Donald Trump’s Machiavellian Instincts
The new president seems to implicitly grasp two core lessons from Machiavelli’s writing: the difficulty of fundamental change, and the need to strike quickly against his enemies.
Donald Trump is not Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini. Instead, he is Niccolò Machiavelli! Or at any rate, were he among the living today, the Florentine philosopher-statesman would instantly grasp the newly-installed chief executive’s methods.
In popular lore, “Machiavelli” is an amoral, mustache-twirling purveyor of ends-justifies-the-means statecraft. That’s a caricature. The real Machiavelli was an on-again, off-again official in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence. He penned such treatises as The Prince, The Art of War, and my favorite, his Discourses on Titus Livy’s History of Rome, to help princes and leaders of republics navigate the politics of Renaissance Italy. That was no easy feat. To describe Italy in the age of Machiavelli as a hardscrabble neighborhood understates the matter to a comical degree.
Surviving and thriving in Florence demanded a bare-knuckles approach to statecraft. That’s what Machiavelli prescribed. Along the way, he produced counsel commanding lasting if not eternal value for students and practitioners of statecraft. And his advice was surprisingly humane for the times and circumstances. He aimed to help political leaders consolidate their rule and, in so doing, make life secure and bearable for the populace they governed.
Per Machiavelli, rather than comport himself like a villain, a wise prince should “seek to make the people friendly to himself,” helping them live content. Same goes for the overseers of a republic. So much for the caricature.
Change And Its Enemies
Two Machiavellian insights bear on Trump’s opening moves from the Oval Office. First, politics. The president regards himself more as a revolutionary figure than a simple custodian of the U.S. government. He wants to replace one thing with something else. Or maybe he’s a counterrevolutionary figure, on a mission to uproot what he considers the excesses of past presidencies and restore past eminence. “Make America Great Again” suggests the latter.
Either way, he is undertaking a project full of peril. Failure is always an option. In The Prince, Machiavelli observes that “nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, then to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders.” For him, “orders” seems to refer to institutions, or in a larger sense the way of life or culture that prevails within a state. That is to say, fundamental change. Why is such change hard? Because people hate change from the familiar while the future, with its bounty—if any—remains unfathomable. Better to stick with the known.
That being the case, fervor is an ally for the prince’s adversaries. The prince is trying to do something new and unproven. His foes are defending the devil you know, and whose sway proved profitable, over the one you don’t. According to Machiavelli, “the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies,” while “he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders.”
Perversely, the introducer’s backers tender only tepid support. In part that’s because they face adversaries that may “have the laws on their side,” and thus the ability to enlist the state’s coercive power, during revolutionary tumult, when the outcome of the struggle remains in doubt. In part, says Machiavelli, it’s because of “the incredulity of men, who do not truly believe in new things” before seeing them with their own eyes. The revolution has to triumph before they believe. So they doubt.
As a consequence of this mismatch in passion, stakeholders in the old order attack with “partisan zeal” whenever the opportunity arises while doubters “defend lukewarmly so that one is in peril along with them.” In other words, the initiative goes to conservators of the ancien régime over their assailants. Trump confronts daunting odds according to Niccolò Machiavelli.
Strike Quickly—But Carefully
Second, strategy. To implement an agenda of such sweep—and surmount that partisan zeal—Trump is mounting a lightning assault on what he sees as the defenders of a corrupt old order within the Beltway. Much as savvy field generals do, he is striking blow after blow in swift succession to keep adversaries stunned and off balance. He never breaks contact.
Machiavelli would nod knowingly. In the Discourses, the Florentine sage writes that “Whoever takes up the governing of a multitude . . . and does not secure himself against those who are enemies to that new order makes a state of short life.” And all political leaders want their states to have long lives.
The scribe draws on Roman history to illustrate his point, zeroing on early Romans’ banishment of the Tarquin kings in the fifth century B.C. and founding of the republic. He advised the founders of republics to use cruelty well.
By that he meant striking with utmost force against as narrow a set of opponents as possible. Brutus had expelled the Tarquins, liberating the city, only to find that his own sons longed to bring back royal rule. Why? Because they had benefited from it, personally profiting from monarchy. Roman freedom, paradoxically, “appeared to have become their servitude.” So they mounted a youth conspiracy to overthrow the republic.
Romans took drastic measures against these “partisan enemies” of their republic. Machiavelli approves. To redress the disorder from internal rebellion, he concludes, “there is no remedy more powerful, nor more valid, more secure, and more necessary, than to kill the sons of Brutus.” And that’s what the guardians of the new republic did—quashing the revolt at a stroke.
From this parable, Machiavelli reasons that the populace of a state will quickly get over a short, sharp purge of the regime’s enemies, but political leaders who exercise forbearance against their foes find themselves using force anyway—but in whack-a-mole fashion, and over time. He maintains that prolonged campaigns to defeat holdouts—that is, deploying cruelty as a matter of routine—tend to sow hatred among the governed. And a hateful populace is the worst fate that can befall a ruler.
Better to get the unpleasantness over and cauterize the wound.
But when? Timing was everything for Machiavelli. He beseeched political leaders to strike against their analogues to the sons of Brutus not just hard, discriminately, and fast but early. Said Machiavelli: “That prince . . . or that republic that does not secure itself at the beginning of its state must secure itself at the first opportunity, as did the Romans.” Better to dispatch the sons of Brutus at the inception of the new regime than let their conspiracy fester into something truly malignant.
Best I know, the Trump administration has not unsheathed the poisoned stiletto against federal employees or others targeted in his flurry of executive orders. No sign of knife-wielding assassins in Newport, at any rate. The president is trying to do away with the sons of Brutus nonetheless—thankfully by less cutthroat means.
About the Author: James Holmes
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.
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