Abstract
For the last two years journalists have asked whether Donald Trump is a Machiavellian “prince.” But a truly “Machiavellian” prince would never be suspected as such. He would follow Machiavelli’s advice always to appear to be merciful, faithful, humane, honest, and religious. Trump does not manifest any of these qualities. To prevent him from enacting dangerous policies, Machiavelli would advise us to rely on the checks and balances established by our constitution. Some critics have argued that the constitutional checks are no longer effective, because the American people have become corrupt. The problem, however, is not popular corruption so much as a lack of leadership and imagination in designing remedies for the weakening of the constitutional checks that have resulted from changes in election laws and advances in modern technology.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, David Ignatius, “Donald Trump is the American Machiavelli,” Washington Post, November 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-the-american-machiavelli/2016/11/10/8ebfae16-a794-11e6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html?utm_term=.6f0d; Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng, “Donald Trump is the ultimate Machiavellian prince,” Financial Review, December 21, 2016, http://www.afr.com/news/politics/world/donald-trump-is-the-ultimate-machiavellian-prince-20161220-gtexc3; Jannik Skadhauge Sano, “Machiavelli, Trump, and success,” April 18, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/machiavellianism-trump-succes-jannik-skadhauge-sano; Susan B. Glasser, “Machiavelli Would Approve,” Politico, April 17, 2017, http://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-russia-foreign-policy-machiavelli-would-approve-michael-anton/.
- 2.
For example, retracting his earlier opinion, David Ignatius, “Trump is not so Machiavellian after all,” Washington Post, March 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-not-so-machiavellian-after-all/2017/03/23/01cb9516-0ffd-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html?utm_term=.2f9490afe; Peter Sahlins, “Sincerely, Niccolo Machiavelli: An Open Letter to Donald Trump,” Berkeley Blog, February 26, 2017, http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2017/02/26/sincerely-niccolo-machiavelli-an-open-letter-to-donald-trump-from-a-berkeley-freshman-published-in-salon-magazine/; Maurizio Virolì, “Machiavelli not in support of Donald Trump,” Princeton University Press Blog, April 11, 2016, http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2016/08/11/maurizio-viroli-machiavelli-not-in-support-of-donald-trump/; Jack Butler, “4 Ways Donald Trump Doesn’t Live up to Machiavelli,” The Federalist (2016). http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/22/4-ways-donald-trump-doesnt-live-up-to-machiavelli/; Steffen White, “Machiavelli’s Verdict on Trump: He’s No Prince,” Bureaucracy Blog, March 27, 2017, https://bureaucracybuster.com/2017/03/27/machiavellis-verdict-on-trump-hes-no-prince/; Doyle McManus, “Trump is neither feared nor loved ,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-trump-fear-love-20170702-story.html; “If Trump Has Read Machiavelli, It Doesn’t Show,” The Heisenberg Blog, July 7, 2017, https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/47439673-the-heisenberg/5008973-trump-read-machiavelli-doesn-t-show.
- 3.
As David Wooten argues, “Introduction,” Niccolò Machiavelli “The Prince” (Indianapolis: Hackett, 195), xxviii, by “prince” Machiavelli does not refer simply to a son who will inherit power from his father, the king . He begins The Prince by cataloging the many different ways a “prince” can acquire rule, not only by means of force but also with the support of his people.
- 4.
Maurizio Virolì, How To Choose a Leader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Robert Zaretsky, “The Hands of a Leader: Donald Trump and Niccolò Machiavelli,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 31, 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/218473/ .
- 5.
Most recently, but before the election of Donald Trump, such concerns were expressed during the Obama administration by Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013). However, as Eric A. Posner, “POTUS-phobia,” The New Republic, December 23, 2010, points out in his review of Ackerman’s book, Arthur Schlesinger warned about the development of an “imperial presidency” in the 1970’s . Indeed, worries about a concentration of power not merely in the national government , as opposed to the states and localities, but specifically in the executive branch can be traced back to the founding era, in disagreements between the Federalists and Anti-federalists, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. To counteract the necessarily slow decision-making processes in deliberative bodies, Machiavelli himself argued for the utility of an office like the Roman dictatorship (D 1.34), which gave unlimited powers to an individual to deal with a specific emergency for a strictly limited period of times.
- 6.
D 1.53. Quotations from Niccolò Machiavelli , Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 115.
- 7.
See Federalist 49; Aristotle Politics 2.8.1268b4-1269a24.
- 8.
Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html.
- 9.
Amy Davidson, “Donald Trump’s Stunning Win”, New Yorker, November 9, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/trumps-stunning-win.
- 10.
James G. Wiles, “Machiavelli’s Advice for Mr. Trump—and Us,” American Thinker, April 30, 2017, http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/04/machiavellis_advice_for_mr_trump_and_us.html, argues that the question is whether the expanded welfare policies of the Obama administration have so corrupted the American people that they will not be able or willing to do without them. But are these the “people” who voted for Trump? If so, Machiavelli would see Obama and the Democratic Party as having sought partisans by handing out individual benefits. However, since the benefits were provided by law and not delivered directly or personally and public health is a public good, Machiavelli would not think that people who sought to retain goods they had obtained from their government through political action are corrupt. As he states in P 14, he thinks that it is very natural to desire to acquire, and those who do so successfully are praised. A corrupt people for Machiavelli are those that have lost the organizational and deliberative skills to rule themselves. (See D 1.16.)
- 11.
Publius Decius Mus [Michael Anton], “The Flight 93 Election,” http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/. Michael Anton had been one of the founders of that on-line journal which was taken down almost as soon as it appeared. He has since become a national security advisor for the Trump administration, and the Journal of American Greatness has been replaced by a seemingly more respectable, evidently better funded journal entitled American Affairs, available both in print and on-line. Machiavelli would, no doubt, have been puzzled by Anton’s choice of a pseudonym. In D 2.16 and 3.45 Machiavelli compares the intentional sacrifice of his life in battle to inspire courage in his troops first by Publius Decius Mus the elder and then by his son Publius Decius Mus unfavorably to the alternative policy adopted by their fellow consuls, Manlius Torquatus and Fabius Rullianus, who held part of their troops in reserve to attack and prevail over a tired enemy. In D 3.1 Machiavelli recognizes that extraordinarily self-sacrificing acts of leaders such as the Decii inspired good men to imitate them and made the wicked ashamed not to follow produced “almost the same effect” as laws and orders, i.e., that laws and orders are a more reliable way of preventing a people from becoming corrupt than inspiring examples of virtuous behavior.
- 12.
John Marini, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” CRB Digital, July 22, 2016, http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/donald-trump-and-the-american-crisis/.
- 13.
D 1.15.
- 14.
See James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), and the chapter by Robert Burton, Zachary German, and Michael Zuckert in this volume.
- 15.
Hunt Alcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, No. 2 (Spring 2017): 211–36.
- 16.
Cf . Federalist 10.
- 17.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 7.1, 276–77.
- 18.
See D 1.47-48. After the debacle of the McGovern election , the Democratic Party tried to do this by creating superdelegates. But it was unlikely that the nomination of Hillary Clinton would have been accepted as legitimate if she had not won a majority of the votes in the primary elections . Machiavelli suggests that elites should not merely select the candidates, but select them in such a way that the people will vote for the candidates selected.
- 19.
D 1.49, 3.49.
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Zuckert, C. (2018). Trump as a Machiavellian Prince? Reflections on Corruption and American Constitutionalism. In: Sable, M., Torres, A. (eds) Trump and Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74427-8_5
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