline them.

I am currently working on the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Demagogue in the White House: Lessons Learned from the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. This essay is derived from the first section of that introduction.