Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “ To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader. ” This is the second entry in a series on political followership.
In my previous op-ed for The Fulcrum, I examined how political followers create their leaders, just as much as leaders create their followers. I observed that while our culture may still romanticize leaders, the real work of governing is done by skilled and courageous followers. Let’s explore this further, this time using a dance floor analogy.
In straight culture, a man usually leads a woman in ballroom dancing. Many men share my experience: When I have tried my hand (or foot) at dancing — whether it’s the Texas two-step or the Argentine tango — my novice partner would endure my clunky moves as I “lead” her in the most basic steps, hopefully without bruising her or other couples, or ricocheting off a wall. Not a pretty sight.
In the same lesson, when a more advanced dancer was my partner and took the follower role, I suddenly looked like a halfway competent lead. I was still formally doing the lead steps, but she was subtly guiding me into the music, the tempo, the weight shifts onto the correct foot, while keeping us to the spatial lanes and away from the walls. The follower had made the leader look good!
Anyone who has been involved in politics or governance knows this is an apt metaphor for how followers make political leaders look good.
I’ve been writing and teaching about followership for several decades and while my work has found its way around the world, only now am I applying it directly to politics. Particularly when examining politics at a national level, it quickly became clear that “follower” behavior needs to be broken down by access to the leader. This has resulted in a new way of visualizing political followership.
Confidants clearly have the most direct access. In the case of the White House, they have “walk in” privileges when they need the ear of the president. Oftentimes it is a close family member who can be the last voice the president hears before making a decision, whether that’s Jill Biden or Donald Trump Jr.
Elites can relatively easily get the attention of the leader. They have something the leader wants — a large following, deep pockets for campaign contributions, the power to move or block important legislation, media platforms. Elon Musk, Peter Theil, Nancy Pelosi, James Clyburn and Taylor Swift all fit into this category.
No head of government achieves objectives without working through the bureaucrats who play a significant role in transforming goals, policy and legislation into actionable and enforced programs. But large agencies can develop a mind of their own. They can “slow walk” or procedurally hamper both the bad ideas of a would-be-tyrant and the good ideas of a would-be reformer, without being blatantly non-compliant.
Activists are the spark that gets the broader public moving in favor of (or against) candidates and their political agendas. Their power to influence is many times greater than that of an average citizen. Whether this is Dan Schultz advocating for MAGA Republicans to fill the seats of precinct captains, or Stacey Abrams (before she became a nationally known figure) mobilizing minority voters in Georgia, they have an impact on policy formulation that rivals those of elites.
Those who make up the populace are the citizens and non-citizens alike who are affected by the actions of government and fill the stadiums and arenas to support the political leaders whom they feel most represent their views and interests. They may never personally meet the candidate or fully examine their platforms, yet make the ultimate difference in elevating their preferred candidate through their support.
In each entry in my series, I will take a dive into the vulnerability and power of each type of follower, offering a taste of what I explore in depth in my new book, “ To Stop a Tyrant.” Like couples on the dance floor, competent or courageous followers will make a good leader look better than they are. Conversely, bad or colluding followers will make a bad leader worse, to all of our detriment.
Begin paying attention to which circle of followers you fall into, in relation to different political leaders (local, state, national), and how you might be making them look better than they really are. Then consider what a courageous follower would do.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.