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 fourth entry in a series on political followership.
The presidential debate has come and gone. The sittingAmerican president is rattling the saber of long-range weapons for Ukraine. The sitting Russian dictator is expelling the West’s diplomatic staff. The outgoing president of Mexico has pulled off the largest-ever change of a judicial system in a substantial democracy. The prime minister of Israel defies the populace by continuing to use bludgeons to free hostages who increasingly are freed post-mortem. The presumed winner of the presidential election in Venezuela has fled the country.
This was last week. When did politics become so consequential?
Answer: It always has been.
In each of these cases an individual who has managed to make themselves the leader of their polity through outplaying rivals in the political game is now impacting millions of lives. What of their followers? Remember, there are no leaders without followers.
In my book, “To Stop a Tyrant,” I focus on the followers while everyone else is focusing on the leaders. What do followers want? Why do they follow?
As always, the elite (who hate to view themselves as followers) act from the hubris that they can elevate and control the political leader. They do a pretty good job of this until they miscalculate, allow the leader to accrue too much power and find themselves the ones at the end of the puppet strings.
Members of the inner circle, practically drunk on the power of being able to influence the putative leader, outsmart and outmaneuver each other until the leader loses confidence in them and turns to other, more questionable confidants. Woe to the leader whose confidants stroke their fragile egos.
The vast army of bureaucrats sit warily on the sidelines, wondering who they will be answering to, calculating how much they can use the newly installed power to their advantage, or how much they can thwart threatened incursions on their well- guarded turf.
Meanwhile, the activists act. Paid or unpaid, that’s their job. More importantly, that’s their passion. Some paint their chosen person as the savior and some paint them as the destroyer of worlds.
You, dear citizen, will need to sort out which scenario is more credible.
If I were king, my one decree would be that all young people in a democracy study historic examples of how democracies die. How ruthless leaders have been elevated by people like themselves in the belief they were the answer to the country’s woes. How they missed the warning signs until it was too late and the leader had full control of the coercive power of the state. They would play simulations. Experiment with choices. See the outcomes. And prepare themselves to meet the temptations of their own era with a clear mind.
In my book, I use the term “prototyrant” to describe the political leader with the characteristics who, given the chance, can morph into a full blown tyrant. I asked a friend of mine who supports a candidate with too many of these characteristics why he is not worried about them achieving office. His answer seemed simple. The military in our country would never go along with a dictator. It sounded good. I want to believe the same thing.
Yet, the belief is almost childlike. History offers no proof that this would be the outcome. If it were, the result would just as likely be civil war or chaos. The time to interrupt the progression of a prototyrant is before they control the coercive levers of the state. If they have fooled us into giving them access to the levers, slam the brakes hard as soon as they begin to misuse those levers.
No prototyrant gets better when in power.
“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We were told that in 1907 when it was published in a collection of Lord Acton’s letters and essays. It seems a hundred years hasn’t been enough time for us to digest this crucial observation.
I have examined the rare instances when enough individuals in the five circles of political followers work together to stop a prototyrant while they can. It may be time to consider these examples and do a bit of make-up study for the class we never took on how to keep democracies alive.
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.