In this episode of Democracy Works from The McCourtney Institute for Democracy, the team discusses democracy’s many doomsayers and how to heed their warnings for the future without falling into despair.
Podcast: On democracy's doomsayers
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks from the Cross Hall of the White House on April 1, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Pool/Getty Images
How Presidential Primetime Addresses Shape Public Trust in Democratic Institutions
Oct 01, 2026
A question still being studied is the effects on public trust when the head of the Executive casts doubt on the institutions that run elections, enforce laws, and decide legal disputes. The President of the United States is arguably the most powerful man in the world. He is the commander in chief of a nation #1 in nominal gross domestic product as well as #1 in military power, budget, and spending as of 2026. The actions he takes spew ripple effects across the world and follow many generations. A way you can measure the executive's power can also be measured in how much influence his speeches have on the markets, opinions of the masses, news outlets, lawmakers, social media reactions, etc. His framing of an issue can shape the next day’s political conversation.
These conversations become extremely dangerous/consequential when discussing a principle as embedded in our country as Democracy. In his July primetime speech, Trump continued to pedal the claims about election security and argued for stricter voting rules. He continued to portray the country as facing a moment of corruption and uncertainty, followed by presenting himself as the one prepared to restore order. The address continued with repeated claims about his loss in the 2020 election that have not been supported by the evidence compiled over years of investigation by many parties. Professional reviews, audits, and courts have yet to find significant evidence of foul play substantial enough to influence the outcome of that election.
Despite the facts of the matter, Trump continues his assault on our institutions through his words and actions. For decades, Primetime presidential speeches have been used to speak directly to the public during wars, economic crises, and moments of national grief. These addresses can be reassuring. They can make government action easier to understand and give people a sense that their leaders are responding to an emergency.
Ronald Reagan used television to project optimism and national confidence during the Cold War, a period of large paranoia and uncertainty. George W. Bush’s speeches after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 helped create an early sense of unity even across the world, although later questions about the Iraq War damaged trust in government claims. Barack Obama often used his national addresses to explain major policy decisions and encourage civic participation.
Trump constantly fails to do many of those positives. His primetime speeches heavily deepen the division this country has been experiencing in the last 20 years in particular; the president encourages people to believe that elections, courts, or civil servants are inherently corrupt, which then closes the door for the public to accept outcomes they do not like. That problem has never been confined to one party or one president. Democratic principles depend on more than laws to keep them accountable. They depend on a shared belief that institutions can be challenged, criticized, and improved upon without being dismissed as illegitimate whenever they produce an unfavorable result. No, that does not mean presidents should avoid criticism.
Yes, government institutions should be questioned, investigated, and reformed when they fail. But mindful criticism is most useful when it is specific, evidence-based, and paired with a realistic solution. Trump leans more on cynicism, whereas he displays much more personal bias, ego, and mental rigidity.
[INTERVIEW SECTION????]
Historically, primetime presidential speeches strengthen democracy when they help Americans understand a challenging topic and encourage them to participate at the local and federal levels. They weaken democracy when they turn routine political disagreement into a reason to reject the legitimacy of systems and institutions altogether.
For voters, the goal to aspire towards is knowing the difference between hearing and listening. The care that you put into analyzing these speeches is what separates the two. A president’s words matter, but they should never be accepted without questions: What evidence supports this claim? Who can verify it? Does the proposed solution protect democratic participation, or does it make power less accountable?
Those questions are not partisan. They are part of what it means to be an informed citizen.
Shon Eric Hernandez is a Fulcrum fellow and MDC contributor. He can be reached at shondesil06@gmail.com
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
Brain science explains why voters reward charisma over results — and why the leaders who "fix" the most get credit for the least. A behavioral look at elections.
alvaro gonzalez/Getty Images
The Résumé Should Outvote the Smile
Sep 21, 2026
There's an old joke about a couple who finally solved years of arguing over decisions. "Since you're the man of the house," the wife said, "you handle the big things -- our stance on foreign wars, who we send to the Senate. I'll take care of the small stuff: groceries, the mortgage, where we live, what we eat." The husband agreed happily, certain he had won the better half of the deal. A few years later he realized the trade had gone entirely the other way. He held forth on geopolitics at dinner parties while his wife quietly ran every detail that actually touched his life: what he ate, where he lived, how his money was spent. What looked like ultimate authority was, in practice, near-total abdication over the things that shaped his days.
