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.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.