Voters make the same trade, and pay for it the same way. We keep hiring leaders for the qualities we would want in a spouse -- warmth, charm, a commanding voice, the sense that they see us -- instead of the qualities we would want in a mechanic: someone who can find what is broken and fix it before the whole system fails. We evaluate candidates the way we choose intimate partners, not the way we hire people to run complex, high-stakes systems.
A Brain Built for the Wrong Timescale
This is not just a cultural blind spot. It has a biological driver. Brain-imaging research over the past two decades has linked our response to an inspiring speaker with a fast release of dopamine and oxytocin, the same chemical reward system engaged by a great meal, a new romance, or a win at the slot machine. A charismatic leader delivers that hit in real time, on stage, in a two-minute clip that circulates for days. Studies of split-second judgment go further still: shown a candidate's face for less than a second, with no policy information at all, people guess election winners correctly roughly seven times out of ten, based purely on a snap read of competence and warmth.
Good policy does not work on that clock. A tax reform, an infrastructure project, or a shift in interest rates typically takes twelve to eighteen months before its effects show up in the data, and years longer before ordinary voters feel them in daily life. The Federal Reserve itself estimates that the full impact of a single interest-rate change can take up to two years to reach the broader economy. By the time results arrive, the brain has already moved its emotional credit to whoever gave the most recent good speech, whether or not that person had anything to do with the actual work. Slow, structural improvement carries no dopamine spike, so it goes uncredited. Fast, emotional performance carries a large one, so it gets over-credited. The mismatch is not a character flaw in any one voter. It is a design feature of a brain built for a much smaller, much slower world.
When the Audition Beats the Résumé
This mismatch explains why screen presence so often beats governing experience at the ballot box. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California recall election with under half the vote in a field of more than a hundred candidates, arriving with zero governing experience and a résumé built entirely in front of a camera. He left office seven years later with the state carrying a budget deficit in the tens of billions of dollars, a gap that outlasted his tenure and shaped California's finances for years afterward. Ronald Reagan followed a similar route into the same office in 1966, defeating the incumbent governor by nearly a million votes on the strength of his screen presence and radio-honed delivery, not his record in public administration, of which he had none. His later political career is remembered as substantively consequential, which complicates any tidy conclusion. Charisma and competence are not always opposed. They are simply poorly correlated at the exact moment people cast a ballot, which is precisely when it matters most.
The clearest case of all sits in Tamil Nadu, India. In 1977, film star M. G. Ramachandran, known across the state as MGR, was elected chief minister after three decades of building a screen persona as the untouchable defender of the poor. His fans did not distinguish the role from the man. When he died in December 1987 at age 70, roughly one million people flooded Chennai's streets for his funeral, some standing in line for over a day. By multiple contemporary press accounts, around 30 grieving fans took their own lives in the days after his death, unable to process the loss. That grief was never about tax policy or administrative competence. It was the sudden loss of a one-sided emotional attachment as real, to the people who felt it, as losing a parent.
Charisma Is a Luxury Good
The divide runs along economic lines too, and this is the part most commentary on charisma leaves out. Voters with enough material security to treat politics as a form of entertainment can afford to prioritize a leader's decorum, stage presence, and rhetorical polish. For the much larger share of any electorate whose week is defined by grocery prices, rent, fuel costs, and job security, charm is an expensive luxury they cannot afford to indulge. They need competent mechanics who can diagnose and repair broken systems, not a warm and reassuring presence who makes them feel better about a system that keeps failing them. When the roof is leaking, you do not hire the contractor with the best smile. You hire the one who actually stops the leak, even if he is short with you on the phone.
Evolution built us for small tribes of a few hundred people, where a warm, confident face reliably signaled a trustworthy ally worth following into danger, and where the entire consequence of a bad choice was visible within days. That heuristic misfires today, in a world of roughly 8.2 billion people governed by institutions too large, too specialized, and too interconnected for any one charismatic figure to run on instinct and stage presence alone. The scale has changed by many orders of magnitude. Our wiring has not.
What Breaks the Spell
None of this means charisma is worthless, or that voters are foolish for responding to it. Communication matters; a leader who cannot explain a plan cannot build support for it. The fix is not to prize dullness over eloquence. It is to separate the two judgments that charisma tends to fuse into one: does this person make me feel confident, and has this person actually delivered results before. Structured evaluation helps here in the same way it helps in hiring for any other high-stakes role: a specific record of past performance, checked against verifiable outcomes, weighs more than a stage presence, no matter how persuasive that presence feels in the room.
We keep choosing leaders for spouse-like qualities and then act surprised when we get senator-like failures. The bill for that confusion comes due in stalled reforms, wasted budgets, and a public that trusts government less with every cycle, in country after country. Fixing it does not require voters to stop feeling anything at the ballot box; feeling is not the enemy. It requires one honest substitution, repeated at every election: stop asking who you would most want to have dinner with, and start asking who you would trust to fix what is actually broken. Until we make that substitution a habit rather than an exception, we will keep overpaying for charisma and underinvesting in the competence that actually improves lives. The résumé should outvote the smile.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D. is Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he focuses on the analysis of human behavior, public health, and global affairs, drawing on an interdisciplinary background. He published in multiple RealClear platforms, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., Fulcrum, The Humanist, AFRO American, South Asia Monitor (on editorial board, and host of a show), and others.
Keep ReadingShow less
a group of soldiers in uniform
Photo by Oleg Ivanov on Unsplash
Moral Leadership Can Protect Service Members' Psychological Well-Being
Sep 20, 2026
It has recently been reported that President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth disparaged the mental health concerns, including suicide attempts, expressed by the sailors serving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during the carrier’s record deployment. Their comments brought back the disquiet I felt several months ago while attending a performance of the US Naval Academy Glee Club at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan. Usually, when I attend choral concerts in the church’s imposing Baroque sanctuary, my mind quiets, and I find myself immersed in the music. But not on that occasion. Instead, as I enjoyed the exuberant singing, my mind filled with resentment. The Glee Club, handsome midshipmen in formal dress, is a multiethnic group of men and women. The harmonious singing of a chorus composed of individuals of widely varied backgrounds seemed a metaphor for how our country and its military should work.
My upset originated with the realization that during their time at the Naval Academy, these midshipmen had witnessed the firing of the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr., as part of an apparent purge of those supporting diversity in the military. Even uglier was the implication that Brown, a highly decorated officer, had been elevated to his position as a ‘DEI’ hire. They also had seen the firing of trailblazing women leaders in the military, including Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman Coast Guard Commandant, and Admiral Yvette Davids, the first woman Superintendent of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the very institution they were attending. I was offended and angered by the message these firings conveyed to the men and women of the Academy’s Glee Club, especially the women and minority midshipmen, who had volunteered to serve their nation and, ultimately, to place themselves in harm’s way for it.
I also wondered about the message and potential consequences of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing of top military lawyers whose responsibility is to advise military officers and help them avoid violating U.S. law and the laws of armed conflict. It was in this context that I recalled being moved by the sight of former Marines weeping in front of pictures of what they had wrought during their time of combat when visiting the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi some years ago. What I witnessed served as a vivid reminder of the price paid by Vietnam vets who suffered with PTSD across their lives. The prevalence of that diagnosis has increased for those who served in operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, as have the clinical consequences of moral injury in those who have found themselves at odds with their deeply held values during their time of service. As a psychiatrist, I found myself concerned about how such firings may increase the likelihood of the young midshipmen I was listening to, as well as that of others who serve, experiencing moral injury, PTSD, and, ultimately, difficulty reintegrating into civilian life after deployment.
Our service men and women deserve leadership, both civilian and military, which they can respect and which in turn demonstrates respect for them by preparing them for the successful execution of their missions, shows equal esteem for all who serve regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or faith, and strives to minimize the likelihood of their incurring physical and psychological harms. Unfortunately, from my perspective, those currently serving lack the thoughtful and moral civilian leadership they deserve.
Dr. Barry B. Perlman is a retired psychiatrist. He was president of the New York State Psychiatric Association and past chair of the New York State Mental Health Services Council. “Rearview: A Psychiatrist Reflects on Practice and Advocacy In a Time of Healthcare System Change,” his memoir, was published in 2021.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.